"I'm sure."
"And my statement." She said it lightly, looking at the flyer, not at me. "The district asked if any neighbors had observed anything. I told them what I saw. I'd have been derelict not to. I hope you understand that, as a mother."
I unlocked box 87. There was a catalog for children's clothes addressed to the people who'd lived in my house before me, an electric bill, and a cream-colored envelope with the HOA seal embossed on the flap. I didn't open it. I knew what it would say; Ruthanne had warned me. A notice of hearing before the board regarding "alleged unlawful use of the residence," with the possibility of fines and suspension of amenities. Bobbie had signed it the day after the arrest. She'd been busy.
I closed the little metal door.
"Bobbie," I said, "do you have children?"
She went very still.
"A daughter," she said after a moment. "Jenna. She lives in Michigan right now."
"And grandchildren?"
"A grandson. He lives with me." Her voice had changed. "His father and he moved in after Jenna got sick. Three years ago."
"Sick," I said.
She looked at me then, directly, and I saw that her eyes were wet, which I hadn't expected.
"My daughter is an addict, Gisele," she said. "Pills, then worse. Since she was twenty-two. She's been in a residential program in Grand Rapids for fourteen months. It's the longest she's ever stayed. I've spent sixteen years of my life driving to emergency rooms and treatment centers and courthouses. I've sat in the waiting room at St. Brigid's more times than you've worked there. I've had a police officer call me at four in the morning to tell me they'd found her in a gas station bathroom and she'd been gone for three minutes before they got her back." She took a breath. "So when I tell you I understand what you're going through, I'm not saying it to be kind. I'm saying it because I know. And when I tell you the most important thing, the only thing, is to get him help early, before it gets its hooks in, I'm telling you as somebody who didn't do that in time."