Bobbie's case is the one still open as I write this.
She was charged with tampering with evidence, possession of a fentanyl-related compound, inducing panic, making a false report, and falsification. Her lawyer, an expensive one, filed a motion in December to suppress the dashcam recording on the grounds that it had captured her voice without her consent, and the motion lasted about as long as it took the judge to point out that Ohio requires the consent of only one party to a conversation, that she'd been a party to a conversation with a man on a speakerphone and not with my car, and that in any event she had opened the door of somebody else's vehicle in the middle of the night and leaned into it. In January, a week after Cade's adjudication, she pleaded guilty to three of the five counts. Her sentencing is in March.
She resigned as president of the Larkhaven Commons Homeowners Association the day after the hearing, by email, two sentences long, citing "personal matters." There was no vote. There didn't need to be. The vice president, a soft-spoken retired pharmacist named Barnaby Dunphy who'd mostly served on the board to keep the pond's aerator fountain running, withdrew the board's notice against my household the following Monday and sent me a handwritten note of apology on lined paper that I've kept. In December, the Architectural Review Committee met for the first time in eleven months and approved every pending application in a single forty-minute meeting, including mine. My doorbell camera is back up. So, I've noticed, are about thirty others up and down the walking loop.
We filed the civil suit in November. Ruthanne and a younger lawyer from her old firm sued Roberta Tillotson, Lyndon Harrower, and the Halverton City School District for malicious prosecution, false imprisonment, defamation, and civil rights violations, and they sued the homeowners association for defamation over the Community Safety Reminder email. The association's insurer settled in February for an amount I'm not allowed to say but which paid off what I still owed on the Subaru and then some. The district is still negotiating, mostly now about how many new policies it will have to put in writing about who gets to search a student's bag, and on whose tip, and with whom watching.
I didn't want any of it, at first. I told Ruthanne that, in her office above the vacuum repair shop, with Judge Wapner snoring in the corner. I said I didn't want to be the woman who sued her neighbor.
"You're not suing your neighbor," Ruthanne said. "You're sending the bill to the people who ran up the tab. Your boy spent nine hours in juvenile intake with no shoelaces. He couldn't say his own birthday. He lost half a swim season and a month of school and he's going to flinch every time a deputy walks down a hallway for the next ten years. Somebody pays for that, Gisele. The only question is whether it's them or him."
And that was the end of that conversation.
Izzy went back to Halverton East on a Monday in late October. I drove him. I didn't drive him into the bus loop or the student lot; I parked across the street by the tennis courts, and we sat there for a few minutes with the engine running and the little blue light pulsing behind the mirror.
"Kofi says everyone knows," he said.
"Knows what?"
"Everything. That it was Mrs. Tillotson. That it was Mr. Harrower. That I was the one who told on Cade." He was looking at the school. "He says people are being weird about it. Like, good weird. He says a junior on the lacrosse team told him I was a legend."
"How do you feel about being a legend?"