I hired a lawyer the next day. Her name was Paloma Ferro, and she came recommended by a nurse I used to work with whose ex-husband had tried to take the family cockapoo in the divorce and failed. Paloma was thirty-eight and small and fierce and practiced out of a converted Victorian in downtown Tamsen with a law library in what used to be the dining room and a three-legged cat named Habeas who sat on her files.
She read everything I had in about forty minutes, which was the first time in a month I'd watched somebody read the whole thing.
"Okay," she said, when she was done. "The HOA side is ugly but it's civil. We can dispute the fines, demand a hearing before the board, and if they won't give you a fair one, we can sue. It's the county side I care about right now. That hearing is in seven days. Do you have anyone who'll testify that they saw someone other than your dog leaving these things?"
"There's a man named Bao Huynh," I said. "He's thinking about it."
"Tell him to think faster."
Mr. Huynh, as it turned out, had been thinking quite hard. He came to my door that evening wearing a cardigan and holding a spiral notebook, the kind with a wire coil and a cardboard cover, and he sat at my kitchen table and opened it and showed me pages of small, neat handwriting in blue ballpoint, columns of dates and times and steps.
"I keep a log of my walks," he said. "For my doctor. Steps, time, weather. Sometimes I write down what I see. A heron. A dead fish. Teenagers." He turned pages. "August 9. Five-oh-two. 'Woman in long jacket with hood, Sandpiper sidewalk, carrying small bucket.' I thought it was strange. It was not raining." He turned another page. "August 13. Four-fifty-eight. 'Same woman, pond path by bench. Bucket.' August 19. 'Same. Kingfisher, by playground.'" He looked up at me. "The bucket was white, with a lid. Like for paint. Small. Two gallon, maybe."
"Did you see her face?"
"No," he said, and I could see that it cost him to say it. "It was dark, and she kept the hood up, and I am eighty-one and my eyes are not so good. But I saw her walk. And I see her walk every morning, at six o'clock, after the sun comes up, on the same path." He closed the notebook. "I am almost sure. But almost is not enough to say someone's name to a judge. So I will tell them what I wrote, and I will tell them what I saw, and I will not tell them what I think."
"That's all I want, Mr. Huynh."