Candace turned herself in at the Tamsen County Sheriff's Office on the Monday after Thanksgiving, accompanied by her attorney, at nine in the morning, so that there would be no knock on her door and no squad car in her driveway for the neighbors to see. She was booked, photographed, fingerprinted, and released on her own recognizance by noon. The charges were one count of tampering with evidence, one count of falsification, one count of making a false report to a public agency, and, filed separately the same week, one count of theft by deception in connection with the reserve account.
I saw her at the arraignment in December. I hadn't meant to go. Paloma said I didn't have to, that the state was the party, not me. But I went, and I sat in the back of the courtroom in my good wool coat with my purse on my lap, and when they called State versus Vreeland, she stood up from the front row in a navy suit and walked to the defense table with her lawyer, and I almost didn't recognize her.
It wasn't anything dramatic. Her hair was still blond. Her suit was still pressed. But the bob had grown out a little at the neck, and nobody had trimmed it, and she'd lost weight in a way that showed in her collarbones, and she held her left forearm in her right hand the whole time she stood there, covering the scar, the way she had the first day on my porch.
She pleaded not guilty to everything. The judge set a pretrial date in February. It took four minutes.
On her way out she passed the end of my row. She saw me. She stopped, just for a second, and I braced myself, for what I'm not sure. Then she gave me a small nod, the kind you'd give someone at a funeral when you can't remember how you know them, and kept walking.
XII.
The recall meeting was held on a Saturday afternoon in January, because the bylaws required a special meeting of the membership with thirty days' notice and a quorum of twenty percent, and nobody had ever once in the history of Heron Bend managed to get twenty percent of anybody into the clubhouse for anything. That day they had to open the folding wall into the pool equipment room and borrow chairs from the Methodist church on Route 9.
Kayla Breck had gathered the signatures for the petition. She'd done it in nine days, door to door, with Mabel in a wagon. The petition called for the removal of the entire board except Lois and Corey, who had already said they'd step down if asked. Thad had resigned in December. Candace had not.
The annual election in November had been postponed by Crestline pending "resolution of governance issues," which Paloma said was the most polite phrase for "everyone is being investigated" she'd ever seen in writing. My fines had been reversed and expunged from my account by a written vote of the remaining board members, who had suddenly discovered a great deal of enthusiasm for due process. I was, as Neville Albers put it in a carefully worded email, "an owner in good standing, and in fact always has been."
Neville ran the meeting, because there was nobody else who could. He stood at the head table in a sport coat this time instead of the quarter-zip, and he read the recall procedure aloud from the bylaws in a voice that cracked twice, and then he said that before the vote, any member who wished to address the meeting could have three minutes.