Mabel, I heard through the grapevine, was fine. Kayla had taken her to the pediatrician, who'd given her a once-over and told them to watch for fever. There was no fever. But the Brecks stopped waving when I walked by, and Kayla, who used to stop to let Mabel pat Rook, crossed the street with the stroller when she saw us coming, and once, I am almost sure, I saw her take a photo of us from her front window.
IV.
The board meeting was held on the second Thursday of September in the Heron Bend clubhouse, a room with a vaulted ceiling, a gas fireplace that had never once been lit, and a framed aerial photograph of the subdivision under construction, all raw dirt and survey stakes. Usually the quarterly meetings drew about a dozen people, mostly retirees and the woman from Kingfisher who wanted the board to do something about geese. That night there were forty-some folding chairs and every one was full, and people were standing along the back wall.
I was item number six on the agenda. Item six read: Discussion and vote: Formal nuisance complaint, 14 Sandpiper Court.
I brought Rook. I thought about it for a long time beforehand, and I decided that if they were going to talk about him, they could look at him while they did it. He lay at my feet on the industrial carpet in his harness and watched the room with his ears up and his face calm, and I watched people look at him and look away.
Candace ran the meeting from the head table with the other four board members arranged beside her: Thad Mize, the treasurer, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a stack of folders he never once opened; a pleasant young dad named Corey who handled the website; a retired teacher named Lois who had been on the board since the Bush administration and was mostly there for the cookies; and a man named Vince Ostrander who sold insurance and agreed with Candace about everything, usually before she'd finished saying it.
Neville Albers from Crestline Community Management sat at a side table with a laptop, taking minutes. He was a lanky young man in a quarter-zip pullover who had the faintly hunted look of someone who managed nine HOAs and was paid by none of them enough.
The first five items took forty minutes. Then Candace said, "Item six," and the room went quiet in a way I felt in my teeth.
She had a presentation. Of course she did. Neville put it up on the pull-down screen. There were photographs of each incident, eight of them by then, taken from a respectful distance in good morning light, each one labeled with a date, a time, and a location on the laminated neighborhood map. There was a timeline. There was a copy of each violation letter and a ledger showing my fines, which, after the fourth, fifth, and sixth offenses, had climbed to two thousand three hundred and fifty dollars. I'd paid the first two. I'd stopped paying after the third and sent a written dispute, which, according to a slide titled Owner Response, had been "received and reviewed."
And there was the clubhouse camera still.
The HOA had a camera mounted under the eaves of the clubhouse, pointing at the pool gate and a long stretch of the pond path. Candace clicked, and there on the screen was Rook, in daylight, loping along the pond path with his leash trailing behind him on the ground. Alone. No Bernie in sight.