Glynis smiled at me. She has a very good smile. It goes all the way up.
"The logs will be provided," she said, "to the county inspector, who is the appropriate authority. Not to individual residents with grievances. Next item."
The county inspector came out in late July. The pool passed. The logs, I learned much later, were immaculate: neat columns of chlorine and pH readings in blue ink, initialed every single day, with Everett's certification number written at the top of each page. The certification number had expired twenty-two months earlier. Nobody checked. Why would they? Inspectors look at hundreds of pools a summer, and a seventy-one-year-old man with thirty-four years in the business is the very last person anyone expects to be the problem.
Nico was not allowed back in the pool. That was not my rule. That was the HOA's. Three weeks after the meeting, I got a letter informing me that "due to a pattern of disruptive behavior," the household at 4417 East Mariposa Lane was suspended from amenity use for the remainder of the season. Two weeks after that, Yesenia Sotelo, who had filed her own complaint about Alma's eyes, got a letter saying Alma had been observed "bringing an unapproved substance," which turned out to be a bottle of children's sunscreen, into the pool, and that the family was being fined for "contaminating shared water." Yesenia paid it. Her husband drove a delivery route and they had two other kids and a third coming, and she didn't have the energy to fight an association over three hundred dollars. By Christmas, they'd sold their house and moved to Casa Grande.
I didn't pay mine. I kept recording.
I want to be honest about what that looked like from the outside, because I know exactly what it looked like. It looked like a divorced woman who worked nights, standing on a step stool behind her orange tree at odd hours, filming a pump house. It looked like a grudge. I knew people said so. One of the men on the board, a retired insurance adjuster named Darrow who wore golf shirts with the collars up, started calling me "the Pool Inspector" whenever he passed my driveway, and not in a friendly way. Glynis sent two more letters, one about my trash cans being visible from the street for a period exceeding twelve hours and one about the color of my front door, which was the same color it had been when I bought the house. I paid the trash can fine. I painted the door. I kept recording.
What I was recording, mostly, was nothing. Everett in the late afternoon, walking slowly across the gravel with a test kit, a dented aluminum water bottle, and a little transistor radio playing a Diamondbacks game. Everett sitting on an overturned bucket in the shade of the pump house door, writing in a clipboard binder. Everett standing at the edge of the pool, very still, for a long time, looking down at the water as if he were waiting for it to tell him something. Sometimes Glynis came with him. She didn't help. She stood a few feet away with her arms folded and her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and she talked to him in a low voice I couldn't hear, and sometimes, when he went into the pump house, she followed him in and stayed until he came out.
I noticed, over the winter and spring, that he went more slowly. That the Diamondbacks game on the radio was sometimes a game from a week before, the same announcers calling the same home run. That once, in March, he walked to the pool, stood at the gate for a full minute, and then turned and walked home without going in, and that ten minutes later Glynis came out alone, unlocked the pump house, and spent half an hour inside with the door closed.
I didn't know what any of it meant. I am not a detective, and I am not a neurologist. I write down what I see because that is what I'm trained to do: at three in the morning, when a patient's oxygen saturation drifts down by two points, you write it down, because two points is nothing until it's the first two of twenty.
Fern said I should let it go. She said it gently, over iced tea in her kitchen, which is the only kitchen I have ever been in that still has a periodic table magnet on the refrigerator.
"You've documented," she said. "That's the scientist's job. At some point the data either says something or it doesn't."