Mrs. Alvarez was already on my porch when I got home. She had a shoebox in her lap.
"I heard," she said, "about the dam."
"Word travels."
"Frank Devereaux called me last night. He's the one at the bottom of the hill. He said something's coming." She handed me the shoebox. "Four years," she said. "Every notice, every fine. My husband used to tell me to throw them out. I never did. I don't know why."
I opened it: four years of low-grade financial cruelty stacked in chronological order: $75 for a mailbox, $200 for a wreath, $300 for a porch light, compliance fees, reinspection fees, lien initiation fees—a little over $9,600 total.
I closed the box.
"If you're going to fight her," she said, "I want to help."
"I know."
"You don't even know what I'm going to say."
"You're going to tell me that if I'm fighting her, you can finally say out loud what she did to you."
She looked at me a long time. "That's exactly what I was going to say."
I asked her to leave the shoebox.
Word travels in a subdivision the way water travels in a drainpipe: quietly, then all at once. By the next afternoon, 14 people had been to my porch.
Frank Devereaux first—retired fire captain, lowest house in Cedar Ridge. He didn't shake my hand so much as fold it inside both of his own.
"You're the guy who saved my basement in 2016."
"I—"
"You did. I know what got built in 2017. I've been wanting to thank you for seven years." He didn't make me say anything to that. He pulled a folder out from under his arm: labeled, indexed, tabbed. "Two years ago, I wrote the HOA board as a retired fire captain that the storm drains in this subdivision were undersized for a 25-year flood event. I told them they needed to upgrade or hire a hydrologist. I'm not an engineer; I just know what bad drainage does in a real storm."