Okafor, at the turning circle, had finally landed her trick, and was bent double with her hands on
her knees in triumph, entirely unaware that her phone, propped on a shoe forty yards behind her,
had just recorded the most valuable twelve seconds of footage in the history of Marlowe County
real estate.
Walter Hargrove crossed the court at the walk of a man who had crossed toward trouble for forty
years and intended to arrive at it with his breath. "Gordon," he said, from the foot of the driveway,
and the whole court heard the first name and the tone under it, which was not the tone of a parade
or a clubhouse. "Put the edger down. Lay it on the concrete, by the handle, and step back from the
car." Gordon Pruitt stood among the bright wreckage of the mirror with the tool in his hand and
looked at the sheriff the way a man looks at a weather report that cannot be right. "Sheriff. This is
an association matter. This is a compliance—" "That was an association matter," Walter said, "until
about forty seconds ago. Now it's my matter, and the Commonwealth's. Edger down, Gordon. I
won't say it a third time, because we know each other." The edger went down with a small, clean
ring against the concrete. Trent Halvorsen, still in the golf cart across the mouth of the driveway,
turned the engine off, and the silence that followed was so complete that Sam Rowan's voice, from
inside number nine, could be heard asking his sister whether the pancakes were the flat kind or the
other kind.
"Sheriff, you saw—" Gordon began, and assembled, in real time, the defense that his whole
profession had trained into him: the owner was present, the owner was warned, there had been an
altercation of words. "I saw you strike this man's car twice with a garden edger," Walter Hargrove
said, "from the curb at number seven, where my vehicle was parked with its camera running, as it
runs whenever the door opens, which is a thing half the county knows and the other half is about to.
I saw it, Gordon. Mrs. Shah saw it, and her phone saw it, and I'd be obliged if we didn't spend the
morning discovering who else. Now." He took, from the left inside pocket of his coat, a folded
document, tri-folded, with a blue backer and the seal of the circuit court worked in gold that caught
the sun as the mirror glass had caught it. He did not hand it over at once. He held it where Gordon
could see the caption, and there are witnesses — three of them, in the end, under oath, in the
fullness of time — who swore that Gordon Pruitt read the caption in that driveway, standing in the
wreckage of his own morning, and that his face performed in four seconds the entire journey the
rest of the Ridge would take a month to travel. "Halloway Ridge Homeowners Association," the
sheriff read aloud, since reading aloud was evidently the morning's theme, "Ridgeway Community
Management, and Fenwick Recovery. Restrained, by order of Judge Whitaker, signed this morning
at nine-twenty, from fining, liening, towing, or otherwise encumbering the property at Nine
Sycamore Hollow Court in connection with the vehicle in question, pending hearing in June.
Personal service on the president. That's you, Gordon. I came down here to put it in your hand and
have pancakes with my grandchildren. You've made it a different errand."
"Grandchildren," Gordon said. The word had come out of the sheriff's mouth as simply as
weather, and it landed the way the edger had not. "Your grandchildren. Number nine is—" "My
daughter June's house," Walter Hargrove said. "Has been since March. My son-in-law you've been
fining under a rule that, having read the application on the way down here — and I have read it,
Gordon, the whole thing, with the exhibits — I'm prepared to say a judge has already found
wanting. Now I need you to understand the rest of the morning, so listen with the good ear you've
used on claims for thirty years. I am not arresting you. I am not arresting you because Caleb is my
son-in-law, which makes me exactly the wrong man to put cuffs on you, and we are going to do this
so far above reproach that your lawyer — and you're going to want one, a real one, not the
association's — will have nothing to work with but the facts. The edger is evidence. The glass is
evidence. The scene is a scene. A deputy who is not related to anybody on this court is eleven
minutes out, and the Commonwealth's Attorney is going to get this file from her, not from me, with
my recusal written on the front of it in my own hand. What she does with it is above both our pay
grades." He paused, and the sheriff went out of his voice, and what was left was a neighbor of nine
years, and it was the neighbor who said the last of it, quietly: "But between us, Gordon, and it stays
between us as long as the law allows: the damage threshold in this Commonwealth for felony
criminal mischief is a thousand dollars. June priced that mirror at the dealership in April, for the
insurance rider. Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars, assembly and labor. You didn't