divided. Lasky's office had acknowledged her request for the minutes, the ledger, and the
management contract with a courtesy so complete it amounted to a schedule: production would be
made in due course, following review for privilege and relevance, categories Lasky proposed to
apply himself. Nolan read the letter twice, from the bottom up, in a habit she shared with exactly
the family now depending on her not to notice it, and she dictated a reply of four sentences, the last
of which observed that the Commonwealth was content to proceed, for the present, on the evidence
of the morning itself, and that documents withheld in May had a way of being read aloud in the fall,
in rooms where withholding was itself a subject of interest. She did not expect the letter to produce
the ledger. She expected it to produce, in due course, something she valued nearly as much: a
record of the ledger having been asked for, and not produced, by the men who would eventually
stand up in public and call it the cleanest book in the county. Gordon Pruitt had already said the
sentence, in his own clubhouse, in front of witnesses, into minutes that — for the first time in nine
years, though Nolan could not know it — had been typed exactly as spoken. The war he had
declared on Sunday night was about to acquire its second front, and it would not be opened by the
Commonwealth. It would be opened, on schedule, by the United States mail.
The Facts About Saturday arrived on Wednesday the twenty-first of May, in all two hundred and
fourteen mailboxes, in the cream envelope, on the heavy paper, with the ridge-and-sun logo at the
head — which was the letter's first and most consequential decision, reached in Lasky's office and
regretted, later, by everyone who had been in the room when it was reached: to send the defense of
Gordon Pruitt out into the Ridge dressed in the uniform of the association's ordinary business, so
that it landed on kitchen counters beside the dues reminders and the pool schedule with the
borrowed authority of routine. It was two pages long. It regretted the misunderstanding of Saturday.
It explained that during a scheduled compliance inspection, association officers had identified a
pre-existing safety hazard — a compromised side mirror, its housing cracked, presenting a danger
particularly to the children of the court — and that in the course of documenting the hazard, an
unfortunate contact had occurred. It explained that a member of law enforcement with a close
family relationship to the resident had intervened and had produced, after the inspection, a
document obtained that morning without the association's participation, whose validity the
association's counsel was reviewing. It explained that the resident was employed, in a senior
capacity, by the federal government, a fact the association believed the Ridge was entitled to weigh.
It did not use the words edger, strike, or glass. It used the word contact once, the word hazard four
times, and the word family twice — once for the sheriff's relationship, where it was an accusation,
and once, in the closing paragraph, for the Ridge itself, where it was an appeal: the association, the
letter concluded, existed to protect the family of Halloway Ridge, and it asked that family, in a
difficult season, to be patient, to be fair, and to be wary of accounts — the word was Lasky's, and it
did more work than any other word in the letter — of accounts that had been prepared in advance.
The letter split the Ridge, which was, in the short term, precisely what it was for. A
neighborhood is not divided by being told a lie; it is divided by being told a lie that costs less to
believe than the truth, and the Facts letter had been priced, by a professional, with great care. To
believe it, a household on Maple Hollow or Chestnut Hollow — streets that had seen nothing on
Saturday but a golf cart going about its rounds — had only to believe that a proud man had
blundered against a broken mirror and been ambushed for it by his victim's powerful family: a story
with a villain's shape already cut to fit a man most of them had never spoken to, who drove a car
most of them had only seen. To disbelieve it, the same household had to believe that the president
of nine years, the keeper of the ponds and the property values, the man whose signature was on the
welcome letter in their closing binders, had walked up a neighbor's driveway in front of witnesses
and committed a felony with a garden tool — and then had to decide what that belief obliged them
to do, at the annual meeting, with their proxy, in the open, under his eye. Belief, at Halloway Ridge,
had always been priced by its consequences, and Gordon Pruitt, who understood his electorate the
way he had once understood a claims file, had counted on the arithmetic. By Friday, the arithmetic
was visible at the mailboxes, in the small change of the cul-de-sac: who crossed the street to say
good morning and who suddenly had the mail to sort on the porch; who used the word incident and
who used the word shame; the Hendersons' bins, out again on a Thursday, either in defiance or in