standing up, in its own clubhouse, like a neighborhood.
The board organized on Tuesday in a session Elaine Foster minuted at seven pages, the longest
of her tenure, because almost everything in it was new. Elaine Cho was elected president — the
first president of Halloway Ridge chosen in a contested era, as Harold put it, moving her election
himself — and her acceptance consisted, in the minutes, of a single sentence: that the board would
govern from the recorded documents or not at all. Gordon's resignation was accepted, with his
service noted, in a formula Priya drafted and Harold amended and Elaine Cho refused, twice, to
sharpen. Marcus Bell, attending as a member, placed the management contract, the Fenwick
contract, and the insurer's letter on the table and offered — without office, without fee — to assist
the treasurer pro tem in the accounting the membership had directed, an offer the board accepted in
the minutes with an astonishment it did not trouble to conceal. The board voted, that same evening,
to give Ridgeway Community Management notice of the suspension of all fining authority; to
direct Fenwick Recovery that no vehicle was to be touched on association business; to retain Ruth
Abramson, who had done half the closings on the Ridge and all of its reading, as the association's
counsel for the reckoning; and to instruct her to recover, in order, the money, the contracts, and —
Elaine Cho's phrase, entered verbatim — the association's good name, which was understood by
everyone at the table to be the only item on the list that could not be invoiced. Gordon was not
present. He had sent the resignation by hand, in an envelope delivered by Dale Fenwick, who stood
on Elaine Cho's porch with his cap in both hands and said, to the new president of his late brotherin-law's association, the sentence he had evidently driven over to say: "He isn't taking calls. He
wanted it there Tuesday. Whatever else — he wanted it there Tuesday." The board did not discuss
him. His defense, which was his own and not the association's, belonged now entirely to Victor
Lasky, to a courtroom three weeks away, and to a fund of one man's money, the assessment having
died in the clubhouse with the forty-one votes that could not save it.
July came in hot and stayed. The Bentley sat in the driveway of number nine under its sapphire
cover, accruing nothing — the portal balance stood at zero, by court order, and after the twenty-first
of June nobody at Ridgeway appeared inclined to test what a second contempt would cost. Caleb
Rowan declined, in writing, the suggestion that he stand for the vacancy Gordon's resignation
would leave: he had moved to Sycamore Hollow Court to live on it, a prosecutor's neighborliness
was a contradiction the street had already paid once to learn, and Harold Abernathy, at eighty-two,
had more recent experience of the board than he did. He attended no meeting of the Reading
Group, which met anyway, in Harold's kitchen, over the accounting. He mowed his lawn on
Saturday mornings, badly by Ridge standards and improving, and took Sam to the pond to feed the
geese, an offense his son regarded as the founding liberty of the new regime. The file completed
itself without them: Doyle took the last statements; the dealership's service manager, a man named
Okonkwo who had quoted the mirror in April and kept the photographs from the insurance rider,
was listed to testify to a number the whole county by then knew by heart. And Walter Hargrove, in
those three weeks, performed the most disciplined act of his third term: he did nothing, in public, at
all. He ran his county. He fished, once, with his son-in-law, in a boat in which the case was not
mentioned by either man. When a reporter telephoned for a father's comment on the coming trial,
the office's answer — the sheriff has recused himself from this matter and will have no comment,
now or after — was printed in full, and read, in at least one kitchen on Sycamore Hollow Court,
aloud, twice, with respect.
The trial of the Commonwealth against Gordon Pruitt opened on Tuesday the fifteenth of July, in
the circuit court at the county seat, in a courtroom built, like the clubhouse, for a smaller attendance
than it got. Judge Whitaker did not preside. She had signed the injunction and ruled on its
contempt, and the case had been assigned, at the Commonwealth's own unopposed motion in June,
to Judge Raymond Osei, a visiting judge from the adjoining circuit — no relation, the record was
careful and faintly weary to note, to Caleb Rowan's counsel Daniel Osei — a spare, courteous man
of seventy who ran his courtroom the way Elaine Foster kept minutes: completely, and without
rescue. Victor Lasky had filed, and lost, the motions the file required of him: to exclude the dash
camera, admitted as a recording made in the ordinary course, by a machine, without an editor; to
exclude Maya Okafor's footage, admitted on her mother's consent and her own testimony to come;
and to strike any reference to the injunction, which the court refused, holding that an order served
on the defendant that morning, concerning the very property in the indictment, was context a jury
was entitled to weigh. What Lasky kept whole was the defense he had built in Richmond: that the
mirror had been cracked before the edger touched it; that the contact had been an officer drawing