Diane went to her own filing drawer and pulled the association's correspondence file. She found Alicia's letter and placed it on top, where it could not be buried under newer paper. Then she wrote, in her own hand, a short note to herself on the inside of the folder: "Reply in writing. Do not paraphrase the covenants from memory. Send the full text." It was a small act of self-correction, and it steadied her. The board had a duty that was larger than keeping meetings short, and she intended, this time, to meet it.
James Okafor kept the association's governing documents in a filing cabinet in his study, in folders labelled by year, because he believed that a rule you could not find was not much better than a rule you did not have.
He pulled the covenants that evening and read them the way he read everything that might affect other people's homes: slowly, with a pen in his hand, marking the margins only where the language was unambiguous.
He found the pool provision on the third page of the relevant section. It was narrow, as such provisions tend to be, and it was written in the careful, unadorned language of people who had wanted to prevent arguments rather than win them. The association, it said, could request an inspection of a pool's drainage and fence maintenance where there was a reasonable concern. Such a request had to be made in writing, at least fourteen days in advance. It had to propose a time. And it required the owner's consent.
James read the paragraph again. Then he read it a third time, because he wanted to be certain he had not missed a clause that followed it, a sub-paragraph that granted entry, a footnote that changed the meaning. There was none. There was no right of entry. There was no provision for an unannounced visit. There was no clause that allowed a board member, or a compliance chair, or anyone else to open a gate and walk into a private garden because she carried a form.
He sat back in his chair and looked at the page for a long time. He was a by-the-book man, not because he loved rules for their own sake, but because he had seen what happened when rules were stretched by confident people: the stretch became the new rule, and then the new rule was enforced against people who had never agreed to it. He had joined the board precisely to prevent that kind of drift. And now, reading the paragraph in his own study, he understood that the drift had already happened, quietly, over two years, while the board had been busy with budgets and road repairs and the ordinary business of a neighbourhood.
He telephoned Diane that night, though it was late enough that he almost waited until morning. He did not wait, because the letter to Alicia would go out in the morning, and he wanted Diane to know what it contained before she signed it.
"Fourteen days," he said. "Written notice. Owner's consent. No entry without it. That's the rule. There is nothing else."
Diane was silent for a moment. "And Karen's form?"
"Form CS-7 is not in the covenants," James said. "It is not in the bylaws. It is not in any board minute I can find. As far as I can tell, it is a form Karen designed herself."
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The facts, stated plainly, were sufficient, and both of them understood what they meant: that Alicia Bennett had been right to refuse, that the fine had no foundation in the document the fine purported to enforce, and that the board now had a decision to make that it could not make by postponing it again.
Before he telephoned, James had checked the rest of the file, because thoroughness was his habit and because he did not want to be caught, later, by a clause he had missed. He read the sections on fences, on common areas, on the board's powers to levy fines, and on the procedure for disputing them. The fine procedure, like the inspection procedure, required notice, an opportunity to respond, and a decision recorded in minutes. None of that appeared to have happened in Alicia's case. The fine letter had arrived as if it were the end of a process, when no process, as far as the documents showed, had begun.
He also searched the board minutes for any mention of Form CS-7, or of a pool inspection programme, or of Karen's appointment as an inspector in any formal sense. He found the appointment of Karen as chair of the compliance committee, recorded in ordinary language, and he found references to her reports, which the board had received and noted without, it seemed, ever asking to see the forms on which those reports were based. That, James thought, was how drift happened: not through a single dramatic decision, but through a series of small acceptances, each one reasonable on its own, that together created a practice no one had authorised.