Diane Foster called the meeting to order with a tiredness that was not indifference. She was a woman in her late fifties who had run the board for six years, and she looked, that evening, like someone who had hoped this particular matter would resolve itself and had finally accepted that it would not.
"We are here," Diane said, "to consider a complaint about a compliance inspection, a fine, and a police report arising from the same afternoon. We will look at documents, not at characterisations of documents. I will ask that everyone speak in turn, and that we keep to what can be shown."
James Okafor, beside her, laid out a set of papers in front of him with the methodical care of a man who believed that order on a table helped produce order in a room. He was by-the-book in the best sense: he did not raise his voice, he did not take sides in advance, he followed the text to wherever it led.
Alicia was invited to speak first, briefly. She did not tell a story. She laid out her folder, document by document, in the order they had been created. Her timed account from the evening of the fall. Her photographs of the gate stop, the mark where the gate had struck, and the fence latch. Eleanor's stills, which Eleanor herself then stood and explained, in her teacher's voice, pointing to the dry sandals at entry, the empty space between the two women, the slip with no contact.
"The camera does not take sides," Eleanor said. "It records. This is what it recorded."
Karen sat at the far end of the table, clipboard in front of her, her blonde bob neat, her eyebrows drawn sharply, her blouse a quieter colour tonight, as if she had chosen it to look less like an arrival and more like a defence. She listened without interrupting, which Alicia took as a sign that Diane had spoken to her beforehand about the rules of the evening. Her hands were folded. Only the tightness around her mouth gave away that she was hearing her own afternoon described back to her by other people.
When Eleanor finished, Diane nodded to James.
"Mr. Okafor will take us through the covenants," she said.
James opened the covenant booklet to a page he had marked with a thin strip of paper. He read aloud, slowly, so that every word could be heard in the room.
The covenant, he said, concerned pool drainage and fence maintenance. It allowed the homeowners' association to request an inspection. It required fourteen days' written notice. It required the owner's consent. It granted no right of entry. It did not authorise any person to enter a private yard uninvited, to order a resident to leave a lounger, or to conduct an inspection on the spot.
He read the passage twice. The second time, the room was very quiet.
"Fourteen days," James said, looking up. "Written notice. And consent. Those are not suggestions in the text. They are conditions. Without them, there is no inspection under this covenant. There is only a visit."
Alicia watched Karen's face. For a moment, something flickered there — not anger, exactly, but recognition, as if she were hearing a sentence she had once read and then decided to read differently.
Diane placed the covenant booklet in the centre of the table, open to the marked page, where everyone could see it.
"This is the rule we are bound by," she said. "Not a form. Not a habit. This."
Sophie Martin spoke next, and her voice shook at first, then steadied as she went on, the way a voice does when it discovers that the room is actually listening.
She was twenty-six, and two summers earlier Karen had come to her yard while Sophie was hanging washing out, clipboard in hand, and had told her she was inspecting the fence and the small above-ground pool Sophie shared with her housemates. Sophie had not known whether she was allowed to say no. She had let Karen walk around the garden, open the gate to the pool area, and write notes, because Karen had spoken as if the matter were already settled, and because Sophie had been afraid of a fine, or a letter, or trouble with the landlord.
"I didn't invite her," Sophie said. "I didn't get a letter first. I didn't sign anything. I just — I thought she must be allowed, because she acted like she was."
The man from the next street spoke after her. He described a similar visit the previous spring: Karen at his back gate, clipboard ready, asking to see his fence line, telling him there had been a complaint. He had received no written notice. He had not consented in advance. He had let her in because arguing with a neighbour at the gate felt worse than letting her look.
The woman with the toddler spoke last of the three. Karen had come while the child was napping, she said, and had stood in the garden writing, and had told her the side gate needed replacing. The woman had replaced it, at her own expense, because she had believed the instruction came with authority behind it. Only later, talking to Sophie, had she wondered whether it had.