She did not waste time on small talk, and I liked her for that. She said she had read the fine letters twice, and she wanted to see the originals, not photographs of them, and she wanted to see them that same day. Rachel was still at the house, packing a bag for a run down to the Bayline yard, and she looked up from the kitchen table when she heard Olivia's name. I told Olivia we would bring everything we had, including the letter with the two hundred dollar fine and the second letter that had come after it, the one that talked about five hundred dollars a day. Olivia said to bring the envelopes too. She said envelopes mattered, because postmarks mattered, and dates mattered, and in a case like this the smallest piece of paper could turn out to be the one that held everything together.
We drove over in Rachel's truck, not the Porsche. The Porsche stayed in the driveway at home, parked where it had always been parked since Rachel arrived, and I noticed as we backed out that Helen Ortiz was watering her front beds and gave us a wave that was a little longer than usual, the kind of wave that says I am still here and I am still watching. The streets were quiet in that late-spring way, with the palmettos moving slow and the light coming flat and bright off the water at the end of the lane. Rachel did not say much on the drive. She kept her hands steady on the wheel and her eyes on the road, and I could tell she was thinking the way she thinks when a job at Bayline goes wrong, not angry exactly, but working through the steps in order.
Olivia's office was on the second floor of a brick building not far from the courthouse, with a waiting room that smelled faintly of coffee and old paper. She was younger than I had expected, maybe in her early forties, with dark hair pulled back and a desk that was neat in the way of a person who does not trust a neat desk to do the work for her. She had files stacked in straight piles, and a legal pad with notes already written in a careful hand. She shook both our hands, offered us water, and then spread the fine letters out in front of her like cards on a table.
She read the first one aloud, slowly, the way you read something when you want to be sure you are not imagining the words. It said the Porsche was in violation of a rule against the display of luxury vehicles in a residential driveway. It said the fine was two hundred dollars. It said the rule had been adopted on the twelfth of March. Olivia tapped that date with her pen and looked at me.
"Tom," she said, "do you remember any meeting on the twelfth of March where a rule like this was discussed?"
I told her I did not. I told her I went to most board meetings when I could, the way a lot of us did when we had the time, and I did not remember any talk about luxury vehicles, or driveways, or display rules, or anything close to it. I remembered talk about the gate, because the gate had been sticking all winter, and talk about the pond, because the pond needed dredging, and talk about dues, because dues always came up. I did not remember a rule that would make a car parked in its owner's daughter's driveway a violation.
Olivia nodded and pulled out a second set of papers. These were the covenants, the CC&Rs, the thick document every homeowner in Harbor Pointe Estates signs when they buy in. She had marked pages with small coloured tabs. She walked us through them, page by page, and I followed along as best I could, though the language was the kind of language that makes a plain sentence work hard for its living. There was a rule about commercial vehicles, and a rule about boats and trailers left on the street, and a rule about cars that did not run and were left to rust. There was nothing about luxury vehicles. There was nothing about display. There was nothing that said a daughter could not visit her father and park her car in his driveway.
"That is the first problem for them," Olivia said. "A fine has to come from a rule that exists. It cannot come from a rule that somebody writes down later and dates backwards."
Rachel leaned forward. "Backdated?" she asked.
Olivia chose her words carefully. She said she was not accusing anyone yet, not in a formal sense, and not on the record. She said she was looking at dates. The rule, according to Carol's letter, was adopted on the twelfth of March. The board minutes for March, the ones Olivia had been able to get so far, did not mention it. The minutes for April did not mention it either. The first time the rule appeared in writing, as far as Olivia could tell, was in the fine letter itself. That did not prove, by itself, that the date was false. But it was the kind of gap a lawyer notices, and it was the kind of gap that makes a lawyer ask for more paper.