Walter's next explanation was about passwords. The association's accounting software, he said, had been updated, and the old password no longer worked, and the new password was with a former board member who had moved away, and they were trying to reach that person. Olivia asked for the name of the former board member, and Walter said he would have to look it up. She asked for the name of the software, and Walter said he would have to check. She asked whether the bank could provide statements directly, since a bank does not need a software password to print its own records, and Walter said the bank would need a board authorisation, and the board would need to meet, and the board had not yet met. It was a circle, and Walter walked around it very carefully, as if he believed that if he kept walking, nobody would notice that the circle led nowhere.
I watched this happen from the outside, mostly, because Olivia was handling the legal side, and Rachel was handling the Bayline side, and my job, as I saw it, was to be a steady witness and a neighbour who did not make things worse by gossiping. That was harder than it sounds, because the street was talking, and people stopped me on walks and at the mailbox to ask what was happening, and whether it was true about the duplicates, and whether it was true about the gate money, and whether their own fine had been part of it. I told them the same thing each time, that Olivia was looking into it, and that the records would tell the story, and that they should keep any letters they had received, and any receipts for payments they had made, and bring them to Olivia if they wanted to. I did not tell them numbers that were not yet final, and I did not tell them who Olivia suspected, because suspicion is not proof, and a neighbourhood that starts accusing people before the proof is ready can tear itself apart in ways that are hard to repair.
But I will admit that, in private, on my own porch in the evenings, I thought about Walter a great deal. I had known Walter for years, in the casual way you know a treasurer, from meetings and from the annual picnic, where he always brought the same potato salad and talked about interest rates as if they were weather. He had seemed, for a long time, like a careful man, a man who liked order and liked figures to add up. Now the figures did not add up, and the man who was supposed to keep them in order was the man who could not find them, or could not open them, or could not get permission to share them. I did not enjoy thinking that about a neighbour. I did not enjoy it at all. But I had spent thirty years in a firehouse learning that when smoke keeps coming from the same place, you do not keep telling yourself it is just steam, and you do not walk away because the person in charge of the building tells you everything is fine.
Olivia, for her part, stayed calm through all of it, and her calmness steadied the rest of us. She sent a second letter, firmer than the first, setting a final date for full production of the records, and stating, in plain language, that if the records were not produced by that date, she would ask a court to order their production, and she would ask the court to note the delay. She sent that letter by certified mail as well, and she kept a copy, and she told Walter, on the phone, exactly what it said, so there could be no misunderstanding. Walter said he understood, and that he was doing his best, and that the books were complicated, and that these things took time. Olivia thanked him, and she wrote down that he had said so, with the date and the time.
Mr. Ellis, meanwhile, worked with what he had, and what he had was already enough to worry about. He confirmed June's duplicate towing figures, invoice by invoice, and he confirmed the gate-reserve transfer, and he began to trace the fine payments from the thirteen households, matching letters to receipts to deposits, as far as the partial bank records would allow. He did not finish, because he could not finish without the full books, and he said so plainly in a short interim note to Olivia, which she read to Rachel and me in her office one afternoon. He said the records provided so far were incomplete, that the gaps were not random, and that the missing pages were exactly the pages that would have shown where the second towing payments went and where the gate money went after it left the reserve account. He did not accuse anyone in that note. He did not need to. A gap that lines up, page after page, with the money that is missing, tells its own story, even before the last page is found.