What the Theft Report Named on Cypress Pointe Lane

Alice Monroe came to my door that afternoon with a folder of her own and a list written in her careful handwriting, and she did not knock the way someone does when they want a favour. She knocked the way someone does when they have already decided to do the work and are only checking whether you will stand beside them while they do it. Alice had kept the duplicate minutes, the real ones, through every meeting where Sandra Whitaker had presented a different version of what the board had supposedly agreed, and she had paid for that care with months of being treated as difficult, as disloyal, as a problem to be managed. She told me she was done being managed. She said the neighbourhood did not need another angry speech, it needed a process, and a process meant a petition, a meeting properly noticed, and a vote that nobody could later claim had been rigged or rushed or held in secret. Elena Ruiz was with her, and Kevin Brooks, and when Harold Parker and June Parker pulled into my driveway a few minutes later, I understood that this was not a small group of people who happened to agree with me. This was the beginning of a campaign, and it had a shape to it, a patience to it, that Sandra had never expected from the people she had fined and frightened. Harold brought a thermos and a notebook with the names of households he had already spoken to, and June brought a tray of sandwiches as if we were about to do honest labour, which in a way we were, and Elena brought the steadiness she had shown since the first week, the kind of steadiness that does not rise to bait and does not back down when bait fails.