Chapter 7 : She thought about it all weekend.

Saturday she drove up to Grand Junction and sat with her mother for four hours and helped her eat half a cup of orange sherbet, and on the way home she stopped at a rest area outside Kingman and sat in the car with her phone in her hand and thought about it.

Ask her about the pool camera. Not "ask the board." Not "ask the office." Ask her. Her, Dana Whitmore.

Which means one of two things. Either it's a taunt — somebody who wants to watch her sweat at the meeting. Or it's a real direction, from somebody who already knows what the pool camera file does and doesn't show, and who wants her to do the one thing that Pat Vance had spent the whole hearing not doing.

Not asking for a fob audit.

Dana sat in the car and replayed the meeting back in her head. There was one thing she had not said at the table because it had not occurred to her until Wednesday at 4:00 a.m. in her kitchen, and once it had occurred to her it was the only thing that fit.

The pool gate at Sierra Vista Estates is a common-area gate with a keyed fob reader. It logs every fob that opens it, timed to the second, keyed to a serial number, and it has logged every one for as long as Dana had lived there, because she had once sat on the landscape committee and had signed the PO for the reader upgrade herself.

You can open a gate with a fob. You can also prop it open with a rock. The camera shows the gate, not the rock.

But the log shows the fob.

And the fob reader has a keypad for guests.

Dana turned the car on and drove home the rest of the way with the windows down and the sun on her face, and when she pulled into her driveway on Alder Ridge at 8:40 that night she said out loud to the empty car, "She never asked for the fob audit."

Because that's the sentence. That's the one.

In eleven days of phone calls and door stickers and a hearing at a folding table, Patricia Vance — who had caught a person she believed was lying, who had a ledger, who had a camera, who had the whole apparatus of a six-hundred-home association behind her — had never once asked for the pool gate's own log.

Because the log has a date and a time and a fob number.

And Dana had spent eleven days telling herself she could prove she wasn't in Arizona, and she could, she had the sign-in sheet and the badge printout, but those prove where she was. They don't prove who worked the gate.

The fob log proves who worked the gate.

She parked and got out and walked in and made a cup of coffee and sat down at her kitchen table with the laptop and typed into the association portal and pulled up the governing documents, and she found what she was looking for on page eleven of the CC&R amendment history.

Vote of the board of directors, June 3. Proposed by: P. Vance. Seconded by: R. Okafor. Amendment 9-29-B-2: "To provide that the assignment of code enforcement and violation issuance authority, including all enforcement tools, shall rotate monthly among board members and shall be maintained on an internal assignment sheet at the office."

Initialed, on the certification page at the bottom of the amendment: P.V., in ballpoint, the same two letters on every one of the forty-one amendment pages, going back four years.

Dana looked at that for a long time.

Because the amendment said the assignment rotates monthly. And on Monday, July 28, when Kayla Ortiz processed the violation against Dana's door, Kayla's assignment sheet — the one she had not opened and would not open until Friday — was the only proof in the world of who had held code-enforcement authority for July.

Dana set her coffee down and pulled her shoulder bag over and took out her mother's sign-in sheet and laid it flat on the table next to the amended language, and she thought about a woman in a cream blazer standing at the head of a folding table with a clipboard against her hip, saying I'm the one with the gavel on the agenda.