Chapter 2 : He talked for eight minutes.

I sat at the kitchen table with the phone on speaker and my hands folded and I listened, and I didn't interrupt him once, because he had a story to tell and I had the sense that if I interrupted him he would stop and apologize and we would never get back to the middle of it.

"The pool lights are on a separate system from the gate," he said. "Different reader, different back end, different vendor, but the management company has access to both because we handle the billing on both. The gate log we read tonight was the Miller Road gate. The pool lights are on the pool deck panel. I pulled the pool light log last October for a maintenance issue — a bunch of residents called about the lights being on at night when the pool was closed, and the office supervisor asked me to find out why. I found out why. I sent an email about it. And then I sat on the email for eight months because I got a call from Pat Vance the next morning saying that the issue was going to be handled at the board level and I shouldn't 'get out in front of the board.' Those were the words she used. 'Get out in front of the board.'"

He took a breath. I let him.

"For eight months I have been pressing refresh on a spreadsheet every Friday morning," he said. "Every Friday morning there is a new entry. Usually eleven p.m. to midnight. Sometimes one a.m. Twice, two a.m."

"Every Friday?" I said.

"Almost every Friday since last September. Sept ninth was the first. Oct fourteenth, Oct twenty-first, Oct twenty-eighth. November — the fourth, the eleventh, the eighteenth, the twenty-fifth. December — the second, ninth, sixteenth, thirtieth. January — the sixth, thirteenth, twentieth, twenty-seventh. February — third, tenth, seventeenth, twenty-fourth. March — third, tenth, seventeenth, twenty-fourth, thirty-first. April — seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty-eighth. May, June, July, August. It runs the whole way forward and it runs back."

I did the arithmetic while he was still talking. Eleven or twelve Fridays a month, no. Eleven or twelve a season. About four a month. About thirty-two since the first of the year. Plus the fall.

"So forty-one after-hours gate entries, ninety-four nights of pool lights," I said. "That's over a hundred. That's a hundred Fridays."

"A hundred and thirty-one," Marcus said. "The pool light cycles overlap the gate fob entries. Same nights, both systems. Same time window, one to two a.m. Never once during the day. Never once on a night when the gate log shows any other fob except zero-one-four."

"And the pool area on those nights?"

"Messy every time. Cups on the deck, usually. A couple of towels. Twice the float was broken and Pat filed a violation against a household the next morning. Once the cabana door was standing open. That was the night she filed a violation against Lot 12. They paid it. Six hundred dollars even. They're an older couple, the Friedmans — Hal and Marion, on Circle Drive. They paid it because they didn't want trouble."

I knew the Friedmans. I wave at Hal at the mailbox. Marion is the one who came to the door the week after my husband died with a foil pan full of lasagna, and I still have the pan, washed, on the shelf above the washer.

"Marcus," I said, "I want to understand something before I decide how angry to be."

"Okay."

"Did you know that every one of the violation stickers that came out of your office for the last eight months was coming out on the same week as a pool light cycle that traced to Lot Six?"