Kent Ashford arrived at my house on a Sunday afternoon carrying a folder that looked as if he had carried it around for several days before gathering the courage to knock. He was in his early fifties, neatly dressed, with tired eyes and a careful way of speaking. I recognized him by his blue station wagon. He introduced himself as the HOA treasurer and asked whether we could talk somewhere private.
I made coffee and took him to the kitchen. He remained standing until I pulled out a chair, then sat with both hands around his mug. For several minutes he asked questions about the bridge, almost as though he needed to establish that the photographs in the local paper represented an actual structure rather than a neighborhood argument. When I described Pops and the demolition, Kent stared into his coffee. Finally he opened the folder.
"I have a problem," he said. "Actually, eighty-five families have a problem. We just don't all know it yet."
The first document was an invoice for twenty-eight thousand dollars, paid by Meadowbrook's HOA from its infrastructure reserve. It was labeled emergency bridge hazard abatement. The date was the day after Darlene's bulldozer had finished its work. The next page was a set of board minutes, purportedly authorizing the expenditure at a meeting I knew two board members had said never occurred. Kent had the association calendar, the bank transaction record, and an earlier draft of the minutes. The entries did not agree.