PART THREE: THE CASE IN THE BOATHOUSE

Chapter 12: Shoreline Watch

Candace knew how to face a camera. She angled the phone slightly above her eye line, placed the lake behind one shoulder, and gave her audience the expression of a neighbor reluctantly delivering disappointing news.

“Hi, everyone,” she began. “Quick update from our Saturday pavilion. You know the place. We’ve kept it beautiful for years. Well, it seems somebody has decided to throw a little party down here without checking with the people who actually live beside the lake.”

The viewers appeared slowly at first. A dozen familiar names. Then thirty. Someone posted a string of shocked faces. Someone else asked whether the association had a permit. Candace ignored that question and answered the easier ones.

“Oh, yes, there are chairs everywhere. There’s a church bus. Balloons. The whole thing. You’d think the county fair had moved in.”

Lorna stood just outside the frame, holding an extra cup of iced tea. She listened to the description and looked across the lawn. What Candace called a circus was a family carefully arranging flowers beneath the roof of a public pavilion. Rowan was helping an older guest step over the edge of the path. Bethany was speaking quietly with a child whose dress had caught on a folding chair. Nothing about the gathering resembled the threat Candace’s voice suggested.

“And the groom?” Candace continued. “Lovely man, really. He’s a teacher from Detroit. Public schools, he told me proudly. So between the taxes paying his salary and the property’s value, I suppose our neighborhood is paying for this party twice.”

One viewer wrote, *Let them have their wedding.*

Candace skipped over it. Another wrote, *How is this allowed?* She smiled.

“Exactly,” she said, as though she had been asked the question aloud. “Rules are rules. We have all followed them for years.”

She turned the camera to show the chairs. The stream caught a glimpse of Hiram’s photograph and an elderly woman in a purple hat sitting firmly where Candace had expected her to move. It also caught the new sign, its handmade lettering so large that a careful viewer might wonder why a twenty-year association rule had to be written that morning.

“There are always people who think a forty-dollar receipt gives them ownership of a whole community,” Candace said. “I disagree.”

She signed off with a promise to update her neighbors if anything changed. Almost immediately, a dozen messages arrived encouraging her to hold her ground. Candace read them with the private satisfaction of a woman whose followers understood her, or at least understood the version of the afternoon she had given them.

Behind her, Lorna looked at her own phone. She had been recording since Candace first crossed the lawn, mostly out of habit. Candace often asked her to make short clips for the association page, and Lorna had learned that keeping the phone running was easier than figuring out when the important moment might occur. Her camera held the unflattering angles Candace disliked: the paper torn in two, the photo nearly knocked off the table, the way Bethany had asked repeatedly for a respectful conversation.

Lorna had not thought of the recording as evidence. It was simply the afternoon she had witnessed. But when she replayed the first few minutes and heard Candace call the woman carrying chairs “the help,” she felt a small, unpleasant weight settle inside her.

She remembered laughing.

Candace approached, glowing with renewed purpose. “The neighbors are furious. I told you they’d understand.”

“Some of them,” Lorna said.

“What does that mean?”

“A few asked whether the reservation was valid.”

“People ask stupid questions on the internet.”

“We could just move our picnic to your yard. The tables are already in the truck.”