Invasion of Privacy

and be comfortable.”
    I took one of the plushy easy chairs, thinking as I sank into its cushions that “plushy” wasn’t quite generous enough. The thing nearly swallowed me, as though there were room for another person underneath the cushions. Stepanian seemed unable to take advantage of her own hospitality, instead perching on the edge of the matching sofa like a seventh-grader attending her first coed dance.
    I unzipped the portfolio and handed a questionnaire to her, putting another on top of the portfolio as a writing surface.
    The clouded look again. “What’s this?”
    “I want to be able to have a consistent interview with each person I visit in each complex, so I figured my working from a form and writing on it would make more sense. That copy’s so you can see what the questions will be, and maybe save us both some time in answering the earlier ones. If you notice anything on there that troubles you, please let me know.”
    She scanned the questionnaire.
    I said, “Okay?”
    Her eyes came up from the paper. “I suppose so.”
    “FULL NAME?”
    “Lana L. Stepanian.”
    “HOMETOWN?”
    “Do you really need that?”
    Stepanian was proving to be good dress rehearsal for using the questionnaire on Andrew Dees. “My clients thought it would help them to judge how people from different parts of the country might view their condo management company.”
    I wasn’t completely convinced myself, but Stepanian said, “ Solvang , California .”
    “Can you spell that for me?”
    “S-O-L-V-A-N-G. It means ‘sunny field’ in Danish.”
    “You’re from Denmark ?”
    A small smile, showing me the smaller teeth. “No. Mexican-American. Solvang is northeast of Santa Barbara .”
    “MAIDEN NAME?”
    “Lopez, with a Z.”
    “EDUCATION?”
    “ Boston University .”
    “SPOUSE?”
    She glanced down at the form. “Steven, as I said. With a V, not a P-H.”
    “And his HOMETOWN?”
    A pause, as though these details seemed increasingly strange to her. “ Idaho , somewhere.”
    A little vague, but I didn’t want to push my luck. “EDUCATION?”
    “ University of Idaho .”
    Smiling as warmly as I could, I looked up at her. “How did you two meet?”
    “A party, when I was at BU.” A cocking of the head, as though she thought that was the strangest question yet. “Mr. Cuddy, why do you—”
    Move to firmer ground. “Now, you said you’ve lived here for six years?”
    “Almost six, yes.”
    “Did you PURCHASE outright OR RENT?”
    “Purchased, from the first developer.”
    “The first?”
    “Yes.” Stepanian seemed to redirect herself. “Well, I guess the only developer, technically. We were buying at a bad time, when it looked as though everything was going up and up and what we had in the bank was shrinking from about ten percent of a purchase price to more like five. Steven and I had almost given up hope on a normal life.”
    “Normal?”
    “Owning our own home.” The neutral voice again. “Then we saw Plymouth Willows, and really liked it, and so we offered the asking price on this unit and just beat two other couples to it. Or so we thought.”
    “I don’t get you.”
    “Well, the project was in trouble. The developer had kind of squirreled away some of the bills, getting people to buy in the hope that he could pay them off. But in the end, he had to sell at a discount to a lot of investor-owners, not owner-occupants.”
    “So the absentee owners began to rent out to tenants.”
    “And the developer did too. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except it got to be more than fifty percent of the units.”
    “At which point...?”
    “The banks didn’t want to lend to new buyers if the current owners weren’t occupying, so the banks made the new buyers come up with twenty, even twenty-five percent down payments.”
    “Which was tough.”
    “And got worse. Once the real estate market went into a spin, the prices started tumbling, and the investor-owners couldn’t rent the places for what they were paying to carry them. We had trouble getting those owners to send in their monthly maintenance fees for the grounds and all, and once the foreclosures started, we had even more trouble getting our money.”
    “The banks that foreclosed wouldn’t contribute the monthly maintenance?”
    Stepanian wagged her head. “It was the developer who did most of the foreclosing, because he’d taken back mortgages from a lot of the original purchasers who were perhaps a bit... shaky on