(The Machine Years, Chapter 5) How Many Ways Does a Raspberry Cookie Brownie Crumble?
AAC Board of Directors Winter Meeting: Mixing Ingredients of Deceit to Burn the Director Who Didn't Ask Cookie-Cutter Questions
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Act I: The Brownie
She appeared in my doorway.
I don’t remember hearing her footsteps. Pulaski County Treasurer Debra Buckner moved like someone who had learned not to announce herself; a treasurer’s habit, or just the quiet of a woman who didn’t need a door slam to prove she’d arrived. Debra was a mentor of mine since I arrived at AAC. She was always supportive even though she did not pull any punches or sugar coat anything. She was one of the very few Association of Arkansas Counties board members in my work inner circle.
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I was at my keyboard. I stopped typing midword. I turned my head first. Made eye contact before I spoke.
Then I pulled my fingers off the keys. I swiveled my chair ninety degrees, the rest of my body following my eyes, and I smiled.
The smile surprised me. It wasn’t professional courtesy. It wasn’t calculated. It was relief. For six months, my boss, AAC Director Chris Villines had been managing me out of my own life. First it was a demotion that came out of the blue after six years of service. Silent treatment in hallways, non-recognition at meetings. He disenfranchised me in front of stakeholders, behind the scenes, across both sides of the AAC building. He made me a ghost with a payroll entry.
Debra was the kind of person who didn’t have to bring me anything, so when she walked in and smiled back, I felt seen.
Not tolerated, not snubbed. Seen.
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She set something on my desk.
A brownie, foil-wrapped. Homemade from her kitchen. Topped with raspberry and cookie crumble, though I wouldn’t know that until later. At that moment, it was just a dessert morsel on a napkin.
“Here you go,” she said, or something close. I don’t remember her exact words. I remember her hands; I remember the napkin. I remember thinking: Someone in this building still knows I exist.
We spoke for a brief moment, maybe two. Nothing about budgets. Nothing about meetings. Nothing about my salary or my future or the thing she was about to walk into. Debra was one of my mentors in the various roles of county governement when I first came to AAC. She was someone who I respected.
Then she said she had to go. She walked out of my office.
And I watched her cross the hall.
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Act II: The Walk Across the Hall
The law library, a.k.a. the county war room, was across from my office. I could see its door from my chair. It was a standard AAC budget committee meeting that day, nothing remarkable, nothing that would have made me look up from my work if Debra hadn’t just left my desk.
She walked toward the library door.
It opened before she reached it.
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Chris was on the other side, holding the door for her. I could see his face. I could hear the low murmur of the small committee already seated inside: other board members, county officials, the quiet shuffle of papers before business.
Chris saw me.
He had to. My office door was open. I was right there, swiveled toward the hallway, the brownie still on my desk, my body still turned from the act of receiving something kind from someone who mattered.
He didn’t wave. Didn’t nod. Didn’t acknowledge me at all. But we made eye contact as he glanced over Debra’s right shoulder.
He just held the door for Debra while looking at me.
She walked through.
And he closed it.
The latch clicked.
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I sat there. The brownie sat there. The door sat there — closed, ordinary, just a door.
I didn’t know what was happening inside that room, and what it meant for my future. That the vote in there, orchastrated by Chris, would be the last push out the door for me.
I didn’t know if Debra knew what was on the agenda before she gave me the brownie.
I didn’t know anything.
And that’s the part I need you to understand:
There was no way for me to know. Not then. Not that day. Not for eight years.
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The door closed. The meeting happened. I went back to my keyboard drafting a press release. The brownie sat there until I ate it. I really don’t remember that part. I remember the door.
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Act III: The Letter and the Message
Dec. 16, 2016.
The next day.
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Chris called me in. Or handed me something in the hallway. Or sat me down in his office. The details have blurred with time, but the document’s content are seared.
A letter.
A salary reduction, effective immediately because of my reduction in duties and change in title. Board action cited, a budget committee vote at the previous day’s meeting referenced. The meeting across the hall. The one with the door Chris held open for Debra.
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I don’t remember the conversation we might have had when Chris gave me the letter. I do remember trying to understand why the sudden demotion, the change in duties, and now the salary reduction.
All I could come back to was a write-up a couple of months before for a county clerks meeting that you’ll recall was the sole piece of paper in my file for supposedly not attending a county clerk meeting.
“You are watched closley because of your important position,” the write-up said.
I’m watched closely? That’s a laugh.
I remember thinking: “I haven’t been seen or included for months.”
I didn’t blow a gasket.
There’s an iteration of me — the school-yard version or the less-healed inner child iteration of myself, the one who regulates with anger and cutting words — that would have flipped that desk and created a scene for the ages. That version exists. He’s not hypothetical. He’s just not the one who survived.
The one who survived took the letter.
“You are watched closley because of your important position.”
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I was in my office. I looked at the spot on my desk where the brownie had been. I replayed the previous day.
The smile.
The napkin.
The “Here you go.”
The walk across the hall.
Chris opening the door. “You are watched closely,” etched and echoing in my head space.
The door closing to its frame.
The latch.
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The question arrived fully formed, sharp as a blade:
Did she know?
Did she know when she walked into my office? Did she place that brownie on my desk — warm, homemade, human — while already aware of what she was about to walk into across the hall?
Or did she learn it in that room? Did the door close, did the papers come out, did Chris say the words, and did she sit there — once my advocate, my ally — and realize she had just given me a brownie on the way to take my salary?
Or was she neither?
Was she just another board member, another person in that room, another hand that went up or stayed down, and I will never know which because no public record exists, no vote was recorded, no minutes captured the moment?
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The Question That Never Left
For eight years, I carried Debra in my map of the world as if she knew.
Because the alternative — that she was innocent, that Chris used her and the rest of the board, that the brownie was just a brownie and the door was just a door and the meeting was just a meeting where something happened that she may or may not have understood — the alternative was harder to hold than betrayal.
Betrayal makes sense. It can be defined. Betrayal has edges. It’s tangible. Betrayal is a story you can tell yourself at 2 a.m..
Innocence used as camouflage — that’s the one that keeps you up until dawn.
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So I held the question for eight years. Through the “don’t work out your notice” letter, through the Saturday extraction to get my things so Chris wouldn’t have to answer questions from staff, through the years of silence and rebuilding. The picking myself up again and again and again to eventually co-found Tracking Arkansas. The question remained through what felt like a lifetime of uncertainty trapped in someone else’s narrative. It was the enduring and emerging question, the inquiry I danced with almost every day until I penned Chapter 4 only weeks ago.
Did she know?
I didn’t answer it because I couldn’t. Not without evidence. Not without FOIA. Not without finally, eight years later, asking for the documents Chris never wanted anyone to see.
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What the FOIA Said and What It Couldn’t
I filed the requests just this Feburary.
I waited.
The documents came back. The Tracking Arkansas team is still reviewing the massive amount of documents pertinent to our request and specific to other active investigations; however, this is what we know about the documentation, or the absence thereof, as we track the crumbs of Chris’ fictional storyline of how I left the AAC.
No official action by the board on my demotion or salary reduction in the public record. No vote recorded. No resolution. No motion. No second. No roll call. No budget committee meeting minutes in existence. Nothing in the minutes of the full board. No paper trail. No due process.
According to the law — the only law that matters for public bodies — the board never took any action on my salary on Dec. 15, 2016.
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So what happened in that room?
What did Chris tell them?
What did Debra hear?
Did she raise her hand and vote yes? Did she stay silent? Did she object? Did she leave that meeting and wonder if she should come back across the hall and say something to me?
I don’t know.
The FOIA can’t answer that. The FOIA can only tell you what exists, not what was said in a room without a recorder.
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But here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then:
If the board didn’t know – if Chris never told them, never brought a vote, never presented a resolution – then Debra is innocent. The brownie was just a brownie. And I spent eight years wondering why did she or other board members not even say a word to me or were they unaware what Chris was doing behind her back.
And if the board did know – if Chris told them, and they discussed it, and they reached some consensus without a public vote, without minutes, without due process – then they knew illegally.
No guiding legal authority. No public record. No notice to me. No opportunity to respond. No write-ups. No performance reviews. Nothing but a closed door and a handshake and a “we’ll let Scott figure it out.”
That’s not governance. That’s a conspiracy without the courage to put it on paper.
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The Door Remains Closed
I’m not going to answer the question here.
Not because I don’t have an opinion. Not because the evidence is unclear.
Because for eight years, no one but Chris and the board knew. Not the public. Not the board members themselves, maybe. And I want you to sit in that not-knowing for just a moment longer, the way I sat in my office on Dec. 15, 2016, with a brownie on my desk and a door closed across the hall.
Did she know?
Did the board know?
Or was Chris the only one in that building who knew exactly what he was doing, and counted on the rest of us never comparing notes?
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The brownie doesn’t tell you.
The FOIA doesn’t tell you.
The door, that ordinary, wooden, latched door, doesn’t tell you.
But here’s what I can tell you with certainty:
Chris handed me a salary reduction letter on Dec. 16, 2016. He claimed board action. He claimed a vote. He claimed a meeting.
The public record shows none of that happened.
The door closed anyway.
And I ate the brownie.
And I started asking questions, the kind of questions that crumble silence in the void. Exposing what lies in shadows, the emptiness of what should be full and complete, changing the unknown to the seen for the people who deserve it, to perserve a fair and complete record of what oftentimes is swept under or fades into the margin of error. Giving the record its voice from the dark places like the space between Chris’ handwritten note and what did or didn’t happen on the other side of that door that is why I scribe light.
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Eight years later, I’m still digging, tracking crumbs of evidence and the tables have turned.
“Chris, you are watched closely because of your important position.”
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Did She Know?