We sat in my kitchen until almost midnight. Priya had a way of going very still when she was concentrating, her pen held sideways between two fingers like a cigarette. When I showed her the excavator, she laughed once, sharply, without humor.
"You understand what this is," she said.
"Tell me what you think it is."
"In Ohio, under the planned community statute, an HOA can impose fines for violations, but only after it gives the owner written notice and a chance for a hearing. Notice by mail to the owner's address, with a specific description of the violation and the date. If those steps aren't followed, the fine isn't valid. And if the fines are being charged to the owner's account and the association's declaration lets it lien the property for unpaid charges — " she flipped through the Wren Hollow binder, which I'd also brought, and found the section, and tapped it " — and this one does, Section 9.3, 'all assessments, fines, charges, and costs of collection,' then the association can record a lien against your house. And a lien can be foreclosed. That's the nuclear option. It doesn't happen often, because most boards aren't crazy, and because a judge looks at a foreclosure over fines on an elderly widow and sees a newspaper headline. But it happens." She put the pen down. "If someone wanted to take a paid-off house from an old lady who doesn't read her mail carefully, it's not a bad way to do it. It's a slow, papered, legal-looking way to do it."
"Who would want that?"
"That," Priya said, "is the right question." She looked at my spreadsheet, at the cell that said Who else? "You started a list?"
"I've started a list."
"Let's make it a long one."
* * *
It took us three weeks to canvass Wren Hollow. Priya did evenings, I did mornings, Gus did the afternoons because he said nobody under seventy was home in the afternoons and those were the people who'd talk to him.
We had a script, more or less. We were collecting copies of HOA violation notices from the last three years, for a review. We weren't accusing anybody of anything. Did they have any letters they'd kept?