I didn't know the name. Gus didn't either.
But two days later, I walked the morning loop with Hal Brenner, and Hal did.
* * *
Hal had been the treasurer of the Wren Hollow board for nine years. He was a retired CPA in his seventies, a tall, stooped man with a long jaw and the cheerful pessimism of someone who had spent his career reading other people's balance sheets. He'd resigned from the board in the spring of 2023, a few weeks after I'd moved in, and he'd answered my email about the tree tags as one of his last acts in office. I'd met him only in passing since, at the pool, at the annual meeting. He lived on Tanager and kept honeybees in two white boxes at the back of his lot, which I suspect was a violation of something in Karen's appendix.
I'd asked him to meet me at WH-6, the clubhouse maple, at 7:30 on a Friday in August. He was there early, in khaki shorts and black socks, and he listened to the whole thing without interrupting, his hands clasped behind his back, looking up into the maple's canopy as if the answers might be written in it.
When I said "Brent Kessler," he closed his eyes.
"Karen's son-in-law," he said. "Married her daughter Megan, oh, five years ago. Big wedding at the Columbus Athletic Club. Karen talked about the ice sculpture for a year. Brent's in 'real estate investment.'" He put the quotation marks in with his voice. "Flips houses, buys rentals. He came to the clubhouse once and gave a little talk at a social about 'building generational wealth.' I remember thinking it was an odd thing to be selling to a room full of retirees."
"Hal," I said, "why did you resign?"
He was quiet for a while. A pair of chimney swifts went chittering over the clubhouse roof.
"Karen pushed the board to fire the management company," he said. "The company wasn't great, I'll grant you. But they were a check. They sent the violation notices on their letterhead, they kept the logs, they ran the hearings. Once they were gone, Karen took over compliance herself. She said it'd save us eighteen thousand a year. And then she wanted the board to adopt a new fine schedule — fifty dollars a day, accruing, per violation, with administrative fees on top. I said that was insane, it was a hundred times what anybody else in the county charged. She got the votes anyway. The other two directors at the time were friends of hers. Still are." He looked down at me. "And then she wanted to open a separate bank account for fine collections. 'For transparency,' she said. 'So fines don't get mixed in with assessments.' Her name on it, and the secretary's. Not the treasurer's."
"Not yours."