"Not mine. I said no. I said every dollar that comes in goes into the operating account, where I can see it and the auditor can see it. She said I was being obstructionist. The vote was two to one." He shrugged. "I resigned that night. I'm seventy-six years old, Nell. I didn't want to spend my seventies fighting Karen Whitcombe over a checking account. I told myself it was just bad governance. I'm not proud of that."
"Do you know if that account still exists?"
"No idea. But I'll tell you something. The association's annual financial statement, the one they hand out at the annual meeting — the last two years, it shows fine income of about four thousand dollars a year." He turned his long face toward me. "You've got eleven households on your list. How much in fines did you say?"
I had it on my phone. I'd added it up the night before. Paid fines, from people who had paid rather than fight: just over sixty-one thousand dollars over three years, according to the receipts and canceled checks and bank statements people had shown us. Not counting what had come out of the proceeds of the Bickel and Ellery and Abernathy sales to "clear the account."
Hal whistled, low and long.
"Well," he said. "That's a reconciliation problem."
* * *
The August board meeting was held in the clubhouse on the third Tuesday of the month, at seven in the evening, in a room with a drop ceiling, a pool table nobody used, and a framed aerial photograph of Wren Hollow from 1998 in which all the trees were the size of broccoli. Usually seven or eight people came. That night there were thirty-four. Gus had been working the phones.
Karen sat at a folding table at the front with the two other directors: Deb Sorensen, the secretary, a brisk woman who sold skin care through a multilevel company and had once tried to sell me eye cream at the mailbox, and Lyle Pratt, the vice president, a retired insurance agent who said almost nothing at any meeting and seemed to attend mostly for the air conditioning. Karen had a laptop and a stack of agendas and a bottle of sparkling water with a lime wedge in it. When she saw the size of the crowd, I watched her face do something complicated and then go smooth again.
The open forum came at the end, after a twenty-minute discussion of the pool's new lounge chairs. Residents got three minutes each. I had practiced mine in front of the bathroom mirror. I'd had a lot of practice over the years at saying difficult things in a calm voice to people who didn't want to hear them; most of them had been fifteen.
"My name is Nell Haskett. I live at 43 Larkspur," I said. "Under section 5312.07 of the Ohio Revised Code, an owner has the right to examine the association's books, records, and minutes. I'm submitting a written request tonight" — I held up the envelope; Priya had drafted the letter — "for the following: the violation files, including all notices and proof of mailing, for eleven households, which are listed in the letter. The original digital photographs used as evidence in those files, in their original format. The minutes of any hearings held on those violations. And the bank statements for any account into which fines have been deposited since January 2022."