Karen Whitcombe resigned from the board of the Wren Hollow Homeowners Association by email at 11:52 p.m. on the night of the search warrant, citing "health and family reasons." Deb and Lyle resigned within the week. The Dublin collections firm withdrew from every pending matter, and the association's insurance carrier, sensing the shape of the bill that was coming, retained a new management company within the month. On December 3, at a special meeting in the clubhouse that drew a hundred and nine people — they had to prop the doors open and stand along the walls, under the broccoli-sized trees of 1998 — the owners elected an interim board of five. Hal Brenner was treasurer. He gave a nine-minute report that consisted mostly of the words "I don't know yet," and got a standing ovation.
On December 18, the Court of Common Pleas dismissed Wren Hollow Homeowners Association v. Ruth A. Pruitt with prejudice, on the association's own motion, and ordered the lien released. The new board voted to void every fine imposed under the 2023 schedule, refund every dollar it could trace, and pay Priya's fees. Priya donated the fees to the Delaware County legal aid office and told me if I ever tried to thank her again she'd report my tags to the board.
Ruth found out about the dismissal from me, at her kitchen table. She didn't cry, which surprised me. She got up and went to her pantry and came back with two jars of pickles and put them in front of me, and then she went back and got two more, and then she sat down and put her face in her hands for a while, and then she cried.
In February, a Delaware County grand jury returned an indictment against Karen L. Whitcombe on fourteen counts: theft by deception, telecommunications fraud, tampering with records, forgery, falsification, making a false report to law enforcement, and four counts of voyeurism. Brent Kessler was indicted separately in March, for complicity and for receiving stolen property, after the detectives found the text messages. I won't quote them all. There's one I can't get out of my head, from Karen to Brent, in May of 2024, about Martin Ellery: He's in rehab after the fall, daughter's out of state and overwhelmed. If we push now she'll take anything.
Karen pleaded guilty in August, a little less than a year after Ruth came to my back door with her letter shaking. The plea was to five of the counts, including the false report and two of the voyeurism charges, which mattered to me more than I expected it to. She was sentenced to nine months in the county jail, five years of community control, and restitution of a little over two hundred thousand dollars to the association, to the eleven households, and to the families of Lorraine Bickel, Martin Ellery, and the Abernathys. She'll be on a registry for a while. The judge, in pronouncing sentence, said something I wrote down in the back of the green ledger: "The defendant counted on her victims being too old, too tired, or too alone to check her work. She did not count on the trees."
I don't know that I'd have said it that way. But I didn't mind.
The Whitcombes' Colonial went on the market in the spring. Gary moved to a condo in Westerville. The listing photographs, which I looked at online, I'm not ashamed to say, were taken in April, with the redbuds in bloom and the lawn a fresh, shining green. They were accurately dated.
Copperline Residential dissolved. Brent's lawyers settled the civil suits before any of them got near a jury. The sheriff's sale of Lorraine Bickel's house was vacated, and the house was resold, properly this time, at market, with the money going into a trust for her care in Marion. She was ninety-one by then, and her nephew told me she didn't fully understand what had happened, but that when he told her the house had been sold for its real price she said, "Well, that's more like it," and asked for a second pudding. The Abernathys got a settlement large enough, Priya said, for a down payment on a house in a neighborhood with no HOA at all. Martin Ellery's daughter wrote me a letter on stationery with a loon on it, from Minneapolis. I keep it in the ledger.
* * *
The new board reinstalled my tags in March.
They did it properly — an encroachment agreement, signed and recorded, two pages long, which Hal insisted on drafting himself and which I believe is the only legal document in the history of Delaware County to cite the Ohio Seasons Project by name. The landscaping crew set the aluminum markers back at the exact GPS coordinates, flush with the turf, so the mowers would pass over. Somebody — I suspect Gus, who denies it — had a small bronze plaque made and screwed it to a cedar post beside WH-1 on the triangle. It says: