The problem, and it was a significant one, was that the HOA's governing documents specified the annual meeting must occur within a thirty-day window in June. Postponing it outside that window required a vote of the members—the very members she was trying to avoid.
Petra filed a formal objection with the management company the same afternoon. The management company, which was by now deeply tired of this situation and acutely aware of its own liability exposure, confirmed within twenty-four hours that the meeting would proceed as scheduled.
Beverly was out of administrative moves. The meeting was eleven days away.
While she scrambled, I prepared. I reviewed every document one more time. I numbered every page. I made two copies of everything: one for presentation, one for the record. I met with Nell Harrigan off the clock at a diner on Route 9. She listened to the full picture. She said she'd attend the annual meeting as a private citizen—civilian clothes, but she'd be there.
I drove home that night thinking about the difference between people who abuse systems and people who actually understand them: Beverly had spent six years doing the former; we'd spent six weeks doing the latter. The net was drawing closed.
Six days before the annual meeting, Beverly made her most audacious move. She called an emergency board meeting, noticing it just forty-eight hours in advance—the minimum the bylaws allowed—with a single agenda item: a vote to dissolve and immediately reconstitute the HOA's enforcement committee under new rules giving the board president unilateral enforcement authority. No board review required, no appeal process: one person, one decision, final. In one vote, she could make herself legally untouchable inside the HOA's own structure.
Tad got the emergency notice in his mailbox on a Tuesday morning. He stared at it for approximately ten seconds. Then he called Petra. Petra called me. I called the management company.
The management company called Beverly's attorney and explained, with what must have been extraordinary restraint, that an emergency meeting called for the explicit purpose of eliminating governance oversight did not qualify as an emergency under any reasonable definition, and that certifying such a vote would expose the management company to its own liability. The meeting dissolved before it happened.