"I submitted an application on the twentieth of August. I put it in your lockbox. I have a copy, and I sent another to the management company by certified mail today."
"There's nothing in the lockbox." She said it without hesitation. I believed that she believed it, and I also believed that somewhere in that gray house there was a manila folder she'd decided not to open. "You'll get the notice," she said, and she walked on, and I stood there by the mailboxes with my water bill and a flyer for gutter cleaning and thought about her husband.
Fitzgerald told me about Simon Vasbinder a few days later, while we sat on the bench by the pond and he showed me, without exactly saying he was showing me, the HOA's ledger of fines and liens. Simon had been an accountant with a firm in Raleigh, a quiet, funny man who coached Little League and grew prize tomatoes and sang bass in the Methodist choir. He was diagnosed with ALS seven years ago and died two and a half years later. Marcella had nursed him at home until the end. Their savings went. Their second mortgage went into a wheelchair van and a stairlift and an aide three nights a week. The week after the funeral, she ran for HOA president unopposed, and she had been running Bittern Ridge ever since like a woman bailing out a boat.
"She was not always like this," Fitzgerald said. "She was always particular. But not like this. When Simon was alive, she would bring you a casserole if you had a baby. Now she brings you a notice." He turned a page of the ledger. "Grief makes some people soft. It makes some people hard. I think it made Marcella afraid. Of everything that might come in and take the little she has left."
"That doesn't make it right."
"No," he agreed. "But it makes it human. And human is harder to fix than wrong." He put his finger on a column. "There. Look."
Over the past four years, the Bittern Ridge HOA had placed liens on nine properties under Article Nine. Seven of those had gone to foreclosure sale. All seven had been bought at the courthouse steps by the same entity, Tidewater Home Solutions, LLC, for amounts between eleven and twenty-four thousand dollars, the value of the liens plus costs. All seven had been renovated and resold within a year, for between two hundred and sixty and three hundred and forty thousand dollars.
212 Plover Lane was one of them. Mine. I'd paid two hundred and seventy-one.
"Who owns Tidewater?" I said.
"I don't know," Fitzgerald said. "I've asked. Marcella says it's a local investor who's helping to improve the neighborhood. The management company says it's none of the treasurer's business who buys at a public auction. They're right, technically. It isn't." He closed the ledger. "But I count money, Mrs. Quarterman. And I can count to seven."