"How big?" Angela asked.
"Over four years, north of $600,000, maybe more."
"Send me the filings. I'll look at it this weekend."
I spent Saturday knocking on doors in Stone Creek Estates—not wearing a badge, not identifying myself as law enforcement. Just a neighbor. Just a rancher from next door.
The Patels at Lot 22 had been fined $4,200 for a vegetable garden Rhonda declared an "unauthorized agricultural installation." She'd walked through their backyard uninvited, picked a cherry tomato off the vine, held it between two manicured fingers like evidence at a crime scene, and told Priya, "This is a residential neighborhood, not a farmer's market. Remove it or I will." She smiled when she said it, beautiful and absolutely empty the way a mannequin smiles.
The Orozcos at Lot 59 had paid a $1,500 emergency repair levy for driveway resurfacing that was never performed. Rhonda told Maria in person, standing in her doorway in kitten heels as if she'd wandered out of a magazine shoot into a foreclosure proceeding, that nonpayment would trigger a forced sale. The driveway still had the same cracks.
The Washingtons at Lot 31 had been denied access to the community park pavilion for incomplete compliance documentation. When Tamika Washington asked what documentation was missing, Rhonda tilted her head with the effortless cruelty of a woman who lies the way other people breathe and said, "If you'd read the handbook, you wouldn't need to ask." There was no handbook. She invented it on the spot.
The Kwans, both retired teachers, had their assessment raised twice with no board vote. When James emailed requesting documentation, Rhonda replied, "The board does not respond to adversarial correspondence." James Kwan was 71 years old and had taught sixth-grade math for 34 years. Adversarial. She called him adversarial because he asked to see a receipt.
Every family had the same expression when I asked if they'd ever seen the HOA's financial records. The expression was a kind of tired resignation, the look of people who'd been overcharged, underserved, and told that asking questions was the same thing as causing problems.
Every family had one more thing in common: none of them had ever received an annual financial report from the HOA. None had ever been invited to review the budget, and none had ever been told where the Community Enhancement Fund money went, because the answer was a credit union account in Lampasas with one name on it—and that name wasn't on any document the homeowners had ever seen.