Lacey Drummond and her photographer arrived at 11:45, press credentials clipped to their shirts, cameras slung. Constance saw them from across the patio and her expression did something complicated: first surprise, then a careful social smile—the kind that means the opposite of what it looks like.
At 12:20, a woman named Sandra who lived in the house immediately adjacent to the clubhouse's east side came to find me in the crowd. "Garrett," she said, "there's water coming up around the east wall of the building."
Not dramatic, just water seeping through the gap where the foundation met the concrete slab: a slow, dark creep of moisture spreading across the patio edge. The saturated ground that Priya had measured Friday morning was pressing gently but persistently against the wall that hadn't been designed to receive that kind of sustained hydrostatic pressure.
Within 20 minutes, it was visible to everyone at the party. The dark stain spread along the east edge of the patio slab. One of the party tables set up near that wall developed a slow puddle underneath it. A kid in water shoes discovered it and yelled, as kids do, "There's a flood!"
Which caused about 40 adults to turn and look.
Lacey Drummond was already moving.
Priya walked calmly to the east wall, crouched down, looked at the seepage, stood up, and said to the people around her, clearly, not unkindly, in her civil engineer's voice, "This is the result of redirected impervious surface runoff being discharged against this foundation for approximately three years. It was diverted here from a residential property it was previously being dumped onto."
She said it to the group standing around her. Not to a camera, not to a reporter, just to people.
Constance crossed the patio toward Priya. Her face was controlled, but her jaw was tight. "This is not the time or place for—"
"Ma'am," Winifred Polk said, stepping in from the left, legal pad in hand. "I'd like to raise a motion for an emergency membership vote on the unauthorized 2018 loan. We have a quorum present."