Meanwhile, Darla's behavior within the HOA was becoming visibly erratic. Jean told us that at the September board meeting, she had proposed levying a special assessment on all Stonebridge Meadows homeowners to fund ongoing legal consultations regarding adjacent property nuisances. The board voted it down 4 to 1. Darla was the one. She had gone from HOA president to a minority of one on her own board without apparently noticing the transition.
She had also, according to Patty, begun attending board meetings with a new adviser, a man she introduced as a community standards consultant, but who turned out to be a friend from Columbus with no legal credentials and a background in residential property management. He sat in the back of the room at every meeting and takes notes on a yellow legal pad, a mirror image of Darla.
Nobody knew what case he was building. The board was nervous. Two members asked Patty privately whether they had any personal liability if Darla's actions resulted in a lawsuit. The answer, Constance told us when we relayed the question, was potentially yes. Board officers who knowingly allow or facilitate a pattern of harassment can share liability exposure under certain conditions. Patty passed that information back to the two nervous board members. The board got more nervous.
Then came the incident that essentially handed us the public moment we'd been waiting for. On the last Saturday of September, Darla showed up at the edge of the road with a professional surveyor, hired independently out of her own pocket, and attempted to have him survey the boundary between the development's eastern green space and the Puit property. She wanted to establish that our drainage easement ran in a different location than our deed showed, which would have complicated our drainage rights and potentially given her new legal footing.
What she did not know was that Dad had spotted her car on the road 20 minutes earlier and called Constance, who called the surveyor's licensing board by phone to confirm that the survey request being made by a person without legal standing to commission a boundary survey on a disputed property was procedurally improper. The surveyor was informed of this by phone while he was still setting up his equipment on the roadside. He listened, asked two questions, packed up his tripod, and drove away without a word to Darla.
She stood at the road's edge for a full five minutes after his truck disappeared, legal pad pressed to her chest, staring at the evidence wall mounted on our fence post. She read section 14 from 15 ft away. You could see her reading it, the large black letters, the laminate catching the afternoon sun.
Dad watched from the porch. He did not go out. He did not wave. He just watched.