I prepped for the board meeting, the special homeowner meeting that Randolph and Patricia had quietly organized. Not an official board meeting, but a homeowner forum open to all 47 properties in Cedarbrook Estates, was scheduled for the Saturday before the lawsuit's court date. The timing was partly deliberate and partly just how the calendar fell. Theo helped me prepare a presentation, nothing fancy. A projector, a screen borrowed from the community center, a stack of printed documents for anyone who wanted copies.
The financial summary Dr. Grant had prepared translated from accounting language into plain numbers a homeowner could follow in 3 minutes. The charter provision about HOA liens, the history of the audit request and its repeated obstruction. We weren't going to ambush Delores at the meeting. She'd been notified of the forum along with everyone else. We weren't going to make accusations beyond what the documents showed.
We were simply going to let the numbers speak. I also spent a quiet evening rereading the CC&Rs, all 37 pages of them. The thing about Delores was that she had used these documents as weapons for 3 years and she knew them well, but she'd read them the way a bully reads rules, looking for leverage, not for constraint. I'd read them looking for every protection available to a homeowner, and I'd found them. The charter lien provision, the board removal procedure, the audit rights, the requirement for documented minutes on all fine approvals.
The documents that were supposed to give her power were the same documents that were going to take it away. I also, and this was Beverly's suggestion, filed a formal notice with the county register of deeds documenting the pending fraud investigation and its potential lien implications on Delores's property. This notice didn't place a lien. It just made public record that such action was under consideration. What this meant practically is that Delores could not sell her house, refinance her mortgage, or obtain any credit secured by the property without this notice appearing in a title search.
She was financially frozen in place. I learned later, much later, from the detective, that when Delores discovered this filing, she tried to immediately contact a real estate agent to list the house. The title notice appeared in the pre-listing search. The agent told her the property couldn't be marketed in its current legal status. Delores had apparently been planning to sell, pocket whatever equity remained, and disappear before the whole thing came down around her.
The filing stopped that. One of the last things I did that week was drive past my wall. New mortar, good block, steel rebar running through it clean and straight. The hillside behind it solid and contained. A few tulips had come up in the garden bed I'd replanted after the wreckage.
Red and yellow, moving in the spring wind. The wall had survived a Jeep going 34 mph. It was going to be fine. I drove home, called Beverly to confirm Saturday's timeline, and went to bed early for the first time in 3 months. The homeowner forum was held on a Saturday morning in early June at the Cedar Brook Estates Community Center, a building that, I noted with some satisfaction the HOA reserve fund was supposed to have repainted last fall and hadn't because the money wasn't there.