The Audit Began While Neighbors Signed the Recall Petition

Miles gave the voucher to Mara himself the next morning.

"I entered the payment after she sent it," he said. "I never asked for the second signature."

"Was one required?" Mara asked.

"For reserve spending over a thousand dollars."

He looked at me.

"I thought arguing would make the board stop working."

"It stopped working anyway," I said.

He did not argue with that.

Mara sent the voucher to the association's new attorney. By then, Lenore and Miles had voted to hire separate counsel for the association. Tessa needed her own lawyer for her personal interests.

The two board members also voted to preserve the bank records and hire an outside accountant for nine hundred dollars.

Tessa called the vote disloyal.

Lenore answered in an email copied to every owner.

Our duty is to the association.

I printed that page and put it in the Rules folder.

The accountant worked from bank statements, paid invoices, meeting minutes, and the reserve ledger. She asked questions that had numbers in them.

Who approved this? Which vote? Which account? What service was delivered?

There was no shouting to answer.

Meanwhile, the city sent a drainage engineer and a building inspector to our lane. I watched from my property while they checked elevations and photographed the garage wall.

Orson met them with his survey.

"This is the easement location," he said. "The flow assessment is yours."

The engineer followed the low ground behind June's house. He examined flood marks and checked the inlet.

Later, his written findings said the garage obstructed the recorded channel and backed water toward nearby homes. Restoring that route would be required in a correction plan.

Tessa received a notice to provide a compliant plan. It did not order a bulldozer to appear that day. It gave her a deadline and a path to fix the work.

She still told neighbors I had caused the city to attack her.

"You could have talked to me," she said when we passed by the mailboxes.

"I did. At the first meeting."

"You embarrassed me with these papers."

I held my mail against my coat.

"They have dates, Tessa. They don't have opinions."

June started a petition for a special meeting under our bylaws. Six owner signatures were needed. Eleven people signed before supper.

She asked me to carry the clipboard on the second evening.

One owner caught us outside and asked whether signing would bring a fine to her door.

June lowered the clipboard.

"You can read the meeting clause yourself," she said. "You don't have to take our word."

I gave the woman a copy from my folder. She stood beneath her porch light and followed the lines with a finger.

"Six signatures," she said.

"Six to call the meeting," June answered. "Then everyone gets a vote."

The woman signed. I waited while she made her own copy. That took longer than the signature, but it seemed to matter more.

I shook my head.

"I'll explain what happened if anyone asks. You should run the petition."

"You don't want her chair?"

"I want my kitchen table back."

The notice went out for a meeting fourteen days later. Removal of the president was listed in plain words. So was a vote on replacing any vacant board seat.

No surprise motions. No green maps.

During those two weeks, the accountant issued her first report.

The forty-eight-hundred-dollar concrete payment had no required second approval. The invoice described a garage apron, not a shared drainage channel.

There was also eleven hundred twenty dollars in fines paid by four other owners. The charges rested on rules the board had discussed but never adopted.

One woman had paid two hundred fifty dollars after leaving wet furniture on her porch during a flood.

I remembered her carrying a chair alone in the rain.

The report did not call anyone a thief. It listed unsupported payments and missing approvals. That was enough to make people read the next page.

Miles submitted his resignation, effective when a replacement could be chosen at the special meeting. He agreed to help the accountant finish and gave up access to the bank account.

"Will you tell people I brought you the voucher?" he asked me.

"Yes. I'll tell them you processed it, too."

He nodded slowly.

I knew what a mistake cost when someone owned it. I also knew owning it did not put the money back.

Mara called that Friday. Our first court hearing would be Monday morning.

"Bring the originals," she said. "And get some sleep."

I packed the certified papers, the signed survey, and Ida's notebook. I set her rule beside them, then put it in my coat.

At four fifteen, the clerk's office called about the title check I had requested.

A lien had just been recorded against Lot Seventeen for fourteen hundred dollars.

Tessa had signed it that morning.