The following week, Cole was posted at the gate when a delivery driver asked him, casually, whether the houses were really going to be under water. Cole answered only that he could not discuss the case, and directed the driver to association counsel, as the memo required. The driver shrugged and drove on. Cole watched the truck disappear along the curving street and thought about how strange it was to guard a place whose future was now being decided in a courtroom he had never entered before that week.
The HOA board of Silver Pine Ridge Estates had always met in a room with good chairs and a long table, and for years its meetings had been short. Monica ran them efficiently, remembered everyone's birthdays, and sent the minutes out before anyone had time to disagree with them. The meeting after Dean Walsh's statement was different. It lasted three hours, and no one sent flowers afterwards.
Alice Moreno had filed Dean's statement and Cole's corroboration with the court, and copies had reached the board members before the meeting began. The board could read, in plain language, that the guards had been ordered to remove Tom before any notice existed, and that the three charges on the $9,600 notice did not match what the guards had seen. Two board members asked Monica, directly, whether the notice had been prepared before Tom arrived or after he left. Monica said the association's counsel would address questions of timing, which was not an answer, and the room noticed.
The split did not happen all at once. It happened in the way such splits usually happen: one member asked for the enforcement file, another asked for the title opinion, a third asked why the board had never seen the reservoir's operating schedule. Monica answered each question with the same composure she had always used, but the composure no longer settled the room. The members who had once deferred to her began to look at each other instead of at her, checking whether someone else would speak first.
By the end of the meeting, three members had asked, on the record, that the HOA stop issuing new enforcement notices until the court ruled. Two more had asked for an independent review of the association's legal bills. Only two members still defended Monica without qualification, and one of those did so by saying that the board should stand together, which is a different thing from saying the board was right.
Monica left the meeting with her leather folder under her arm and her shoulders straight, but her allies were thinning in a way she could count. She called Grant Harrington that evening to tell him the board was fracturing and that the guards' statements would be difficult to explain. Grant did not answer. She called again the next morning. He did not answer then, either. His assistant said he was in meetings. His assistant said that on the third day as well, in a voice that had been trained to sound helpful while saying nothing.
Monica understood what that meant. Grant had told her the title opinion was clean. He had told buyers the lake was permanently retired. He had told her, more than once, that Tom Halstead was a retired engineer with a grievance and not a problem. Now that a court filing, a newspaper story, and two guards' statements were all pointing the same way, Grant had stopped returning calls. Monica was left holding the letters she had signed, the notices she had issued, and the folder that had never contained a deed.
She did not call a fourth time. She sat in her office, looked at the filing cabinet where Edna Marsh's letter still sat, and thought about the meeting she would have to face next. The board had not removed her. It had simply stopped following her without asking questions first, and for a woman who had run the association by being the person everyone trusted to have the answers, that was a colder change than any vote.
Two days later, one of the board members who had asked for the enforcement file called Alice Moreno directly, without going through Monica's office. He asked, in careful language, what documents the court would expect the association to preserve, and whether the board should instruct its counsel to stop contesting the guards' account of the escort. Alice answered the first question and declined to advise the board, since she represented Tom, but the call itself told her what she needed to know: the board was no longer speaking with one voice, and Monica was no longer the only channel through which it spoke.