"She said your station is under review for covenant violations. Four of them, she said. She said the board has lost confidence." Luis paused. "Jake, I've known you for five years. I'm not switching. But I thought you should know what she's telling people."
After I hung up, I sat in my office for a long time, looking at the wall where Mr. Hendricks had hung a framed photograph of the station on opening day โ 1987, a single pump and a dirt lot โ and I felt something shift in my chest. The anger from Tuesday had cooled into something harder and clearer. Karen Whitfield wasn't just an entitled woman who wanted free gas. She was a person who had lost an election and decided to burn down the building rather than hand over the keys. And she had nine days left to do it.
I called an emergency meeting of the board for Monday evening. As president-elect, I had the authority to call it โ one of the few powers the bylaws granted before installation โ and I asked the association's attorney, a meticulous man named David Okafor, to attend. I also asked Priya Raman, who had been elected to the board in the same special election, to come early so we could talk strategy.
Priya arrived at my station at five o'clock on Monday, carrying a manila folder thick enough to stop a door. She was a software engineer, forty-two, with two kids and a manner so calm it made agitated people feel embarrassed about themselves. She set the folder on my counter and said, "You need to see what I've found."
"What is it?"
"The HOA's fuel expenses for the last three years." She opened the folder. Inside were spreadsheets, invoices, credit card statements โ months of financial records she had requested as a board member-elect and received, after some resistance, from the association's management company. "Jake, look at this. The HOA has been paying for gasoline โ not diesel, gasoline, the kind that goes in passenger cars โ on the association's fuel card. About four hundred dollars a month, every month, for three years. Charged to 'board travel and emergency response.'"
I frowned. "Board travel? The board meets at the clubhouse. Where are they traveling?"
"That's the question." Priya flipped to a highlighted page. "And look at this โ the fuel card is in Karen Whitfield's name. She's the only authorized user. And these charges?" She pointed to a column of transactions. "They're all at gas stations within five miles of her house. Including, interestingly, several at a station on Highway 290 โ never at yours."
"Because I would have noticed," I said slowly. "If someone was putting four hundred dollars a month of HOA gasoline through my station, I'd have noticed."
"Exactly." Priya's voice was very quiet. "Jake, I think Karen Whitfield has been using the HOA's fuel card to gas up her personal Escalade for three years. And I think the reason she wanted free gas from you on Tuesday โ the reason she was so confident she was 'entitled' to it โ is that she's been getting free gas for so long she's forgotten it was ever stealing."
I stared at the spreadsheets until the numbers blurred. Four hundred dollars a month. Twelve months a year. Three years. Fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars. Not a fortune, in the grand scheme of HOA embezzlement โ I had read the horror stories, the treasurers who vanished with six figures โ but it wasn't the amount that made my jaw clench. It was the brazenness of it. The entitlement so complete, so calcified, that she had walked into my station and demanded I participate in it, and when I refused, she had called the police on me.
"There's more," Priya said. "The San Marcos fuel outfit she mentioned to Luis? I looked them up. It's called Hill Country Fuel Services. It's a real company. And its registered agent is Karen Whitfield's brother-in-law."
I closed my eyes. "She's trying to steer the HOA's fuel contract to her own family."
"Sixty thousand a year," Priya said. "Plus whatever markup they'd build in. And the first step is getting rid of you โ the violations, the 'loss of confidence,' all of it. She's not just retaliating, Jake. She's running a play. And the installation meeting on the twenty-eighth is her deadline, because once you're president, you can order a full audit, and she knows it."
I opened my eyes. "Then we don't wait until the twenty-eighth."
The emergency board meeting that night was held in the clubhouse's main room, under fluorescent lights that hummed like angry insects. All five board members were present: me, Priya, Karen, and two holdovers from the Bell era โ Tom Kowalski, a retired firefighter who had voted for me, and Susan Merritt, a realtor who had been Karen's closest ally for a decade. David Okafor, the association attorney, sat at the end of the table with a legal pad. About thirty residents sat in folding chairs behind us, because word had gotten around that something was happening, and in a community like Sundale Meadows, a board meeting with an audience is the equivalent of a prizefight.