On the last day of Olivia's deadline, Walter called her office and said the books would take another month, at least, because the storage unit needed sorting, and the accountant needed time, and the board needed to meet, and he was doing his best under difficult circumstances. Olivia listened, and she thanked him, and she told him she would be filing for a court order the following week, and that the bank, unlike a storage unit, kept its own copies, and that those copies did not need Walter's password, or his boxes, or his board meeting, to be produced. Rachel and I sat with her after that call, and we did not celebrate, because there was nothing to celebrate yet, but we did feel something shift, the way a heavy door shifts when you finally find the right leverage. Walter could stall the books, but he could not stall the bank statements, the invoices, or the thirteen households who had finally started talking to each other.
That evening I walked the lane slowly, the way I do when I need to think, past the Ramans' roses and Helen's porch and Sam's fence, and the street looked the same as it always had, quiet and ordinary in the fading light. Yet something had changed underneath that quiet, and I could feel it in the waves people gave me, a little steadier now, a little less afraid. We did not yet have every answer, and we did not yet have every page, but we had enough to know we were not imagining things, and enough to keep asking, calmly and in order, until the books, or the bank, told the rest.
The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, thick enough that I knew before I opened it that it was not another fine.
Olivia Grant had warned us it might come, and still my hands were not quite steady when I slit it open at the kitchen table. Rachel was standing at the counter with her coffee, watching me, and I could tell she was trying to read my face before she read the papers. The letterhead was from a law firm over in Charleston, one of those firms with three names and an address downtown that sounded expensive. It said Carol Beckett was suing us. Me and Rachel both. Defamation, it said, and unlawful recording, and interference with the business of the association. It asked for damages in a number that made me sit down properly, because it was the kind of number meant to frighten a person into being quiet.
I read it twice, slowly, the way I used to read incident reports when I wanted to be sure I had not missed a line that changed everything. The defamation part said we had spread false statements about Carol, about the fines, about the towing, about the books. The recording part said the neighbours who had filmed on their phones that morning in the driveway had broken the law, and that we had encouraged them and shared the footage. It did not mention the backdated rule. It did not mention the duplicate invoices. It did not mention the fifty-six thousand dollars that had moved out of the gate reserve. It read like a story with the middle pages torn out.
Rachel took the papers from me, read them standing up, and then set them down very carefully, as if she did not want to tear them even though she had every right to be angry at them.
"She is trying to flip it," Rachel said. "If she sues first, she gets to sound like the injured party."
"She sounds scared," I said, and I meant it. I had seen scared people dress themselves up in official language before. At a fire scene, a scared person talks louder and uses bigger words. Carol had never been a loud woman in the ordinary way. She was a clipboard woman, a letter woman. This lawsuit was a clipboard with a lawyer attached to it.
Olivia came over that same afternoon. She did not rush, and she did not make light of it, which I appreciated. She sat at the table, read every page, and made notes in the margin with a plain black pen. When she finished, she looked up at both of us.
"This is a pressure suit," she said. "It is filed to make you stop talking to the board, stop talking to the auditor, and stop talking to the neighbours. It does not make the audit go away. It does not change what the records say. But you need to take it seriously, because a court filing is a court filing, and we will answer it properly and on time."