The notice was one page, printed on association letterhead, and it landed in every mailbox on Juniper Lane and across Willow Bend on the same afternoon, which meant Marjorie Whitcomb had organized the mailing before she had told half her own board. Rosa Jimenez learned about the special meeting from a neighbor. Harold Finch learned about it from the notice itself, folded into his box between a seed catalog and a water bill. Both of them would say later that this was when they understood the meeting was not really the board's meeting at all. It was hers, and the board had been invited to sit beside her while she held it.
The stated purpose, in bold type near the top, was to address persistent violations and community standards concerns regarding a property on Juniper Lane. The property was not named. It did not need to be. By then the street had spent weeks talking about the fine notices, and Edith Kramer had carried the story from porch to porch. There was not a house in the subdivision that could not have supplied the address the notice had left blank.
Andre called Claire Novak within the hour. She asked him to read the notice aloud, exactly as written, and he did, including the date, the following Thursday evening, and the location, the community hall on the edge of the subdivision. She asked whether the notice period satisfied the bylaws. He said Kevin had already checked, ten days were required and she had given eleven, as if she had counted them herself with a finger on a calendar. Then she will have her meeting, Claire said. She advised him to attend, to bring the file, to bring no temper, and to let Marjorie speak first and fully, because a person determined to make a case in public should be allowed to finish making it before anyone answered. Let the unfairness stand in the open long enough to be seen, she said.
Edith Kramer took it upon herself to call the families she still knew from the earlier years, not to lobby, she told Andre, but because some of them had left Willow Bend believing no one had believed them, and she thought they should know about the meeting. Two of them said they would try to come. One, reached by phone in another town, cried briefly and then said she would drive back for it, because she had never been given a room to stand in.
The board, meanwhile, tried to become a board again. Harold Finch requested, in writing, that any presentation materials be shared with all members before Thursday, and received no reply. Rosa Jimenez requested that the agenda include time for a response from the homeowner concerned, and received a single line back saying the format would follow the president's discretion. Andre, reading copies of both exchanges that Rosa forwarded to Claire with her permission, felt something shift in his understanding of the evening ahead. He had imagined himself as the accused at a trial the board would run. It was becoming clearer that the board would be sitting in the audience with everyone else, watching their own president, and that some of them knew it and were afraid of what she intended to say with their names on the letterhead behind her.
On Thursday the hall filled early. Andre arrived forty minutes before the start with Diego beside him carrying the binder in a plain tote bag, and Kevin behind them with the laptop and a small speaker, tested twice at home, in case any recording needed to be heard by more than one person at a time. Terrence came straight from a job site, washed his hands in the hall kitchen sink, and took a seat in the second row without ceremony. Edith Kramer arrived with a neighbor on each arm and was settled near the front like a guest of honor no one had officially declared.
By ten minutes to seven, every folding chair was taken. People stood along the back wall and in the doorway to the kitchen. Someone propped the main doors open because the room had grown warm, and still more neighbors came up the path from the parking area, drawn by a hall that everyone could see was fuller than any annual meeting in memory. The board's table at the front had five chairs. Marjorie's seat, in the center, held her cream-colored jacket over its back, placed there early, marking the position from which she intended to run the evening. Andre sat in the third row with his file on his knees and his hands resting on it, and when the clock over the kitchen door reached seven, Marjorie Whitcomb stood, thanked everyone for coming in a voice warmed for a crowd, and called her meeting to order.
Chapter 20: Her Presentation