Chapter 17: The Board Splits
Elaine had predicted it would be the insurance company, not the sheriff, that moved first, and Elaine, as usual, was right. Ten days after I filed the complaint, the association's liability carrier sent the board a letter. I know what was in it because Dwight Ferris read it aloud at an emergency session that Trish Donnelly called herself, apparently believing she could ride it.
The letter was three pages of courteous dread. The carrier had been notified of a trespass claim naming the association and its president. The carrier required the board to produce its access-code policies, its code-retention minutes, and a statement of corrective action. Failure to act, the letter said, in the passive voice insurance companies use instead of a raised hand, could affect coverage for the association β the clubhouse, the common areas, every mailbox and culvert in Sycamore Ridge.
The emergency session met in the clubhouse board room, a room with no windows and a portrait of the founder that nobody had dusted since the millennium. Five of us by title, though only four by the end. Donnelly placed an agenda at each seat β three items, and the insurance letter wasn't one of them. It was Carla who put it on the table, sliding her copy across the laminate. "We were all copied," she said. "Let's not spend the evening pretending we weren't."
Donnelly read the room the way she always had, as an audience. "This is a form letter," she said. "Carriers send these."
"No," said Gerald Moss. It was the first word he'd spoken all evening, and it landed like a dropped plate. Gerald was sixty-six, treasurer for five years, a retired credit-union man who kept the association's books in pencil first and ink second, on principle. He stood up slowly, holding his copy of the letter with both hands, the way you hold something that might be warm. "This is not a form letter, Trish. This names us. This names *me*. I sign those checks. I have signed checks for seven years on the understanding that the business of this board was the business of this neighborhood." He folded the letter in thirds, precisely, and put it in his jacket pocket. "I resign as treasurer, effective now. I will not be a named party in a lawsuit about a swimming pool I never swam in, at a party I wasn't told about, behind a gate I thought was locked."
He walked out. Nobody called after him, because there was nothing to call. The door closed with the soft click of a latch that had been oiled by somebody's husband for free, for years, because that was how this neighborhood used to work.
Carla Jimenez sat very still at the president's left. Fifty-two, vice president, three terms, Donnelly's reliable second β the one who seconded, the one who soothed, the one who told angry residents the president meant well. I'd watched Carla for weeks the way you watch a pressure gauge. Now she took off her reading glasses and set them down like a decision.
"I move," she said, "that the board suspend the president's authority over association access, funds, and communications, pending a vote of the membership."
"The motion is out of order," Donnelly said, instantly, the way a referee calls a foul he's been watching for.
"It is not out of order," Carla said. "Section nine. Any officer may be suspended by majority vote pending a membership meeting. You've read section nine at me for seven years."
"The chair rules the motion out of order," Donnelly said, and brought the gavel down once, gently, almost tenderly, as if volume were the only thing left that distinguished the two of them.
And then the room produced the sound I'd been waiting three months to hear: the scratch of Dwight Ferris's pen, unhurried, absolute. Dwight, seventy years old, secretary for a decade, keeper of minutes so complete that two attorneys had once settled a boundary dispute out of his notebooks rather than argue with them. He wrote for a full minute while everyone watched. Then he read back, in his flat clerk's voice, what he had written: that the motion had been made and seconded by acclamation of two members; that the chair had ruled it out of order; that the ruling itself violated section nine, subsections two and four, of the bylaws of the Sycamore Ridge Homeowners' Association; and that the secretary declined to strike the motion from the record.
"Minutes are what happened," Dwight said, closing the book. "Not what we wish had."