Brilliant and evil in equal measure. Turn my research into stalking, my legal questions into threats. Make the victim into the aggressor while positioning herself as the concerned citizen protecting innocent families from the dangerous ex-soldier.
Deputy Jim Torino, whose family had lived here almost as long as mine, caught me in the parking lot afterward. The gravel crunched under our boots as he lit a cigarette with hands that had worked construction for 30 years. "Watch yourself, Marcus," he said quietly. "Karen's got connections downtown. Political friends who owe her favors from her real estate deals."
As I drove home that night, my headlights cutting through mountain darkness, I found something slipped under my windshield wiper. A note on plain white paper. "Check the lake deed. Not everything is what it seems. A friend."
The game was just getting interesting.
That anonymous note burned in my pocket for 3 days before I worked up the courage to follow its advice. Something about check the lake deed felt like opening Pandora's box. Once you look, there's no going back to blissful ignorance. Karen didn't waste time licking her wounds from the board meeting. Within 48 hours, she'd escalated faster than a fire in an ammunition depot.
She organized something called the Lake Meridian Improvement Committee with a $50,000 budget raised from newer residents who apparently had money to burn on HOA revenge fantasies. The first sign of her new strategy appeared on a Tuesday morning. Private security boats patrolling the lake like we were some kind of drug smuggling operation. Two guys in matching polo shirts and wraparound sunglasses, circling in a sleek speedboat that probably cost more than most people's cars. They'd idle near my dock for 20 minutes at a time, taking photos and making notes on waterproof clipboards.
Then came the signs, big orange warnings posted around every communal area. No unauthorized watercraft. Violators will be prosecuted. The legal language was impressive for something that had zero actual authority, but Karen was betting most people wouldn't know the difference between official and expensive looking.
I knew I needed professional help, so I followed that mysterious tip and drove to the state archives in Denver. The building smelled like old paper and government coffee, and the clerk who helped me looked like she'd been there since Colorado achieved statehood. "You want the original land surveys from 1981?" she asked, peering at me over reading glasses held together with electrical tape. "Those are in the basement vault. Nobody's requested those files in probably 15 years."