The approved vendor list, Walt pointed out to me, had not been updated in four years and consisted of six companies, two of which had gone out of business. The four of us started meeting on Sunday evenings at Braddock’s garage, which smelled wonderfully of motor oil and wood shavings. And we built a map, literally, a whiteboard map of every grievance, every violation, every suspicious expenditure, every regulatory maneuver Marlene had made over six years.
It took three sessions just to get everything on the board. By early January, what we had was a picture, and the picture was not pretty. Marlene had been steering HOA contracts to preferred vendors for years, not always her nephew’s company, but companies with relationships. A landscaping firm owned by a friend from her church, a pool maintenance company whose owner had given the HOA board a Christmas courtesy gift of five hundred dollar restaurant gift cards three years running.
Not illegal on its face, maybe, but ethically rancid and potentially a breach of her fiduciary duty as board president. And then there was the gate again. The gate budget had been fourteen thousand dollars, but the community records showed the actual invoice total was eleven thousand eight hundred dollars. The difference, two thousand two hundred dollars, had been coded to a line item labeled community improvement administrative overhead. There was no supporting documentation. In any functioning accounting system, that’s a red flag.
We drafted a formal complaint to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Corporations Division and the Community Associations Ethics Board. Vivian reviewed it. We were careful, specific, and thoroughly documented. We submitted it in late January. Marlene received notice of the complaint in February. I know because she changed at the next board meeting.
The casual contempt was replaced by something harder and more defensive. She came in with her attorney, Greer, the nervous folder man, sitting beside her. She cut off public comment early. She moved through the agenda like someone trying to outrun something.
She also, around this time, began a whisper campaign. I heard it from Connie first, then from two other neighbors. The story going around was that I was a troublemaker with a personal grudge, that I had a history of conflicts with authority, and that my army background was, and I want to quote this precisely because it’s so perfectly petty, a red flag about instability.
I will tell you what I told Braddock when he brought this to me, standing in the garage under the fluorescent lights with the smell of motor oil around us. “That’s fine. Let her talk. Scared people make noise. Dangerous people make plans.” And we had a plan.
But then August arrived, and before any of our careful, methodical, legal groundwork could come to fruition, nature stepped in with a Category 3 hurricane named Dolores and compressed our entire timeline into forty-eight hours. The bus incident didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because everything before it had been building pressure, and a hurricane was about to be the needle.
The night before evacuation orders were issued, while I was loading our emergency kit and Renata was packing Lily’s backpack for what we hoped would be a two-night stay at her mother’s house inland, I got a call from Walt Schumacher. “Dex,” he said, “I need you to look at something.”