Within a week, the association replied through an attorney whose stationery listed a state bar number. The letter called my Mustang a chronic nuisance and demanded removal within fourteen days. Ruth looked up the bar listing and discovered that the number belonged to an attorney who had retired years earlier. A telephone call to the address on the letter produced a recording saying the suite was available for lease.
We did not immediately accuse anyone of forging a lawyer's identity. There were possibilities ranging from sloppy use of an old template to deliberate impersonation, and a credible investigation would need to distinguish them. Ruth asked the bar's consumer-assistance office to verify whether the named attorney had issued the letter. The answer came back that he had not.
I took the letter home and put it in the folder. By then the folder had become a box, and the box had begun to feel like a second occupation. I started a second box for the things I did not yet understand. It held the oil container, screenshots of Hadley's messages, the photographed notices, and a notebook filled with dates that connected one small humiliation to the next.
I was tempted to call Hadley and tell her exactly what I had found. I imagined the silence on the other end of the phone when she realized her letter had an attorney's name on it without the attorney's permission. Then I remembered Wallace Price's lesson from decades earlier. A person who has not finished talking will often tell you more than a person you have already warned.
The next escalation arrived on a Friday morning. Three men wearing matching navy polo shirts stood outside my closed garage, holding a clipboard and a digital camera. They identified themselves as the Briarwood Glen Community Standards Committee and said they were there for an inspection authorized by Section 8.4(B) of the bylaws. The man with the clipboard did not give his surname until I asked twice.
I asked them to identify the provision giving them access to the interior of a private garage without the owner's consent. They could not. I asked whether the homeowner had been offered a hearing before an intrusive inspection. They referred me to a notice that had arrived in the portal at midnight two days earlier.
"I am not consenting to entry," I said. "If the association believes it has lawful authority, it can have its attorney put that position in writing."
The tallest man shrugged. The man with the camera glanced past me at the house, and then the three walked away. I saved the porch video, including my refusal and the fact that none of them attempted to force entry. Later I learned their names: Vance Lockwood, Whit's brother-in-law; Reno Tarver, a handyman who occasionally worked on distressed properties; and Dixon Boudry, a contractor who had done odd jobs for the Lockwoods for years.
The names mattered later for reasons I had not expected. At the time I only knew three people had appeared at my house claiming official-sounding authority and had disappeared as soon as I asked to see its source. I sent Ruth the video and requested that the association preserve the inspection authorization. No reply came.