The story hit our neighborhood’s social media page within hours. Someone uploaded the video with the title “HOA president attempts grand theft auto, gets arrested instead.” It racked up three hundred comments in the first hour. I did not post it. I did not have to. Turns out I was not the only one who had suffered under Brenda’s reign. Residents began sharing their own outrageous fines and fabricated violations, and the comment thread became a kind of unofficial archive, the one she had not color-coded.
Tom Morrison described being fined for aggressive lawn maintenance because his grass was too green. He had fertilized in the spring, the ordinary way, and the lawn responded, the ordinary way, and Brenda had measured the color against a chart she would not show him. Sarah Kim posted a citation for unauthorized squirrel feeding, because squirrels visited her bird feeder. The citation did not allege that she had fed them. It alleged that she had failed to prevent the visit. The Hendersons admitted they had been written up for excessive holiday cheer, for leaving Christmas lights up until January second. Apparently two days past the acceptable festive window. They had taken the lights down on the second because of work. Brenda had photographed them on the second at dusk, which is when lights are visible, and called the visibility the violation.
Other stories followed, smaller and meaner. A widow fined for a wreath that was “seasonally ambiguous.” A teenager cited because a basketball hoop’s shadow crossed a property line at four in the afternoon. The Johnsons, again, with the eight hundred dollars and the thirty-seven minutes. Reading the thread, I understood that my folder was not a personal feud. It was a sample.
The emergency HOA board meeting Brenda had been racing toward still happened, just with a drastically different agenda. Vice President Reynolds, a mild-mannered accountant who had taken the job only because no one else wanted it, called the meeting to order in Brenda’s absence. The community center was fuller than it had been for any gnome hearing in the association’s history. People stood along the back wall. Reynolds had the look of a man who had been handed a gavel and a problem and would have preferred the gavel stay decorative. First item: her immediate suspension pending criminal proceedings. He read it in the voice he used for budgets. The vote was unanimous, even from board members who had previously been too intimidated to oppose her. One of them, a woman who had seconded Brenda’s motions for three years without looking up, seconded the suspension and then sat on her hands as if they had surprised her. Protocol 7 was not activated. Reynolds said, into the microphone, that he had looked for it and it was not in the book. Someone in the back laughed, once, and then a lot of people laughed, and Reynolds let them, because he was an accountant and he knew relief when he heard it.
I was invited to testify at a special hearing the following week. I arrived with my meticulously organized folder of absurd violations. The automotive-flamboyance citation. The nocturnal-luminosity-excess notice. The pollinator zone. The two-degree mailbox. The door, with the spectrometer note attached in Brenda’s hand. I also showed them doorbell footage of Brenda measuring my grass with a ruler at six in the morning on multiple mornings. The board watched the footage in silence. A ruler. A Tuesday, and then a Thursday, and then a Saturday that was not the hedge Saturday. She measured, wrote, and left. The board was horrified to learn about emergency protocol 7 and Brenda’s supposed transit privileges, neither of which existed in any legitimate HOA document. Reynolds had the covenant open to subsection 47B. It concerned the staining of perimeter fences. It did not mention vehicles, emergencies, or the right of a president to enter a car. Brenda’s laminated card was in an evidence envelope by then. It looked smaller on the table than it had in her hand.