Chapter 6 - Eighty-One People in a Clubhouse
The board meeting landed on the fourth of November.
By then, we had a lawyer — a woman named Priya Nakamura, who specializes in association law and who read that entire envelope in twenty minutes flat before saying one word I won't repeat here.
There were eighty-one people packed into that clubhouse that night. There are only ninety-four homes in the whole neighborhood.
Marguerite Voss — seventy-one years old, deaf in one ear, a woman nobody on that street had properly spoken to in two years — stood up with a microphone she absolutely did not need, and delivered eleven straight minutes of her own analysis.
Three hundred and eighty-one out of four hundred and six.
The transfers. The family relationship. The dates lined up in a row nobody could argue with.
Bertram Coyle stood up and called it a coordinated smear campaign, insisted he had "acted at all times in the interests of property values" — and then he said the one sentence that finished him completely:
"Every single one of those complaints was legitimate."
A man three rows back didn't even stand up. He just said, loud enough for the whole room to hear:
"You reported a five-year-old's bubbles."
The room laughed. Coyle didn't.
He resigned on the eleventh of November, before the recall vote could even be scheduled — advice from his own attorney, presumably, though nobody ever confirmed it.
The board that replaced him voided every single outstanding violation on every property in the association, pending a full review. Ours disappeared. Marguerite's disappeared.
The state's regulator for community associations opened a formal file that January. Priya says it'll take about two years and will probably end in a settlement.
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The four families who sold their homes have all been contacted. Two of them are pursuing a joint case with a lawyer. One of them sent us a letter I still haven't been able to read all the way through — from a woman who sold in 2023 after eleven straight months of exactly what we'd lived through in five, who thought, the whole time, that it was just happening to her alone.
Warrick Sloane has said, through a spokesman, that his company "has no knowledge of any association enforcement activity" and that the purchases were made at arm's length. That might even be true. Priya says that's exactly what makes it so hard to pin down.
