The HOA President Shoved the Treasurer-Aide, Then Her Own Initials Surfaced Twice
"Search her bag," Marla Finnegan said, and forty neighbors turned to watch the treasurer-aide's cardigan sleeve.
Jenna Purdy types every fine into the community ledger and delivers the monthly minutes to the clubhouse. Eleven months of quiet work, one house she shares with her brother Theo, and one job that pays for both. When the board president calls her a cover-up artist at the July hearing, that job — and the house — sit on the table with it.
Marla has spent eleven months treating Jenna like clerical furniture. At the July meeting, Marla told the room Jenna was protecting the pool-rule violators, then shoved her into the clubhouse door hard enough to rattle the frame. A framed CC&R clause tipped on the wall. A red mark spread above Jenna's cardigan cuff. Jenna squeezed her eyes shut once, then opened them.
She straightened her cardigan and said nothing. Then she opened her notebook.
The neighbors remember the clues differently now. Curtis Bell mentioned at the June meeting that the Finnegan pool gate had been propped open all summer — somebody laughed, and the comment died. Somebody else noticed Jenna's ledger pages carry two inks: her black ballpoint entries, and the president's neat blue initials in the margin. Marla initialed every fine. That was the system.
Jenna stopped writing fines in April. She kept the carbon copies instead.
At the meeting, Curtis Bell held his manila folder of pool photos and asked one short question that nobody answered: who initialed the fine for Lot 12? Marla started talking about the audit. Jenna's hand went to her notebook — not to open it, just to rest on the cover, where a page was already waiting.
She'd called her brother the night before. Theo, who uses a wheelchair and lives with her, works a clerk's desk at the county office. He pulled one page. A county clerk's reception stamp sits in its corner.
Jenna stood up at the door. "I called my brother," she said, and the clubhouse doors were already unlocking.
The blog shows the ledger line itself: "LOT 12 — POOL GATE VIOLATION, 4/14," the violator column reading "FINNEGAN, UNIT 12," the amount in Jenna's own black ink, and two blue "M.F." initials — dated April 14 and again May 14. Then the August meeting, the manila envelope on the head-of-table spot, and the audit committee opening the original in front of the whole board.
You'll see whose chair is empty, and whose initials are on the page.
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