Mr. Tuttles laid with his head on my feet, and I absentmindedly leaned over to stroke his soft white fur, relaxing as I did so. Weren’t there studies that showed petting dogs lowered your blood pressure? I felt like that had been at the center of one of our marketing campaigns, but I couldn’t remember for sure. Maybe it was that owning pets helped you live longer. I glanced at Stormy, who was watching my every move from the windowsill with her large black eyes.
Live longer? I’ll be lucky if that one doesn’t put me into an early grave.
My phone binged, bringing me out of my reverie. Harmony, Angie’s daughter, was sending me her airline reservations. She’d be arriving later this evening, and I promised to be there to pick her up.
I couldn’t even imagine what Harmony and her family were going through. If Angie’s death was hard on me, it would be a thousand times harder on them. Angie had been one of those moms who stops mothering her child when she became an adult and started being an older, wiser friend to her instead. Angie made it look so easy, I sometimes wondered if I had chosen a different life, could I have been as good of a mom as Angie?
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Time to get back at it. I downloaded the photos I took of Angie’s notebook onto my computer and brought them up in full size on the screen. I needed to see every detail.
Angie was clearly a list-maker, something I heartily approve of. The last pages of her notebook contained a lot of lists with “to-do’s” crossed out in bold strokes. Every page had a date at the top, and I silently thanked Angie for being so organized.
I had taken photos of the last 20 pages, which corresponded to about the last month and a half.
The entries told a story of an active HOA President, with a couple of other duties thrown in. Things like:
Email Mrs. Henry re speeding signs
Look up new law about solar panels
Grocery store - pickles & yogurts
Pool maintenance guy?
Email about broken boards - fence
As I read further along, I started to find lists that didn’t have items crossed out.
“Mrs. Gates wants bees. Check CC&R’s.” This one had a whimsical drawing of a bee next to it, along with a smiley face. Apparently Angie found the idea of somebody wanting to keep bees in her backyard to be amusing. I was struck by how good the drawing of the bee was. Little drawings peppered each page, one a stick figure of a man stopping an irrigation leak with his thumb, the confusion on his face apparent, a bunny eating a flower, and one that really struck me showing a small lake on a cloudy day. Each little pencil sketch contained a complexity of shading that evoked some emotion, the man with the sprinklers was fun and funny, the one of the lake was dark and stormy. I wondered if that was what she was feeling when she drew them or if it was the emotion she was hoping to convey. Probably a little of both.
I knew Angie could draw, but I had no idea she was this good.
Other items included homeowners who wanted the HOA to buy them a tree for their front yard, upgrading irrigation nozzles to more efficient ones, and a question about how much the cost of rock is going to go up with inflation and every HOA in the entire southwest getting rid of turf and adding rock. She also had little inspirational notes sprinkled throughout the notebook, to herself or what she wanted to say to the board, it wasn’t clear.
“Water is money and less water means lower dues!”
“The budget is a handshake between the board and the homeowners. Don’t abuse that.”
“Every email is to be valued, even the bad ones.” Bad was crossed out and the word “critical” was written over it. “It means people are engaging, which is a good thing.” Then, a little arrow pointed to the words, “even when it’s dumb.”
“People like to be useful. If somebody offers to help, let them, and be sure to thank them for it.”
Angie also had several entries I couldn’t make heads or tails out of:
5000-00 $200 June, $150 November
5005-00 $200 Feb, July, November
Grounds Repair 6305-00
I had no idea what any of that meant, but I made a note of it. It might be important, or it could just be boring budget stuff that had nothing to do with anything.
One whole page had her pencil sketches of shrubs and trees with a few flowers thrown in. The shading made it extremely realistic, except that the shrubs were the same size as the trees, and the flowers were even larger, dwarfing the trees. In the corner, there was a single shrub, much smaller than the ones in the main part of the drawing, that had a circle and slash through it, like a “Do Not” sign. “Do not shrub,” I thought to myself and mentally shrugged. On another page she had drawn a river rock and smaller cobble interspersed into a paisley-type design. Tall grasses swayed in a gentle breeze. Each of these intricate drawings were on pages immediately following her notes for a board meeting, and I surmised these were her doodles done during the meetings. She had mentioned more than once how the meetings dragged on, especially during the open forum when the homeowners made a plea to reduce dues while also wanting more services. “It’s just not going to happen,” I remember her telling me.
I was struck by how much HOA work she did and how much of it she never shared with me. When we walked, we discussed our former jobs or good books or how to achieve world peace. Perhaps she thought the inner workings of the HOA to be too mundane to discuss, or maybe she felt too many of the HOA’s issues involved our neighbors, so she was maintaining their confidentiality.
The other perplexing thing was that most of what I was reading was really the HOA manager’s job. Replying to emails about the covenants, telling somebody the HOA doesn’t pay for trees in their own yards—these are things the manager should be doing.
Why would Angela be doing the HOA manager’s job?
Typically, a manager acts as a liaison between the HOA board and homeowners, facilitating effective governance and supporting the smooth operation of the community. A manager’s duties generally include administrative tasks like filing taxes for the HOA, paying the bills, collecting dues, and managing financial records and budgets.
From her notes, it seemed as though Angie was fine with Felyne paying the bills and collecting dues, but Angie herself was interfacing with the homeowners and answering their questions.
The last two pages of Angie’s notebook interested me the most, because they were the most relevant, I hoped, to the day of her murder.
“Call Cyn to discuss.” Discuss what?
“Email Ed about shrubs.”
“Follow up with Brady.”
“Start googling management co’s.”
Wait, what?
If Angie was thinking about changing her management company, then Felyne would have a motive for killing her. Sunhaven was a large contract; Felyne’s company was making a lot of money off us.
I sat back and thought about all of this. Who was Brady? And why was Angie meeting all of these people on a Saturday? That seemed unusual to me. Mr. Tuttles rubbed against my leg, begging for some attention, and I stroked his fur.
My phone binged again, this time from Dayna.
Know anybody named Brady Strong?
Brady Strong? I literally just read Angie’s notes, “Follow up with Brady.” I googled him quickly before I answered but got too many Brady Strongs in the area to narrow him down.
**No, should I?**
I already knew where this was going.
He’s our 2:12 appointment with Angela.
Employed by an extermination company.
As somebody who reads a lot of thrillers, my mind immediately went to an extermination company like assassins paid by the CIA, but I pulled my mind back to the much more likely type of exterminator for an HOA: one that kills the bugs.
**I’m guessing he has the current extermination**
**contract with Sunhaven.**
You nailed it!
So Angie was meeting with the exterminator at her house on a Saturday. Why? I rejected my first thought, which was that it was a romantic connection. Angie had secrets, but I would have known if she was getting frisky with Bug Guy.
I set my phone down, thinking probably the exact same thing Dayna was thinking. A contractor visited Angie at home, on a Saturday in the afternoon. I’d put money on him being on the take, and Angie found out.
I’d been guessing that Angie’s murder was due to passion, and, sometimes, the concept of losing a lot of money could make a lot of people extremely passionate.
I took out my notebook and wrote, “Brady Strong - Bug Guy. On the take?”
If Bug Guy was on the take, then there was a good possibility that either Felyne, as the HOA Manager, Beatrice, as President, or Cynthia, as Treasurer, were in on it, too, or maybe even two of them or all three could all be in on it.
I underlined “On the take?” and then wrote all three ladies’ names underneath it with question marks next them.
I tapped my pen on the desk. Of the three ladies, Felyne was the one I knew the least about.