Felyne O’Shea. I’d only met her twice. The first time I met her was at the first HOA meeting I ever went to, which would have been about 15 years ago. I had vowed to stay away from those things after that experience. Animosity hung over the room, making everybody’s words seem more sharp as they cut through the tension.
Felyne ran the meeting, and the President at the time, whose name I couldn’t remember, just sat at the table with a look that varied between utter terror and anger.
In spite of all that, Felyne actually did a good job back then. New to the position, she was vibrant and full of energy, a natural with angry residents. She easily played up her good looks, with her long, straight red hair, large green eyes, pale complexion and relative youth as a way to deflect arguments, always promising to do better the next time.
That was a vitriolic meeting. A large faction of moms showed up to protest the closing of the pool for a month for some needed repairs. Here in the city of Palm Hills, pools stay open year round, but there are slower months for its use than others, and had there been any planning at all, they would have closed the pool in December for maintenance that very likely could have prevented the pool needing repairs later. I have to admit to feeling a tiny bit of sympathy for the moms - it was plenty warm in May to allow the children to swim. However, May is still when kids are in school, so I at least felt as though Felyne and the board were on top of it enough to have the repairs done before the kids were out for summer, when pool use would spike. While inconvenient, it certainly wasn’t something to be so angry about.
That meeting 15 years ago had another very contentious issue - refrigerators. The covenants in our community expressly forbid refrigerators in the garage, but many residents had them to keep their stash of drinks cold and as a backup for their own indoors fridge.
As far as I was concerned, this was a stupid rule, and it seemed to me the most obvious answer was to strike the rule out of the covenants. Refrigerators in one’s garage can’t really bother anybody, and I honestly couldn’t think of a single reason for the rule. Even driving by a garage with the door wide open and seeing a refrigerator isn’t that bad; it’s not like people were keeping them in the middle of their front yards, for goodness sake!
The problem was that people were using the rule as revenge on neighbors they didn’t like. Drive too fast down our street? You’ll be fined for your refrigerator. Dog bark too much at night? Garage refrigerator fine.
In order to change this covenant, Felyne explained to everybody at the meeting that we would need two-thirds of the residents to vote for it.
We had never, in the history of our HOA, been able to convince two-thirds of our neighbors to do anything, much less vote. Changing the covenants was extremely unlikely.
The result of all these first-world problems was that the moms whose kids couldn’t swim for a week were at the HOA board meeting, with their frown lines, pursed lips, and angry whispers, sitting next to the dads angry that their beer refrigerators were still against the rules.
I was working full time building my company back then, and, honestly, it was those angry soccer moms who scared me the most. They were way more crazy than the refrigerator faction. I didn’t envy Felyne having to deal with them, but she handled everything gracefully, deflecting their arguments, and, while she didn’t admit to any guilt in the poor planning for the pool, she artfully gave them a non-apology and moved on. To me, young Felyne seemed mature beyond her years and was very good with people.
I hadn’t had any dealings with Felyne since then, as I always paid my dues on time and never violated any rules. With the exception of the refrigerator rule, I’d found our little neighborhood to be quite reasonable with their expectations.
Unfortunately, I had to miss the Annual Homeowners Meeting last November, when Angie was elected and Beatrice was ousted. I heard from Angie that the mood there had been one of simmering resentment, quiet whispers, and long speeches. The gist of it was that the neighborhood was sick of the board doing nothing about rising water prices, and we were facing major dues increases. While for some of us living in that community, that wouldn’t have been a horrible price to pay, many of our neighbors were retired elderly people who had paid off their homes and were now living on a fixed income. We also had a large group of houses that were smaller and much more reasonably priced, at least for a gated community in Southern California, where many families with young children lived, and we had a strip of condos along the eastern side of the community where the homes were much more affordable. A large dues increase would affect them as well. People were mad. Voting in Angie made them feel better, as she promised to do more to help lower water costs, and, therefore, dues.
The second time I saw Felyne was more recently, when Angie asked me to go with her to a monthly board meeting. It was the first HOA meeting with Angie in charge. That would have been in, what? January, probably.
This meeting, after Angie was elected, was completely different. Felyne was noticeably older, and you could tell she was less assertive, probably having years of seeing the same issues pop up over and over again. People still showed up to complain about one thing or another. At the beginning of the meeting, there was an Open Forum where anybody who wanted to speak had five minutes. The first man started in on how the grass in the common areas was being mowed to the wrong height. It was something to do with the fact that the HOA wanted to save money by having the grass cut to a shorter height, so it wouldn’t have to be mowed as often, but mowing it to a higher height would save money on watering bills. Felyne half listened and told him his time was up and to sit down, but Angie, as the brand new President of the HOA, intervened and said she’d like to give him a few more minutes. She was writing everybody’s complaints down. “I can’t make any promises,” she said, “but I’ll talk to our landscaping contractor, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Another homeowner stood up and asked if we could reopen the subject of garage refrigerators, eliciting a huge sigh from Felyne, who I imagined heard about that stupid rule many times over the last 15 years. Mrs. Jameson, a nasty woman with a huge chip on her shoulder, stood up to defend the rule.
Angie, who had up until then been extremely understanding of everybody’s arguments, looked straight at her. “Sit down, Susan,” she said with steel in her voice. She turned to Renee Hernandez, the Board Secretary. “You can write this in the minutes: I am telling everybody right now that the garage refrigerator issue is completely closed. We cannot change the covenants because we will never get ⅔ of our residents to come to a meeting, as that would be over a thousand residents to have either come in person or sign a proxy. When I ran, I went door to door, and I didn’t even get that many people to vote.
“So here is what we are going to do. I am going to direct our most capable manager to ignore any complaints about refrigerators, whether they be in somebody’s garage, somebody’s yard, or dumped at the bus stop. We will no longer issue any fines for refrigerator violations. Period. Is that understood?”
“You are BREAKING THE LAW!” Susan shouted.
“Am I? Well, how about this, then. Why don’t you go find yourself a lawyer that you can pay a lot of money to in order to make this HOA comply with a rule that never should have been written? Even if you can find a lawyer that would take that case, any judge will laugh you out of his courtroom.”
Looking at Renee Hernandez, HOA secretary, she reiterated, “The subject is closed. There will be no refrigerator fines.”
First there was stunned silence by the other fifteen homeowners in the room, and then I started clapping. Slowly, at first, the others joined in while Mrs. Jameson sat and shot daggers from her eyes at all of us. Angie declared the meeting closed.
Thinking about this, I wrote Susan Jameson down on my list as well.
Felyne had seen many different presidents over the years. She was like the Energizer Bunny of managers, she just kept going and going. Most presidents were content to let her do everything, pay the bills, keep the accounts, issue the fines, and they rarely intervened.
Angie’s style was different. She took charge and ran the meeting herself, her way. But I never saw Felyne object. She was the sleeper of the bunch. As the HOA’s manager, Felyne likely knew where the bodies were buried.
Was Felyne worried about being fired? Or maybe she was raking in money in a kickback scheme with Bug Guy? I’d never heard of any issues between Angie and Felyne, but then again, if I was a murderer, I wouldn’t go around letting everybody know how angry I was with the victim; I’d pretend everything was okay until I found my moment.
I wasn’t sure, though. Angie was bashed over the head with her own candle holder, a crime of passion, one unplanned, sloppy, and very spur of the moment. That didn’t seem to be Felyne’s MO.
What I really needed to do was to organize my thoughts. I’d listened to a lot of true crime, and, while the most likely person to be the killer was the one standing over the body with a gun, they weren’t the ones the podcasters were highlighting. It was the tough cases, the ones with multiple suspects and no answers that I’d been listening to. I’d often thought how I’d solve a case like that. Well, now was my time to put my leadership skills to the test.
If I was being truthful, though, this case would probably be solved in the next day or two. Fingerprints or DNA would no doubt point straight to Angie’s killer. Unless, of course, it was one of the four people who visited Angie on Saturday. Those people would have an innocent explanation for having their forensic evidence at the scene, so that could make things complicated.
Clearly, the only way to solve this was with a list. I pulled out a notebook and pen.
Possible Murderers
Beatrice
Cynthia
Felyne
Bug Guy
Possible Angry Homeowner - Jamison?
Angie’s Ex
Random killer
I circled Angie’s Ex and wrote next to it, “check with Dayna on alibi.” Dayna surely would have done that by now, as he’d be one of the highest on her list, but he’d moved to a different state long ago.
Possible Motives
I paused, thinking for a minute. It seemed as though this was a crime of passion, but I needed to think about the facts.
Felyne was the last person to see Angie that day. If she wasn’t the killer, then whoever did this had to have known about the security camera at the front door and gone around to the back. That suggested premeditation.
Premeditated can still suggest passion.
I continued with my list.
Possible Motives
Anger
Money
Love/Jealousy
Vengeance
Secrets
I looked at that list and crossed out love/jealousy. I was certain that if Angie were involved in any sort of love triangle, even a forbidden one with a married man, she would have told me about it or at least given me some hint. She had often mentioned that she had no desire to remarry and how happy she was as a single woman living alone. No, nobody killed her over a man. Or a woman.
Preventing a secret from coming out could be related to both the first and second items. It was a subset of each. Anger and Vengeance could go together too. I put little arrows connecting them.
Shoot, now I was going around in circles again. The only thing I really had that was certain was my list of suspects, and when your list contains things like “Angry Homeowner” and “Random Person,” it’s not like I was narrowing anything down. I drew a box around the first five on the list. Those were the top suspects for now.
I went back to my phone and took a look, again, at the photos I had taken of Angie’s desk.
Who was this person whose name was on the sticky note found under the chair, I wondered.
Peter Barlow. Googling just his name gave me too many hits, so I tried “Peter Barlow Palm Hills.” Nothing. I thought of the surrounding cities and tried his name with each of them.
“Here we go!” I said out loud. Peter Barlow was a forensic accountant, his office located just twenty miles outside of the city of Palm Hills.
Forensic accountant? That’s interesting!
I glanced at the clock. Too late to call him.
Harmony’s arrival was still hours away, and I was feeling unsettled. What I needed was some fresh air.
I looked at Mr. Tuttles. “Time for walkies, Big T!”