Chapter 7
The call to Ron Bell's supervisor happened the following Monday.
His name was Marcus Holloway and he managed the regional office in the next county. Maggie had found his work number on the management company's website the way anybody could. She called and left a message and he called her back within the hour, which surprised her, and he asked her to put her concerns in writing, which did not.
She wrote a two-page letter.
She attached the April 8 request for her exception page, signed by R. Bell. She attached the April 17 request, signed by Patricia Vance. She attached the March 14 architectural review packet with the receipt stamp. She attached the county assessor's letter from April 28. She attached the login log from the failed camera-system password reset at 2:04 a.m. on the Sunday morning after the hearing, with the same residential IP that had created the Nextdoor account.
The only thing she did not attach was the carbon copy of the March minutes, because it had been sent to the county on April 21 with the original, and she no longer had it.
She mailed the letter on Tuesday, May 27, with delivery confirmation.
On Thursday, May 29, she got a call from Marcus Holloway.
"Ms. Ellison. I want to tell you what we found."
"Okay."
"Mr. Bell resigned on Wednesday. That was not for cause — that was his choice, and he has a severance agreement that keeps the specifics confidential. But I want you to know, on the record, that the April 8 request on your exception page was not part of his normal portfolio duties. He was asked to open it by a community board president, which is against policy. He did it. He should not have."
"Which board president?"
"Ms. Vance."
"And the second request on April 17?"
"That one he signed in Ms. Vance's name, without her knowledge, based on a mistake in our log system. The system timestamped the request at 4:18 p.m. but Ms. Vance was in a client meeting with a notary until 5:30 that afternoon. She has the notary's sign-in sheet. So it wasn't her."
Maggie sat very still.
"Wait," she said. "You're telling me the April 17 request was not signed by Pat."
"Correct. It was Mr. Bell. He used her signature line because he did not have her wet signature on file for that document type, which is another policy violation. The county has been notified."
"He was covering for her."
"I can't speak to his motives. I can tell you he told me, before he tendered his resignation, that he was concerned about the exposure of a different property in the community and he wanted to make sure the record reflected only one exception page in the file. That's the phrase he used. 'Only one exception page.'"
Maggie was quiet for a moment.
"He was covering for her own deck," she said.
"I can't confirm that."
"He knew about the second camera. He was in the room on Saturday. He came in late, stood in the back left corner, and left before the vote."
"I have no knowledge of Mr. Bell's attendance at any hearing."
Maggie thanked him and hung up.
She sat at the kitchen table with the phone in her hand and thought about the way the whole thing had gone. Ron Bell had opened a file on April 8 to help Pat cover her own violation. He had come to the hearing. He had stood in the back left corner where the television was visible and the president's face was not. He had left before the vote. He had signed a county request in Pat's name on April 17 to make it look like she was still trying to find the exception, which was a move meant to be discovered — meant to make the room think Pat had been scrambling.
Which meant the whole thing had been intended to look like a scandal, not a confession. It had been intended to make the carbon copy the center of the story, so that the story would be about a document, and the document would be the only exception page in the county file, and nobody would ask about the deck at 1439.
Somebody had wanted the meeting to go off like a firework.
Somebody had planned for Maggie to be publicly vindicated, which meant somebody had known she had the carbon.
Which brought it all the way back to Dana Reyes, who was moving to the county clerk's office in June, and who had called Maggie the day before with a piece of news that Maggie had not yet processed.
"I need you to know something," Dana had said. "Before I leave. The carbon copy I gave you on April 4 — I didn't make it just because you asked."
Maggie had waited.
"I made it because on March 28, I came back from lunch and the original March minutes were out on my desk," Dana had said, "which they should not have been, because they were already filed. And there was a corner of the sign-in sheet paper clipped to them that wasn't there before — a photocopy, in the file with the exception page. The photocopy had a different date on the sign-in than the original. March fifteenth, not March fourteenth."
Maggie had put her hand flat on the table.
"Somebody had put a page in the file after the fact," Dana had said. "A different sign-in sheet. I didn't know what it was for, and I still don't. But when you came in and asked me for the minutes, I thought — if I give her the carbon, at least there will be two versions. I made the carbon myself from the original before the photocopy was in the folder. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to put you in the middle of a thing I couldn't explain."
Maggie had thanked her and hung up and sat very still for a long time.
Now, on Thursday at eleven in the morning, she took the legal pad off the kitchen counter and added a line at the bottom.
"March 28 — a photocopy of a sign-in sheet appeared in the March minutes file. Date on it is March 15, not March 14. Dana made the carbon off the original before the photocopy was in the file."
She looked at the line for a while.
Then she wrote under it:
"Which means the exception vote might not have been March 14. Maybe it was March 15."
She circled the line.
Then she got up and took the pile of folders off the counter and went out to the car, because there was a copy of the original exception page in her own architectural review packet that she had filed in February, and she wanted to look at the date on the signature.
Advertisement