I asked how much of Brier Lake the association actually owned. She started to answer and stopped. She looked at the filters in her hands. She said the lake had always been the community’s lake. And then she said more quietly that she assumed the developer had conveyed it at some point in the eighties and that the older records were in a storage unit the board had never fully inventoried. She said it like a woman who had just heard her own sentence out loud for the first time.
I did not push her. I said I was going down to the county records office on Thursday and that if she wanted I would tell her whatever I found. She thanked me in a voice that was mostly nerves. I paid for my hinge screws and drove home. And on the way, I passed the north entrance with the stone monument and the flowering pears. And I thought about how many people in those houses had been paying for a lake nobody had ever pulled a title on.
Twelve years at least, Elaine had said. Some line items only survive because they are small enough that nobody stops to ask. That Thursday, I never made it to the records office because Thursday morning, my hot water heater failed, and I spent the day with my arms in a floor drain. I moved the trip to the following week. And on Saturday morning, Vanessa stopped mailing me things altogether.
I was out in the South Cove a little after eight in the flat part of the morning when the water holds the sky and every sound carries. There were four or five people gathered on the association dock at the far side of the cove, which was unusual for that hour, and I recognized Vanessa’s jacket before I recognized anybody else. Then a county truck came down the access road, green with a gold seal on the door, and parked at the top of the dock.
A man in a ranger uniform got out, put on his hat, and walked down to meet them. Vanessa began talking before he had reached the bottom of the ramp, one arm already extended in my direction. I did not paddle away. That was a decision, and I made it on purpose. I had spent four months answering paper with paper while the price of my mornings went up in fifty-dollar increments. And here at last was somebody with an actual badge, somebody whose job was the water instead of the property values around it.
I set the rod down across the thwarts and let the boat drift while she told him her version. I could hear pieces of it across the water. Repeated use of a private lake, warned multiple times, refused to obtain a permit, a homeowner who did not respect the community.
Ranger Mason Trent was maybe forty, built like a man who walks a lot, and he had the most useful quality a person in a uniform can have, which is that he did not seem to be in any hurry. He listened to all of it. He asked her one clarifying question I could not hear. Then Vanessa raised her arm again and said the sentence loud enough to reach me and everyone else in a voice that had been waiting all summer to be used in front of an audience. “Get him off that lake.”
I paddled in slow because I wanted him to see a man cooperating and not a man fleeing. When I was about twenty feet out, Vanessa said to nobody in particular, but plainly for my benefit that some people believe they can do anything simply because nobody has bothered to stop them yet. Two of the board members made a small approving sound.