I put a hand on the piling and held the boat steady and told the ranger good morning and gave him my name and I said I lived at the South End and had been fishing here since before the clubhouse was built. He said, “Good morning, Mr. Reic,” and he said it the ordinary way which after four months of hearing it the other way was almost strange.
He did not order me out of the water. He turned back to Vanessa and asked whether the association owned the entire lake bed. She said of course. He asked for the parcel number. She said the community had held the lake since the development was platted. He said again patiently that he was asking for a parcel identification number.
Vanessa handed him the glossy map, the same one she had held up at the meeting, and I watched him take it and look at it for about five seconds. “This is not a property map,” he said. It was the first time all summer I had seen her lose the beat. She started to explain that it was the official community plan produced by the developer and that every homeowner received one at closing.
He nodded while she talked, which is a thing patient people do that is not agreement, and he was already tapping at the tablet he carried on his hip. He said the county keeps a public parcel map service and that it would take him a minute. Somebody on the dock asked if this was really necessary. Nobody answered.
He turned the tablet slightly so it was not in the sun. He found Brier Lake easily enough. That shape I knew better than my own driveway. The two arms and the narrow south cove and the little hook at the spillway. Then he switched on a layer and thin white lines came up across the image. They did not stop at the shoreline. They ran straight out into the blue and kept going, cutting the water into shapes, three of them meeting near the middle like the seams of a ball.
The lake was not one property. It never had been. Mason zoomed in on the south cove where my boat was tied to the piling under our feet and he looked at the screen for a while without saying anything. Then he looked at Vanessa. Then he looked at me and something in his face changed. Not dramatic, just the small adjustment of a man who has found the thing he was not expecting to find.
“Ma’am,” he said at this moment he is not on association property. Vanessa said that was impossible. She said it fast and a shade too loud. And I remember thinking that the words did not sound like a woman being surprised by news. They sounded like a woman hearing something out loud that she had already heard once before, somewhere quieter.
Mason did not argue with her. He tapped the screen twice more and the map went in closer still. And the next thing that came up on that little display was considerably worse for her than the first. He read the parcel record off the screen the way a man reads a serial number flat and careful one field at a time. The south cove and a band of lake bed running out from my shoreline toward the middle of the water carried its own identification, its own acreage figure, and its owner of record. Parcel C. Reic.