I heard my own last name come out of a stranger’s mouth attached to a piece of water, and for a second it did not connect to anything. I had come down that slope with a thermos ten thousand times. I had never once thought of the mud under my boat as something a person could own.
Vanessa asked to see the screen. He turned it toward her and let her look as long as she wanted, and she looked for a long time, and the dock got very quiet while she did. One of the board members, a man named Grant Halloway, who had lived there since the first phase, leaned in and then straightened up and put his hands in his pockets and did not lean in again.
Mason asked me if I had a copy of my deed at the house. I said I did, and that there was a clause in it, referencing a plat I had never looked up, and I gave him the words the way I had memorized them off the kitchen table, together with parcel C, as shown on Brier plat number two. He said that would do it.
The pieces I had been carrying loose all summer went together standing there in ten inches of water. Brier Lake is not natural. It was made in the middle of the last century when a creek was dammed for irrigation and the ground under it came from three old farm holdings that ran down to that creek from different directions.
When the developer assembled Cedar Glenn decades later, he bought two of those old holdings outright and platted them into cul-de-sacs and the north half of the lake. He did not buy the third. The third was my uncle’s and my uncle would not sell because my uncle was exactly that kind of man. And the developer built around him and printed a brochure that showed the water in one smooth color and let everybody assume the rest.
Vanessa recovered faster than I expected, which told me something about how much practice she had. She said that even if a title question existed on the southern portion, the association held an easement over that ground recorded and had held it for decades. She said the word easement with a lot of weight on it. And she said it to Mason, not to me, because she understood that at that moment he was the only person on the dock whose opinion changed anything.
He said he could check that, too. He asked her which instrument. She said the board’s counsel had it. He asked if she knew what it granted. She said it grants us the lake. He found it in the county index in about four minutes. And he read the operative paragraph out loud in that same flat voice. And I have never heard a document do so much damage while sounding so boring.
The easement granted the association and its maintenance contractors the right to enter and cross a described strip of parcel C for the purpose of accessing, inspecting, and maintaining the drainage line and the spillway structure along with an obligation to restore any ground they disturbed. That was the whole of it.