It did not convey title to any part of the lake bed. It did not grant recreational rights, exclusive or otherwise. It did not authorize the association to permit, license, price, restrict, or police the use of water above ground it did not own, and it certainly did not authorize the board to order a man off the cove attached to his own parcel.
Mason handed the tablet back to nobody and let it hang at his side. He said mildly that if anyone on this dock needed to demonstrate a right to be here this morning, at the moment it was not Mr. Reic. Nobody laughed. Bitsy Vance, who had brought a dog down for the show, picked the dog up.
Grant Halloway asked Vanessa quietly whether the board had ever actually pulled title on the lake, and she said the association had operated on the developer plan since incorporation, which is a sentence that sounds like an answer for about two seconds. That is when I understood that these people had never lied to me exactly. They had inherited a story and repeated it until repetition felt like proof.
Then Mason asked the question that ended it, and he asked it without any relish at all, which made it land harder. He looked down at the boards under our feet at the association dock with its solar lamps and its cleats and its little brass plaque, and he asked which parcel this dock was standing on.
Vanessa did not answer. She looked out at the water for a moment and I watched her do the arithmetic behind her eyes and I saw the exact instant she decided not to say the number she knew. Mason said he would leave the property question to the county and the parties that he had no citation to issue to anyone this morning and that he would advise the board not to direct any employee to remove a person from water they could not document owning.
He walked back up the ramp. The truck started. I untied my boat and pushed off. And I did not say one word to Vanessa Pike because there was nothing I could have said that would have been better than the silence she was already standing in.
The following Thursday, I finally got to the county records office, a low brick building downtown with a counter worn smooth on the customer’s side. The woman who came to help me was named Lydia Monroe, and she had the patient competence of somebody who has spent twenty years explaining to angry people that the file says what the file says.
I gave her the deed clause. She pulled Brier plat number two out of the map drawer. Within ten minutes, a linen-backed original from the year the dam went in, and she laid it flat under the light with two weights on the corners. There was parcel C hatched running from my shoreline out into the water. With the surveyor’s stamp and the recording date and my uncle’s name in a clerk’s careful hand, she made me certified copies.