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.
Then she asked casually whether I wanted her to run the association’s name through the grantee index while I was there since people usually did. I said sure, expecting nothing. What came back was not nothing and it changed the shape of the whole summer for me.
There was a document filed the previous year, not by the association, but recorded by a surveying firm out of the county seat, and it was a preliminary boundary and feasibility report prepared for the Cedar Glenn Estates Homeowners Association concerning proposed shoreline improvements. Lydia printed it for me, twenty-two pages, and I read it standing at the counter with my copies under my elbow.