A woman near the window said out loud that she had paid that fee every year since she moved in and had never once been on the water. Somebody else asked whether the fee had funded the insurance rider and if the rider was written against ground the association did not own what exactly had been insured.
Vanessa said the fee had always supported the entire lake as an amenity belonging to the whole community. It was the right sentence for a different meeting. Grant Halloway turned in his chair to face her fully and asked the question I had come there hoping somebody other than me would ask. “Vanessa,” he said, “when did you learn that parcel C is not association property?”
She said the board relied on the developer plan. He asked again using her name again. She said title questions were complex. And that is when I took the last thing out of my folder and laid it on the table, the preliminary boundary and feasibility report, opened to page nine with the title considerations paragraph marked. And then I turned it to the final page and set my finger under the distribution list where her name was printed with a date fourteen months old.
Nobody said anything for a while. Elaine Foster leaned over and read the page from where she sat and then she took off her reading glasses and let them hang. And she looked at Vanessa the way you look at somebody you have been defending in conversations you are now remembering one by one.
The board had never seen that report. It had been commissioned under the president’s discretionary authority for preliminary project work a spending category with a ceiling low enough that it never required a vote and it had gone to her and it had stopped there. Vanessa said finally that the report was preliminary and that preliminary findings are frequently revised.
I said that may be true and that I was not a lawyer and had no interest in pretending to be one. Then I said the only sentence I had prepared in advance and I said it in an ordinary voice because I had learned by then that ordinary carries further in a quiet room than loud does. “You told me I did not belong on this lake. It turns out the map remembers me better than you do.”
I sat down. Vanessa moved to table the discussion pending advice of counsel and the motion carried and the meeting went on to the mulch bid. And I want to be honest, I thought that was going to be the end of the easy part. It was because a woman like Vanessa Pike does not lose a room and go quiet. She loses a room and changes the subject.