I told her I was not going to argue with her on a hillside, and that anything the board wanted from me should come in writing. That request was the thing that seemed to bother her most. She wanted a scene. A scene between the two of us on a slope with a young employee watching would have been a story she could tell in her own words at the next meeting. A written record is different because a written record does not care about tone and it stays exactly the same length forever.
I said it twice. In writing, please. And then I went back to my leader and let the silence sit. She left. The golf cart made a small polite whine going up the hill and the young man walked beside it and I sat in the shallows for another hour and caught nothing at all.
The following Wednesday, I ran into Elaine Foster at the hardware store on the highway holding a package of furnace filters and looking at me like she had been hoping not to. I asked her without any edge in it how long the association had been collecting money related to the lake. She said the lake access fee had been part of the annual assessment since before she joined the board and that it was a separate line item not folded into general dues.
I asked what the money covered. She listed it easily the way you list something you have read on a page many times. Dock maintenance, shoreline landscaping, algae and weed control and the liability insurance rider for water access. Then I asked her the only question that mattered and I asked it gently because Elaine was not the enemy and I already suspected she was going to be the one who paid for other people’s confidence.
I asked how much of Brier Lake the association actually owned. She started to answer and stopped. She looked at the filters in her hands. She said the lake had always been the community’s lake. And then she said more quietly that she assumed the developer had conveyed it at some point in the eighties and that the older records were in a storage unit the board had never fully inventoried. She said it like a woman who had just heard her own sentence out loud for the first time.
I did not push her. I said I was going down to the county records office on Thursday and that if she wanted I would tell her whatever I found. She thanked me in a voice that was mostly nerves. I paid for my hinge screws and drove home. And on the way, I passed the north entrance with the stone monument and the flowering pears. And I thought about how many people in those houses had been paying for a lake nobody had ever pulled a title on.
Twelve years at least, Elaine had said. Some line items only survive because they are small enough that nobody stops to ask. That Thursday, I never made it to the records office because Thursday morning, my hot water heater failed, and I spent the day with my arms in a floor drain. I moved the trip to the following week. And on Saturday morning, Vanessa stopped mailing me things altogether.
I was out in the South Cove a little after eight in the flat part of the morning when the water holds the sky and every sound carries. There were four or five people gathered on the association dock at the far side of the cove, which was unusual for that hour, and I recognized Vanessa’s jacket before I recognized anybody else. Then a county truck came down the access road, green with a gold seal on the door, and parked at the top of the dock.