He turned the tablet slightly so it was not in the sun. He found Brier Lake easily enough. That shape I knew better than my own driveway. The two arms and the narrow south cove and the little hook at the spillway. Then he switched on a layer and thin white lines came up across the image. They did not stop at the shoreline. They ran straight out into the blue and kept going, cutting the water into shapes, three of them meeting near the middle like the seams of a ball.
The lake was not one property. It never had been. Mason zoomed in on the south cove where my boat was tied to the piling under our feet and he looked at the screen for a while without saying anything. Then he looked at Vanessa. Then he looked at me and something in his face changed. Not dramatic, just the small adjustment of a man who has found the thing he was not expecting to find.
“Ma’am,” he said at this moment he is not on association property. Vanessa said that was impossible. She said it fast and a shade too loud. And I remember thinking that the words did not sound like a woman being surprised by news. They sounded like a woman hearing something out loud that she had already heard once before, somewhere quieter.
Mason did not argue with her. He tapped the screen twice more and the map went in closer still. And the next thing that came up on that little display was considerably worse for her than the first. He read the parcel record off the screen the way a man reads a serial number flat and careful one field at a time. The south cove and a band of lake bed running out from my shoreline toward the middle of the water carried its own identification, its own acreage figure, and its owner of record. Parcel C. Reic.
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.