Susan called again and said she would meet Rachel and me at a diner thirty miles away the next morning. She would bring copies of the acquisition materials and whatever accounting records she was permitted to inspect. I asked whether she was worried about getting in trouble with the board. "I'm worried about telling 123 families we own something we never bought," she said. "I can live with being unpopular. I can't live with signing the next check without understanding what it's for."
That was the first time anybody inside Silver Pine sounded more concerned about the truth than about defeating me. It was not a dramatic change in the weather or a sudden revelation from a stranger in a suit. It was an experienced treasurer looking at numbers that refused to balance, and a seventy-three-year-old surveyor remembering a name from a forgotten map. I had gone looking for the legal basis of one gravel road. What I was finding was the outline of a much larger transaction.
Susan arrived at the diner before us, chose a booth facing the parking lot, and placed a grocery bag on the seat beside her. She had not brought an HOA binder with an association logo. Instead, she had made photocopies at home and marked them with small yellow tabs. Her coffee had gone cold by the time Rachel and I arrived, and she barely touched the breakfast the waitress brought. She looked like somebody who had spent a week deciding whether telling the truth would ruin the life she had built.
"Laura asked me to approve another transfer," Susan said after we sat down. Rachel opened her notebook and asked how much. "Two hundred and forty thousand dollars, from the acquisition reserve into an escrow account our board hasn't been given full access to." I asked whether that amount was part of the $4.8 million Laura had discussed publicly. Susan nodded. Then she added that the contract itself still lacked several signatures and that the financing committee had not issued its final approval.
She placed a thick presentation packet between the salt and pepper shakers. The cover showed the lake at sunset, with a headline promising permanent access to an exclusive waterfront lifestyle. Inside were photographs of the cedar clubhouse, forty-two slips, eleven cottages, a fuel dock, a beach, and what appeared to be acres of adjoining shoreline shaded the same luxurious green. Every page was beautiful. Rachel turned past the photographs without expression until she reached the legal description.
"Where is the title commitment?" she asked. Susan produced a separate schedule, still marked preliminary, and Rachel ran her finger down the parcels. There were several small tracts associated with the original development, but a parcel referenced in the supporting survey was not on the list of land to be conveyed. Rachel wrote the number in her notebook: 18-C. She asked whether Susan had questioned Laura about it.
"Three times," Susan said. "The first time she told me Caldwell's lawyers were cleaning up a survey error. The second time she said I was confusing the operating company with the land. The third time she told me to stop discussing the deal with Mark Caldwell or his attorneys because it might undermine negotiations."