One evening Sandra drove me to see her sister in Charlotte. We had been promising to visit for months, and she insisted that I needed to spend a weekend talking about something other than Vivian Blackwater. I arranged for our neighbor Mrs. Henderson to collect any packages and glance toward the lake from her property. Then I locked the gate, checked the cameras, and went.
Charlotte was busy and loud in the way cities can be, but I enjoyed having dinner with people who didn't ask about my shoreline. Sandra's sister teased me about my stubbornness. We played cards, walked through a market, and ate breakfast in a crowded restaurant where nobody knew my name. On Saturday evening I realized I had gone almost six hours without thinking about the lawsuit. It felt like recovering a little piece of myself.
I didn't know that during that same weekend, Vivian was turning her attention from paperwork to the water itself.
Much later, investigators would reconstruct her calls and messages. A few weeks earlier she had asked an HOA committee to investigate an alleged algae problem in the lake. The committee had never authorized work on my property, and the lake had shown no evidence of a dangerous bloom. Still, Vivian contacted Clearwater Solutions, a company that provided chemical treatment services for private ponds and commercial water features. She represented herself as the authorized manager of a community lake and described an urgent problem that required immediate action.
The company's owner, Derek Thompson, should have verified the ownership and scope of permission more carefully. His staff should have demanded a site assessment and an appropriate treatment plan. Instead, paperwork was rushed, payment was accepted, and a nighttime application was arranged without my knowledge. The company later argued that Vivian had supplied false information. She had. But that lie did not erase the company's own responsibility to ensure it was treating the correct water under safe conditions.
There was no legitimate emergency. There was no measured bloom requiring the amount applied. What existed was an HOA president who had spent months trying to control a lake outside her authority and a contractor willing to accept an expensive job on the strength of her assurance. Their combined carelessness would travel much farther than either had expected.
We returned to Pine Ridge on Sunday evening. I noticed the smell as I unloaded the truck, but the wind had shifted and I couldn't identify where it came from. Sandra asked whether someone had sprayed crops nearby.
I said I'd check after supper. Then Mrs. Henderson called and told me she had seen work lights near the north shore during the night and wondered whether I had hired a crew. A hard knot formed beneath my ribs.