Chapter 3 : Ramona walked over at 4:45 in flip-flops and a clean gray t-shirt, with her tote on her shoulder and the deed in a gallon Ziploc bag because Delia had brought the peas and made her put a bag of them on her cheek, and the peas had left a w
She had spent the entire week after the funeral with that page in a Ziploc.
The clubhouse still smelled like chlorine and coffee. There were already twelve people in the meeting room when Ramona got there, which was more than the room could comfortably seat, so four of them were standing along the wall by the water heater. The board secretary, Sonya, was seated at the end of the table with her laptop open. Sonya was fifty-eight, a retired dental hygienist, and she had been Ramona's neighbor for twenty-two years. She had been the one to call the meeting. She had also, that afternoon, walked over in her house slippers and handed Ramona the bag of frozen peas without saying anything, and Ramona had not asked her any questions.
Dale was at the head of the table in his navy polo and a fresh pair of khakis. His notary log was not visible anywhere in the room. His fine ledger was. It was on the table in front of him, closed.
There was a man Ramona did not recognize sitting at the far end of the table in a sports coat, gray hair, reading a single sheet of paper with his reading glasses pushed down his nose. She learned his name at 4:52 — Arthur Penn, counsel for the HOA's management company, out of the regional office in the state capital, arrived at 4:30 in a hybrid sedan with a state-issued license plate.
He had driven two hours and forty minutes to sit in a converted storage room in Alder Creek on a Saturday evening.
Ramona sat down in the second row of the five chairs they had set up for residents, front left, and put her tote on her lap.
At 5:02, Arthur Penn cleared his throat.
"Ms. Vega," he said. "Before we start, I'd like to state for the record that this is an informational meeting only. The board does not plan to take any action tonight, and no member of this board is authorized to make any finding — legal or factual — about the status of any parcel in this subdivision."
"Understood," Ramona said.
"Are you represented by counsel?"
"No."
"Are you aware that you may want to be?"
"Yes."
"Are you aware that anything you present here tonight can and will be used in any subsequent action?"
"Yes."
"Are you aware — "
"Mr. Penn," Ramona said, "with respect, I've been aware of all of this for three years. I have a copy of a filed and recorded deed. I have the recorder's receipt stub from 2016. I have the notary acknowledgment and the wet-ink signature and the stamp. I have the fine ledger with the parcel number 22-C written at the top of every page in Dale's hand. I have a three-year pattern of fines filed against a parcel number that doesn't belong to me. I don't need a lawyer to explain it. I need this board to read the paper."
Penn looked at her over the top of his glasses. He did not smile. He did not frown. He wrote something on his sheet.
Dale said, "Ms. Vega — "
"Ramona," Ramona said.
"Ramona," Dale said. His voice sounded different in the meeting room, small, the way voices sound in small rooms. "There is a procedural matter I want to raise before we go any further. The parcel you're claiming, 22-C — that parcel was conveyed to the HOA in 1996 when the subdivision was replatted. It's on the plat. It's on the master deed. It has been common area for thirty years."
"I know what it says on the plat," Ramona said. "The plat says the pool parcel was conveyed to the HOA as common area in 1996. But in 1996 my mother had a right of first refusal on the replat because she was the original grantor's daughter. And she never exercised it, so the replat went through and the parcel showed up as common area for thirty years even though she still held the underlying fee. In 2016 she quitclaimed her fee to me. The recorder's office filed it under instrument number 2016-041187. That's the page I have. It supersedes the plat, because a later conveyance from a still-holding grantor beats an earlier plat that assumed she'd already conveyed."
Penn's pen stopped moving.
"Ms. Vega," he said, "how do you know that?"
"My mother's estate lawyer," Ramona said. "Bert Hastings, over in Carthage. He's retired now but he was the one who drew it up. He's the one who told me to keep the page on me and wait."
Dale said, "Wait for what?"
Ramona turned and looked at him for the first time since she sat down.
Wait for what.
She had known, sitting at her mother's kitchen table in 2016 with the coffee ring and the Formica and Dale in his lake shirt with his grandkids in the truck outside, that this day was coming. Not the slap. She hadn't known about the slap. But she had known, listening to her mother's lawyer explain the transaction in careful sentences, that a day was going to come when somebody in this subdivision was going to try to make her small, and on that day she was going to have this page, and when the moment arrived, she was going to wait — because if she didn't wait, they'd say she was making it a fight, and if she did wait, they'd have to say what they said in front of witnesses.
"Wait for the record," Ramona said. "This is the record."
She took the deed out of the Ziploc and unfolded it on her lap and turned it so the meeting room could see the notary block.
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All 8 chapters
- 1One second the pool deck was a wall of noise — cicadas, a radio playing something with too much bass, kids screaming through the chain-link, the flat slap of wet feet on hot concrete — and the next second all of it went thin, like somebod
- 2The first thing that happened was that Marcus, the pool desk clerk, came out of the clubhouse with the clipboard that carried the membership roster for the season. He was nineteen, skinny, still in his school polo from a summer internship
- 3Ramona walked over at 4:45 in flip-flops and a clean gray t-shirt, with her tote on her shoulder and the deed in a gallon Ziploc bag because Delia had brought the peas and made her put a bag of them on her cheek, and the peas had left a w
- 4Dale's signature on the deed was not pretty. It slanted up to the right, the way signatures do when you're signing on the hood of a car or a counter you're not leaning on, and the "D" had a habit of losing its loop at the end. His "Brandt
- 5The earlier log was in the safe-deposit box that Dale Brandt kept at the Carthage Savings Bank on Main Street, box 441, and Ramona did not know that until Tuesday morning at 9:12 AM, when Sonya called her from the bank's parking lot.
- 6Ramona called at 8:30 Wednesday. Lane answered on the second ring.
- 7Ramona was on the second floor at 8:05 Thursday with the strip's legal description written on an index card, and she handed the card to the woman at the desk, and the woman typed it into the terminal, and looked at the screen, and looked
- 8"Yolanda says the box has been empty since Monday," Sonya said. "The log shows Dale was in there Monday at 9:07. Yolanda says she didn't see what he took out. She wasn't working the vault that day."
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