Chapter 5 : The 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.
Sonya had a key to the clubhouse safe. She did not have a key to the box. But she had found, in the clubhouse safe, a copy of the bank's rental agreement for box 441, and she had spent Monday evening reading the state's open records statute with a red pen in her hand, and she had walked into Carthage Savings at 8:50 Tuesday morning with the HOA's articles of incorporation and her own secretary's letter of appointment, and she had asked to update the signature card on the association's accounts.
The bank had let her. It shouldn't have. But the bank had let her, and she had come out with a photocopy of the safe-deposit rental agreement, and she called Ramona from the parking lot the moment the glass doors closed behind her.
"Box 441," Sonya said. "Joint. It's got your mother's name on it."
Ramona was sitting in her Corolla in the visitor row of the Alder Creek tennis courts, on her lunch break, with a turkey sandwich on the passenger seat that she had not touched.
"Sonya," she said. "Are you sure you're reading that right?"
"I'm reading it right. Two signatures on the original 1998 card. Dale Brandt. And Barbara Vega. Your mother was the board treasurer in '98. She signed on for the box because the association did its bookkeeping there."
Ramona looked through the windshield at the tennis courts, where two old men were hitting balls back and forth without any particular urgency, and she put the phone on speaker and set it on the dash.
"I'm not going to open that box," she said.
"I'm not going to ask you to," Sonya said. "But I can go to the county and pull every notary acknowledgment Dale filed between 2010 and 2022. That's public record. He filed them with the clerk's office at the courthouse in Carthage. It's all in the index."
"Can you do that today?"
"I'm retired," Sonya said. "I can do anything today."
She was back at Ramona's kitchen table by 3:40 that afternoon with a folder and a legal pad and a cup of coffee she had brought from home.
"I pulled everything," she said. "2010 through 2022. Every acknowledgment Dale notarized in that window that got filed. It's about three hundred pages total. I only copied the ones that touch this subdivision."
She slid the legal pad across the table. There were eleven lines on it.
Eleven notarized documents filed between 2010 and 2022 that touched Alder Creek.
"Read them to me," Ramona said.
Sonya read them.
The first was Ramona's mother's quitclaim — the deed in Ramona's tote. The second was a mortgage payoff for the Hendersons at 22-A that everybody in the subdivision already knew about. The third was a power of attorney from the woman in unit 38, executed in 2014, naming her son in Tampa. The fourth was a lien release on the pool clubhouse after the 2017 roof — Ramona remembered the roof, remembered the special assessment, remembered writing the check. The fifth through the ninth were personal transactions — a car title, a boat title, two small loans between neighbors, an easement for a fence.
The tenth was the interesting one.
"4/18/2016," Sonya read. "Confirmation deed. Grantor: Barbara Vega. Grantee: Alder Creek Homeowners Association, Inc. Lot 22-C. Recorded 4/19/2016. Filed under instrument number 2016-041223."
Ramona set her coffee down.
"Say the date again."
"April 18th, 2016. Six days after the deed he notarized for you."
Ramona was quiet for a moment.
"The confirmation deed," she said. "What does a confirmation deed do?"
"It confirms a prior conveyance," Sonya said. "It's a belt-and-suspenders document. You file it when you want to make absolutely sure the title record shows the transfer happened — usually because somebody might challenge it later."
"Who drew it up?"
Sonya looked at the copy. On the bottom, below the notary block, in the corner where the drafter's name goes, it read: *Prepared by Brandt & Associates, LLC.*
"Brandt and Associates," Sonya said.
"His brother's law firm," Ramona said. "In Carthage. Dale's brother Lane did real estate closings for twenty years before he retired."
"So six days after Dale notarized your mother's quitclaim to you, Dale also notarized a confirmation deed from your mother to the HOA."
"That's what the record says."
"Both of them filed. Same week. Both recorded."
Ramona stood up and walked to the kitchen counter and looked out the window over the sink, which faced the cul-de-sac. Dale's house was on the corner. His trash cans were at the curb. The recycling bin was in the wrong place, three feet from the mailbox, which was against the subdivision's own rules. She could see it from her kitchen.
"Did he know?" Ramona said.
Sonya didn't answer right away.
"I don't know," she said. "But there's a fifth notary line on this list I haven't read you yet. Do you want to hear it?"
"Read it."
"6/14/2018. Confirmation deed. Grantor: Alder Creek Homeowners Association, Inc. Grantee: Alder Creek Homeowners Association, Inc. Lot 22-C. Recorded 6/15/2018. Filed under instrument number 2018-062917."
Ramona turned around.
"A deed from the HOA to itself."
"A correction deed," Sonya said. "Fixing a scrivener's error in the 2016 confirmation deed. Also drafted by Brandt and Associates. Also notarized by Dale Brandt."
"On a document where he's the notary for a deed from the HOA to the HOA."
"On a document where the HOA's president is also the notary for the HOA's correction deed."
Ramona sat back down.
She looked at the legal pad with the eleven lines on it and she thought about the sentence Dale Brandt had said at the pool gate, and she thought about the fact that in the middle of all of this — in the middle of every one of these documents — there was a signature that belonged to a man who had told a full subdivision that her mother never finished the paperwork.
The paperwork had been finished four separate times, by four separate instruments, in 2016 and again in 2018. The last one, the HOA-to-HOA correction deed, had been drafted by Dale's brother's law firm and stamped by Dale himself.
"Ramona," Sonya said gently, "what are you going to do with this?"
Ramona picked up her coffee and took a sip, which she immediately regretted because it had gone cold, and she set it back down.
"Nothing tonight," she said. "Tomorrow I'm going to go see Lane Brandt."
She didn't sleep well that night. She lay in her mother's old bedroom, which she had never redecorated, and listened to the cicadas and the neighbor's dog and, at 1:40 in the morning, the sound of a car door closing somewhere out on the cul-de-sac. She got up and looked out the front window and saw nothing. The street was dark and quiet and the Corolla was in the driveway where she had left it. She stood there for a while anyway.
At 6:15 she gave up on sleep and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with the folder Sonya had left and read the eleven lines again, in order, out loud, like a woman checking a grocery list against a recipe.
At 7:50 she called the dental office and told them she would be in at noon.
At 8:30 she called Lane Brandt.
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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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