Chapter 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."
"Did she call him?"
"She called him Monday afternoon," Sonya said. "To ask whether he wanted the box closed. He told her to leave it open. He said there was still association business pending."
Ramona looked at the envelope.
"Are you going to open it?" Sonya asked.
"Not in the car."
They drove back to Alder Creek, and Ramona pulled into her own driveway, and the two of them walked into the kitchen and Ramona put her tote on the table and set the envelope on the Formica next to the coffee ring, and she stood there for a long minute looking at it.
"It's from your mother," Sonya said.
"I know."
"Ramona."
"I know, Sonya."
She opened it with a butter knife.
Inside was a single page, folded in thirds, in her mother's handwriting, dated 4/12/2016 — the day of the quitclaim.
*Ramona —*
*If you're reading this in the bank's parking lot, then the thing happened that I thought might happen and you're still standing, which is all I wanted.*
*Dale didn't read the deed. I knew he wouldn't. He was on his way to the lake. He stamped the last page and signed it and went. That's not the important thing.*
*The important thing is the strip. I found out in 2014 that Dale quietly took the strip between our driveway and the pool lot from the association. He did it in 2013 at a board meeting when I wasn't there. I was the treasurer and I wasn't there. He paid a dollar. He notarized himself. He never filed it. I found out because the association's audit trail from that year is missing and I went looking for it.*
*I did not confront him. I want you to know that. That's the part I'm least proud of and I want you to know it in writing. I was sixty-nine years old and I was tired and I thought — he'll file it eventually, or the county will catch it, or somebody else will. Somebody else never did.*
*Then I got sick. And I thought, if I go, what holds the pool is the strip. If the strip is in Dale's name and the pool lot is in your name, then Dale can shut you out of the pool by locking the strip. And he will. Because he'll realize eventually.*
*So I asked Lane to draw the confirmation deed and the correction deed and I had Dale notarize them both. I had Lane make the paper as clean as it could be so that if anybody ever went looking, they'd find the record and they'd see that the HOA had taken the pool lot subject to my daughter's remainder interest. That's what the paper does. That's what it says. Please read it, Ramona.*
*What it does not do is give you the strip. The strip has to be handled separately. I left the notary log from 2012 to 2015 in the box with the strip deed in 2016. I asked Yolanda to hold my key. I know Dale knows the key is here. I don't know if he knows I know about the strip. Maybe he does. He always thinks people don't know more than they do.*
*If he emptied the box, he took the strip deed and the log and the whole thing is going to be his decision now. If he did not empty the box, the strip deed is in there and you can decide. Either way you're not alone with this anymore because you're holding this letter, which means somebody told you about the bank.*
*I love you. Do not be small about this. — Mom*
Ramona read the letter twice, standing at the kitchen table with her tote on her shoulder, and then she set it down on the Formica next to the coffee ring and sat down in the chair.
Sonya read it after her. She didn't say anything. She poured two cups of coffee, set one in front of Ramona, and sat down across the table.
"So he emptied the box," Sonya said. "He has the strip deed and the earlier log."
"Yep."
"Where's he going to go with them?"
Ramona thought about it.
"He's going to the county recorder in Carthage," she said. "He's going to file the strip deed late and pay the penalty. Then he's going to sit on the lot and wait. It's an access easement problem, and if he holds the strip in his own name, then he can charge the HOA — which means me, the parcel owner — for access, or he can just lock the gate and call it private property. That's what he'll do. He'll put a lock on the gate and call it private property."
"When?"
"This week," Ramona said. "Probably today. Because after Monday he knows that the whole thing is going to end up in court, and he wants the strip in the record before that."
She picked up her phone and called Lane Brandt.
Lane answered on the second ring.
"Ms. Vega."
"Your brother emptied box 441 Monday. He has the strip deed and the 2012-to-2015 log. He's going to try to file the strip deed late."
"Well," Lane said. "That's a problem."
"Can he file it?"
There was a pause.
"The strip deed is valid," Lane said. "It's valid if it's signed by the right people and notarized. The board minutes from 2013 are going to be a problem for him — the minutes don't show a resolution authorizing the sale. If he didn't have board authorization in 2013, the file is going to get kicked at the recorder's office. The county recorder rejects deeds without a supporting board resolution when the grantor is an HOA. He'll know that. He'll wait until he can produce the minutes."
"Can he produce the minutes?"
"Depends on whether the minutes exist," Lane said. "If they exist, he wrote them. If he wrote them, they'll show the sale."
"Are they in the clubhouse?"
"They should be. Ask Sonya."
Ramona looked at Sonya.
"Minutes from 2013," she said.
Sonya was already up. She went to her house and came back forty minutes later with a binder, and she set it on Ramona's kitchen table and opened it to March 2013, and there, on the page, was a motion to convey the strip between unit 14 and parcel 22-C to "President Brandt, in trust for the association," for one dollar, seconded by the same man who had moved it, carried by the same man who had made the motion, with four board members absent.
It was one page later, in the same binder, that Sonya found the missing 2013 audit trail, filed as an appendix.
The audit trail showed a $1.00 transfer of an asset valued at $17,000.
It showed the transfer to "President Brandt, personally."
The audit trail was initialed by the board treasurer. The board treasurer was Barbara Vega.
The initials were Ramona's mother's.
Ramona sat with that for a long time.
Her mother had signed the 2013 audit trail. Her mother had known. Her mother had signed that audit trail and said nothing and stayed on the board and kept the records clean, and in 2016 she had quitclaimed the pool lot to Ramona, and asked Dale to notarize it, and not contradicted him when he didn't read it.
Her mother had spent the last three years of her life positioning paper.
"Are you okay?" Sonya asked.
"I'm okay," Ramona said. "I'm just — I'm just seeing it."
She stood up.
"Come on," she said. "We need to go to the clubhouse."
It was a Friday afternoon in mid-May. The pool had reopened Thursday, but there were only two people at the deck when Ramona and Sonya walked across the cracked concrete walkway at 2:40 in the afternoon. The woman with the sun hat was one of them, on a lounge chair with a paperback face-down on her chest. The other was a kid Ramona didn't recognize, floating on a noodle, bopping to something on his waterproof speaker.
Ramona walked to the gate between the pool deck and the strip that ran along her driveway.
There was a new chain, heavy, bright orange links, and a brand-new padlock.
Dale was on the other side.
He was in his navy polo and his khaki shorts, and he was holding the earlier notary log against his chest, and he was standing on the strip, which was — Ramona realized — technically his.
"Ms. Vega," he said.
"Dale," Ramona said.
"You need to move off the pool deck."
"I own the pool deck."
"You own the pool parcel," Dale said. "You don't own the walkway to the pool parcel. The walkway to the pool parcel crosses the strip, and the strip is mine. I own the strip. I filed it this morning." He held up a piece of paper — a recorder's receipt, dated today, 11:14 AM. "It's in the record, Ms. Vega. You are welcome to use the pool if you can get to it by helicopter."
Ramona looked at the receipt. Then at the padlock. Then at Dale.
And Ramona reached into her tote and pulled out the letter from her mother.
"Dale," she said. "Before you lock that gate, there's one thing I want to read to you."
She read it. Out loud. Standing in the sun on her own pool deck, in front of her mother's pool, in front of two neighbors and a kid on a noodle and Sonya with her laptop open behind her, Ramona read the letter her mother had left in the safe-deposit box for this exact morning — and it took about ninety seconds.
Dale's face went through about four colors. When Ramona got to the part about the 2013 audit trail, his hand went to his breast pocket and rested there. When she got to the part about the four board members absent, he took a half step back off the strip.
When she finished the letter and folded it and put it back in the tote, the woman with the sun hat was standing up next to her chair, and the kid on the noodle had paddled to the edge of the pool and was staring, and Sonya was reading from her laptop, quietly, to somebody on speakerphone — Arthur Penn, in the regional office, who was apparently listening to the whole thing and — Ramona heard him say it through the speaker — asking whether Dale had filed the strip deed with a board resolution or without.
"Without," Sonya said. "There's no resolution in the binder that supports it. The 2013 motion is a single page in his own hand and it's been challenged since this morning."
There was a pause on the phone.
"Mr. Brandt," Arthur Penn said through the speaker, "you have thirty minutes to meet me at the county recorder's office in Carthage with the strip deed in your hand and a written request to withdraw the filing. If you do, the HOA will not bring the matter to the state notary commission. If you don't, the HOA will."
Dale didn't move.
"Mr. Brandt," Penn said. "Thirty minutes."
Dale Brandt stood on the strip between Ramona Vega's driveway and the pool parcel with a notary log in his hand and the padlock still on the chain and a letter from a dead woman in the air between them, and after a long moment he took his hand off the padlock and turned and walked, not toward his truck, but toward the gate of the pool deck.
Not through. Around.
He walked to the visitor row and he got into his own vehicle and he drove away, and Ramona stood on the deck with her mother's letter in her tote and watched him go, and the woman with the sun hat walked over and sat down on the folding chair next to Ramona's, and after a while the kid on the noodle asked if the pool was going to be open tomorrow.
"Pool's open," Ramona said. "It's my pool. Come on in."
She sat on the folding chair in the shade of the crepe myrtle and watched the water and stayed there until the sun got low.
Two weeks later, on a Tuesday evening in early June, Ramona sat at her mother's kitchen table with the envelope open in front of her and the recorder's receipt stub and the certified plat and the deed in its Ziploc — all of it laid out, all of it finally out of her tote — and across from her sat Arthur Penn with a legal pad and a cup of coffee, and Sonya, and the woman with the sun hat, whose name was Andrea and who had, it turned out, been the HOA secretary once, in 1998, before Ramona's mother had taken the job.
The board had voted the week prior, 4–0, to authorize the HOA to release the strip back to Ramona for one dollar and to record the corresponding correction deed; Dale had not attended; his resignation letter from the board had come in by email two days earlier; the state notary commission had accepted a voluntary relinquishment of his commission without an investigation, on the condition that he never apply for reinstatement. That wasn't a win, exactly. Ramona had wanted the commission to investigate. But Bert Hastings had told her on the phone that a voluntary relinquishment was as much as she was likely to get in this county without a fight that would take years, and that the strip deed and the pool parcel and the 2016 quitclaim were all on the record now and that's what mattered, and she had said okay.
The pool was open every afternoon, and the roster had eleven names on it, and the fee was two thousand a quarter, and no one had complained yet. Marcus the pool clerk had gotten a raise. Delia had taken her first post down and left the second up because the second one was — she had told Ramona with a straight face — "the record." Sonya had resigned from the board and been elected again. Dale still lived on the corner; his trash cans were still out on the wrong day; Ramona still waved at him from the driveway when she drove past, and he still didn't wave back, and after a while she stopped expecting him to.
And on this Tuesday evening in June, the sun was going down over the cul-de-sac, and there was exactly one chair at the table that hadn't been used since 2016, and Ramona leaned over and pulled it out and put it next to her own, and set her coffee cup down in front of it, and nobody said anything about it, and after a while Sonya got up and poured a second cup and set it next to Ramona's and sat back down.
"Thanks," Ramona said.
"Sure," Sonya said.
They drank coffee, at the table, in the kitchen, in the last of the light, with the deed back in the tote and the envelope folded on the table, and at 8:40 Ramona got up and turned off the porch light and put her phone away and went to bed.
Advertisement
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."
You may also like
My Uncle Slapped Me at the Country Club and Called Me a Thief — But I Was Already Holding the Chit He Signed
My uncle's palm cracked across my cheek at the country-club lunch table and he shouted that I had stolen a member number that never…
The Vice Principal Tore Up My Transfer Slip at the Pep Rally — Then the Attendance Clerk Walked In With His Own Initials
Coleman Pruitt tore my transfer slip in half at the pep rally, held the pieces above my head, and told eleven hundred people I…
The HOA President Fined Me $650 for a Pool Gate I Never Touched — Then I Held Up the Pink Carbon Copy With Her Own Initials on It
"You left the pool gate unlatched again," Patricia Vance said, sliding the $650 violation sticker across the folding table, "and this time the board…
The Director Fired the Nursing Aide for Stealing—Then the Cabinet Fob Log Showed Whose Badge Opened It at 2:03 A.M.
The director's palm cracked down on the medication-room counter while the pill tray was still in my hands. "You took from the cart at…
The HOA President Fined Me $650 for a Pool Gate — Then the Log Showed Her Own Fob at 2 A.M.
The violation sticker landed on the folding table in front of me dated April 12 — the night I was three states away at…
She Shamed Me for a Junkyard Yard — My Doorbell Cam Caught Who Really Dumped It
"Your junkyard is why my property value dropped, Frank!" Brenda slammed the violation photo down on the table, and the whole clubhouse leaned in…