The crunch of Harriet's footsteps on my gravel driveway the next morning brought better news. She had a folder. "I found something in my attic," she said, "that you're going to want to see." Harriet Openhouse had been Harlan's next-door neighbor for 14 years.
She was 71, taught fourth grade for three decades before she retired, and had the organizational instincts of someone who never lost a permission slip. When Harlan's health started declining in his final years, he'd given her a banker's box, the brown cardboard kind with the metal reinforced edges, and told her it was just some papers and to hold on to it for a while. She'd kept it in her attic under a shelf of Christmas decorations, not thinking much of it.
After my situation with the HOA started circulating through the neighborhood, she dug it out. Inside, among the property tax receipts and old utility bills, was a four-page document printed on plain white paper, a draft agreement dated March 2019. Harlan Beaty, property owner, and the Clearwater Pines Homeowners Association. It outlined a formal lake access lease, $3,600 annually, renewable every 3 years, granting residents dock and recreational rights in exchange for maintenance contributions and liability insurance. At the bottom of the fourth page, above two blank signature lines, someone, Harlan in that same shaky ballpoint, had written, "Sent copy to board.
Waiting to hear back." Stapled behind it, a certified mail receipt showing delivery to the HOA's registered address, March 14th, 2019. They had received it.
They had signed for it. And then, they had done absolutely nothing. No response, no negotiation, no counteroffer.
They had looked at a proposal from an 81-year-old man who was offering them a reasonable, legal path to keep using his land, and they had chosen to ignore him until he died. I sat with that for a long minute. The coffee on my counter had gone cold. Somewhere outside a woodpecker was doing its best to destroy one of my pine trees. Then I scanned every page and sent them to Braddock.
"This," Braddock said when he called back, "changes the posture of this entire situation." He explained it in terms even a county code inspector could follow. The HOA's failure to respond to Harlan's offer wasn't just bad manners. Combined with the earlier newsletter defamation and the prescriptive easement threat, it formed a pattern, a documented pattern, of the HOA knowingly using private property without consent, ignoring formal requests to formalize the arrangement, and then attempting to legally bully the new owner into submission.
That's not a neighborhood dispute. That's tortious interference and potentially unjust enrichment. In plain English, they got something valuable for free. They knew they shouldn't have it for free, and they're now fighting to keep it.
The dock inspection was Dolores's next move. Four days after we found Harlan's box, a county code enforcement officer named Randy appeared at Mill Lake with a clipboard. He walked the dock. He tested the boards. Some boards bounced, some creaked, carrying the smell of weathered wood and old lake water.
He took photographs and checked his paperwork. Then he looked at me and said, "This is in fine shape for its age. No violations. You're good." He was there for 11 minutes.
That evening, a post appeared in the Clearwater Pines Facebook group, run by a Dolores ally named Phyllis, announcing that county authorities had been out to investigate the new lake property. No clarification that the inspection had found nothing, just the implication hanging there like smoke. I would have been frustrated, but I was busy with something else. On a hunch, or maybe it was habit from 20 years of checking paperwork on job sites, I went through the county permitting database. It's public record, searchable by parcel number.
I put in Harlan's old parcel number and filtered for the last five years. There it was, a dock construction permit application. Filed October 2021. Applicant: Clearwater Pines Homeowners Association.
Parcel: Harlan Beaty, private. Rejected. County notes: Applicant does not hold ownership or recorded easement for subject parcel.
The HOA had tried to build a permanent structure on land they didn't own. The county told them no. And then they went right back to pretending the lake was theirs. Takeaway: County permit databases are public record, and they don't lie about who tried to claim what.