HOA Sold Me Their Dried-Up Lake for $9,000 — Then Tried to Take It Back After a $41M Find
Chapter 5
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Then Walter looked into the shaft, went pale, and shouted, "Jack, that ladder has been cut!"Frank caught me under both arms just as another piece of the bank fell into the hole. My boot stayed trapped beneath the root. For one awful second, I felt my body stretch between his grip and the ground holding my foot. Then the leather tore. My heel slipped free, and we rolled backward as the place where I had been lying dropped into darkness.We kept crawling until we reached the excavator. Walter stood several feet away, leaning hard on his cane. I shouted for him to move uphill. He tried, but his bad leg folded beneath him. Frank reached him first and helped him toward the boat ramp, while I followed in one boot and one muddy sock.Behind us, water struck concrete with a sound like rocks inside a washing machine.Melissa was already calling 911. Owen stood beside her, crying without making much noise, which somehow hurt worse than if he had screamed. I sat on the ramp and held out my hand; he grabbed it with both of his."I'm all right," I told him, although my ankle throbbed and blood ran from my elbow. "You did the right thing staying back with your mom."The fire crew arrived first, followed by a deputy named Daniel Price. They marked off the broken bank and kept everyone away from the opening. One firefighter looked down with a light mounted on a long pole. He said the hole exposed an old service shaft, probably built so workers could reach underground valves. Nobody was going inside until the water stopped and the ground had been checked.Deputy Price asked what we had been doing. I showed him the photographs from before we started, the old drawing, and the shallow brush clearing Frank had completed. Walter told him about the white pickup: he had seen it parked behind the pump building when he arrived, then heard an engine and rushing water. He could not see who was driving, and he would not pretend otherwise.The rushing slowed after about 20 minutes. A county worker traced the pipe uphill to a smaller stormwater pond behind Willow Ridge. Its outlet gate was open. Whether someone had opened it that morning, he could not yet say. Water had run through the old system and escaped beside a damaged joint, washing loose dirt into the hidden shaft. Our digging had put us beside it at exactly the wrong moment.Patricia arrived while a medic cleaned my elbow. She walked past me and went straight to Deputy Price."I warned him about that building," she said. "Now he's damaged community drainage."Price asked her to wait while he finished taking statements. She looked offended, but he repeated himself. It was the first time I had seen anyone make her stop talking without raising a voice.