HOA Sold Me Their Dried-Up Lake for $9,000 — Then Tried to Take It Back After a $41M Find
Chapter 6
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When Price asked about the pickup, Patricia said maintenance crews used the service road all the time. When he asked for their names, she said she would check. I watched her look toward the hole. It was a quick glance, but her face changed when she saw how much concrete had been uncovered. Then she noticed me watching and turned her attention back to the deputy.Lucy drove me home because my ankle had swollen too much to work the clutch. She made soup, found my old ankle brace, and placed my muddy boot on the kitchen table. Its torn side hung open like a mouth."You could have died for a pond," she said.I had no answer that would help. I let her be angry, because fear sometimes needs somewhere to go.The following morning, I called Melissa to check on Owen. She said he kept asking whether helping me had caused the accident. I asked her to bring him over. We sat on the porch, and I showed him the photographs I had taken before the digging. I explained that the problem had been hidden underground long before he picked up his first empty can.He listened carefully, then asked whether we were giving up on the turtles. That nearly broke me. I told him the pond would have to wait until grown-ups who understood pipes and dirt said it was safe. He nodded and offered to help me sort nuts and bolts in the workshop instead. We spent an hour doing that, and neither of us mentioned the hole again.Rebecca came that afternoon. She took copies of everything and told me to keep a written record of each visit, call, and expense. She also sent the association a request to save its maintenance records, messages, and work orders connected to the lake."We don't know whether this was neglect or something else," she said. "So we stick to what we can prove."She recommended an engineer named Paul Mercer, who inspected drainage systems for farms and small towns. Paul spent two days studying the site from safe ground. He found that the shaft roof had partly failed years earlier and had later been covered with fill. The black plastic helped hide the outline. He could not tell us who had covered it, but he said it was no proper repair.The ladder troubled him, too: its upper section had been removed, leaving smooth, straight ends where rough breaks should have been. Paul photographed them with a long lens. He said cutting away a rusted ladder could be part of legitimate work, but leaving an unmarked shaft beneath loose dirt was dangerous. For now, the area needed a fence and the pipe needed to be isolated before anyone worked nearby.The first bill was more than I wanted to see. I sat at my kitchen table with it beside my checkbook and felt foolish. $9,000 had seemed like a chance to do something good; now I owned a hole that could swallow a person, and the truck I had decided not to replace needed a new transmission seal. For the first time, I considered selling.Walter arrived before I could finish feeling sorry for myself. He brought the old photographs he had promised and a folded check for $200. I pushed the check back. He pushed it toward me again.