HOA Sold Me Their Dried-Up Lake for $9,000 — Then Tried to Take It Back After a $41M Find
Chapter 7
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"That lake gave my wife somewhere to walk after her surgery," he said. "You're not the only one who wants something good left here."I accepted $20 for fence wire and told him he could settle the rest by helping me understand the pictures. We spread them across the table: there were fishing contests, summer picnics, and June smiling beside the water with a cane much like Walter's.Then we reached a photograph taken from the far bank, and I noticed a drilling truck behind the pump building. A name was painted on its door:Red Hollow Resource Surveys. Beside it stood three people: one was a younger Patricia, another was the board treasurer who had laughed at closing, and the third wore a hard hat and held a long tray filled with pale stone.I asked Walter whether those were the men he remembered. He put on his glasses and leaned close."That's them," he said. "They were here almost a month."He explained that the trays held pieces pulled from deep drilling holes. He had once helped move empty wooden boxes into the pump building because rain was coming. Later, he saw the crew carrying full boxes toward an old storage shelter on the far side of the property.I had not known a shelter existed. We found it behind a wall of thorn bushes two days later. By then, my ankle could handle slow walking, though Lucy had made me promise to take someone along. Frank used hand cutters while I held the branches back.The shelter was built into the slope, with a low concrete roof and a steel door covered in vines. It appeared on my survey as a small storage structure. The door was swollen with rust, but it opened after Frank worked oil into the hinges.Inside were stacked wooden boxes, each about four feet long. Several had rotted at the bottom; others remained dry beneath the roof. The nearest lid carried a date from nine years earlier and a number that matched a marking on the old lake plan. I photographed it before we lifted anything.Inside lay narrow rods of stone fitted into rows divided by wooden strips. Some were ordinary brown rock; others were pale and almost clear, with white bands running through them. Small metal tags marked depths and hole numbers.I did not see treasure. I saw abandoned work that someone had spent serious money doing, then left behind without mentioning it when the property was sold.Frank wanted to know whether the stone could help explain the leak. I called Paul, who said that question belonged to a geologist. He gave me the name of Dr. Sarah Collins, a woman who studied rock deposits for landowners and construction companies. She agreed to stop by after another job nearby. I sent photographs, expecting her to tell me the boxes were useful only as records.