The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into

Step two: the county, on the same day

Here is the part I am proudest of, because it took a cool head and I have not always had one.

Brenda had told her whole party that a county man was coming Tuesday to look at making us tear the pool down. So I did not wait for Tuesday. Monday morning I put on a real blouse and I drove to the county building office with my fat manila folder, every stamped permit, and I asked for the building inspector by name. Wendell Karr. Same man who had signed our electrical off twice, the second time on Brenda’s own false complaint, and remembered being annoyed about it.

I laid the folder on his counter. I said, “Mr. Karr, I understand there is a complaint that my pool is over the setback and you are coming out tomorrow about tearing it down.”

He said yes, there was a complaint, and he was obligated to check it, and he was sorry but that was the process.

And I said, “I would like you to check it. I want you to measure every inch. But before you do, I think you ought to see who filed it and why.” And I played him the audio.

Wendell Karr listened to Brenda Vance, on my deck, at her trespassing party, brag that she had filed a setback complaint she knew was false in order to get two old people’s pool torn down out of spite. He listened to the whole thing twice. When it was done he took his glasses off and pinched the top of his nose and said, “She has filed on you people four times now. Four. Every one of them I have had to come out on, on the county’s dime, and every one was nothing.” He put his glasses back on. “I will come out tomorrow and measure, because I have to, and it is going to be exactly where your permit says. And then I am going to have a conversation with my supervisor about Mrs. Vance filing false reports she knows are false, because that is a thing a person can be fined for, and frankly she has cost this county more of my Tuesdays than I care to add up.”

He came out Tuesday. He measured. It was exactly where the permit said. He signed it off a third time, and this time the paper had teeth of its own, because now it was documented that the complaint behind it was knowingly false.

The letter

We got a lawyer. Not a big-city outfit, just Denny Falk who does everything in town, wills and closings and the occasional fender bender, and had known Roy since Little League. Denny watched the footage in his little office over the drugstore and laughed once, short, and said, “Diane, she made this real easy for you.”

Denny sent Brenda and Dale Vance a letter on his letterhead. It laid out, in flat lawyer language, the trespass on locked property, the unauthorized copying of a key entrusted for a specific purpose during a family emergency, the documented property damage with an itemized figure, and the knowingly false county complaints. It stated that all of it was captured on video with audio, copies of which were now with the sheriff’s office. And it gave them a choice: pay for the deck repair, the cracked table, the cleanup, and Denny’s small fee, in full, within thirty days, surrender the copied key, and put in writing that they would never again set foot on our property or file another complaint, or we would let the county pursue the false-report matter and the sheriff pursue the trespass, and see how the summer went for them.

It was not about the money. The money came to a little under nine hundred dollars, which for what she did to us was nothing. It was about the paper. It was about Brenda Vance, who had spent nine years standing at that fence certain she was the one above reproach, holding a letter in her hand that laid out in plain black type exactly who had been in the wrong the whole time, with her own voice as the proof.