Miriam asked the question nobody had voiced clearly.
“Why would Brenda need control of our front yards?”
Walter looked toward the library window and remembered the green strip on Brenda’s map.
The strip connected the six houses to a larger parcel beside the creek.
He had assumed it represented ordinary drainage access.
On the revised map, however, it formed a continuous corridor that reached a vacant field at the end of the street.
He could not yet say who wanted that corridor or what it was worth.
He knew someone had spent money creating recorded documents to make it possible.
And the same person had chosen to start a fight over a row of yellow flowers.
The county recorder’s office sat beside a courthouse whose limestone steps remained slick after every rain.
Walter returned on Wednesday with Evelyn and Sofia.
They asked the clerk for certified copies of the instruments, the submission receipts, and the public index history.
The clerk, an attentive woman named Keisha Bell, explained the limits of her office’s responsibilities.
Recording established that documents had been submitted and indexed, not that every signature or claim within them was authentic.
The office did not resolve disputed ownership and could not quietly erase documents because a neighbor was upset.
Keisha showed them the appropriate public request process and the forms used to flag a suspected fraudulent filing for further review.
She also recommended speaking with a real estate attorney before signing corrective instruments.
Evelyn asked whether she had lost her house.
“Not simply because someone recorded an easement,” Keisha said.
“But you should get legal advice about any instrument affecting your property.”
Sofia pointed at a service address on one of the application pages.
It belonged to a small office park on the north side of the county.
All six submissions had been delivered through a courier service rather than by the homeowners themselves.
Each bore the same document preparer’s initials.
The initials were L.M.
Walter wrote them down.
He also noticed that the transfer documents referred to an exhibit labeled Boundary Alignment Schedule B.
None of the copies contained that exhibit.
Keisha checked the scanned index and confirmed that the attachment appeared to have been omitted from the recorded packet.
That might be a clerical error.
It might also make the scope of the purported grants unclear.
Walter requested whatever associated pages the recorder had in its archive.
Outside the courthouse, Sofia stared at the document she held.
