Her father, Calvin Price, had spent years as a survey technician before a stroke slowed his speech.
When I visited, he sat in a bright room overlooking a bird feeder, carefully arranging photographs on a tray.
He recognized Lillian’s name immediately.
“She wouldn’t sign,” he said.
Janelle leaned toward him.
“Sign what, Dad?”
He pushed one photograph across the tray.
The picture showed a temporary drainage excavation and a survey stake with a strip of orange ribbon tied around it.
Calvin tapped the stake.
“Moved,” he said.
He struggled to form the next words, and I resisted the urge to finish them for him.
“After rain,” he finally managed.
Janelle brought him a glass of water.
He pointed toward the photograph again and said that somebody had moved the stake after the flood to make the property boundaries appear different on an inspection map.
His memories were incomplete, and neither of us treated them as a substitute for documentary proof.
Still, the photograph gave Nadia a new location to investigate.
I asked Calvin whether he would be comfortable speaking with an independent surveyor later.
He nodded and seemed relieved that I had asked his permission.
On Friday, Tessa joined Malik and me in my dining room with a legal pad and an expression that promised an uncomfortable afternoon.
She explained that the first question was whether the HOA had any recorded authority over the seven lots.
The second was whether Martin had purported to give the committee contractual rights he lacked power to grant.
The third was what Brenda had told tenants when collecting money.
“We cannot fix all three by shouting that you own the block,” she said.
“The owner of rental houses still has legal obligations, and the tenants are not props in a property argument.”
I told her about Calvin’s memory and the old flood.
She wrote down the details and asked whether anyone had already altered the drainage path on my land.
I showed her Nadia’s photographs.
Tessa sighed.
“We’ll need an engineer, and possibly a local environmental or public works review,” she said.
“But first, we have to stop the immediate interference with residents.”
She drafted notices to Martin and the committee disputing their claimed authority and demanding preservation of records.
She also prepared a separate letter to tenants acknowledging that charges made under Martin’s arrangement had not been authorized by me.
The letter offered reimbursement for documented payments through a neutral process that would not require anyone to participate in litigation.
