That distinction mattered to Simone, who asked for the source copy the next morning.

A week before Brenda changed my locks, I spoke to a woman named Jolene Price who cleaned offices for several small businesses.

Jolene had recently worked after hours at Eastgate’s temporary planning suite.

She was not a spy and she was not interested in our dispute until she recognized my address on a stack of mailers.

“They argued about Willow Lane,” she told me at a coffee shop.

“Who argued?”

“A man named Everett and a woman whose voice sounded like the HOA president.”

She could not be certain because the office door had been closed.

She remembered hearing the word signatures and the phrase seven parcels.

She had no recording and did not know what the argument meant.

I thanked her without asking her to stretch the memory.

“What made you reach out?” I asked.

“Because a week later I saw a notice saying your house was abandoned,” she replied.

“I had seen you painting the front steps the day before.”

Jolene lived nearby and walked past my house on the way to the bus.

She had been worried the company would get someone removed over an error.

I asked whether she would speak to Simone.

She agreed if her employer could not retaliate against her for telling the truth.

Simone explained what protections might and might not apply, then arranged a recorded statement with Jolene’s permission.

The statement contained only what she had actually heard.

We did not know then that Jolene’s small, careful account would later expose a contradiction in Everett Pike’s timeline.

According to Eastgate, the disputed deeds had been completed before Everett ever reviewed the acquisition project.

Jolene remembered him discussing seven unsigned parcels weeks afterward.

That discrepancy turned the case from a single suspicious deed into a sequence that needed explaining.

My younger brother, Ben, lived across the state with his wife and two children.

He drove over after I told him Dad’s signature had appeared on a document supposedly executed after his death.

Ben arrived with our father’s battered green ledger in a grocery bag.

I had forgotten about the ledger.

Dad used it to record every repair he performed and every neighbor who borrowed a tool.

The pages were filled with dates, small sums, and practical notes about gutters or furnace filters.

Inside the back cover was an envelope addressed to Aaron and Ben.