“Whose commitments?”
He did not answer.
Instead he offered to purchase my house at a figure above the most recent assessed value.
He also proposed that I sign a document ratifying the original transfer before the sale.
I asked whether he understood what he was requesting.
“It’s a paperwork correction,” he said.
“Then it should be easy for your lawyers to explain to mine.”
I ended the call.
Simone later explained why the proposed ratification was important.
If I acknowledged the earlier deed after the fact, the other side could argue that I had accepted a chain of title I was currently challenging.
Everett was not offering a clean, voluntary sale.
He was asking me to help make a contested history look legitimate.
The next morning, his lawyer sent Simone a settlement letter with a strict confidentiality provision.
It required me to withdraw my allegations and refuse to assist other homeowners.
Simone read the provision twice.
“He isn’t just trying to buy your property,” she said.
“He’s trying to buy your silence.”
Lila Grant agreed to speak with investigators after her attorney reviewed the first set of questioned documents.
She had once worked as a mobile notary for real estate closings.
Her equipment included a portable scanner, a signature tablet, and a laptop that she used to prepare acknowledgment forms.
Months earlier, someone had entered her office during a move and copied files from an old computer.
She believed the intrusion was connected to the deed forms.
The investigators did not accept her explanation without testing it.
They asked for computer repair invoices, backup histories, appointment records, and the dates on which she had been commissioned.
Lila produced a journal showing she had met Everett Pike on three occasions for unrelated business paperwork.
There were no entries for the seven homeowners.
The seal image on our deeds matched an electronic stamp from an older software package rather than the one she used when the forms were supposedly signed.
That discovery gave the case a new direction.
Someone had prepared the transfer packets with an archived tool that could make them look official without requiring Lila’s physical presence.
The document examiner compared the transfer files with samples that investigators lawfully obtained from Lila’s old laptop backup.
Several metadata patterns were consistent.
They could not identify the individual who pressed the final button, but they could show that the packages were generated from a shared template.
