The rain finally eased shortly before dawn. By then the creek had cut a fresh scar into the bank below Cordelia's property, and water had entered a storage building at the edge of her landscaped grounds. I did not go over there. I had no wish to trespass or argue with her in the dark, and the county had already advised residents to stay clear of unstable slopes.
When morning came, I began walking my own boundaries to assess damage. Mud had deposited weeds, plastic wrappers, broken twigs, and pieces of corrugated packing material along the upper lawn. Near the fence below Cordelia's storage shed, several soggy file folders lay tangled in a drift of leaves. Water had carried them across the property line and left them on my side, where the current slowed against a fallen branch.
At first I assumed they contained ruined instructions for gardening equipment or old association newsletters. I photographed the folders where they lay and picked up the nearest one carefully. Its outer sheet bore the Willowbrook Estates logo, and beneath the logo were columns of numbers, authorization dates, and payment references. Half the page was stained brown, but the total at the bottom remained clear.
Negative eight hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars.
It was not the sort of number one expected to find in a bundle of paperwork washed onto a lawn after a subdivision's president destroyed a dam. I stood in the damp grass, holding the sheet by its clean corner, and watched the creek move around the stones of my grandfather's broken spillway. Then I went inside and called Marlo Chen.
"I think," I told her, "we may have found out what this was really about."
Marlo's first instruction was not the one I wanted to hear. She told me to stop reading the papers, put them somewhere clean and dry, and photograph the collection area before anyone else disturbed it. Then she asked whether I had crossed my property line to retrieve them, whether I had opened any locked container, and whether anyone had witnessed their discovery. She was making sure that the story of how we obtained the documents was as clear as the documents themselves.
"They were lying in the grass on my side of the fence," I said. "Autumn's here, and I've photographed the location."
"Good. Don't sort them by what looks interesting. Keep their original order as much as you can, and I'll arrange for someone to preserve them properly. We need evidence, Zeke, not a kitchen-table treasure hunt."
It was irritating advice because the first page had already given me a reason to suspect far more than an unlawful assessment. But she was right, and I knew it. A document can be genuine, altered, taken out of context, or completely misunderstood when wet ink and bad lighting make its numbers difficult to read. The last thing I wanted was for Cordelia to dismiss a legitimate discovery because I had been careless with its history.
I laid the folders on clean paper in a locked room to prevent further deterioration, took additional photographs, and called the county emergency contact to report possible association records washed from an adjacent property. Marlo arrived that afternoon with a specialist who handled damaged business records. They separated the pages carefully, recorded their sequence, and made preliminary digital copies without pretending water-soaked originals were ready to be presented in court.