"You made this?" Daniel asked.
Ethan nodded. "I thought somebody might need to see whether the same fish appeared in different photographs. It's not a complete count, but it shows what we actually observed."
"That's exactly how you should describe it," Daniel said. "Not more, not less."
The lesson seemed small, but I watched Ethan absorb it. He had a habit of getting excited by patterns, and Daniel was teaching him not to turn a useful clue into a certainty before the evidence warranted it. We would need that restraint later, when the numbers surrounding the fish became much larger and much more tempting.
The photographs attached to Karen's lawsuit contained their own problem. One image showed several tagged fish in a transfer tank beside a familiar section of Silver Ridge's retaining wall. The file information and an accompanying contractor note placed it weeks before the date Karen had described as the sudden environmental emergency. A second photograph showed the same holding area from another angle, with identification boards that appeared to record stock numbers.
Daniel circled the dates and arranged to obtain the original files. "We should verify the metadata and the photographer's account before making accusations," he said. "But these documents strongly suggest the association was monitoring registered fish before the emergency it claims forced an immediate decision."
We then received a county-held email from a consultant who had worked on the proposed Silver Ridge development. Its subject line was REGISTERED BROODSTOCK DISPOSITION OPTIONS, and it had been written roughly six months before the transfer. The sentence that made Daniel sit upright read: Relocation to Hayes Pond would eliminate community exposure while preserving the breeding population.
My surname sat there in black letters. The consultant had identified my water as a destination long before Karen stood beside it pretending nobody had been available to ask. I felt a kind of cold anger that was worse than shouting, because it left no room for doubt about how casually those people had discussed my property. Somebody had looked at a map, seen a large spring-fed pond owned by an elderly man outside the HOA, and put my name into a plan without ever calling me.
"They selected me," I said.
"They selected the pond," Daniel answered. "Which is bad enough. But we still need to establish who approved the plan and whether the association believed it had a lawful right to act."
The email had an attachment. It was a development projection prepared for a later phase of Silver Ridge, complete with road alignments, proposed housing parcels, and a financial summary. The figure at the top was $24.6 million. That was the projected value of the expansion, not cash already earned, but it explained why a narrow strip of land that looked like an old drainage ditch on my survey might matter so much to powerful people.