Roberts approved the report for our file. He also prepared a sworn statement for Gerald Anderson, who reviewed it by telephone with him before signing at a notary's office in Florida. Gerald confirmed the road was built in 2005 for his household, that he had never signed an access grant to Pine Ridge, and that nobody from the association had offered a permanent agreement.
When Gerald mailed the affidavit back, he included a photograph. It showed him twenty years younger, standing beside a grader on a hot afternoon with his wife Evelyn at the edge of the frame. She was holding two paper cups of lemonade and laughing at something out of view. Behind them, the first strip of fresh gravel ran through the trees toward the house.
On the back he had written, in block letters, EVELYN SAID THE ROAD WOULD BRING US HOME. I placed the picture on the shelf beside my kitchen window. It was easy to see why he had wanted to leave the lake after her death. Even a road could hold too much memory.
Roberts met with me again at his office after receiving the survey. He arranged the documents in neat stacks and pointed out the questions that remained. The original developer might have promised buyers an easement that it did not own. An association could possibly try to argue for rights by prescription, though the apparent period of use was shorter than the ordinarily required twenty years. The legal and factual history would have to be tested, not merely announced.
"What we're strongest on," he said, "is that they cannot simply bill you as a Pine Ridge member when they haven't shown any covenant binding your land. They're claiming authority over your property without explaining its source."
"And the road?"
"We can seek a declaration about the claimed easement and negotiate practical access while the question is resolved. I don't want you to misunderstand me, Alex: winning an argument about ownership is not a reason to endanger anyone. You can be firm without becoming reckless."
I listened because he was telling me what I needed to hear rather than what anger wanted. The temptation to install a heavy gate had returned more than once. Yet I could picture the medical van from the camera footage, the one that used the junction three mornings a week. I didn't know whose house it served, but I refused to make that household a pawn in a quarrel its residents might not even understand.
The thirty-day response period in Roberts's letter expired with no easement produced. Henderson sent a brief notice acknowledging receipt and reserving his client's rights, but it did not contain the 2009 agreement. Roberts suggested we prepare a declaratory judgment complaint and continue gathering evidence while he made a final attempt to obtain the HOA records voluntarily.