Her eyes narrowed. "I would advise you not to make this adversarial, Mr. Meyers. You're new here. People remember how their neighbors behave."
"Then I hope they remember that I asked for a document," I said.
Amber climbed into her golf cart. She told me to expect correspondence from counsel and drove away before I could ask another question. The encounter had lasted less than ten minutes. I sat in my truck afterward, watching a groundskeeper sweep leaves from a perfectly clean curb, and understood that I had not met someone trying to resolve confusion.
I had met someone trying to establish a chain of command.
That night I cleared the kitchen table, unrolled the property survey, and opened every closing document I had signed. I traced the boundary lines with a pencil until I could see the parcel in my sleep. The seven-point-two acres ran from the state-maintained highway down a wooded slope to the lake. The private drive sat wholly inside the recorded parcel, and the spur connecting toward Pine Ridge crossed the eastern boundary before joining the neighborhood's internal street.
There was a utility easement for electric and water lines. There was no recorded ingress-and-egress easement for Pine Ridge Estates. There was no clause subjecting the land to its covenants, no plat reference incorporating the cabin into the subdivision, and no agreement obligating me to pay annual association fees. As an engineer, I knew the danger of assuming that a drawing settled every question; as a homeowner, I also knew the danger of accepting a claim unsupported by any drawing at all.
I opened the county mapping website and overlaid the assessor's parcel lines onto aerial photography. In the current photograph, I could see the gravel junction and the narrow track curving through the trees. When I selected the older imagery available through the county's planning archive, the junction disappeared. In the earliest picture, my drive ended at Gerald Anderson's house and the Pine Ridge road network approached from the opposite direction without connecting to it.
Somebody had joined the two later. The question was whether they had ever obtained permission. I wrote the question in a notebook and underlined it twice.
On Wednesday I called the county Register of Deeds. A clerk named Patricia answered and explained how I could order an index search tied to the parcel's legal description. She was careful not to give me a legal opinion. Recorded documents were only one part of determining property rights, she said, but she could tell me what the public records contained.
An hour later she called back. "Mr. Meyers, our index doesn't show a recorded access easement benefitting Pine Ridge against your property," she said. "There is a utility easement, but nothing resembling the road agreement you're describing."
"Anything filed in 2009?" I asked.
"Not on your parcel. You can request certified copies of the search and chain of title if you're preparing for a dispute."
I thanked her and ordered the copies. After I hung up, I stood by the window overlooking the lake and watched a fishing boat crawl across the far side of the water. I had expected the call to make the problem vanish. Instead, it gave the problem edges and dimensions.