I set the letter on the table beside the deed and looked at them both for a moment. Then I picked up the phone and called my attorney, a woman named Patricia Okafor, who had handled my father's estate and who had the particular quality of becoming very still and very precise when something interested her.
I read her the letter over the phone. There was a pause on her end that I had learned to recognize over the years—not uncertainty, but the particular silence of someone organizing their thoughts before speaking with care.
"Garrett," she said, "do you have the easement document in front of you?"
I told her I did, and the deed to the utility parcel.
"I told her I had that, too."
"Good," she said. "Don't respond to the letter yet. Let me pull the county records and see what the HOA has on file, if anything."
The records Patricia pulled arrived on her desk within the week. She called me on a Thursday morning, and I remember the call clearly because I was in the equipment barn sharpening a set of auger bits when my phone rang. I set the file down on the workbench and listened while she walked me through what she had found.
The county recorder's office showed Easement Agreement Number 1988-0447, correctly recorded, correctly expired. It showed the deed to the utility parcel in the name of Garrett Raymond Cutler, recorded in 1991 following my father's death. It showed the Ridgeline Pines subdivision plat with the boundary lines drawn exactly where I knew them to be, excluding the utility strip entirely.