They regroup. And while I was focused on the lawsuit and the fines, she was quietly doing something I wouldn't discover for another 6 weeks. Something that, when I found out, made the hair on my arms stand up and made Beverly go very, very quiet on the phone. It was my neighbor Theo who caught it first. Theo Drummond, retired civil engineer, 68 years old, spent 30 years designing municipal drainage systems for the state.
He walks the neighborhood every morning at 7:00 sharp. Same route, same pace, same beat-up Carhartt jacket that smells like cedar and motor oil. He notices things. It's a professional deformation, he says. Once you've spent three decades thinking about where water goes, you can't stop looking at slopes and gradients.
He knocked on my door on a Saturday morning in April, coffee thermos in hand, and said without preamble, "Someone pulled your survey stakes." I went out with him. Sure enough, the small orange flag stakes that mark my eastern property line, placed by a licensed surveyor 3 years earlier when I built the wall, were gone. All three of them. The holes where they'd been were fresh, recently disturbed.
The soil around them dark and loose compared to the packed earth a few inches away. This mattered. Here's why. Preston's lawsuit was arguing, in part, that my wall was built too close to the road, that it violated setback ordinances. If the survey stakes were gone, establishing the wall's exact position relative to my property line required re-surveying.
Re-surveying takes time. Time delays the lawsuit's dismissal motion. Delays are expensive. And if the re-survey came back with any ambiguity, even a few inches of measurement variance, their attorney could argue the wall's position was uncertain. Someone had pulled those stakes to create delay and doubt.
I filed a police report. Removal of survey monuments is a crime in North Carolina, a Class I felony under NCGS 39-68, actually. The officer who came out was professionally skeptical, the way officers are when a crime scene consists of three holes in the ground. But he took the report. That report existed.
I immediately hired the same surveyor to restake the property. She came out within the week, re-established all three pins, and this time I photographed every stake with GPS coordinates from my phone, then had her prepare a certified survey document with exact measurements and a sworn affidavit of placement. Third trick to know, a certified survey with a surveyor's sworn affidavit carries legal weight that informal stakes don't. It's court-admissible proof of property line placement. Now I had something better than the original stakes.
I had a document. Meanwhile, I was also piecing together something larger. Beverly's audit request had shaken loose more than reinstated fines. Two of the other HOA board members, Randolph Cass and Patricia Angle, both of whom had joined the board before Delores but been gradually sidelined, reached out to me separately. They were quiet about it, guarded even, but they told me they'd been concerned for over a year about financial irregularities they couldn't fully document.