Chapter 3 - The Paperwork WarBy Monday, news of the "Concrete Shore War" had spread across the small town of Lake Crestview.
The concrete had partially hardened against my Chevrolet’s side panels, destroying the paint, crushing the left quarter panel, and rendering the car completely un-drivable. Richard had refused to pay for a towing service, claiming the liability was mine.
I took the day off from my accounting firm and brought my father's legal tin to the offices of Marcus Vance—who, despite sharing a surname with Richard, was his estranged older brother and the most respected property lawyer in the county.
Marcus sat behind a heavy oak desk, reviewing the 1978 survey alongside my father's original land patent.
"My brother has been pulling fast ones in this county for fifteen years, Ms. Bennett," Marcus said, laying down his reading glasses. "He assumed because your father was ill and living on a fixed pension that no one would ever audit the boundary lines when Vance Construction built that estate."
"How bad is the encroachment?" I asked, sitting nervously while Olivia drew quietly in her sketchbook near the window.
"It’s not just a porch," Marcus said, pulling up a digital satellite map of Lake Crestview on his computer monitor. "Look here. When Richard built his three-car garage and that grand terrace, he redirected the natural drainage culvert from the upper ridge. He pushed all his runoff straight down into your gravel lot, which caused your porch to sag in the first place."
"Can we make him fix my car?" I asked.
"Fix your car?" Marcus chuckled darkly. "Ms. Bennett, Richard Vance committed felony property destruction, illegal land encroachment, and municipal drainage fraud. We aren't just going to make him fix your car. We are going to issue a formal injunction to freeze his commercial building permits across the entire lake shore until he restores your land to its original state."
Two days later, process servers arrived at Valerie and Richard’s mansion, delivering a stack of legal summonses.
Valerie came tearing out of her front door, waving the papers in the air like a madwoman as I was hanging laundry on the back line.
"You think you can play legal games with us, you little pauper?!" she screamed across the fence line. "My husband knows every judge in this district! We will buy this lot out from under you at auction after we sue you into bankruptcy for damaging our deck!"
Olivia looked up from her jump rope, stepping right up to the property line fence.
May you like
"Ma'am," Olivia said calmly, looking Valerie up and down, "your red porch looks like a giant strawberry pop-tart. And my mom's lawyer says if you don't stay off our gravel, the police are going to take your husband away in handcuffs."
Valerie gasped, choked on her own words, and stomped back into her house, slamming her double oak doors so hard that two wall tiles fell off her exterior entryway.
