Chapter 6 : Ramona called at 8:30 Wednesday. Lane answered on the second ring.

She said her name and her mother's name and the words "22-C," and there was a pause so long that she checked her phone to make sure the call was still connected.

"Come by at ten," Lane said.

He was sixty-four, thinner than Dale, with the same gray hair but no gel, and he was wearing a light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans, and his office was one room with a metal desk and a legal bookcase and three file boxes stacked in a corner with the tops off. The CBD store below had pumped the whole upstairs full of a smell that was somewhere between a health food store and a locker room.

"Sit," Lane said. He had a file on the desk in front of him that had Ramona's last name written on the tab in blue marker. He had not put it there in the last half hour.

"You knew I was coming," Ramona said.

"I heard about Saturday," Lane said. "The whole county heard about Saturday. My sister-in-law texted me a video and my son texted me a video and my barber texted me a video. You want water? There's a fridge in the hallway."

"I'm fine."

"Suit yourself." Lane leaned back in his chair. "You want to ask me what I know about the 2016 confirmation deed and the 2018 correction deed."

"Yes."

"And you want to know whether I drafted them because my brother told me to, or whether I drafted them because I thought your mother wanted them."

"One of those."

Lane nodded and looked at the ceiling for a second.

"Your mother called me in April of 2016," he said. "She called me directly. She had already done the quitclaim to you with Dale. She said she wanted the HOA to have a clean record in case the neighborhood ever went to war over the pool. She said — and I remember this because she said it twice, once on the phone and once when I went out to her kitchen — she said, 'I want the record to be so clean nobody can say I ever handed my daughter a mess.'"

Ramona did not say anything.

"So I drafted the confirmation deed," Lane said. "She signed it at her kitchen table. Dale notarized it. I filed it the next morning. The 2018 correction deed was because the 2016 one had a scrivener's error — there was a typo in the appurtenance clause. Standard thing. I drafted the correction. Dale notarized it. That's what I did."

"You knew what the quitclaim to me said."

"Of course I knew. Your mother made sure I knew. She showed me the original."