The second discovery request concerned the association's claim that Tom had been given notice before he was ever charged with trespass. Monica's first notice had said, "You were previously advised that access to the Cove is restricted," and Tom had answered, on the day he received it, "No, I wasn't." The association's records, produced under Alice's request, showed a bulk mailing to an address Tom had left six years earlier, when he moved from the county seat to the house where he now lived. The mailing had gone to a place he no longer occupied, and no forwarding record had been kept, and no second attempt had been made. The mailing list itself had been copied from an old association roster, and no one had checked it against a current address before the notice was treated as proof.
The certified-mail receipt was thinner still. The association produced a green card with a tracking number and a signature line that was blank. No signature, no date of delivery, no name of a recipient, and no notation by a postal carrier. The postal record, obtained separately, showed the item as unclaimed after the holding period, not as delivered, and then returned to sender. Alice copied the blank line for the file and set it beside Tom's statement that he had received no notice, and beside Dean Walsh's log, which recorded no prior visit and no prior warning, and beside the fact that Tom had spoken only to Monica on his first day back. The charge of trespass, which had rested on that notice, now rested on nothing, and the charges of obstruction and harassment, which had rested on the same afternoon, rested on the same empty record.
The third item in the same production was the title opinion Grant had called clean. Alice read it with the patience of a woman who had read many such opinions and knew where their limits were usually buried. The firm, an out-of-county practice hired in a hurry at the start of the development, had searched only post-1990 subdivision records. It had not searched the 1968 deed books, and it had not found Book 512, Page 204, because a search that begins in 1990 cannot find a deed recorded in 1968. The opinion said, accurately within its own limits, that it found no adverse claim in the records it searched, and it stated its scope in a paragraph near the end that a busy reader could easily miss. Grant had repeated the conclusion as if it meant no adverse claim existed anywhere. Monica had repeated it after him, in letters and at meetings, without, Alice noted, ever quoting the scope paragraph. The opinion was not a forgery. It was a search with a starting date that excluded the very deed that decided the case, and the exclusion had never been disclosed to the buyers, who had been told only that the title was clean. Tom read the opinion's scope paragraph twice, slowly. He thought of the families who had drained savings for down payments on the strength of a sentence that was true only about the records its author had chosen to look at, and he set the opinion down without comment, because anger at a paragraph would not help the people who had relied on it. Alice, less restrained in her professional judgment, wrote a short memorandum of her own, noting the opinion's scope, the date range, and the absence of any reference to the 1968 deed books, and she filed it with the discovery responses. She also requested the firm's engagement letter, to establish who had instructed the firm, what deadline had been set, and whether any instruction had limited the search, because a limited search ordered in haste and a limited search disclosed to buyers were two different things. The firm produced the engagement letter the following week, and it showed a short deadline and a request for a subdivision-records search, without any mention of the reservoir, the dam, or the operating file. That, Alice told Tom, was the point on which the case would turn for the buyers: not that a lawyer had lied, but that a question which had never been asked had been answered as if it had been.