Chapter 3 - The Price of a Hundred Rings
Arthur Davies arrived at my house by two in the afternoon carrying two heavy leather briefcases. Arthur was seventy-two, with thick wire-rimmed glasses and a head of white hair that looked like an unmade bed, but behind those spectacles sat the most ruthless property litigation mind in the entire state. He had gone to university with Tom; they had played poker every second Tuesday for thirty years until Tom’s funeral.
Arthur didn't say hello. He walked straight into my dining room, tossed a red-bound legal textbook onto the table, and pulled out an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of the sawdust-covered crater in my yard.
“The audacity of this narcissistic creature,” Arthur muttered, his voice trembling with an old friend's quiet rage. “She thinks because her husband made eight million dollars liquidating auto parts warehouses, she can carve up this town like a Christmas ham.”
“Arthur, what can we legally do?” I asked, pouring him a cup of black tea. “The tree is dead. It's already been hauled away in pieces.”
“Linda, my dear, in the state of Tennessee, you do not simply pay the replacement value of an ornamental sapling when you cut down an eighty-foot hardwood,” Arthur said, opening his ledger. He tapped a printed court precedent with a manicured thumbnail. “Have you ever heard of the statutory timber trespass doctrine?”
I shook my head.
“When an individual willfully, maliciously, and without color of title cuts down timber or ornamental trees belonging to another, the court automatically applies statutory treble damages,” he said, his eyes glittering. “Three times the full, appraised replacement value of the living organism. Not a seedling. Not an acorn. A mature, forty-five-year-old specimen.”
He pulled out another document. “I already contacted Dr. Julian Vance—no relation to your charming neighbor, thank God. He’s the head of urban forestry at the state university and a certified master arborist. He’s coming out here at three o’clock with soil boring tools and an ultrasonic trunk assessment kit.”
“Can you actually calculate what that tree was worth?”
Arthur smiled, a terrifying, predatory grin that showed all of his teeth. “Dr. Vance can calculate down to the penny. The trunk formula method considers species, condition, location, canopy volume, environmental cooling offset, and historical significance. A mature silver maple of that scale, situated in an affluent residential enclave, that provided shade, stormwater mitigation, and wind protection for nearly half a century? You are looking at a baseline value between ninety and one hundred and thirty thousand dollars.”
I caught my breath. “That much?”
“Treble that, Linda. That's nearly four hundred thousand dollars in timber trespass alone,” Arthur said. “And that’s before we get to the civil damages. Intentional infliction of emotional distress. She did it while you were at your husband's gravesite. Her contractors trespassed on your lawn with heavy machinery that cracked your flagstone walkway and compressed your topsoil. But wait—that's merely the appetizer.”
Arthur opened Tom’s vellum blueprints across the table, anchoring the corners with my salt and pepper shakers.
“Look here,” Arthur said, pointing to the boundary coordinates. “Pam bought that lot three years ago from the Reynolds estate. When she built that monstrosity of a pool, she didn't use the original county boundary markers. She hired a private contractor from out of state who pulled an outdated 1965 parcel map that didn't include the 1978 easement Tom registered.”
“What does that mean for her?”
“It means,” Arthur said softly, “that the northern lip of her swimming pool, her stone sun deck, and her automated filter pump are sitting exactly seven point four feet inside your legal property boundary.”
May you like
My breath hitched in my throat. “Her pool is on my land?”
“Her pool is on Tom’s land,” Arthur corrected gently. “And yesterday afternoon, when she had that tree chopped down, she didn’t just kill Tom’s maple. She removed the only thing keeping the earth under her unauthorized pool from sliding straight down the hill into the municipal drainage basin.”
