The project had been designed around the removal of this specific building's story, because the story, once told completely, changed what the land was worth in every legal and regulatory sense. In a fitted recess near the base of the south wall, Sawyer had found the last document, a handwritten list on three sheets of paper headed with the years 1949, 1953, and 1958, and beneath each year, a column of names with occupations beside them: laborers, carpenters, tile setters, plasterers, ironworkers, people from across the socioeconomic range of mid-century Nashville, whose descendants would not have appeared in any professional building associations formal membership list. Warren Tate had kept the record because he believed the work of a neighborhood belonged to the people who had built it, and he had hidden the record in the same place he had hidden everything else he expected someone to try to erase. Celeste read the names by lamplight and recognized none of them individually, but understood what they were: the undocumented labor of a community that had been offered, by Garrett Holloway's revised assessment, the conclusion that its own history had no market value. The sound of footsteps on the porch above was followed by Garrett's voice and an uninvited structural engineer he had retained to argue the basement was unsafe for occupancy and Delaney met them at the door and told the engineer with a precision that came from having anticipated exactly this move that the property owner had full legal authority over the contents of the structure and that the arrival of an uninvited assessor at 9 in the evening did not constitute a structural safety review under any applicable statute.
Garrett looked past Delaney to Celeste who was still at the south wall with the list of names in her hand waited for her to defer to him the way she had deferred to him on dozens of decisions over the preceding decade and she turned to him and told him to leave the building and then after standing in Warren Tate's basement a few minutes longer looking at the pencil elevation and the fieldstone foundation that had outlasted every expectation anyone had ever had for it she told Sawyer she was suspending the Hollow Creek Resort project pending an independent review. The announcement reached Mercer Development Group's investor group before Celeste had finished drafting the formal communication because Vaughn had called three board members directly and by the time she sat down in the boardroom the following morning the temperature in the room was the kind she associated with decisions that had already been made before the meeting was called. Vaughn opened by telling the board that the chief executive had allowed a personal and emotional response to an isolated preservation claim to override sound business judgment that the resort project represented the largest investment commitment in the company's history and that the decision to suspend it on the basis of a single property's contested designation was precisely the kind of unilateral action that the governance structure of a responsible organization was designed to prevent. Celeste put the documentation on the table and described what existed without framing it as a defense or an accusation. Two assessment reports, one commissioned, received, and deliberately suppressed before the project was presented to the investment group.
14 residential sales in the Hollow Creek district completed on the basis of the suppressed valuation. The email between Garrett and Vaughn with its date and its contents. The documents arranged in order so any board member who wanted to follow the sequence could do so without her guidance. A board member asked the direct question, "How much would redesigning the project cost? " And Celeste gave the estimate. Between 12 and 18 million dollars in additional design and carrying costs offset partially by the reputational value of a heritage integrated project which a growing segment of institutional investors in cultural destination real estate had been waiting positively.