The price climbing in those increments meant that someone with considerably more information than they were admitting was working backward from a number they did not want him to know. Celeste was not present for any of these visits. Garrett had described the process to her as outreach, a standard conversation to determine whether the property owner was interested in a voluntary sale, and she had asked no follow-up questions. Sawyer began the restoration in earnest, working in the way his father had worked, methodically, without haste, labeling each salvaged board with a number corresponding to a position on a hand-drawn plan, photographing every stage as both documentation and insurance, replacing only what was beyond recovery and recreating what was missing from documentary evidence, rather than substituting modern materials for the sake of speed. Piper came on Saturdays in the canvas work apron he had cut down to fit her, sweeping the sections of floor he had declared safe, and she taped a hand-lettered sign to the interior of the front door that read Langley House Project in uneven capital letters, and he left it there.
Brielle filed a preliminary inquiry with the State Historic Preservation Office, which was returned within 10 days for insufficient documentation, specifically the absence of a recorded plat map confirming continuous chain of title. And Garrett had anticipated exactly this procedural requirement and ensured the relevant mapping records were not easily accessible. Sawyer found the reference he needed in his father's notebook, a name, Delaney Brooks, a property rights and heritage attorney who had worked Hollow Creek disputes years earlier, and whom Lawson had described in two sentences as the one person who knows where the paper is buried. He left a message on her office line that evening, not knowing that Delaney's last formal engagement with anything connected to the Mercer family had ended in a disagreement significant enough that she had declined two subsequent referrals from their firm. What followed over the next 3 months was the kind of transformation that is difficult to describe in linear sequence because it happened in every part of the building simultaneously, the way a living thing recovers rather than the way a machine is repaired.
And Sawyer worked days on paid restoration jobs across Nashville and spent every evening and full weekend on Hollow Creek Lane replacing the collapsed roof section with hand-split cedar shingles from an Eastern Tennessee mill that still cut to the original 19th century profile. Repairing the staircase with old-growth white oak he had been keeping in his shop for years for a project that deserved it. Rebuilding the porch post by post until the structure had its proportions back. The colored glass panels in the upper sash windows turned out to be original leaded glass in a soft amber and green that threw warm light across the front parlor floor in the late afternoon in a way that made the restored plaster walls look like something from a painting. And the hand-thrown brick of the fireplace surround cleaned to a deep red-brown with variations of ochre and gray that no modern masonry product could replicate.
And the structural system Tate had designed performed exactly as the drawings indicated it would, which meant the building required less intervention at the primary frame than any house of comparable age and neglect Sawyer had ever touched. Brielle worked in parallel building the documentary case with the thoroughness of someone who knew it would need to withstand a legal challenge. She located three photographs in the Nashville Public Library archive showing Hollow Creek Lane in the mid-1950s, and the house at parcel 11 appeared in two of them, unmistakably the same structure and unmistakably the centerpiece of the streetscape. And she found a brief unsigned notice in a regional building trade journal from 1952 describing a new residential construction technique demonstrated in a Nashville project. The language matching Tate's structural system precisely.