Delaney Brooks reviewed the Mercer assessment documents Sawyer had obtained through the county's public records process and found the seam where the two reports had been incompletely reconciled. A footnote in the first assessment referencing a preliminary architectural character survey, a document neither attached to nor listed in the second assessment's bibliography. And she had seen this kind of omission before, and she knew it was not the kind of mistake that happened by accident in a professional document prepared for a $140 million project. Celeste drove past Hollow Creek Lane twice in the second month. And the second time she slowed and looked more carefully.
The sagging roofline was gone, replaced by something clean and correct. The porch had regained its posts. The upper windows held glass that caught the light in a way she had not expected. She continued to her meeting and said nothing to anyone, but she did not dismiss what she had seen. By the end of the third month, the Historic Preservation Office had scheduled an on-site review.
And the day before the review, Sawyer walked every room of the house one more time, not looking for problems, but for the story the rooms would tell to people who had trained eyes and neutral intentions. He had set the four original drawings in conservation glass frames along the parlor wall beside the fireplace, had arranged the documentation Brielle and Delaney had assembled on the parlor table, and had placed Warren Tate's letter, framed as well, near the entry so it was the first thing anyone would see when they came through the door. The morning of the review, he opened the front door of a house that had cost him $99 and stood aside to let three evaluators walk into a front parlor with restored plaster walls, a functioning carved oak staircase, amber and green light falling across reclaimed pine floors, and the four original architectural drawings mounted carefully along the wall. The lead evaluator moved through the room slowly, making notes without speaking, and returned twice to the basement before returning to the parlor and standing for a long moment in front of the drawings in the particular way that people stand when they are deciding whether what they are seeing is as significant as it appears. She told Sawyer that if the chain of documentation held, the property wasn't just eligible for designation, it could establish the basis for a district-wide survey that would change the regulatory picture for everything within a certain radius.
And she said this in the measured tone of a professional who understood the implications, but was not responsible for them. She meant the resort project, though she did not say so by name. She did not need to because Sawyer had understood from the moment he opened the oilcloth on the kitchen counter that the house was not just a house, but an argument. And now someone with the authority to validate that argument had just told him the argument was sound. Celeste arrived on Hollow Creek Lane on a Thursday morning intending to review the demolition sequencing for the southern parcels, had accepted Garrett's characterization of the preservation office notice as a preliminary inquiry with no binding effect, and was not prepared for what was on the street when she turned the corner.