When the meeting ended, Owen Pierce approached me beside the clubhouse doors. He did not shake my hand. He held a rolled plan set in one hand and studied me as if he were deciding whether I was a problem he could solve personally. "Mr. Mercer, I'd appreciate a private conversation before this becomes unnecessarily adversarial."
"You can call Robert Hayes," I said. "He has copies of the records. Or you can bring your legal counsel and talk to mine once I've hired one."
"You haven't hired a lawyer?"
"Not yet. That doesn't make the property unowned."
He sighed. "We were told this corridor was in the clear. We have contractors committed, investors expecting delivery, and customers who are already planning to move equipment into the facility. Every month matters."
"Then you should be asking the person who told you the corridor was in the clear," I said. "Why are you asking me to make that statement true after you've spent the money?"
He looked toward Margaret, who was speaking urgently to two board members across the parking lot. For the first time, I saw something besides corporate confidence in his face. He was beginning to calculate the cost of having trusted the wrong answer. He gave me his card and said he would direct his counsel to review the property records again.
I wanted to believe him. He was the first person connected to the project who had acknowledged that the route might be a genuine problem rather than a rancher's emotional attachment. But acknowledging a problem in a parking lot was different from paying to fix it. I drove home past the construction entrance and noticed that the floodlights were still on, with crews working late into the evening.
The next morning, a small aerial survey drone flew along the fence. It stayed outside my airspace as far as I could tell, but the activity reminded me that the project schedule was not slowing just because the legal questions had grown louder. I called Luis Ortega and asked whether anybody had resumed marking the corridor. He said the site had been instructed not to enter my ranch and that he would put the order in writing for his crew.
"I appreciate it," I told him.
"Don't thank me yet," he said. "People above me still think the paperwork will arrive any day. When a job gets desperate, some people start treating a missing signature like a formality. I don't want my guys carrying the consequences of that."
A week later, I hired an attorney named Elena Torres. She practiced property and commercial litigation in the county seat and had worked on more easement disputes than anybody I knew. She asked me to bring every document I had and then spent the first meeting reading in silence. I sat across from her desk while she made a list of dates, participants, and statements that needed independent verification.
"You want to sue?" she asked when she finished.
"I want them to stop coming through my gate and either prove their right or find another route. I don't want to spend the next two years in court because somebody else forgot to do their homework."