That was the first time I understood the project might be a problem for the people Margaret claimed to represent as well as for me. It was tempting to think of the entire subdivision as one group standing behind her. Most of the residents had simply bought homes, paid assessments, and trusted an elected board to handle ordinary shared expenses. Their interests were not identical to Margaret's, and over the next few months that difference would become one of the most important facts in the whole story.
The packet from the association attorney arrived eleven days later in a white express envelope. I knew it was supposed to impress me before I opened it. The cover letter carried the name of a law firm in Dallas and referred to Northridge's commitment to providing resilient digital services for the region. Beneath that were seventeen pages of maps and old property descriptions, some bearing stamps so faint that the dates looked like they had been copied through a window in heavy rain.
The attorney, a man named Colin Mercer who was no relation to me, described the intended route as a historical utility right existing before my grandfather's purchase. That sounded serious until I reached the page where the right was supposedly created. The description referred to a much larger parcel, a piece of country that had been divided more than half a century earlier. The route shaded onto the modern map was not shown on the historical document itself. Somebody had taken a broad reference from one era and drawn a very specific line onto land from another.
I carried the packet to Robert's office the next morning. His waiting room smelled of fresh blueprints and old coffee, and a wall map showed the county in colors that would have confused my grandfather. Robert spread the pages under a bright desk lamp and started comparing legal descriptions. Every so often he made a small sound and put a colored tab on a page, but he did not offer me a conclusion until he had finished.
"The original parcel they cite was divided before your grandfather acquired his tract in 1958," he told me. "The document they're using concerned access through a different portion, and even that right had conditions that were never satisfied. There isn't a recorded grant covering the strip they want now."
"So their lawyer is wrong?"
"Their lawyer has made an argument," Robert said. "It just isn't supported by the records he attached. That's an important distinction, because if somebody wants to press a claim, a court can decide it. What he doesn't have is permission for workers to start trenching while the argument is unresolved."
He turned the old map toward me. I could see a dotted road that followed the creek on the other side of a former boundary, nearly a mile from the route on Margaret's project drawing. The description had been copied faithfully up to a certain point. Then the modern sheet substituted a line that happened to be convenient for the new data center. The mismatch was not a surveying mystery. It was a decision to treat one kind of paper as if it gave authority over another piece of ground.