She said, "I'll sign it right now."
I took a yellow legal pad out of the drawer where I kept the Linda folder. I wrote it out by hand at the kitchen table while she drank her coffee.
Three short paragraphs. Who she was, how long she had lived on the road, what she had personally seen in the spring of 1989, 1990, and 1991, and what she had not seen since the dam was upgraded in 1992.
She signed it at the bottom in careful cursive. I notarized it that afternoon at the bank. She left the photographs with me.
Over the next two weeks, I quietly visited six more longtime homeowners on the original section of the road. I did not ask anyone to take sides. I asked them what they remembered.
Three of them remembered the same brown water she remembered. Two of them, both younger, both newer, politely told me they didn't want to get involved.
They were afraid of Linda. They said so without saying so. They said things like, "We just want to keep things peaceful around here," and looked at the floor while they said it.
The sixth, in the last house on the original road, was already in hospice. I did not press her family for a statement.
Then I drove one more visit out, not for an affidavit, but for archives.
Her name was Eleanor Briggs. She was 81. She had been a clerk in the county recorder's office for 36 years before she retired in 2003.
She lived in the second-to-last house on the original gravel road in the same farmhouse she had grown up in. When I told her what I was looking for, she looked at me over her reading glasses and said, "Sit down, Daniel. I'll be right back."
She came back in about four minutes with a manila file folder.
Inside it was a photocopy on thin onion-skin paper that smelled like old microfilm of a document I had never personally laid hands on. The original 1962 county dam construction permit issued to James Hayes, Henry Patterson, and three other named farmers.
Stamped. Dated. Signed. Permit number 1962-W114, the same number I had been quoting from a digital scan for the last nine months.
I asked Eleanor where it had come from.
She said, "I pulled a copy for myself when I retired. I pulled a copy of everything that mattered to this road. I thought somebody might need one of them someday."
I made copies of her copy on my office printer that afternoon. I put one in the fireproof safe. I put one in the waterproof envelope in the truck. I put one in a brown clasped folder that I had begun to think of as the case file.
That same week, I drove down to the county stormwater office in person. I had been emailing them for nine months. I wanted to be a face now, not an inbox.
The duty engineer pulled up the GIS map on his monitor while I stood beside the desk. He clicked the cursor up the watershed and zoomed in.
There it was in pale blue and bold black: Structure SW-014. Critical stormwater retention. Pre-existing. Permit 1962-W114.
He looked at the screen for a moment longer than he needed to.