He said he couldn't release client documents without speaking to company counsel. I gave him Daniel's number and told him that any paperwork carrying my signature was suspect because I had signed nothing. He stopped asking about the fish after that. Before we ended the call, he confirmed that his trucks had delivered stock on three consecutive night runs using a route designated by the property manager.
Daniel called him that afternoon. The conversation lasted longer than mine had, and when it ended Daniel sounded grim. Mountain Aquatic Services had believed it was transporting fish from a managed facility to a receiving water already approved by the relevant parties. Its paperwork included a facility release signed on behalf of Riverstone Fisheries, an old name that was no longer an operating corporation. The signature appeared beside the name of a manager who had died twelve years earlier.
"Could the signature be an old one copied forward by mistake?" I asked.
"That's what we have to investigate. A signature can appear on a template without being forged intentionally. But if somebody presented it as current authority, that's another matter."
He also told me the authorization included a handwritten note saying the receiving landowner had been notified. My first notification had been Karen standing on the bank after the trucks were gone. Daniel asked me to write down our exact conversation while I could still remember it, then to email the account to him without polishing it into something that sounded better.
I did that at the kitchen table, remembering the way Karen had smiled when she said problem solved. Writing it down made her confidence seem stranger. She had not looked worried about trespassing or consent; she had looked irritated that I could not understand why I should thank her. That meant she either believed the association could act without asking or had convinced herself I would be too intimidated to argue.
The following afternoon a county fisheries specialist named Owen Price came to inspect the tagged stock with Mara. Owen was a tall, soft-spoken man with a weatherproof notebook and the kind of steady gaze I associate with people who have worked outdoors all their lives. He examined the tag records, tested the water again, and asked to see the old Riverstone marker. Then he spent almost an hour with Daniel on the porch, comparing archived registration codes with newer records.
When they returned, Owen looked toward the pond and folded his arms. "Some of these are registered broodstock," he said. "Others are likely their offspring, but we need a formal inventory and genetics records before we can say how many belong to the program."
"And the value?" I asked.
"Potentially substantial. The historical asset schedule put a value of $286,000 on parts of the breeding operation. It would be wrong to apply that number to every living fish you have today, and just as wrong to assume the program is worthless because the original company dissolved. The records matter."
Daniel nodded. "That's what I've been telling him."
"I know," I said. "Both of you are getting remarkably good at telling me not to be excited."
Owen smiled at that, but his next words were serious. He had found references to a successor organization called Riverstone Genetics Cooperative, later administered through an agricultural conservation trust. The trust still appeared in state records, although he could not tell whether it had maintained active operations recently. He believed the tags were authentic, and he believed somebody had access to an inventory more current than anything we had received from Silver Ridge.