Adele sat very still through the applause that followed. She did not need Frank to praise her in public; the coffee he had brought and the hours he had spent in the rain had already told her what mattered. But she understood why he spoke. People had mocked a decision because it seemed to break with tradition, and now the entire county was enjoying the discovery that decision had made possible. Frank was reminding them that curiosity had not come cheaply.
The letter from the county attorney's office arrived three days later. Adele read the first page standing in the doorway and then sat down because it raised a question no one at the town hall had considered. The county's preliminary title review showed historical references to mineral interests on parcels along the ridge, including documents associated with a short-lived coal exploration campaign during the 1920s. Before any commercial agreement could proceed, the office wanted confirmation that the rights to the subsurface material beneath Hollow Creek Farm had not been separately conveyed, reserved, or inherited by a different owner.
The language was careful, but the possibility behind it was simple. Adele could own the fields, fences, pond, barn, and house without necessarily owning every mineral interest beneath them. She had heard of such arrangements in places where coal and gas rights had been traded long before modern landowners arrived. It had never occurred to her that a farm purchased by Josiah in 1888 might carry a similar problem. For the first time since she saw the iron pipe, she wondered whether she had uncovered something that would enrich someone who had never set foot on her land.
She phoned Warren, who said title questions were outside his experience, and Owen, who told her that geology could establish the mineral but could not establish ownership. She called Ellen at the bank and explained why the expected appraisal could not be treated as collateral until the title issue was resolved. Finally she called Constance, who listened without interruption and asked Adele to meet her at the records office at eight the next morning. "Bring everything you have," Constance said. "Especially anything Everett's father kept. Old families sometimes saved papers for reasons nobody bothered writing down."
The following morning they spread documents across a large table in the back room of the annex. Warren had sent copies of the recent survey, and Adele brought the farm's title insurance file, Everett's estate documents, and a cardboard box of papers she had found in the attic years earlier but never fully sorted. Constance assembled the chain of title from 1888 forward, marking each transfer and comparing the legal descriptions line by line. It was slow work. One deed referred to a boundary stone that had disappeared,