My friend Lyle Benton called that evening. We had hunted, argued about baseball, and helped each other through difficult years since our twenties. He had been the one to drive Ellen to a treatment appointment when I couldn't leave a job site, and after she died he mowed my lawn without announcing he was coming. Now he wanted to know whether I intended to respond to Darlene online.
"No," I said. "She can have the comments. I'll take the records."
"That's an awfully patient response to people calling you crazy."
"I didn't say I was patient. I said I wasn't posting."
After we hung up, I brought my old Rolodex out of the office drawer. I still used it because the names on those cards represented people I had worked with, not just contacts saved in a phone. Surveyors, drainage engineers, municipal planners, inspectors, a retired judge who once helped me interpret a complicated county boundary dispute. I wasn't looking for secrets obtained through favors. I was looking for people who could explain where the public record ended and where assumptions had taken over.
Rosalie Chen, an employee in county planning, returned my call the next morning. She had known me for fifteen years and possessed the rare professional skill of reading a permit application without being distracted by the cover letter's promises. She said Darlene had been pressing for accelerated approvals on a proposed community center, tennis courts, and landscaping extensions. The files she could lawfully point me toward were public, she explained, and the approval dates were unusually compressed.