She held the silence so long that I thought she had hung up.

“Just sign the access agreement,” she said at last.

“By Friday, this can all be over.”

On Thursday morning I walked to the public library with the easement papers folded in a folder under my arm.

The woman behind the research desk was a retired title examiner named Doris Pike, and she knew more about Alder Hollow land transactions than anybody who still had to answer office telephones.

“I’m not asking you to do my homework,” I said.

“I’m asking where I should start.”

Doris glanced at the plat number and adjusted her reading glasses.

“Start with the name of the organization requesting your signature.”

The document identified the applicant as Hollow Creek Access Partners.

I had assumed that was a neighborhood entity.

Doris entered the name into a county index and waited for the record to load.

“Limited liability company,” she said.

“Registered six months ago.”

“Who registered it?”

She turned the monitor toward me.

The agent’s name was Grant Sloane.

Meredith’s husband.

The listed address was a downtown office shared by a surveying company and a developer called Atlas Land Recovery.

“That is not the city,” Doris said.

“Not even close.”

I felt the familiar drop in my stomach that comes when suspicion becomes something you can point to on paper.

Doris showed me where to request the recorded instruments affecting my parcel.

There was no municipal application, no condemnation proceeding, and no approved drainage project touching my boundary.

The only new paper was a notice of preliminary interest filed by the Sloanes’ company.

It gave them no right to enter, but its presence might frighten a seller who did not know the difference between a notice and a grant of access.

I paid for copies.

As Doris helped me staple them, she mentioned a name I recognized.

“Atlas has been involved with that old Sterling Glass property.”

“The abandoned plant by the creek?”

“That’s the one.”

The Sterling plant stood upstream of Alder Hollow and had been closed for more than twenty years.

It produced specialty coatings for industrial glass, and its rusting tanks had been part of childhood scenery for people who grew up here.

A county cleanup program had monitored the site after several chemical storage areas were found in poor condition.

I remembered the work because my laboratory had handled unrelated groundwater samples at the beginning of my career.