She did not sign it in thirty days. She did not sign it in sixty. She drove to the Carnegie library on Bilbo Street, the same one where she would later learn about the Federal Reserve data, and she asked the young man at the reference desk how a person would find out what a pipeline company had paid other people for land, and he showed her where to find the parish conveyance records, and she spent eleven days in the Cameron Parish Courthouse annex reading conveyances with a pencil and a legal pad. She learned what an easement was, and what a mitigation credit was worth on the open market, which was a great deal, and she learned that Gulfstar had paid a family of white cattle ranchers twelve miles east of her tract a little over thirty-one thousand dollars an acre for land that was, if anything, worse.
She drove to Lafayette and sat in the waiting room of a land attorney named Remy Sonnier, who had been recommended to her by a woman in her Bible study whose late husband had once sued Texaco. Mr. Sonnier was seventy-three, and wore suspenders, and listened to her for forty minutes without interrupting, and then asked to see her legal pad. He turned the pages slowly. When he got to the end he took off his glasses.
"Mrs. Arceneaux," he said, "who did this research for you?"
"I did."
"By yourself?"
"The young man at the library helped me find the books."
Remy Sonnier put his glasses back on and looked at her for a long moment. "I'll take your case on a third," he said. "But I want you to know, I'd take it on a quarter, just to be in the room when you talk to them."
It took three years. There were appraisals and counter-appraisals. There were meetings in conference rooms in Houston where she was the only person not wearing a lanyard. There was a period of eight months when Gulfstar's lawyers threatened expropriation, which in Louisiana a pipeline company could sometimes do, and Remy Sonnier explained to her that if it came to that, a judge would set the price, and the judge might set it low. She went home that night and sat at the kitchen table across from Lucien's empty chair and asked him what to do.
He didn't answer. But she remembered him in the boat, pointing. That used to be land. And she thought: they need it more than I do. They need it a great deal more than they are telling me. Nobody spends eight months threatening an old woman over a swamp they don't need.
She told Mr. Sonnier to hold.
In the end they settled for a little over seven million two hundred thousand dollars for the fee simple and the mitigation rights together. After Mr. Sonnier's third and the taxes and the accountant in Lafayette who specialized in exactly this kind of thing, there was a little more