Mother-Daughter Murder Night(63)
“Exactly. When you own something, it’s there for you. And in a way, it even owns a bit of you. From the first day you own a piece of property, it gets its hooks into you. You walk around and it whispers to you what it wants to be, who it wants you to be. You feel the need to take care of it, nurture it. I’ve seen it happen again and again with my clients.”
“I still think it isn’t fair.”
Lana snorted. “Real estate never is.”
Beth texted that she’d had a hell of a shift and could they please figure out dinner. While Jack called in an order to Pizza My Heart for a large sausage and onions with extra olives, Lana texted André again. The pizza arrived just after Beth did. Thankfully, Lana’s phone rang before she had to entertain the idea of eating it.
Lana rushed into the back bedroom and shut the door. Beth raised an eyebrow at Jack, but the girl was too busy redistributing toppings for maximum flavor variety per bite to notice.
“Thank you for calling me back so quickly, André.” Lana sat down on the bed facing the window with the slough and pulled the letter of intent onto her lap.
“Darling, of course! Where are you? Your assistant told me something about an out-of-town medical procedure, and then you never responded to my texts, and when I called her again, she was working for some kind of lifestyle influencer in Ojai.”
Lana hadn’t realized how good—and painful—it would be to hear her old friend’s voice. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid she’d forgotten she had on.
“André, I’m fine. Things up here have just gotten more complicated than I anticipated.”
“Where are you?”
“Monterey Bay, near Carmel.” Near enough.
André let out a long exhale. “Thank God. Here I was thinking you were stuck somewhere awful, like a Siberian prison, or Bakersfield.” He paused. “Wait. Are you getting one of those EscarGlow treatments? You beast! I hear the snail slime smell is awful but the wrinkles positively melt away.”
“Please. You know I don’t have wrinkles.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you? So what’s up?”
“I was hoping you could tell me a bit about conservation easements.”
“You haven’t gone Green Party on me, have you?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m looking into a few contracts with a land trust up here, and I had some questions. I’ve never gotten my hands dirty in nonprofits before, and I knew you’d be the right one to ask,” Lana said.
He chuckled. “That’s my girl. All business. Fire away.”
“I’m looking at a signed letter of intent from five years ago for a conservation easement between a rancher and a land trust. Just to be clear, an easement like this, it’s a transfer of development rights, not a transfer of land, correct?”
“That’s right. The owner holds the land, relinquishes the rights to do anything on it, and gets a tax write-off for doing it. In a way, it’s like the easements we’ve negotiated in the past to put new roads through private land. But instead of building, it’s blocking—the easement creates a no-development zone.”
“So if no one is actually buying or selling land, what role does the land trust play? What’s in it for them?”
“Control. The land trust is a kind of nonprofit nanny to the process. They strip the property of all meaningful paths to progress and profit. They get the papers signed and new deed restrictions recorded. And then they monitor the properties under their care, to make sure no one puts up a lemonade stand or a house or God forbid a factory on the premises.”
“How does the land trust make money in that scenario?”
“They don’t. Hence the non to their profit.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Not to you, it wouldn’t. Not to me either, darling. But different strokes . . . and I suppose land trusts do often get large gifts of cash for their efforts. Kind of like making a donation to the hospital where dear old mother gave it up.”
Lana tried to ignore that last analogy.
“What if a land trust had enough land under conservation easement to get some kind of federal status as a wildlife protection zone?”
“What kind of wildlife?”
Lana looked out the window. “Seals. Otters. Waterfowl.”
“Charismatic megafauna,” André said. His voice betrayed a combination of respect and disgust. “The cuter the animal, the bigger the prize. Very popular with Sierra Club billionaires. And the feds. If the land trust could prove such animals were unique or endangered, it could trigger a federal designation. It could mean lots of funding, and power to call the shots for miles around.”
So Diana hadn’t been exaggerating. Lana imagined Victor Morales, conservation king, reclaiming Elkhorn from the ranchers who’d controlled the area for generations. She could see him up on the grassy hillside of the ranch, astride a horse, in custom boots, surveying his eco-empire. He’d enjoy it. He wouldn’t look half-bad doing it either.
But there was one unresolved question between him and that dream.
“In my experience, a letter of intent isn’t binding,” Lana said. “There isn’t some special exception for conservation projects, is there?”
“Nope. An LOI is just a promise. And you know how easy it is for a real estate project to change or fall apart between the promise and the finish line.”