It’s possible that, internally, Ellison’s management team had reasonable explanations for what was being experienced as aloofness and disarray. But down here, on Lanai, locals worried that the inscrutable engineer remaking their island was either turning away from his creation or — worse — incapable of manning all those knobs and switches as competently as they’d believed. People’s lives were entangled in each decision; all the instability was upsetting their sense of the future.

“Pretty soon, it’s not going to be the Lanaian way of living here anymore,” Mike Lopez, Trilogy’s director of operations, told me one afternoon. “Everybody feels that now.” Then, all of a sudden, he shot out: “See, this guy here!” and gestured across the street, to a willowy man with a gray beard, in a ball cap and sunglasses, standing at the edge of Dole Park. It was a new face that Lopez kept noticing around, always alone. “I don’t know if they put people in to observe the atmosphere or what,” he said.

I turned around. The man, who’d paused next to a garbage can, quickly walked away. I’m not really equipped to judge whether a stranger on Lanai looks sinister or not. But neither was Lopez anymore, and that was the point.

The week I returned, those feelings of suspicion on Lanai were coming to a head over what has been the most volatile political issue on the island for generations: water.

The planned desalination plant, already in its first phase of construction near the Four Seasons at Manele Bay, was a linchpin in Ellison’s vision; by converting up to 10 million gallons of salinated groundwater into fresh water a day, it would make more development and population growth possible. Earlier this year, the company went to the Lanai Planning Commission for a 30-year special-use permit to operate the plant. (The commission, made up of nine residents, is the one body of truly local government on Lanai. Everything else on the island gets decided by the county government, on Maui, or the state, in Honolulu. And it’s worth noting that while Ellison has declined to meet with Lanai residents, he hosted Alan Arakawa — the mayor of Maui County, which includes Lanai — for lunch on his yacht and held two big-ticket fund-raisers for Gov. Neil Abercrombie before Abercrombie lost his primary in August.) But after months of hearings, the Planning Commission rejected Pulama’s request and decided to issue a permit for 15 years instead. The move may sound insignificant, but as Robin Kaye, a longtime resident, who helped lead the resistance to Murdock’s wind farm, pointed out, “This is the first time in two years, in a formal way, that any part of the community has said no to something Pulama has asked.” And it provoked the first instance of outright intransigence the community had seen from Pulama. During one of the final meetings about the plant in June, Kurt Matsumoto kept issuing the same ultimatum: Without a guarantee of 30 years of operation, he said, the company probably wouldn’t build the plant. It just wouldn’t be worth the investment. “It’s not a threat,” Matsumoto explained, adding later: “But we’re not here to negotiate that tonight.”

When I ran into Pat Reilly, the gentleman I met at the Blue Ginger Cafe in the spring, he broke down the altercation for me. It was starting to feel as if Matsumoto and his team saw the local political process as an annoyance, he said. They weren’t acting like elected officials, building public support for their agenda; they were acting like they owned the place — because they did. “The local people want a say,” Reilly explained. “And this was their chance. It was a display of power. Psychologically, it makes all kinds of sense to me.”

By now, the standoff was taking on an ugly feel. Many residents felt the commission had acted impetuously, handcuffing Ellison the same way activists sabotaged Murdock’s wind-farm proposal — even if, in this case, the commission wasn’t actually opposed to the plant and had, in fact, given the project a green light. The commission, meanwhile, had just received a stern letter from Pulama’s attorney on Maui, laying out a complicated argument attacking a separate restriction written into the permit. (The restriction stipulated that, once the plant was up and running, the hotel and surrounding homes could only draw water from the island’s main aquifer in emergencies, and only then for human consumption.)