"No, look at this." I pointed. "The amenity center was dark for nineteen hours during that storm. Same as everybody. My house was the only one on the street with power. If I'd been stealing power from the clubhouse, I'd have been stealing from a dead circuit. And if I'd been feeding something over there, it would've come on when I did, not when the co-op did."
He nodded slowly. "And Wednesday?"
I scrolled to the end. My mower had been in the back of Rusty Ferrell's box truck since ten-thirty Wednesday morning. My freezer had been unplugged from my patio. My extension cords were coiled up in a warehouse in Kyle. If I was the drain, the drain should have stopped.
The slab didn't so much as wobble. Thirteen point six kilowatts at 10:30 Wednesday. Thirteen point six at midnight. Thirteen point six at noon Thursday, while I was driving home from Temple.
"Nothing changed," Lamont said quietly.
"Nothing changed."
He sat back in his chair and took off his glasses. "Then what is it, Rae? What draws thirteen and a half kilowatts all day and all night and never once turns off?"
I'd been thinking about that since the first glance. I'd been thinking about it, if I was honest with myself, since April, standing on the loop trail with Splice, listening to that vent roar.
"A load like that," I said, "flat as a table, around the clock, is not a pool pump and it's not air conditioning. Those cycle. They follow the weather, the time of day, the thermostat. This doesn't follow anything. It's something that's designed to run at full power all the time, because every minute it's off costs somebody money." I tapped the screen. "Back in 2022, before I retired, we had a member out past Johnson City who put a shipping container on his ranch and filled it with cryptocurrency mining machines. Specialized computers. All they do is solve math problems as fast as they can, twenty-four hours a day, and they each pull three or four kilowatts and put out heat like a pizza oven. His load profile looked exactly like this. A flat slab, all day, all night. We had to upgrade his transformer."
Lamont stared at me. "In the pool house."
"I don't know that," I said. "I want to be careful. I don't know what's in there, and I'm not going to go in there and find out, because then I'm the one trespassing. But something in that building started pulling thirteen and a half kilowatts on March sixth, and it's been pulling it ever since, and the only person with a key, and the only person with the login to this report, has spent the last four months telling everybody it was me."