Georgine got to her first. Of course she did. She introduced herself as the president of the homeowners association and a retired supervisor of district Field Services, and she gave the officer the whole speech again, the leak, the monument footing, the subgrade, the forty-thousand-dollar common element, Article Nine, the easement, the right of entry, the emergency abatement. She did it well. She did it better the second time. She had a copy of the Declaration in a canvas tote bag on the gravel, with the same yellow sticky flags, and she opened it to Article Nine and showed Kasprzak the paragraph, and Kasprzak read it, frowning.
Then Kasprzak turned to me, and I told her my side, which sounded, after Georgine's, like a man shouting about his feelings. I told her about the lid and the key and the trench, and that I hadn't been notified, and that nobody from the district had been called. And I asked Pia to come down off the porch, and Pia did, and lifted the edge of the towel at the back, and Kasprzak looked at her neck and her scalp and the traffic-cone hair, and her face changed.
"Do you need an ambulance, honey?"
Pia shook her head. "It's better now. My dad rinsed it."
"It needs to be looked at," Kasprzak said to me.
"It will be. As soon as I know what's happening with my water."
Kasprzak looked from me to Georgine and back. I could see her trying to fit it into a box. A homeowners association dispute, a civil matter, a property line, a bylaw, an easement she'd never heard of, a retired district employee who clearly knew more about water valves than anyone else on the street, a homeowner in gym shorts who had admitted to the whole board two days earlier that he had a leak. I could see the shape of the box she was settling on, and it wasn't a good box for me.