"It's reading zero," Fidel said, "because she closed your curb stop. Which means that from the minute she turned that key until the minute I turn it back, which isn't going to be until I flush that line and test it, if your house had caught fire, there'd have been nothing in those sprinkler heads but air. With your daughter in it." He turned to Kasprzak. "That's not a homeowners association dispute, Officer. Our meter is district property. Our curb stop is district property. Operating it without authorization is tampering with utility equipment, and it's a crime in this state. Diverting metered water through an unauthorized connection is theft of utility service. I can't tell you what the DA's going to call the rest of it. But I'm going to be writing all of it down, and I'd like you to be writing it down too."
Kasprzak had already taken out her notebook. She looked at Georgine.
"Ma'am," she said. "Did you install that connection?"
Georgine was standing by the pit where we'd left her. She had not moved. She was still holding the meter key upright in both gloved hands, and she was looking not at Kasprzak and not at Fidel but past both of them, at the red maple, which stood in the morning sun with its small, pointed leaves turning very slightly in the breeze off the Divide, a few of them already tipped with red in the middle of August, which Octave told me later is what a red maple does when it's thirsty and frightened, it starts turning early.
"Rutger used to say it would have been easy," she said, "if he'd been the kind of man who planted juniper."
"Ma'am," Kasprzak said again. "Did you install that connection?"
"I hired a man to install it," Georgine said. "Not Efrain. Another man. Two years ago, in July. When the house was empty. When the bank owned it." She said it the way you'd read a meter, number by number, without any feeling in it at all. "Nobody was living there. Nobody was paying attention to the bills. The district had restricted the Green, and the tree had lost half its leaves, and I had been carrying buckets out to it at five in the morning for two months, and my back went out, and I thought, it's only a gallon a minute, and the bank in Ohio will never even see it. And they never did." She looked at me then, for the first time since Fidel arrived. "And then you bought it."