Fidel didn't turn my water back on that morning. He couldn't, and once he explained why, I didn't want him to. First he photographed everything: the open pit, the closed curb stop, the meter key on the gravel, the saddle tap in the trench, the blue line, the valve box, the canister, the faded red warning on its sticker, which turned out to say DO NOT CONNECT TO POTABLE WATER WITHOUT APPROVED BACKFLOW PREVENTION DEVICE. Then he put a district lock and a red tag on my curb stop, so that nobody, including him, could open it without a supervisor. Then he cut the blue line in the trench and capped both ends of the saddle, and called in a second truck, and two more techs came out and spent the rest of the morning flushing my service line from the meter to the house, running water out of my hose bib onto the dead blue grama for forty minutes while one of them stood over it with a little kit of vials and reagents, testing for nitrogen and phosphate and chlorine residual. The first samples came back with a trace of something. The later ones came back clean. They told me not to drink from the tap or cook with it until the lab results came back on Monday, and they left me four cases of bottled water and a district-issued orange bucket with a lid.
I took Pia to urgent care on Founders Parkway while they worked. The doctor was a tired, kind man who looked at her scalp under a magnifying lamp for a long time and called it a superficial chemical burn, first-degree, with a couple of spots at the nape that might be edging into second. He said she'd been lucky. He said the thing that had kept it from being much worse was that somebody had gotten a lot of water on it fast, and he asked how we'd managed that, with the water off, and Pia said, "My dad drained the water heater," and the doctor looked at me over his glasses and said, "Huh. Good man," which is the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years. He gave her a tube of silver sulfadiazine cream and told her no more bleach until Christmas, and no hair dryer, and no hats. Then he documented everything, with photographs, for the police report, because Kasprzak had asked him to.
Esme got the call somewhere past Glenwood Springs. I made it as calm as I could, and she listened to the whole thing without interrupting, and at the end she was quiet for so long that I thought the call had dropped in the canyon. Then she said, "She bleached her hair? With what? Whose bleach?" and I could hear Rafe in the back seat yelling, "Pia bleached her hair?" with the pure joy of a younger brother who is not the one in trouble, and I started laughing, standing in the parking lot of the urgent care, and couldn't stop for a while. Esme wanted to turn around. I told her not to. I told her Rafe had been training for that meet since March and there was nothing she could do here that I couldn't, except drink bottled water. She drove on to Grand Junction. Rafe took third in the hundred-yard backstroke. Pia FaceTimed him from the couch with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a pillowcase balanced carefully on the back of her neck, and her hair, which was now a streaky shade somewhere between tangerine and wheat, sticking out in every direction, and he laughed so hard he got the hiccups.
The police took Georgine to the county jail in Castle Rock and booked her, and she was released that afternoon on a personal recognizance bond. I know because Octave told me; he'd known her and Rutger for nineteen years, and he went down there and sat in the lobby, though he said she wouldn't let him drive her home. Her nephew came from Littleton. That evening, around eight, I saw the porch light come on at her house, three streets over on Bitterbrush Lane, which I could just see from the end of our driveway if I stood on the bumper of my truck. I stood on the bumper of my truck for a while.
What happened after that happened slowly, the way real consequences do, through letters and phone calls and people in offices.
The district opened an investigation, run by a woman from their compliance office named Lupe Vigil, who came out on the Tuesday with Fidel and a ground-penetrating radar cart and walked the whole Gateway Green. She found exactly what Fidel had said she'd find, and nothing else, which I think disappointed her a little. Then she pulled the meter history on my address, all of it, going back to when the smart meter was installed. The continuous flow started on the twenty-second of July, two years before, three weeks after the district had put the Gateway Green's irrigation meter on its flow restrictor. It never stopped, not once, until the moment Georgine turned the key. Lupe did the math. Over twenty-five months it came to a little over a million gallons. About eight hundred and fifty thousand of those had been paid for, without complaint, by a mortgage servicer in Ohio, who would later tell the district, after several weeks of being transferred from department to department, that they had no record of any problem with the property. The rest had been paid for by me. Octave's doorbell footage filled in the last morning. It showed Georgine's silver Buick pulling up along the boulevard at 6:41, one minute after our minivan turned out of the court, and sitting there with the engine off. It showed her getting out at 6:58 with the meter key over her shoulder like a rifle, and standing at the end of our driveway for almost a full minute, looking at the house, at the closed garage door, at the drawn blinds, before she walked to the pit. It showed her kneel. It did not show her hesitate. I watched that minute at the end of the driveway more times than I want to admit, trying to see in it what she'd been thinking, and I never could.
They found the man who'd installed the saddle tap, too. He wasn't hard to find. He was a retired district service tech named Severo who'd worked under Georgine for fifteen years and now did side jobs out of his garage in Franktown. He came in on his own, with a lawyer, as soon as he heard. He said she'd told him the association had a temporary hardship agreement with the district for the Green during the drought, and that the vacant lot's service line was the closest available source, and that she was handling the paperwork with the district herself, since she still knew everybody. He said he'd believed her because he'd never once in fifteen years known Georgine Vandeventer to cut a corner on anything. He said he'd asked about a backflow preventer and she'd said she'd have one put in the following week, and he hadn't followed up, and he was sorry about that, and he was going to be sorry about it for the rest of his life. Efrain, it turned out, had been hired the Wednesday before through his company's regular account with the HOA, for what the work order described as irrigation repair, Gateway Green. He hadn't known anything. The detective assigned to the case, a dry, unhurried man named Amsel, told me Efrain had cried during his interview, and that he believed him.