Detective Amsel also told me, on the phone one afternoon in early September, what the district attorney's office had decided to file. Tampering with utility equipment, a misdemeanor. Theft of utility services, which in Colorado is graded by the dollar value of what was taken, and which came out, between the bank and the district's drought surcharges and me, as a felony. Criminal mischief, for the trench. And, after some discussion, one count of reckless endangerment, on account of the fire sprinklers and the cross-connection and my daughter. He said it was unusual to see that one in a water case. He said the DA had looked at the urgent care photographs and at the gauge on the riser, which I'd photographed myself that afternoon, still reading zero, and had decided that a woman with thirty-one years in Field Services knew perfectly well what a closed curb stop did to a sprinkler system.
"She knew," Amsel said. "That's the whole case, really. She's the one person in this county who can't say she didn't know."
The Piñon Draw Homeowners Association held an emergency meeting on the third Thursday in August. The clubhouse was full this time. There were people standing along the back wall under the WaterWise Community certificate, which was still hanging there in its gold frame, until somebody took it down partway through the meeting and set it face-down on the snack table, and nobody said anything about that either. Prue Kestler, the treasurer, sat in the middle of the long table where Georgine used to sit, looking as if she might be sick. She read a letter Georgine had sent the board. It was one paragraph. It said that she resigned as president and as a director of the association, effective immediately, that she had acted entirely on her own and without the knowledge of any other board member or any employee of the association, and that she would personally reimburse the association for any costs it incurred as a result of her actions. It was signed in blue ink. Prue read it twice, because the first time her voice went out halfway.
Then the meeting turned into what those meetings always turn into, which is everybody saying what they think. Some people were furious. A man named Duckworth, from Sagebrush Circle, said she ought to go to prison and that he'd be checking his own meter tonight, and a few people clapped. A woman with a baby on her hip said she couldn't stop thinking about the sprinkler gauge, that her house had one too, that she'd never even known what it was for. Somebody asked whether the association was liable to me. Somebody asked whether the association was liable to the bank. Somebody asked whether the association had to give the district back the certificate.
But some people stood up for her, too, and that surprised me more than it should have. A man who'd lived there since the first phase was built said that when his wife had her stroke, Georgine had driven her to physical therapy twice a week for four months and never once let him pay for gas. A woman said Georgine had found the leak under her slab in 2017 by putting her ear on the kitchen floor. And then Octave Thibodeau stood up in the back, in a pressed shirt and a bolo tie, and said that he wasn't going to defend what she'd done, because what she'd done was wrong, and it had hurt a child, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. But he wanted everybody to know, since everybody seemed to be guessing, about the buckets.
"Two summers ago," he said, "after the district restricted the Green, I used to see her from my kitchen window at five in the morning. Every morning. She'd park her car on the boulevard with the trunk open, and she'd have eight or ten of those orange buckets in it, the five-gallon kind, and she'd fill them in her own kitchen the night before and drive them over and carry them out to that tree one at a time, two at a time when she could manage it, and pour them out at the drip line in a circle, the way you're supposed to. Sixty-five years old. She did that every day for two months, until she hurt her back so bad she couldn't lift her arms over her head. I offered to help her. She said no. She said Rutger's ashes were in the root ball and she wasn't going to let anybody else water him." He stopped for a second. "I'm not saying it makes any difference. I don't think it does. I'm just saying that's what it was. It wasn't the grass. She didn't care about the grass. It was the tree."
He sat down. Nobody clapped. The woman with the baby wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.