The well casing has a small bronze plaque set into the concrete at the wellhead that my grandfather had made in 1925 with a Dutch monogram of his initials, HB, and the date. Below the monogram are eight Dutch words my grandfather had asked the foundry to set: Water is het leven van de boerderij—"Water is the life of the farm."
I read the plaque every morning when I check the wellhouse gauge. I have not gone a single morning since 2016 without reading it. The plaque is the first thing I learned to read in Dutch. It is also the last thing my mother said to me at the hospital before she passed in 2015. She did not say it as a sentence; she said it as a trust: "Water is the life of the farm, Edmund. Take care of it."
I have. I will.
Windmill Crossing Estates was built across the south fence line in 2010 on what had been the Ypma Dairy Farm: thirty-eight homes on lots between half an acre and two acres around a small central green with a decorative wooden windmill—a Pella reference no resident from outside Iowa would have understood. The development had been quiet through the 2010s.
Berkeley Markham Stratton moved into lot 14—the largest pad, 3,000 square feet on the south-facing slope—in March of 2018 with her husband, Wesley Stratton, a recently retired Pella Corporation marketing executive. They had paid $840,000 cash. Wesley was fifty-one at the time, retired with a generous pension. Berkeley was thirty-nine. She had been a magazine writer for a regional gardening publication out of Cedar Rapids. She quit the magazine the year they moved to Pella. She decided to become, by her own description in her HOA welcome biography, a "competitive heritage flower grower with a focus on rare Dutch tulip varieties."
I want to describe Berkeley as Pella came to know her, because Pella is a particular kind of small town and Berkeley was a particular kind of newcomer. Pella is a Dutch heritage town of just under 11,000 people. The Dutch families who founded it in 1847—the De Cook family, the Scholte family, the Bokhoven family—still have descendants who hold an annual reunion at the Pella Historical Village. The town runs on a slow Dutch courtesy that an outsider can mistake for warmth. Berkeley mistook it for warmth.
She arrived in 2018 with the marketing-magazine confidence of a woman who had decided before she ever moved that she was going to be a Pella celebrity. She wore yellow rain boots to the Tulip Time parade. She brought a tape measure to a Pella Garden Club potluck and measured another woman's hydrangea. She referred to the Pella Historical Village curator, Anke Vermeer, as "the museum lady." She drove a black BMW X5 with a vanity plate that read TULIP QN. She wrote a 2019 letter to the Des Moines Register editorial page suggesting that the Pella Tulip Time Festival should adopt "professional-grade competition standards" because the existing standards favored "sentimental local growers over serious horticultural talent." The letter was signed Berkeley Markham Stratton.
Anke Vermeer had cut the letter out and framed it in her office. The frame still hangs there. Anke has shown it to many people. She told me the day she gave me the founding member pin: "Edmund, we knew in 2019 that she would not last. We were waiting on her to do it to herself. We did not know she would do it through your well."
Berkeley got herself elected HOA board president in October of 2020 by a vote of 22 to 15. She had run on a platform of "Pella aesthetic excellence and community garden representation at Tulip Time." She had won because the previous president had moved to Florida and the alternative candidate was Theron Vermeer's older sister, Saskia, who had declined the seat.
Berkeley won her first Pella Tulip Time Grand Champion ribbon in 2021. The category was Single Variety Display: Heritage. She had grown a 30-by-30 bed of a rare Dutch breeder tulip called Semper Augustus, a tulip that had not been seen in cultivation, by some accounts, since the 1630s. The Pella Garden Club had been astonished. The local Des Moines Register had run a feature.
Berkeley had won Grand Champion again in 2022, this time for a mixed Parrot tulip border. She had won in 2023 for a Triumph-class display. By the spring of 2024, she was the most decorated amateur tulip grower in the state of Iowa. She had announced in February of 2024 that she would be entering the Tulip Time 16,000-Tulips Garden of Honor—a single integrated display planted on her own property and judged the first Saturday of Tulip Time in May: 16,000 bulbs, four years of cultivation, the headline event of the festival.
Berkeley's cultivation techniques became a small subject of speculation in the Pella Garden Club between 2021 and 2023. Three-time Grand Champion was a rare achievement at Tulip Time. The previous record had been held by a dairy farmer's wife from Knoxville named Marrit Halvorson, who had won twice in the 1990s. Berkeley had beaten the record in her second consecutive season. Her public explanation had been "soil amendment innovation and high-frequency, low-volume irrigation." She had given a half-hour talk at the 2023 Iowa State Garden Conference on her irrigation regimen. The talk had not mentioned, of course, that the high-frequency, low-volume irrigation was being delivered through a buried, unauthorized PVC line from her neighbor's well.
The Pella Garden Club newsletter had run a feature on her in March of 2024 titled "The Berkeley Method: A Closer Look at a Champion's Discipline." The newsletter had used 471 words of column space to praise her water management. The newsletter editor, a 70-year-old Pella native named Aaltje Beemster—no relation to Marrit Beemster, the tour committee chair, just another Pella surname overlap—would later write a personal letter of apology to me after the case closed. She had written: Edmund, I should have asked her where the water came from. I did not. I will not make that mistake again. Thank you for telling the truth in a quiet way that the rest of us were not strong enough to demand on our own. I framed the letter; it hangs in the wellhouse, too.
I started noticing the irrigation meter readings climb in the late summer of 2022. The increase had been small at first: 6% over the comparable July from the previous year. I had not thought much of it; I had assumed I had not adjusted the drip lines for the new dahlia rows. By July of 2023, the increase had been 13%. By July of 2024, it was 18%.
The water bills were not the issue—my well water cost me nothing. But the flow rates concerned me. Wastewater engineers are particular about flow rates. Flow rates that drift upward without a corresponding agricultural justification are, in our trade, a sign of either a measurement error or a leak.
I checked the meter calibrations in March of 2024; they were correct. I walked the irrigation lines with a hand sensor on the second weekend of April; I found no leaks. The trunk line was holding pressure overnight at 112 PSI without dropping more than 2 PSI between midnight and 6:00 a.m.—within normal tolerance for a properly installed system. There was no leak.
I called the Marion County Sheriff's Office on the 14th of April. I asked Sheriff Aldrich Vandermeer to come out for a non-urgent water meter consultation. Aldrich had been the Marion County Sheriff since 2014. He had known my family for thirty years. He had attended my mother Hendrika's funeral in 2015.
He drove out in his cruiser on the afternoon of the 16th. He walked the irrigation route with me. He looked at the meter readings. He scratched the back of his head. "Well," he said in his slow Iowa Dutch drawl, "Edmund, either your meter is lying to you or somebody is taking water you cannot see. I will get my deputy to walk the south fence line with a soil moisture probe Monday morning. We will find it."