The deputy, a young woman named Hilda Becker, walked the south fence on the 22nd. She found nothing on the surface. The unauthorized line, I would later learn, was buried 36 inches below the field, well below frost depth, and ran from the southeast corner of my property line across the 8-foot HOA buffer strip into the back of Berkeley Markham Stratton's irrigation infrastructure on lot 14. The line was buried so deep and so cleanly that no surface moisture, no settling of soil, and no vegetation change had given it away in three years.
Between the deputy's walk-along and the call to Freddy, I spent two evenings on my back porch with the meter logs and a yellow legal pad. I had brought home from 28 years at Des Moines Water Works the particular habit of laying out flow data on a hand-drawn timeline. I drew the four-year timeline by hand. I marked every weekend Berkeley had been documented at a public event: the Tulip Time judging weekends, the Pella Garden Club potlucks, the Iowa State Fair Flower Class judgings. I marked every period when my readings had spiked.
The two timelines did not align with her public events. They aligned with the calendar of her private bulb cultivation cycle: late October bulb planting, March bulb watering, April pre-bloom irrigation. The unauthorized draw had been most intense in the four-week window of late April every year. That was the window of pre-festival, pre-bloom watering.
The cycle was unmistakable: I was looking at a thief who had a horticultural calendar.
I called Freddy that night. I told her in seven minutes what I had been seeing. She listened the way she listens to clients: quietly, taking small notes on a yellow legal pad I knew she had pulled from her bag the moment I called.
She said at the end, "Dad, I want you to run a fluorescein dye trace tomorrow night. I will drive up Friday morning with a 5-gallon jug of food-grade tracer dye from the Iowa Geological Survey field office. We will inject it on Friday at 6:00 p.m. If your water is going somewhere it should not be going, the dye will tell us by Saturday morning. The dye is fluorescein sodium. It is FDA-approved for human consumption at the concentrations we will use. It is the standard tracer for water source investigations across the upper Midwest. We are not breaking a law. We are not damaging a thing that belongs to anyone else. We are tracing our own water. Are you ready?"
I told her I had been ready for two years.
Between the phone call and the Friday injection, I prepared the wellhouse the way Freddy had asked me to. I cleaned the trunk line manifold of any sediment. I calibrated the chemical dosing valve. I tested the backup hand pump. I made up a written chain-of-custody protocol with timestamps, signatures, and serial numbers for every container that would touch the system. Dot photographed every step on her phone. Freddy had told me that any future criminal case would turn on the cleanness of the dye injection record.
I spent the two days the way I had spent thirty years of Water Works incident response work: slow, careful, redundant—the way you prepare a system when you know somebody else's lawyer is going to look at every line of the record. By Thursday night, the protocol was eight pages long. Freddy reviewed it by email Thursday at midnight; she approved it with a one-word reply: Excellent.
She drove up Friday morning. She brought the 5-gallon jug. She brought a handheld UV flashlight for fluorescein detection. She brought a clipboard with a tracer injection protocol from her old water rights professor at the Iowa Geological Survey. She brought Antje, who was excited to spend a weekend at the farm with her grandmother.
We injected the fluorescein into the main irrigation trunk line at 6:03 p.m. on the 26th of April. The injection was four ounces of concentrate diluted to a volume of two gallons, introduced through the main service tap with a hand pump I had designed in 2017. We sealed the tap. We waited.
Dot and I sat on the back porch from 8:00 p.m. Friday evening until 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, waiting for the first reports. Freddy sat with us until midnight, then went up to the guest room to sleep four hours. Antje was already asleep in her room.
The April night had been cool but clear: 51 degrees, no wind, a half-moon over the Christmas tree rows. We had drunk three pots of coffee. We had not spoken much. Dot had read a Marilynne Robinson novel. Freddy had reviewed contract drafts on her laptop. I had sat with the meter log and watched the trunk line pressure on a small monitor I had set up on the porch rail.
The pressure had dropped on schedule, by exactly the same fraction it had dropped every night for three years: 2.1 PSI between midnight and 3:00 a.m., confirming that the unauthorized line was still pulling. The thief was, as she had been every night for three years, drawing my well water for her own bulbs.
I had whispered, more to the porch rail than to Dot, "She is taking it right now while we sit here."
Dot had looked up from her novel. She had said, "Edmund, by morning her field will tell on her."
It did.
Saturday morning at 5:30 a.m., first light over the Ypma Bottoms: Berkeley Markham Stratton's 16,000-tulip Garden of Honor lit up the south slope like a swimming pool. The tulips were Caribbean blue. The leaves were Caribbean blue. The water draining off the slope into the decorative central pond on Windmill Crossing's green was Caribbean blue.