The Pella Garden Club's bus, which had been scheduled to drive past the Garden of Honor at 6:15 as part of a pre-Tulip Time tour for visiting Dutch festival officials, drove past at 6:18. The bus stopped. The Dutch festival officials, the garden club members, and the driver of the bus stood at the road for forty minutes photographing what they had seen. Two of them filed local news tips.
By 8:00 a.m., the Des Moines Register had a photographer on the scene.
By 9:00 a.m., Berkeley was on Facebook claiming the discoloration was "atmospheric pollution drifting in from the corn elevator"—a corn elevator that was three miles upwind on a windless April Saturday, was made of poured concrete, had no chimney, and had not produced any visible emission in twenty-six years of operation.
The Facebook post was screenshotted by, among others, a Pella High School junior named Pim Koolwijk, whose mother had been in Freddy's third-grade class. Pim sent the screenshot to his mother. His mother forwarded it to Freddy. Freddy added it to a folder she had labeled in her firm's case management system: Brinkmeer Water Theft Exhibits.
By 11:00 a.m. Saturday, the story had been picked up by the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Quad-City Times, and a national gardening website out of Connecticut. By noon, a local television crew from KCCI Channel 8 in Des Moines had parked at the corner of the Windmill Crossing access road and was filming the blue field with a long telephoto lens.
By 1:00 p.m., Berkeley had deleted her Facebook post and replaced it with a longer post claiming the discoloration was the result of "a deliberate poisoning of the Pella water supply by a hostile neighbor." She named me. She wrote the name Edmund Brinkmeer in full. She used the words "agro-terrorism."
Pim Koolwijk screenshotted that post, too. Pim is a careful young man; he has, by his own count, screenshotted seventeen of Berkeley's public posts in the months since. The screenshots have been useful. The defamation case will be a separate matter the following year; Freddy has not pressed it yet. She is waiting.
I drove the Gator to the south fence line at 10:15 a.m. I walked along my fence to the southeast corner. I stood at the exact corner where the buried line would later be uncovered. I looked across the 8-foot HOA buffer strip onto Berkeley's property. I could see, at the back of her garden infrastructure, a small concrete utility box she had installed in 2021. The box had no markings. The box was, I would soon learn, the destination of three years of stolen water.
I drove back to the house.
Sheriff Vandermeer pulled into my driveway at 10:31. He had seen the Des Moines Register's photographs on his phone. He had driven straight from his office.
He stood in my kitchen with a cup of coffee. He said, "Edmund, get me the dye chain-of-custody record from Freddy. Get me your meter logs for the past four years. I am going to the Stratton property with a search warrant by lunch. The dye is in her tulips. The dye came from your well. The arithmetic does not require imagination."
He served the warrant at 2:15 p.m.
The unauthorized line—312 feet of 2-inch buried PVC running 36 inches deep from the southeast corner of my irrigation trunk under the HOA buffer strip to a tap at the back of Berkeley's utility box—was located by a Pella Public Works ground-penetrating radar crew the sheriff had borrowed for the afternoon.
The line had been installed by Berkeley's brother-in-law, Casper Markham, a Cedar Rapids plumber who had retired in 2019. Casper had charged Berkeley $4,000 for the installation. The work had been completed across two weekends in the summer of 2021 under cover of routine landscape construction Berkeley had told the HOA was a "perennial bed expansion."
The line had been pumping approximately 210 gallons a night for 1,041 consecutive nights by the time it was discovered. Total stolen water volume: 218,610 gallons. At the City of Pella municipal rate of six cents per gallon, the theft was worth $13,116.60. Under Iowa Code Section 714.2, theft over $10,000 is a Class C felony.
I want to be clear about what I did next, because Freddy had me write down every step in advance and run it past her for legal review.
After the sheriff served the warrant and confirmed the unauthorized line, I told him I intended to make my well water unusable for any unauthorized recipient.
He looked at me. He said, "Edmund, it is your water."