I told him I planned to add a second round of fluorescein dye and approximately 50 pounds of solar salt to the main irrigation trunk over the next 48 hours.
He said, "Edmund, you have no duty to maintain a particular water quality for a thief. I do not see how that is anything other than your own decision about your own water. Document it for the case file."
I asked Freddy. She said, "Dad, Iowa law on this is settled. A property owner has no duty of preservation towards stolen property. The thief took the water in its raw state; whatever state you put your water in afterward is your business, not theirs. Add what you want to add. Just write it down."
I wrote it down.
Sheriff Vandermeer asked me, with Freddy present at my kitchen table, whether the salt dose was strictly necessary for the case. I told him that strictly for the case, it was not. I told him that strictly for the practical protection of my well from further unauthorized draw during the investigative window, it was. I told him that strictly for the principle that a man should be allowed to defend his own well from a thief who had been taking from it for three straight years, it was.
Aldrich looked at me for a long moment. "Well," he said in his Dutch Iowa drawl, "Edmund, I am not the man to tell another Pella farmer how to season his own well. You are not breaking a law. You are not putting it into any water that belongs to another person. Whatever happens to her tulips happens to her because she had no business pulling on your line. Do what you are going to do. I will not stop you." He stood up. He thanked Dot for the coffee. He left.
I added 53 pounds of granulated solar salt to the main trunk over the following 46 hours through a calibrated dosing valve I had originally installed for fertigation in 2018. I also added another four ounces of fluorescein concentrate to maintain the color marker. The salt concentration in the trunk line reached approximately 4,000 parts per million by Monday morning—well above the tolerance of any tulip cultivar and effectively lethal to bulb crops.
I did not adjust the salt level back down. The salt was, by the standards of the wastewater engineer I had been for 28 years, a perfectly reasonable thing to put in my own water. Iowa law agreed.
Berkeley's Garden of Honor, by the morning of Tuesday the 30th of April, was a fluorescent blue field of dying tulips. By Thursday, it was a Caribbean blue field of brown leaves and shriveled stems. By Saturday—the opening day of Pella Tulip Time and the scheduled judging day for the Garden of Honor—the 16,000 bulbs were a single contiguous patch of necrotic tissue and bright blue stems.
The Tulip Time judging committee, having been informed by Sheriff Vandermeer on the Tuesday of the criminal investigation, had withdrawn the Garden of Honor from the festival on Wednesday morning. The placard at the Garden of Honor for the Saturday tour bus read, in the committee's own careful Dutch lettering: Temporarily unavailable by request of Marion County Sheriff.
In the four days between the dye Saturday and the arrest Sunday, the Pella community moved through the story in its own slow Dutch rhythm. The Tuesday Pella Garden Club meeting at the Lutheran Fellowship Hall had 83 attendees against a typical 30. The meeting did not include Berkeley. The meeting consisted, by attendee accounts later, of forty minutes of quiet conversation and twenty minutes of slow, rolling silence while members processed what they had been pretending not to see for three growing seasons.
Aaltje Beemster, the newsletter editor, stood at the end of the meeting and apologized to the room on behalf of the newsletter. Three members cried. The minutes were transcribed by the secretary in pencil and have since been donated to the Pella Historical Village archive at Anke Vermeer's request. The minutes will be available to researchers in 2074; Anke had made the 50-year seal herself. Anke said when she filed the minutes: "Some town stories need to age. This one needs fifty years."
I had asked her why. She had said, "Because in fifty years, a young Pella historian will read it and say, 'Why did it take three years to catch a thief?' And the answer they will find in the minutes is, 'Because Pella was being polite.' And the young historian will write a better town than the one we are."
Berkeley was arrested at her front door at 1:53 p.m. on Sunday, the 5th of May. The charges had been formally filed by Marion County District Attorney Annika Becker—Deputy Hilda's older sister, just a Pella coincidence of surnames—at 8:30 Sunday morning:
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Theft in the first degree under Iowa Code Section 714.2.
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Conspiracy to commit theft under Iowa Code Section 706.1.
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Unauthorized connection to a private water source under Iowa Department of Natural Resources Chapter 567 regulations.
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Forgery of a public document. (Berkeley had been billing the Windmill Crossing Estates HOA $1,700 a month for "Professional Water Conservation Consulting" through her LLC for 31 months, totaling $52,700 in embezzled funds.)
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Plus eight lesser counts.
Casper Markham was arrested in Cedar Rapids the same afternoon on the conspiracy count.
Berkeley's husband, Wesley Stratton, was not arrested. He had not known about the unauthorized line. He had not known about the HOA embezzlement. He had not known about most of his wife's tulip cultivation operation. He had spent the past four years on the road consulting for Pella Corporation on a contract basis and had been home approximately every other weekend. He filed for divorce on the 12th of May. The divorce was uncontested. He moved to West Des Moines on the 22nd.
The criminal cases ran through the summer. Casper Markham took a plea on the 17th of June: six months in Marion County Jail, three years probation, restitution of $4,000 to me, and written cooperation in the case against Berkeley. He served his sentence on weekends, the way Iowa allows for working defendants with no prior record. He returned to Cedar Rapids in the fall. He sent me a handwritten letter the week before his sentence began. The letter said, in part: Mr. Brinkmeer, I should have asked more questions in 2021. I am sorry. I will not take unverified work from family again. I wrote him back; I told him I had accepted his apology, and I told him I wished him a good fall. I have not heard from him since; I do not need to.