I folded the letter neatly, placed it in the document box with everything else, and made one final call to Claire. Then I ate dinner alone.
Friday night, October 11th. Grilled salmon. I watched the reservoir through the window. The water was calm and dark, reflecting the first stars of evening. The stage lights on the eastern shore glowed faintly, and I could hear someone testing the PA system. A man's voice echoed across the water: "Check, one, two. Check, one, two."
I washed my dishes, dried them, set them in the cabinet the way Uncle Vernon always did. Plates on the left, bowls on the right, mugs hanging from hooks he'd installed in 1974. Some habits you inherit without realizing it.
I pulled on my work boots, laced them tight, grabbed my headlamp, and walked down to the embankment. The path was familiar, even in darkness. I'd walked it a hundred times as a kid, following Uncle Vernon's flashlight beam through the trees, learning the shape of the land by feel. The night air smelled like damp earth and approaching autumn. Crickets pulsed in the tree line.
The overflow channel was exactly where it had always been, a stone-lined channel on the western side of the embankment, half hidden by wild fern and old growth. I cleared the valve housing cover, set my headlamp to red light, and put my hand on the handle.
I didn't hesitate. I'd done the calculations. I'd filed the notifications. I'd documented everything. The DEQ had my letter on file. Claire Donahue had confirmed the legality four separate times. The downstream flow was safe.
I turned the valve.
The sound was low at first, a deep, resonant gurgle, like something enormous swallowing. Then it grew—a steady, muscular rush of water pouring through the fourteen-inch culvert and out into the old Cedar Branch streambed. I could feel the vibration through the soles of my boots.
I stood there for maybe fifteen minutes, listening to sixty years of impounded water begin finding its way back downhill. The moon was half full, and in its light, I could see the surface of the reservoir beginning to shift. A slow, barely perceptible lowering, like someone had pulled the plug on the world's biggest bathtub.
The eastern shore, where Margaret's stage and banner waited, was still a half mile away. By morning, it would be the edge of a mudflat.
I looked up at the sky. Orion was just starting to rise over the eastern ridge. Uncle Vernon taught me to find it when I was nine years old, standing in this exact spot. "That's the hunter. He's patient. He waits all year, then shows up right when you need him."
I turned off my headlamp, walked back up to the cottage in the dark, set my alarm for 7:00 a.m., and slept better than I had in months.
I woke at dawn and looked out the window. The reservoir was gone.
Where fifteen acres of blue water had shimmered the day before, there was now a vast, gently sloping basin of gray-brown mud. The exposed reservoir bed stretched out like a lunar landscape, cracked in places, slick in others, dotted with shallow puddles where the last water still gathered in low spots. A few fish flopped weakly near the old creek channel.
The pier that Margaret's crew had started to build jutted into nothing, its pilings standing in open air like the ribs of something dead. The stage on the eastern shore still sat undisturbed. The Edison bulbs still hung from their poles. The banner still read, "Welcome to Meadowbrook Heights Waterfront."
But there was no waterfront. Just an enormous, stinking mudflat where a reservoir used to be.
I made coffee, sat on the porch, and waited.
By 9:00 a.m., the first cars started arriving. Families in SUVs, couples in trucks, kids in back seats with towels and inflatable toys. They parked along the road that ran past the eastern boundary and walked toward the shore.
And then, they stopped. One by one, like dominoes in reverse, they stopped walking and just stared.
The whispers started before Margaret even arrived. "Where's the water?" "Is this a joke?" "Did it dry up?"