I will not take unverified work from family again. " I wrote him back. I told him I had accepted his apology. I told him I wished him a good fall. I have not heard from him since. I do not need to.
In the weeks between Casper's plea and Berkeley's, the Windmill Crossing Estates HOA reorganized itself. A retired Pella school teacher named Saskia Vermuan, Theren's older sister, the one who had declined the presidency in 2020, accepted the interim presidency on the 29th of May. She walked the development door to door for 9 days in early June with a clipboard, listening to each household's concerns and explaining what the new board would do differently. She was 68. She had taught Pella Elementary School for 33 years.
She had her father's careful Dutch demeanor and her mother's quiet, stubborn streak. Within 3 weeks, Saskia had restructured the HOA bookkeeping under independent third-party review, eliminated the executive director role. Berkeley had created for herself and instituted a quarterly open records review for any homeowner who wanted to walk in and read the books. The windmill crossing residents who had voted Berkeley in voted Saskia informally on the 17th of July by a count of 35-2. The two were Berkeley's adjacent neighbors who had voted no on principle because Saskia was Theren's sister and Theren was in their view too friendly with the farmer.
Saskia drove to my farm the day after the vote with a casserole and Theren in the passenger seat. She sat at my kitchen table for 2 hours. She apologized for the HOA's three-year complicity in silence. She and Dorothia have been close friends since. Berkeley took a no contest plea on the 18th of July.
4 years in Iowa state custody, 3 years probation, restitution of $217,000, the stolen water value calculated at three times the municipal rate, a treble damages award under Iowa civil theft statute, the HOA embezzlement, the investigation costs, my dye and salt costs and my attorneys fees. A permanent ban from serving on any Iowa community board. A permanent ban from competing at Pella Tulip Time. She reported to the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville on the 2nd of September. She has not made a public statement since the plea hearing.
The Pella Garden Club expelled Berkeley by unanimous vote on the 8th of June. The Tulip Time Committee revoked her three prior grand champion ribbons in a public ceremony on the 15th of June. The 2021, 2022, and 2023 ribbons were taken down from the wall of honor at the Pella Historical Village Museum and replaced with a single small placard reading withdrawn by disqualification. The committee, in an internal investigation that ran through July, determined that Berkeley's three prior grand champion displays had all benefited from the same stolen water. The committee did not reassign the prior ribbons.
They simply marked them void. The Pella Historical Village curator, a 41-year-old Dutch Iowan named Anka Vermuan, Theren's wife, gave me a small bronze pin at a quiet ceremony the second weekend of June. The pin was the pin the committee gave to its founding members in 1935. Anka told me when she pinned it to my work jacket, "Edmund, Pella has wanted to give you this since 2021. We just didn't know. " The Brinkmeyer farm became, by the Saturday of Tulip Time, an alternate destination on the festival's official tour bus route.