He had known my family for 30 years. He had attended my mother Henrika's funeral in 2015. He drove out in his cruiser on the afternoon of the 16th. He walked the irrigation route with me. He looked at the meter readings.
He scratched the back of his head. he said in his slow Iowa Dutch draw. Edmund, either your meter is lying to you or somebody is taking water you cannot see. I will get my deputy to walk the south fence line with a soil moisture probe Monday morning. We will find it. 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, no vegetation change had given it away in 3 years. Between the deputy's walk-through 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 De Mo Water Works the particular habit of laying out flow data on a hand-drawn timeline.
I drew the 4-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 4-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 7 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 die 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.