Dot had read a Marilyn Robinson novel. Freddy had reviewed contract drafts on her laptop. I had sat with the meter log and watched the trunk line pressure on a small monitor I had set up on the porch rail. The pressure had dropped on schedule by exactly the same fraction it had dropped every night for 3 years. 2 and 1/10th PSI between midnight and 3:00 a.m. confirming that the unauthorized line was still pulling.
The thief was, as she had been every night for 3 years, drawing my well water for her own bulbs, I had whispered more to the porch rail than to Dod. She is taking it right now while we sit here. Dot had looked up from her novel. She had said, "Edmund, by morning her field will tell on her. " It did. Saturday morning at 5:30 a.m.
First light over the Yost Bottoms. Berkeley Markham Stratton's 16,000 tulip Garden of Honor lit up the South Slope like a swimming pool. The tulips were Caribbean blue. The leaves were Caribbean blue. The water draining off the slope into the decorative central pond on Windmill Crossing's green was Caribbean blue.
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 and the garden club members and the driver of the bus stood at the road for 40 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 up wind on a windless April Saturday, was made of poured concrete, had no chimney, and had not produced any visible emission in 26 years of operation. The Facebook post was screenshotted by, among others, a Pella High School junior named Pim Kulvic, 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 Brinkmeyer 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 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 Brinkmeyer in full. She used the words agricultural terrorism. Pim Kulvic screenshotted that post, too. Pim is a careful young man.