“That tap is my house’s water.”
“Then your house used two million gallons while your garden hose lay in the mulch.”
She folded the towel once, the way she folds everything, and put it over her shoulder. “My basement flooded,” she said. “All spring. The sump couldn’t keep up, so I ran a hose and pumped it out. That isn’t a crime. That’s a wet basement.”
“Into the garden’s tap.”
“To take water off my foundation. Yes.”
I stepped back off the top step, and the grate under her dining room window breathed up at me. Warm air. Warm and wet and chemical, the way the lobby of the rec center on Third smelled when we took the kids swimming.
“You’re pumping your basement,” I said, “and it smells like a pool.”
“I shock the sump. It gets algae.”
“Groundwater gets algae.”
“Don’t stand on my steps and interrogate me.” She shut the door, not hard, which was worse than hard.
Tuesday was recycling, and her bin went out to the curb the night before, because the truck comes at nine. I lifted the lid on my way past. On top of the newspapers sat a blue pleated cartridge, still damp, and under it a flattened box.
Norwood Pools & Spas. Filter service. 42 Rowan.
I wrote the tag number on the back of my hand with a pen from my purse and put the lid down. In nine years I had never once gone through her trash. I am not going to pretend it felt like nothing.
Norwood’s office opened at eight. I told the woman who answered the truth, that there was a water dispute at 42 Rowan involving a pool, and asked her to confirm the installation date for me in writing. She said she would have to pull the file.
At eleven she sent it, and I read it standing up in my kitchen.
Work order 4471. Install April 18. Basement lap pool, 6,900 gallons, auto-fill valve on a 3/4-inch supply, quarterly filter service. Customer declined return-line leak inspection at time of install.
Declined. In April. A month before the meter started stacking up three-hundred-gallon clicks in the dark.
I forwarded the whole thing to Curtis Hale and called him, and he was quiet for so long I checked the phone.
“Her pool leaks,” he said finally. “That’s the shape of it. It drains into the basement, she pumps the basement out to the alley, and the fill valve puts the water back. On your meter, on your account, every night since the last week of May.”
“Why at night?”
“Because that block loses pressure after eleven. Her house water sags to nothing, so the fill valve would starve. Your garden line holds. She found the one pipe on Rowan Street that still had something in it at two in the morning.”
I sat down on the floor of my own kitchen with my back against the cabinet.
“Can you prove the tap feeds the pool?”
“I can prove it Wednesday,” he said. “I have an inspector and I have dye.”
Wednesday at nine we stood in the alley, Curtis in a polo shirt with his badge clipped to it and a woman from the city named Ruiz with a case folder and a camera. Curtis had the crew open the curb valve, and the garden’s line came back to life with a knock I felt in my teeth. Ruiz put a bottle of green dye into the tap’s splitter, both ends, and taped a bag over it.
Then we waited in the heat, twenty minutes, not talking. I looked at my shoes a lot. It is a strange thing, waiting to find out whether you have been crazy.
At twenty minutes Ruiz knocked on the front door. Verona answered in a housedress, and when Ruiz told her the city was inspecting a cross-connection and that entry was not optional, Verona looked at me over the inspector’s shoulder and said nothing at all. That silence is the only apology I ever got.
