Her property backed up directly to mine. My rear fence line—old cedar posts my grandfather set—was the boundary. On my side, five acres of honest, quiet country living. On her side, a quarter acre of manufactured luxury with an eighteen-thousand-gallon monument to narcissism sitting thirty-five feet from my fence. And twenty feet on my side of that fence was my rear outdoor spigot, the one connected to my well. That spigot was about to become the most important piece of plumbing in Nacogdoches County.
The first sign of trouble was my electricity bill. In May of my second year on the property, my bill jumped one hundred forty dollars. I assumed it was the shop—I’d been running the welder and the compressor more than usual. In June, it jumped again, one hundred sixty over baseline. In July, two hundred twelve above normal. Three months of climbing bills with no change in my routine. I’m a plumber. When something doesn’t make sense in a system, I trace it. I started with the well. My pump was a one-horsepower submersible set at one hundred fifty feet—normal duty cycle for a single-occupancy home, maybe twenty minutes of runtime per day. I put a data logger on the pump circuit. The results made me sit down. My pump was running three hours and forty minutes a day.
That’s not a leak. A leak at that rate would turn my yard into a swamp. Every joint, valve, and fixture in my house was tight. I’d replumbed the entire system myself when I moved in. No drips, no running toilets, no irrigation system, no pool, no sprinklers—nothing that would explain three hours and forty minutes of pump time. So I walked the property. Every spigot, every hose bib, every exposed line. Front of the house: dry, valve closed. East side: dry. West side: dry. Rear of the house: my rear spigot was open—not dripping open, a quarter turn on a ball valve I hadn’t touched in weeks. And connected to it was a green garden hose, a fifty-foot contractor-grade hose that I did not own.
I followed it. The hose ran from my spigot along the base of my house, through the grass, under my cedar fence through a gap where a bottom rail had rotted out, across thirty feet of Denise Caldwell’s immaculate Bermuda grass, behind her pool equipment pad, and into a brass Y-adapter connected to her pool’s autofill line. I stood there for a full minute. Just stood there looking at a hose running from my well to her pool, trying to process the reality that the most beautiful woman in Nacogdoches County was stealing my water to fill her vanity project.
