Donna Pruitt had accused him of theft, and so theft, at least, could be settled by arithmetic.
The power company sent an auditor named Weiss, a heavy, unhurried man with a tablet and a thermal camera, who arrived three days after the deputies' visit with Sergeant Delgado in attendance and Donna watching from her own porch, arms folded, a plaintiff in posture. Amos unlocked both gates and stood aside. It was the fastest audit of Weiss's career, he said later, because there was nothing to find. Every wire on Amos's lot ran where wires are supposed to run. His meter had never been bypassed, bridged, tapped, or even leaned on. The pump circuit was a plain, permitted-in-1987 circuit off his own panel, installed by an electrician whose sticker still yellowed on the panel door.
"You're not stealing power, Mr. Keller," Weiss said, in the driveway, loud enough for the porch at No. 9 to hear every word. "What you are is a man with a load. That pump of yours, and the little one, and the tank heater in winter β you're buying about nine hundred kilowatt-hours a month extra, every month, going back as far as our smart records go. That's three, four hundred dollars a month, some months. For sixteen years." He did the sum on the tablet with his thumb, slowly, not quite believing the figure. "You've spent a used house keeping that thing running."
"I know what I've spent," Amos said. "I've got the bills."
"All of them?"
"All of them," Amos said. "They're in the shed. In the books."
Donna came down off her porch then, because she was not, whatever else was true of her, a coward. She stood at the fence with her hands flat on the top rail and she said, to Amos and not to the auditor, "Then I was wrong. About the electric." It cost her something; he could see it cost her something, and he nodded once, because a man who had been wronged by two sentences of certified mail knew the weight of an admission.
"About the electric," she repeated, and then she stopped, and the quiet that followed was hers β a new kind of quiet for Donna Pruitt, who had an opinion on every hedge on Larkspur Court. She looked at the shed, where the rig ticked on, indifferent to being audited. "But something runs all night in that shed, Amos Keller. I wasn't wrong about that. Nobody's wrong about that. I've listened to it for six years."
"You weren't wrong about that," Amos said.
It was Weiss, in the end, who moved the matter out of the yard and into the world, because audits generate paperwork, and paperwork asks questions in duplicate. His report form had a field, mandatory in cases of anomalous continuous load, labeled SOURCE OF LOAD β EXPLAIN, and Weiss, an honest man with a stylus, wrote what Amos told him, Amos being past the point of new lies: an unlicensed pump installation drawing down a subsurface shaft at a residential address, operator's estimate forty feet deep, contents unknown, running since 2009. Weiss read it back. Amos said it was correct. Weiss filed it from the truck, and a copy went, automatically, to the county engineer's office β the same office whose two-sentence letter Amos kept folded in the first logbook like a pressed flower.
Delgado, reading the report that evening at the station, read the SOURCE OF LOAD field three times. Then he did what Amos, in sixteen years of letters, had never gotten any office to do. He picked up the telephone, and he called the county engineer directly, and he said that there was an address on Larkspur Court where the sheriff's office had physically observed a capped industrial shaft, pumps, gauges, and handwritten logs going back to 1985, and that he would consider it a professional courtesy if the county's next communication on the subject were not two sentences long.
The inspection was scheduled for the following Tuesday morning. A real one: a county engineer, a geologist, two technicians, a camera rig for the shaft.
Donna heard about it from the auditor's office, because Donna heard about everything. She did not call Amos. She did not come to the fence. But on the Monday evening before the inspection, Ruth's rosebush by Amos's gate β the one that had outlived Ruth by six years and bloomed, most Junes, like it was showing off β received, sometime between dusk and dark, a careful, thorough watering that Amos had not given it, and a small hand-lettered sign on a popsicle stick, of the kind Donna used for her tomato rows, was stuck in the fresh mulch.
He picked the sign up and read it by the porch light. It did not say she was sorry, because Donna was not yet the kind of woman who could write that down. It said, in her schoolteacher's capitals: THIS ONE IS MINE TO WATER NOW.
Chapter 11: The Inspector