She found him beyond the lane, standing with his hat in his hands. "How bad?" she asked, stopping beside him. Warren pointed at the submerged rows and told her what the seed had cost, what the fertilizer had cost, and why there was no sensible reason for water to be moving this direction. Casey followed his finger toward the ditch, but her eyes caught something else first.
White birds stood in a ragged line where the new water met the old field, each one waiting perfectly still before darting forward. A pair of dark-winged birds circled the deeper water, and farther out a small flock settled on a narrow island of mud that had not been an island yesterday. Casey watched them for a moment, then looked toward the creek. "They found this fast," she said.
"The birds aren't my problem," Warren answered. He knew he sounded sharp, and he disliked himself for it, but his mind was already counting the days before the next payment. Casey handed him a cup of coffee and accepted the reply without turning it into an argument.
"I know," she said. "Show me where it came in."
They walked together to the widened channel, and Warren showed her the outlet from the safe side of the fence. Casey photographed the concrete, then crouched to photograph the ditch bank, the exposed soil, and the fresh tracks left by machinery. She asked whether he had older pictures of the same place. Warren said the family albums contained a thousand pictures nobody wanted to look at, and she told him that was the first useful thing he had said all morning.
He almost smiled. Casey had inherited Martha's talent for saying exactly what she meant with no interest in making the sentence decorative. She also possessed the patience to wait for an answer, a gift Warren had lacked when he was her age and still found difficult at seventy-four. They stood looking at the muddy water for another minute, each thinking of a different problem.
Casey was not a wetlands scientist. Her contract work had involved collecting stream measurements, entering field observations, and learning how difficult it was to turn a striking photograph into reliable information. She knew enough to suspect that the new water might change the low ground in ways beyond the loss of a crop. She also knew enough not to announce that suspicion to a man who was already imagining a foreclosure notice.
That evening, after Warren had walked the boundary a second time, Casey spread a county aerial photograph across the kitchen table. She had found an older version on a public mapping site, one showing the development tract before the trees were cleared. The original ditch curved gently away from the Puit boundary and connected to several shallow channels crossing the old scrubland. In the new image, the channel had been straightened and widened, and the outlet appeared to direct water along the most convenient route for the development rather than the route it had followed before.