Those remarks hurt more than I expected. I was not looking for sympathy, but I had spent my adult life selling fruit to families who lived in the valley. I knew the names of customers who came to our farm store every August, and I had donated peaches to school events, church kitchens, and fundraisers without once asking whether the recipients lived in a subdivision or on a farm. The idea that I had deliberately manufactured a water emergency to squeeze money from my neighbors was both absurd and exhausting.
Rachel told me not to answer every insult. "The people who want to understand will find the documents," she said. "The people who only want to be angry won't be persuaded by a longer argument."
I tried to follow that advice. When a visitor asked about the case, I explained that our lateral had been tapped without our permission and that the connection was now disconnected. If they asked about money, I told them I had not sold or been paid for any part of the irrigation delivery. I did not tell them Denise was going to prison, because nobody knew that, including the prosecutor. I did not say that eighty-six families had stolen my water, because eighty-six families had not.
At the farm store one afternoon, a teenage boy wearing a Canyon Lake Estates soccer shirt asked if it was true we were trying to drain the lake. His mother hovered behind him, embarrassed.
"No," I told him. "I'm trying to keep water going to these trees. The lake can use water that belongs to it. It just can't use mine without asking and paying through the right process."
The boy considered that. "So you don't hate our neighborhood?"
"I don't hate anybody's neighborhood. I would like people to stop putting pipes in my ditch."
He smiled, and his mother bought a bag of peaches. That conversation steadied me more than the furious messages had unsettled me. It was possible to separate the people who benefited from a decision from the person who made the decision. The distinction would matter when the case reached court.
As the evidence accumulated, Cole Ramsay kept checking details that other people wanted to treat as obvious. He interviewed the landscapers who had been standing with Denise when I arrived at the lake. One said he had been assigned to monitor the discharge and waterline, not to operate the valve. The other remembered Denise telling him that the orchard owner had finally agreed to a discount because the HOA had committed to a larger landscaping project with the same contractor.
Neither had seen me sign a document. Neither had spoken to me about water. Their statements did not prove the transfer was forged, but they showed that the story of my consent had been passed through the work crew as an accepted fact instead of verified at its source.