CHAPTER TWO — THE FOURTH HOUSE
By late afternoon, Rachel’s water was temporarily restored through a safe replacement section.
Owen advised her not to assume the rest of the service was clear until a licensed crew inspected it.
He also asked her to preserve her video from the doorbell camera if it had recorded Carol entering the side passage.
Rachel had never liked being watched, and the camera angle barely covered the back gate.
The footage was useful for showing when Carol arrived, but it could not explain the tubing.
Owen made that distinction carefully.
Rachel appreciated him for it.
At five,
she walked to the house two doors away, carrying a clean jug of water for her neighbor June Alvarez.
June had called that morning about the strange pressure drop.
She was a retired seamstress whose hands remained busy even when her knees refused to cooperate.
She opened the door with a dish towel over her shoulder.
“You found something in the pipe?” June asked.
“A little plastic tube,” Rachel said.
June sighed and stepped back.
“Come see what happened in my kitchen.”
The sink faucet coughed before releasing a thin, uneven stream.
June explained that she had stopped using her dishwasher after it repeatedly shut down halfway through a cycle.
A maintenance company had told her she needed a new appliance.
She could not afford one.
“Their man said my plumbing was too old for modern machines,” she said.
“The machine is six years old.”
Rachel asked whether she had received the water-efficiency flyer.
June opened a kitchen drawer and produced a neatly folded card.
The blue drop inside the green circle stood above the words CONSERVE MORE, WORRY LESS.
Below was an invitation to participate in a neighborhood pilot that claimed it would reduce waste without altering household routines.
June had never enrolled.
“I told the boy I wasn’t interested,
” she said.
“He said nobody needed to sign anything because they were only observing the public system.”
Rachel asked what the boy looked like.
June described a skinny young man with dark curls and a nervous manner.
The description matched the worker who had visited Rachel.
“Did he enter your yard?”
“I was at the pharmacy when he came back,” June said.
“Carol told me he checked the meter and everything looked fine.”
Rachel felt a small chill.
“How did Carol know he came back?”
June stared at her.
“Because Carol introduced him to me in the first place.”
