Chapter 41: A Photograph From Before the Flood

Travis’s attorney provided a set of project photographs taken before my irrigation line was broken.
The images showed the lower orchard healthy and dry.
They also showed two members of the development team standing near the fence during a preliminary site visit.
One of the men held a clipboard beside an open gate.
The date was six days before the regulator failed.
Maya compared the photographs with the public presentation Celeste had used after the damage.
The later image highlighted standing water and stressed trees without identifying the cause.
A draft slide from the company’s files had called the first orchard photograph an example of productive agricultural land.


The final slide called the same location evidence of decline.
I sat in Maya’s office staring at both captions.
“She changed the story when the trees were damaged,” I said.
Maya tapped the draft with her pen.
“We can establish that the captions changed,” she replied.
“The reasons for the change are a separate question.”
We requested the communications that accompanied the revisions.
At home, I printed the photographs and arranged them in order.
The trees had not moved.
The irrigation system had not aged twenty years in six days.
The only things that had changed were the damage and the words someone chose to put beneath it.

Chapter 42: A Complicated Witness

A former landscaping worker named Aaron Dale contacted the sheriff’s office through his lawyer.
Aaron had assisted Mason Vale on unrelated work at the Morrow property.
He said he once heard a supervisor complain that the Price farm would be more useful if county officials considered it unproductive.
Owen recorded the statement but asked Aaron to identify the speaker.
Aaron was uncertain.
The comment had been made near a loading area while several people talked over equipment noise.
He remembered a dark jacket and a gray baseball cap.
Those details matched too many workers to establish much.


I learned about the account when Owen called to update me on the investigation.
“It’s information,” he said.
“It isn’t enough to identify who said it.”
I asked whether the statement supported my belief that the damage served Celeste’s project.
“It may be consistent with that theory,” Owen answered.
“Consistency isn’t the same as proof.”
After the call, I spent an hour pruning damaged branches.
I had wanted someone to tell me that the pieces fit together.
Instead, every careful answer reminded me that people could have incomplete memories, conflicting incentives, and genuine uncertainty.
It was frustrating work to live with uncertainty.


It was also better than accusing the wrong person because I needed a villain I could name.