Thursday
The stake was still there under Hector Duarte's lemon tree, its aluminium tag gone green, her own handwriting on it from March 2047. She had been younger when she wrote it. She had not been more careful.
She'd tied at Papago at dawn, slept four hours, and had the head down on the back lot by twenty to eleven. 7716 settled in eleven minutes. She ran the stations the way she had two years ago, in the same order, so the night would compare with the old one. Then she did the thing she hadn't done then. She took the tape and the cold probe over the alley wall to the old irrigation well and sounded it from the sensor datum. Fourteen point two metres to water. In 2047 nobody had asked, so she hadn't written it, and the index had filled the blank with whatever was nearest.
Hector came out at one with a thermos and two cups. The price stickers were still on them. He'd bought them for this.
"Is it fixed?"
"It'll say a number it didn't say before. The water's fourteen metres down, under your lot. That's all it says. It doesn't make your house lighter."
"Does it make my bill lighter?"
"I don't know. It makes the certificate true. After that it's Desert Mutual's turn."
At ten past three a phone light came up the alley. Mrs. Lucero's nephew, early twenties, very polite, a hoodie with a community college on it. Did she do the houses on 51st too?
She said no. Not because she didn't want to, she told him. His aunt's certificate wasn't hers, and a notary who walked onto lots she hadn't signed was selling something, whatever she told herself. He nodded as if he'd expected that and went back down the alley, and she watched the light go and thought that he had asked exactly the right person the exact wrong way, because he had no other way to ask.
Closing base at 05:40, drift under two microgals. She filled column 2 on the tailgate under the dome light.
4/15–16 DUARTE RE-OCC. DTW 14.2 M FROM DATUM, MEASURED. DRY IN NOISE. COL 2 FILLED. LUCERO NEPHEW ASKED. I SAID NO.
Friday
Fermín didn't say hello. He never did when he had a number.
"Two dry nights, inside three-tenths of each other. Probe in the bed read dry at dusk both nights, so it's dry by my rule. Water at nineteen point six off an old well under her shed. She didn't know she had a well. Nothing above noise in the house footprint. Her HIGH was your water, read sixty metres sideways."
"Read me the basis line."
"'Instrument, walking, two nights. Client: R. Vega. Payer: St. Vincent de Paul Conference, Maryvale. The ambient index assignment to this lot is not supported by measurement on this lot.' Too much?"
"It's exactly enough." The swamp cooler ticked. "Ten business days to re-rate?"
"She'll know by the thirtieth. After the hearing."
"Fermín. Mrs. Lucero."
"I know. The nephew called me at noon. He said he'd asked you first." She could hear him choosing the next words. "Delfina's minute says one per household until the Board rules, so the parish can't. And if I do Lucero at cost, then I'm the notary for anyone whose nephew has my number. I'd be at it till 2052."
"Then don't."
"Then who?"
She didn't answer. It was the right question. She had spent a week putting it in other people's mouths so she wouldn't have to ask it herself.
4/16 VEGA DRY 2 NIGHTS. HIGH NOT SUPPORTED ON LOT. RE-RATE BY 4/30. 'THEN WHO?'
Sunday
The Iniguez house wasn't the Iniguez house any more. Ray Iniguez had died in October. His daughter sold in January to Saguaro Residential Holdings II, and the certificate went with the deed, because a certificate belongs to the lot and not to the man. It now sat in a portfolio of three hundred and twelve doors.
The property manager answered her email in nine minutes on a Saturday. Access approved Sun 21:00–06:00. Notary to sign nothing on behalf of owner. Owner makes no representation as to subsurface. Tenant notified. A form had written it, and it read that way.
The tenant was a woman named Marisol, leaving for a night shift as Lourdes pulled up, two kids on the couch behind the screen door with a grandmother.
"They told me you're checking if the house is sinking."
"I'm checking where the water is. Your house isn't sinking."
"Does my rent change?"
Lourdes hadn't thought about rent once in three months. Saguaro paid the policy. The uncertainty load rode the policy. The policy rode the rent, at renewal, in a line nobody itemised and no tenant ever saw.
"I don't know," she said. It was true, and it wasn't enough.
There was no well on the lot. She used the state monitor at the canal, two hundred and thirty metres east, and wrote it as what it was: off-lot sounding, distance stated, 17.8 m, not this lot's water. Then she added a clause, because the canal leaked and everyone in Maryvale knew it: canal-adjacent, may read seepage mound. Water under a leaking canal sits high and moves on the canal's schedule, not the lot's. The distance said how far. The clause said which way it was likely wrong. Item 6, written the way she'd made Fermín write his. It would have been easy to write the number without the distance. Nobody would have checked for years.
At five she totalled the exhibit on the tailgate. Three lots. Twenty-nine hours. A hundred and eighty dollars in filing fees. A hundred and ninety-one kilometres, tie trips and lot trips in separate rows. And three boxed figures, $1,140 together, that a notary without a paid-off head would have spent on rental. Three houses. There were about four thousand certificates like them.
4/18–19 INIGUEZ, NOW SAGUARO II, 312 DOORS. CANAL MONITOR 230 M, LABELLED. EXH A DONE: 29 H, $180, 191 KM, +$1,140 IF NO HEAD. THE LOAD RIDES THE RENT.
Wednesday
The exhibit went in on Tuesday the twentieth, columns full, as she'd undertaken. Ofelia stamped it and said nothing about the double I in Iniguez, which Lourdes had left on the header in March out of stubbornness.
Wednesday night she sat at the kitchen table with two numbers that pointed in different directions and a card that said FIND THE CURVE.
She found it on page 31 of DIFI Exhibit 7, November 2047, which had been in the Board's own file for a year and a half. Desert Mutual's uncertainty load per tile, plotted against the number of control certificates inside sixty metres. It wasn't a straight line. Going from no controls to one, the band halved. Going from one to five, it barely moved.
She read it three times. Then she read the axis label, which she should have done first. Controls within 60 m of rated lot. The curve was per lot. A tile was two hundred metres on a side, sixty or seventy houses in Maryvale, and a sixty-metre circle around one lot covered about a quarter of it.
So it wasn't one control per tile, not on page 31's own terms. What it showed was that the first measured control did almost all the work for the lots it reached. What it did at the corners was a different question, and the answer was in the model, which wasn't hers.
She wrote it on the card anyway, with the question attached. ONE PER TILE? ASK HAAS: EVERY LOT, NOT CENTROID.
She did the overlay the way you'd do it in 1990, tracing paper and a ruler over the Records legacy map, tile grid on top. Tiles where the only controls were legacy certificates, the ones her zero would silence: Maryvale, Alhambra, old Glendale, South Phoenix, a strip along Grand. She counted twice and got 588 both times.
If the corners came along, then: six hundred tiles, call it. One re-occupied lot in each, with depth to water measured and not defaulted. At Fermín's at-cost six-forty, about $384,000, paid once. On the other side was Haas's ten to twelve percent on every policy in those tiles, every year, for as long as the band stayed wide. She didn't have premiums tile by tile. But Vega's renewal had gone up three hundred and ten dollars, and there were a lot more than twelve hundred roofs in those tiles.
So it had never been zero or twenty. Twenty bought back a control on the narrowest lots one time in three, and the curve said that wasn't the control that mattered. The one that mattered was a measured one. Zero stayed. Her water stayed off other people's roofs.
The Board couldn't order an insurer to do anything. That was the Department's. But the Board could find, in 49-007, that a legacy series re-occupied with depth measured was a valid control, and that one per tile, at the lot nearest the tile centre among owners who consented, was the minimum. The nearest-centre rule was there so nobody could pick the lot. An insurer choosing among consenting owners would choose the cheapest access or the lot most likely to confirm the old paper. A rule that picked itself left nothing to choose. And Lourdes could send that finding, with page 31, to the Department as a complaint: a load that fell by tile on the streets surveyed by hand, which the insurer could remove for less than it charged. Then the insurer would pay a notary who hadn't signed the old series. The certificate would carry a payer line, so that in ten years nobody could pretend a homeowner had bought a survey she'd never heard of.
Delfina had said it in the parish room on the eighth, over the green-ink ledger. The Board should make the insurer do it. Lourdes had spent two weeks turning that sentence into 588 tile numbers.
She drafted item 7 in four sentences and read it back for adjectives. There was one, honest. She cut it.
4/21 EXH 7 P.31. STEEP 0→1, FLAT AFTER. 588 TILES. CURVE IS PER LOT, 60 M; TILE IS 200 M. ITEM 7 (BOARD): RE-OCC LEGACY W/ MEASURED DTW = VALID CONTROL, 1/TILE AT LOT NEAREST CENTRE (CONSENTING). CORNERS: ASK HAAS. DIFI LETTER: INSURER FUNDS IT, NOT ORIGINAL NOTARY, PAYER ON CERT. DELFINA'S SENTENCE WITH NUMBERS.
Monday
Denny's on Thomas Road, ten past seven, a booth near the kitchen door. Haas had his laptop open next to eggs he wasn't going to finish.
She had sent him item 7 on Thursday, after it was stamped. A supplemental that hit the other side on the morning of the hearing would read like an ambush. She did not want to win by ambush.
"I ran it," he said. "Every lot, not the centroid. You put that on the card, didn't you." He didn't wait. "One control at the lot nearest the centre. Inside sixty metres it comes all the way back. Out at the corners it comes back most of the way anyway, because what the control fixes isn't the lot. It's the depth. Water tables don't change much over two hundred metres. Once one well in the tile is measured, the model stops defaulting depth for the whole tile and interpolates it. Averaged over every lot, the band ends up a little wider than your twenty-metre default would give."
"So twenty is better."
"Twenty is narrower and it's a guess with my name on it. This is a little wider and nobody has to guess." He turned the screen. The tiles went from orange to pale as the model stepped through them. "Payback on the load is under two years across the book. Under one in Maryvale."
"Then file it."
He laughed, not much. "Legal will oppose it tomorrow."
"Why?"
"Paying to re-occupy six hundred lots says the old certificates were deficient. Then every policy we've rated on them since '45 becomes a question. They'd rather carry the load than buy the question."
"Three of three came back clean," she said. "Duarte, Vega, Iniguez. Dry, or inside noise. If the re-occupations look like those, Legal isn't buying the question. It's buying the answer. The old certificates were right about what they measured. They just didn't measure the water."
Haas looked at her for a moment. "Legal doesn't know that yet."
"Then tell them."
"Three isn't six hundred." He moved a piece of egg. "And when the Department gets your letter, they'll say the Board's finding doesn't bind them, which is true."
"It doesn't have to bind them. It has to be in their file."
She watched the tiles fade. Mrs. Lucero's was one of them, two doors from a paid house. Marisol's was another, inside three hundred and twelve doors, under a rent nobody itemised.
"Then I'll say it," she said. "Five minutes. Your curve, page 31, the Board's own exhibit. I won't use your name."
"They'll know where it came from."
"They'll know it came from DIFI's file. That's where it is."
He paid for both before she could stop him. She let it go and wrote it on the back of the receipt in the car: $14.80, G. Haas, party to 49-007. Repay at hearing. A notary didn't take gifts from a party to the docket, not even eggs. She would hand him a ten and a five in the hallway outside Room B and he would be embarrassed, and that was fine. The embarrassment would be on the record too.
She drove home down Campbell. She didn't slow at the Vega house. In the Lucero yard the nephew was hosing the walk and the bed beside it. Anyone who came to measure that lot this week would read the hose. He didn't know that. She thought about stopping to tell him and didn't. Tomorrow at nine she would have five minutes to tell everyone at once.
4/26 HAAS RAN 7 AT EVERY LOT: FULL BACK INSIDE 60 M, MOST OF THE WAY AT CORNERS (DEPTH INTERPOLATED, NOT DEFAULTED). A LITTLE WIDER THAN 20 M, NOT GUESSED. 3 OF 3 CLEAN: BUYING THE ANSWER. <1 YR MARYVALE. LEGAL OPPOSES. CITE P.31, NOT HIM. EGGS $14.80, REPAY. LUCERO NEPHEW WATERING. TOMORROW.