…because there was a long garden hose running from my outdoor spigot through a gap in the fence and into the vacant lot behind my property.
Not just a hose. A whole setup.
A splitter had been attached to my faucet. One line fed my house. The other disappeared through the fence. Someone had even covered part of it with leaves and an old tarp so it wouldn’t be noticed from the yard.
I followed it with my flashlight.
Behind the fence, on an overgrown piece of land that backed up to several properties, sat a small camper trailer I’d never seen before. No lights were on, but I could hear a television playing softly inside.
I called the sheriff’s office.
While I waited, a man stepped out of the camper carrying a bucket. The moment he saw me standing there with the flashlight pointed at the hose, he stopped.
Turns out he’d been living there for months.
The property owner lived out of state and rarely checked on it. The man had figured out my spigot was hidden from the road and easy to reach from behind the fence. Every night he’d fill storage tanks, wash clothes, shower, and run water into the camper.
The utility company came out the next morning.
The meter wasn’t wrong.
They compared the usage after the hose was disconnected and the difference was obvious almost immediately. My next bill dropped right back to normal.
What bothered me most wasn’t the money.
It was realizing I’d spent weeks thinking something was wrong with my house, crawling under sinks and checking toilets, while the answer had been twenty feet from my back porch the entire time.
That old flashlight still sits by my bed.
And every time I pay my water bill now, I remember the night I followed a faint hissing sound into my backyard and finally found where all that water was going.