I’ve delivered propane in this county for twenty-six years, and in February I filled a tank at a house that’s been empty since 2009. You learn your route so well that you remember which houses have dogs, which ones belong to elderly couples, and which properties haven’t had a light on in years. The Ostrander place burned out in 2009, and the family boarded it up and left. I’ve driven past that property more than eleven hundred times since then. So when the work order came through, I noticed immediately because the account was current and the payment had gone through automatically. The meter showed that the tank had drawn four hundred gallons since November.
Nothing about an empty, boarded-up house should use four hundred gallons of propane. There wasn’t even supposed to be a connected line anymore because I had capped it myself in 2010. I walked around the foundation looking for a new connection, expecting maybe someone had started renovating the place without telling the company. Instead, I found a fresh line running into the ground beneath the boards on the north side. The pipe disappeared under the foundation and headed toward the back of the property. There were no tire tracks, no footprints, and no sign that anyone had been inside the house. But the line was new enough that the dirt around it hadn’t settled properly.
I called my supervisor and told him I thought there was an unauthorized connection. He pulled the account history and said something that made me stop talking. The propane had been ordered on a schedule every eleven days, always in amounts small enough that nobody had noticed the pattern. The payments were coming from an account that had been opened two years ago under a name none of us recognized. Then he asked me whether I had ever checked the old well behind the house. I hadn’t, so I went back the next morning with a flashlight and found a steel door hidden beneath a sheet of plywood that hadn’t been there the week before.
There was a staircase underneath it, and at the bottom was a room that shouldn’t have existed beneath that property. Someone had installed lights, insulation, a small heater, and shelves along every wall. There were dozens of propane receipts stacked in chronological order, all going back to November. On the table was a notebook with dates, delivery amounts, and one sentence repeated over and over: “Keep the house looking empty.” The last entry was dated two days before my February delivery, and underneath it was my truck number.
