The water department dug up the meter box at the road because the reading had been wrong for a year. We’re outside Anderson, South Carolina. The man came to my door with his clipboard and asked who lived here. I told him just me, since 2017. He said the meter had been reading for a family of four. I told him there was nobody here but me and the cat. He asked if I’d noticed anything strange, then asked to see the crawlspace access. When he came back around, he was white in the face and called someone on his radio. There was a line spliced off my water supply under the house.
The deputies followed the line four hundred feet through the yard to the old tenant house on the back of my property. Nobody had lived there since 1994, but somebody had water running inside. And power, too, connected the same way. There was mail stacked on a table, all addressed to my house. I asked the deputy how long they thought someone had been using the place, and he said they didn’t know yet. Then he noticed something I hadn’t. The newest envelope was dated that week, and it was addressed to a name I’d never heard before.
I called the power company and asked them to check the service history for the old house. They said the account had been active since 2018 and the bills were being paid electronically from an account tied to my name. I told them I’d never opened it. The deputy asked me if anyone had access to my paperwork when I bought the property. I said no, but then I remembered the closing folder I’d kept in a drawer for years. When I got home, it was still there — except one document was missing. The next morning, the deputy called and said they’d found the person who’d been staying there. It was the same man who had signed as my witness when I bought the property in 2017.
