Pam said, “I told him it might be years before we could actually finish the house, but he took on extra work—driving the school bus and working part-time at Bighorn Liquors—to sock enough away that we could at least pour the foundation. We figured if he did most of the work himself we could save a bundle and maybe even be able to use the place once Hannah went to college.”

“She didn’t want to move up there?” Marybeth asked.

“Ha!” Pam coughed. “Don’t get me wrong—she loved to go up there with her father, but I think it’s more because she wanted to be with him. The last thing on earth she wanted was to move so far out of town away from her friends.”

“Sounds like Lucy,” Marybeth said, and laughed. “A social butterfly.”

“Exactly,” Pam said.

“So . . .” Joe prompted.

“Right,” Pam said, switching back on track. “Butch saved enough to get the foundation dug out, framed, and poured. So a year ago, he went up there on a Friday and started moving dirt. He also had fill dirt brought up and dumped because the lot slopes toward the lake.”

“Two acres, right?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. Not very big, but big enough.”

“So tell me how this involves the EPA,” Joe said. “I’m not connecting the dots.”

Pam looked at him and her expression was fierce. “Even when I tell you what happened, you won’t be able to connect them,” she said.

“Okay,” Pam said. “Three days after Butch started grading the lot, on a Monday—Hannah was up there with him because it was Memorial Day—he was on his tractor when he looked up and saw a car coming down the road. Three middle-aged women get out, and one starts waving at him—summoning him—to come over. He shuts off the tractor and climbs off and walks over to where they parked, which is the road right next to our lot.”

“Were you there?” Joe asked, trying to ascertain if Pam was an eyewitness or had heard the story secondhand, considering her use of the words “middle-aged” and “summoning.”

“I wasn’t there,” she said, “but I heard the same story from both Butch and Hannah. Hannah overheard the entire exchange.

“So these three women get out of their car and stand there, glaring at my husband. There was nothing special about them—they weren’t wearing suits or professional clothes or anything. Butch said he thought they were three lost tourists when he saw them,” she said.

“So he goes over there and one of them says she’s from the EPA office in Cheyenne. She says he has to cease and desist moving dirt that second, that the lot is an official wetlands, and to restore the ground immediately exactly like he found it or he was breaking the law.”

Joe sat back, blinked, and said, “What?”

“That’s what they told him: that our lot was a wetlands and he was violating the Clean Water Act by disturbing it. They told him they were issuing him a verbal compliance order and that unless he restored every inch of the dirt to where it had been before he started up his tractor—and planted native grass and plants on the disturbed soil—we’d be fined every day until it was done.”

“Hold it,” Joe said, shaking his head. “I thought you said you got permits before you did anything.”

“We did!” Pam said, smacking the tabletop with the palm of her hand. “I did it myself. We’re in construction—we know how these things work. I got permits from the county and the state, and I got title to the land cleared through a title company. No one ever said anything about wetlands. And you’ve seen it, right?”

Joe said he had.

“Did you see anything that looks like a wetlands? Did you see any running water, or a swamp, or anything at all besides the natural slope of the land?”

“No,” Joe said, trying to recall the contours of the lot. There was nothing resembling a stream or runoff ditch. And the neighboring houses were close enough, he thought, that he could throw rocks and hit them.

“So when Butch came home that night he was nearly out of his head,” Pam said. “I made him repeat the story about four times, because I couldn’t believe that three broads could just drive up and tell us to stop building our home like that.”

“Back up,” Joe said. “I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. So walk me through it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You received no calls in advance, or any letters from the EPA?”

“No.”

“Did anyone else in the subdivision or the developers have any trouble before? Did anyone else have to do anything special to develop their home?”

“No. And I know this because of the spec home we built. All our permits sailed right through.”

Joe said, “These three women—were they all from the EPA office in Cheyenne?”

“Two were, they told Butch,” Pam said. “The third one was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or so she said.”

“Who were they, exactly? Did they give Butch paperwork or letters from the government?”

Pam shook her head emphatically. “I know the name of one: Shauna Naous. She gave Butch her business card, and I’ve talked to her since. Butch can’t remember if the other two gave their names or not. They didn’t give Butch anything at all except Shauna Naous’s business card. Oh, and they said we would be fined seventy thousand dollars a day.” Pam’s voice was deadpan, as if delivering the punch line.

“Say again,” Joe said, assuming he’d not heard correctly.

“Seventy thousand dollars a day,” Pam repeated. “Starting that Monday, until we complied with the order.”

“Your lot was worth . . .”

“Sixty thousand,” Pam said.

“Wow,” Joe said.

“That’s what they told him, and then they drove away. If Butch didn’t restore the lot to exactly the way it looked three days before—including the weeds and grass—we would be fined seventy thousand dollars per day. This was after three days of dirt work. As you know, there is no way possible to plant grass and weeds and make it look completely natural on a construction site for months in this country. Even if Butch hauled all the dirt out and bladed the slope back to the same grade it was, it isn’t possible to have grass just magically grow again.”

“Pam,” Joe said firmly, “you’re telling me that three bureaucrats drove all the way north from Cheyenne and showed up without a court order, or a warrant, or anything besides a single business card and told you to stop working on the property you owned or you’d have to pay seventy thousand dollars a day in fines?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Joe,” she said. “I swear it.”

“This is just like the Sackett case in Idaho.”

Marybeth asked, “The what?” Pam looked up like she didn’t know the case, either, which Joe found surprising.

“The Sacketts,” Joe said. “A married couple building a home in a subdivision near Priest Lake. Out of the blue, EPA folks showed up and told them to stop and didn’t provide any kind of documentation. Told them to restore the land, or they’d get a huge fine every day. The case is working itself through the legal system right now, and my understanding is it’s likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.”

“You’re telling me this happened before?” Pam asked, as if she wasn’t sure whether it was good or bad news.

“Something similar, anyway,” Joe said. “Pam, be honest with me. I saw the lot, but I didn’t study it. Is there any way it’s actually a wetlands area? Is it conceivable Butch was filling in a swamp or a runoff stream that would go into the lake?”

“No, and that’s not all,” Pam said. “When this horrible Naous person finally took my call, I asked her where they had gotten the information that our property was a wetlands. She told me that it was public information and I could look it up on the Internet at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Wetlands Inventory database. I was pissed because I thought the developers somehow forgot to check that or something, so I got on the computer and checked it myself. And guess what?”