thick fabric kind with a little knot of gold thread, sodden and furred with a
season of somebody else's sunscreen. Elaine's laugh left her face the way a
tide leaves a beach β not all at once, but with everything in it going. "That is
not mine," she said. "Colin. I haven't put my hair up to swim since β Paul, I
don't even β whose is that?" And Colin, who had been instructed to be
boring, heard himself be honest instead, very quietly, because her face had
already done the work: "That's what we're trying to find out, Elaine. Without
ruining anybody in the finding." She didn't speak again until he was at the
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gate, and then she only said, "We were in Denver that whole month of
Wednesdays. Paul bid Denver all summer. Somebody knew that," and closed
her own gate behind him with great care, as if the latch mattered now.
The Haverfords had come home from Maine three weeks early because
George's sister had taken ill, and so they were there to receive him at their
own table, which was worse and better. George kept a folder β of course
George kept a folder; half the street was retired from jobs that kept folders β
and in it, produced with the air of a man who had been waiting for the right
audience, was an invoice. Professional letterhead: Palmetto Pool & Patio
Services, an address on Abercorn, a phone number. Services rendered,
Wednesday the fourteenth of August: inspection, skim, backwash, water
balance, complimentary. Their housesitter β a great-niece named Tess,
nineteen, blameless as a glass of milk β had found it in the mailbox on the
Thursday and had saved it for them in the sugar bowl, assuming it was theirs
to file. They had booked no cleaner. Their cleaner was a man named Aurelio
who came on Fridays and had, when asked, looked at the invoice the way a
priest looks at a forged indulgence. Colin turned the paper over in his hands.
The phone number was printed small at the foot of the page, and in the truck,
afterward, he dialed it with his hands not quite steady, and a recorded voice
told him, brightly, that he had reached the Heron Bay Estates clubhouse and
that office hours were Monday through Friday, nine to four.
Eleven houses. Nine Wednesdays at his. The water wasn't the only witness
β the houses had kept things too: a hair tie in a basket, an invoice in a sugar
bowl, small kept things, the pocket-lint of a pattern. He wrote his visit notes
up that night in the log book he kept for the samples, in the same square hand
as the dates on the vials, and he did not permit himself a single adjective.
Val's answer arrived on a Thursday, by certified mail, in an envelope heavy
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enough to have its own weather. The board β on her motion, the letter said,
the minutes to follow β had cited Colin Avery of 14 Egret Lane on two
counts: harassment of an inspection committee in the performance of its
duties, and the unauthorized recording of association officials. A disciplinary
hearing was scheduled before the board in nineteen days. Fines were
itemized and accruing. His amenity access was frozen effective immediately
β the clubhouse, the marina, the lap lanes at the community pool where he
had swum at six in the morning beside June's friends for a decade. The letter
was three pages, and Colin read it standing at the mailbox with the Georgia
heat coming up off the asphalt, and what he felt first was not anger. It was a
strange, desolate admiration for the completeness of the inversion. The man
whose pool had been used all summer was the accused; the use was a duty
performed; the evidence of the use was the crime. It was so tidy it was almost
beautiful, the way a whirlpool is tidy.
Benson read it in her office with her glasses low on her nose and made one
sound, once, through her teeth. "She's not defending herself," she said. "She's
seizing the calendar. Nineteen days of hearing process is nineteen days where
you're the story instead of the samples. It's good lawyering, whoever's doing
it for her β and it's panic, whoever's paying for it. Panic and good lawyering
are not opposites, Colin. In my experience they're usually the same invoice."
Her response went out the next day and was two paragraphs long: a
preservation demand for every record touching the inspection program, the
access logs, the newsletter grids, and the association's disbursement files for
two summers, and a statutory request for the same under Georgia law,
framed so politely that Walter, when Colin showed him, said it was the first
time he'd ever seen a knife ask permission.
The social weather changed faster than the legal. There is a particular
30
choreography in a neighborhood that has decided a man is a problem, and
Colin learned it step by step, the way you learn a dance you will never be
asked to join. Dottie Merrill, who had swum the lane beside June for eleven
summers and who had brought three casseroles the week of the funeral and
eaten none of them because hers was not the grief, began crossing the street