with her little dog when she saw him at his mailbox β not hurrying, never
hurrying, with the plausible deniability of a woman whose dog preferred the
far curb's smells. The Palladinos' Labor Day cookout had opened its gate to
14 Egret Lane every year since Colin and June moved in; this year the paper
invitation that had always arrived in the third week of August did not arrive,
and Greg Palladino, cornered at the marina gate by nothing but Colin's
presence, said, "Val says it's better if things cool off, you know how it is,
Col," to his own shoes, and Colin said, "Sure, Greg," and hated how easy it
was to forgive him and how the forgiving didn't help either of them.
Sandra Halston called on a Sunday evening. Becca's mother. She had the
bright, controlled voice of a woman who has rehearsed in a car. "My
daughter is twenty-nine years old and she is being dragged into a widower's
obsession," she said. "She sells houses for Val's team, she has a career
starting, and whatever you think you saw on some camera β " Colin sat at
his kitchen table and looked at June's photograph on the counter, the one
from the Asheville trip, her hair wet from a river, and he kept his voice at the
level of a man reading a water bill. "Mrs. Halston, I haven't said your
daughter's name to anyone. I haven't said anyone's name to anyone. When
there's something official, you'll hear it from an office, not from the street."
There was a silence that had to drive around something large. "She cries
about it," Sandra Halston said, suddenly and much less rehearsed. "She won't
say why. She just β Colin, she cries in her car." And he said, because it was
true and because it was all he had, "I'm sorry about that. I truly am," and the
31
line went dead with more information in it than anything the board had sent
him.
He answered the citation in writing, through Benson, in four days, every
sentence a level bubble in a level vial. He attended nothing angry. He did not
go to the clubhouse he was banned from, did not drive past Val's house on
the far street, did not repeat the word inspection in public with any
expression on his face at all. And every morning, at the hour when the herons
were deciding about the marsh, he went out to his own pool in the blue first
light and did what he had done all summer and would, he understood now,
do for the rest of his life: he drew the day's sample, held it up against the sky,
labeled it in his square hand β date, hour, weather, reading β and racked it
with its brothers, and tested his water, and wrote the numbers in the book. It
was not evidence anymore, not really; the evidence was in a courier's box
and a lawyer's safe. It was a discipline. A man winding a clock in a house
where time had misbehaved. Some mornings he talked to June while he
worked, under his breath, the way he'd done since the funeral when the pool
was only a hole in the ground he'd dug to have somewhere to put the year.
"You'd have handled Val better," he told the empty water, on the morning the
citation came due for its answer. "You'd have brought her a casserole first. I
never learned the order of operations on that." The water, which kept no
secrets, kept this one too, and gave it back to him as silence, which was the
correct answer.
The report came on the tenth day, and Benson did not phone it in. She
brought it to his kitchen table in the evening in a folder with tabs, the way
she brought everything that mattered, and she laid it between the salt cellar
June had bought in Charleston and the log book with its summer of square
numbers, and the two of them went through it the way Walter had gone
32
through the vials β in order, without skipping to the end, because the end
was the part that was going to change the room.
Coastal Analytical had done what bench chemistry does when it is paid to be
careful: it had named names, in Latin and in numbers. Sunscreen first, the
expected ghost: avobenzone and octocrylene residues across all nine
Wednesday vials, at loads consistent with multiple bathers over multiple
hours, not a child's cannonball visit. Then the tartrates, calibrated against a
reference standard β tartaric acid and its potassium salts in a ratio the report
called, in the flattest prose Colin had ever loved, "consistent with the
repeated introduction of sparkling wine." "Champagne," Benson translated.
"Not prosecco, not cava. The lab has opinions and a reference library.
Sparkling wine, French method, and not the grocery-store end of the shelf
either." Then the peptide: a protein fragment signature the lab had matched
against its cosmetics database to one product in production β a reparative
face serum, French, four hundred dollars for fifty milliliters, the one in the
frosted bottle with the gold collar. Colin did not need the report to tell him
whose vanity it lived on; the whole street knew Lorraine Faye's serum the