way it knew the mayor's car, because Lorraine told it, often, usually while
touching her own cheek with the backs of her fingers. "The report doesn't
name her," Benson said, reading his face the way she read everything. "It
names a molecule. The street will do the rest, and I want you to notice that
we are not the street." And then the bronzer β dihydroxyacetone and its
breakdown products, the very chemistry of Walter's green footprints, in eight
of the nine vials, freshest in the last three, as if somebody's weekly
appointment had been kept, all summer, on schedule, right up to the edge of
the season when a young realtor's tan could not be permitted to lapse.
"That's the circle," Benson said. "That's the summer, in four compounds.
33
What's left is the fifth page, and the fifth page is why I drove over instead of
calling." She turned the folder around so the print faced him, and put one
finger under a line halfway down, and waited while he read it twice.
Ketoconazole. Two percent. A prescription antifungal, the report said, of the
kind dispensed in creams and medicated preparations for stubborn, recurrent
infections of the skin β present in seven of the nine Wednesday vials at
concentrations the lab had flagged with an asterisk and a note, because the
numbers were too high for residue, too high for a pharmacist's trace, too high
for anything except the thing itself: whoever carried it had gone into his
water within the hour of applying it, freshly, thickly, the way you apply a
medicine you are desperate to have work β and had done it again the next
Wednesday, and the next, seven Wednesdays out of nine, all summer long.
Colin sat with that for a while, with the heron hour gone dark outside his
windows and the pool light off and the water in the yard holding whatever it
was still holding.
"Somebody's been sick all summer," he said at last. "Quietly. In that circle,
with those women, and swimming in my pool to β what. Hide it? Treat it?
Swim it off?" He shook his head slowly, and the anger that had been carrying
him for two weeks moved over in his chest and made room for something he
hadn't expected to feel about any of them. "That's not a party fact, Laura.
That's a person with a secret she can't afford, going into the water with it on
her skin."
"The lab can name the drug, Colin," Benson said, tapping the line with one
fingernail. "It can't name the woman. But there's exactly one pharmacy
record in this county that will match a summer-long weekly pattern β refills,
regular as a metronome, June through August β and when the police ask for
it, this number becomes a name." She closed the folder with the care of a
34
woman shelving something loaded. "Which is why we are patient a little
longer. Because the day this stops being a neighborhood scandal and
becomes an investigation, I want every one of our facts to already be
standing in a row with its hands at its sides. The drug is our β "
The phone rang. Not his cell β the kitchen landline, the number June had
chosen in 2004 for its easy last four, which half the street still had in their
address books from the years when the Averys were the ones you called.
Colin answered it out of a habit older than the grief, and for a moment there
was nothing on the line but a man breathing at the wrong speed, and then
Ron Dunn identified himself, twice, as if his own name had become a thing
he had to check. Ron Dunn, treasurer of the board. Marcia's husband. A man
Colin had known for fifteen years as a pair of hands over a ledger at every
annual meeting, signing what was put in front of him with the serene
confidence of a fellow whose gift was arithmetic and whose faith was that
arithmetic was all a signature meant. His voice, now, had the sound of a man
who has been reading his own signature for an hour β reading it and reading
it, the way you read a word until it stops being a word.
"Colin," Ron Dunn said. "I was looking for a missing invoice and I found
forty-one reimbursement checks I signed for Val β inspection mileage,
supplies β every one of them dated a Wednesday. What has my wife been
doing on Wednesdays?"
Ron Dunn came to Colin's kitchen at twenty minutes to ten on a Tuesday
night, carrying a banker's box he held with both arms, the way a man carries
something that has already fallen once.
He had not called. He stood in the doorway with the box against his chest
35
and said, "I need you to not be kind about this. I need you to just look," and
Colin moved the supper dishes off the table and made room.
The box held copies. Forty-one reimbursement checks, each with its request
form and its attachments, each signed in the treasurer's hand β his hand β
across two summers. Ron had made the copies at the office-supply store on
Abercorn that afternoon, he said, because he did not trust himself to carry the