originals out of the association's file cabinet and because he wanted a set that
existed somewhere Val could not reach with a shredder. He laid the first one
on the table like a man laying down a card he had been holding against his
own chest for a year.
"I signed them without reading the attachments," he said. "I want that said
first, in this room, before we look at anything. Val's paperwork was always
perfect. Every form filled, every line item in its box, every receipt stapled
square. Signing was a courtesy. It was the part of the job that took four
minutes." He turned the first check over. "Four minutes, twice a month, for
two summers."
The attachments were the story, and Ron walked Colin through them the way
he must have walked himself through them that afternoon, in order, without
skipping the small ones. Mileage reimbursements, first โ modest figures,
twelve dollars, nineteen dollars, submitted by Val as president for what the
form called site inspections. But the mileage was calculated to addresses, and
the addresses were printed right there in the reimbursement column, and
Colin read them with his finger moving down the page and felt the room
change temperature. The Whitfield place. The Beauregards'. The Petersen
house on Heron Bay Lane. His own address, nine times. Every house on the
Wednesday rotation, visited on Wednesdays, at association expense, by the
woman who was swimming in them.
36
"She charged us for the drive," Ron said. "I want you to appreciate that,
Colin. The association paid her mileage to get to your pool."
Then the supplies. Inspection supplies, the category said, and under it,
itemized in Val's immaculate hand and reimbursed in full: a forty-eight-quart
marine cooler. Two portable speakers, waterproof. A set of four oversized
pool floats, the kind with cup holders. A string of outdoor lights. A second
cooler, the following June. Replacement floats, the following July, described
on the request form as sun-damaged.
"Our money bought the party equipment," Ron said. "The association's
money. Dues money. The Whitfields' dues and the Beauregards' dues and
yours. She didn't even reach into her own pocket for the floats, Colin. She
put them on the books and I signed, and somewhere there's a photograph of
those women floating on a raft that the Heron Bay Estates Homeowners
Association purchased for the purpose." He sat down then, heavily, in the
chair Colin pulled out for him, and put both hands flat on the table on either
side of the forty-first check, like a man holding the table down. "That's the
professional disgrace. Now I'll tell you the other thing, and then your lawyer
can tell me what I am."
He had read the lab report at Colin's table three days earlier, when Colin, still
procedural, still believing in order, had shared it with the two men he thought
of as his witnesses-in-waiting: Walter, and the treasurer. Nine dated
Wednesday vials, and the lab's quiet itemization of what Colin's water had
kept. The serum peptides, Val's signature face product, the expensive one she
sold through her brokerage's wellness side-business and gave as closing gifts
in little silver jars. The DHA bronzer. Becca Halston's โ that one had
surprised no one who had ever seen Becca in August.
And the third finding, which the lab had listed without a name: a prescription
37
antifungal, ketoconazole cream, two percent, present in the water at a
concentration the report called consistent with repeated application by a
bather.
"I knew whose it was before you finished reading the line," Ron said. "I
didn't say so. I've been a coward in installments, Colin, and that was one of
them. It's Marcia's. I pick it up at the pharmacy on the first of every month. I
have picked it up on the first of every month for three years. They know me
there. They have it bagged before I reach the counter." He looked at the
checks. "Marcia tells me โ has told me, every Wednesday for two years โ
that she is in Beaufort, at her sister's, sitting with their mother. Their mother
is dying, Colin. That has been the sentence in our house for two years. Their
mother is dying, slowly, and Marcia is the daughter who goes. I have
repeated that sentence to people. At church. At this table, probably."
He had called the sister that afternoon. He described the call the way a man
describes weather he drove through: carefully, and only the parts that marked
the road. The mother was not dying. The mother was eighty-four and mean
as a snake and had put in tomatoes in April and complained about the heat in
May and was, the sister said, going to outlive them all purely to have the last
word. And the sister, Ron said, had gone quiet in a particular way on the
phone, and had asked him why everyone kept saying so. Why everyone โ
meaning Marcia โ kept saying so. And then she had told him, in the tone of
a woman finally permitted to set down something heavy, that Marcia had not
been in Beaufort on a Wednesday in two years. Not once. Not for an
afternoon. The sister had assumed the Wednesdays were just Marcia's story
to him, the way the dying mother was Marcia's story to the bridge club, and