she had not corrected either one because families keep each other's fictions
the way they keep each other's spare keys.
38
"She has never once been there on a Wednesday," Ron said. "Two years of
Wednesdays. I did the arithmetic in the car. It's a hundred and some
Wednesdays, Colin. A hundred times she kissed me goodbye in the morning
with a casserole dish or a book for the drive, and drove โ where. Here. To
your street. To a bathing suit in somebody's pool, on a rotation, with a
schedule." He folded his hands. His voice, when it came, was quiet and total.
"My wife has been lying to me in a swimsuit, Colin. With my own board's
money buying the floats."
Colin called Laura Benson from the kitchen phone, and she came the way
she always came, without ceremony and faster than the hour excused, her
hair still wet from a shower, a legal pad already under her arm. She listened
to all of it a second time without interrupting, which Colin had learned was
her way of taking a thing apart while it was being handed to her. Then she
had Ron say it again, in order, with dates where he had them and honest gaps
where he didn't, and she wrote it down in her small square hand while the
kitchen clock worked its way toward midnight.
"You are a witness now," she told him, at the end, not unkindly. "That's a
different animal from a suspect, but it's an animal with rules. You don't warn
your wife. You don't warn Val. You don't fix anything, apologize to anyone,
or move a single piece of paper out of that file cabinet except by handing it to
me or to Detective Kim. The checks you signed are evidence of what she did.
They only become evidence of what you did if you start tidying." She tore
the statement pages off the pad and put them in her bag. "Go home, Ron.
Sleep in your house. Kiss your wife goodnight if that's what the night
requires, and tomorrow you call me before you call anyone else in the
world."
He stood in the doorway a moment with the empty banker's box under his
39
arm. "She'll be asleep," he said. "She's always asleep by now. Wednesdays
tire her out." And then he went home to Heron Bay Lane, to the house two
streets over from Colin's, where his wife of thirty-one years was sleeping the
sleep of a woman who believed the water had kept her secrets.
The rounds continued through those weeks, Benson's letter first โ the
measured one, on her letterhead, that introduced Colin to households he had
only waved to for years as something other than a grievance: a man
assembling the truth of a thing that had happened to all of them. The
Petersens received him on a Saturday morning, in a kitchen that smelled of
coffee and the particular cleanliness of a house with a sick child in its recent
past, and Mrs. Petersen made the tea nobody drank while her husband stood
at the window with his back to the room, looking at their own pool through
the glass as if it were a photograph of a place he'd once been.
Their daughter had had her surgery in Atlanta on a Wednesday. That was the
whole of it and it was everything. A Wednesday in the middle of July โ the
operation in the morning, the two of them in the family waiting room with
the paper cups and the television nobody watched, their phones face down,
their whole world narrowed to a door that opened every hour or so with news
that wasn't theirs yet. The surgery had gone well. They had driven home
Thursday in the late light with their daughter asleep across the back seat in a
nest of hospital blankets, and Mr. Petersen had carried her in, and Mrs.
Petersen had gone, out of the habit of a housekeeper's soul, to deal with the
laundry before she dealt with anything else.
The hamper held wet towels. Not damp โ wet, wrung and heavy, towels
from their own linen closet, four of them, smelling of chlorine and somebody
else's sunscreen. And on Sunday, when Mr. Petersen cleaned the filter basket
the way he did every Sunday, there had been an earring in it. A gold hoop,
40
small, good quality. Not his wife's. Not his daughter's, who was nine and did
not have pierced ears. He had put it on the kitchen counter and they had
looked at it, the two of them, in their own kitchen, in the week of their
daughter's surgery, and had decided โ she said this part looking directly at
Colin, because it was the part that shamed her โ that they were too tired and
too frightened and too grateful to have their girl home alive to ask the
question the earring was asking. She had put it in the kitchen drawer. The
junk drawer, with the batteries and the takeout menus and the spare key to a
lock they no longer owned. It had been in there all summer.
She got up and opened the drawer and took it out. She had put it in a little zip