A HOA Broke Into His Pool With Her Friends — Then the Water Exposed Every One of Them

bag, the kind for beads or buttons, and she set it on the table in front of

Benson with the care of a woman setting down something asleep, and said,

"Someone swam in my pool while my baby was under anesthesia." Her voice

did not rise. Her fury was the controlled kind, the kind that has had weeks to

learn its lines. "I have thought about it every day since Mr. Avery's letter

came, and I keep arriving at the same fork in it. I want to know which of

them picked the day. If one of them knew — if one of them said, the

Petersens are in Atlanta, the house is empty, that's our Wednesday — then

that's one kind of person. And if the day didn't matter to them at all, if my

daughter's surgery was just a blank square on a rotation that none of them

ever looked at closely enough to see — I need you to understand that that is

worse. That is so much worse. It means we weren't even people whose day it

was. We were just the house with the pool that week."

Benson bagged the earring in her own evidence envelope and had Mrs.

Petersen write on the seal what it was and where it had been kept, and Mr.

Petersen turned from the window then and signed the statement with a hand

that was not entirely steady, and said, to the table generally, "Tell them we

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kept it. I don't know why we kept it. Tell them we kept the earring all

summer, like we knew."

The Hollises lived at the marsh end of Heron Bay, in the house with the

widow's walk that no one had walked on in thirty years. Mr. Hollis was

seventy, a retired harbor pilot with a handshake like a mooring line, and he

shook Colin's hand too hard at the door and apologized and did it again

inside, the way a man does when his grip is the only part of him that still

reports for duty on time. His mother's funeral had been on a Wednesday in

June. She had lived the last six years of her life in the room over their garage,

and her chair — a white wicker pool chair with a cushion she had re-covered

herself, twice, in a fabric with anchors on it — had sat by their pool in the

same position for all six of those years, angled to catch the morning and keep

the afternoon off, because his mother had been a woman of settled

arrangements and the chair was one of them.

He had come home from the funeral — from the service, the graveside, the

church hall with its ham biscuits and its casseroles, the whole long liturgy of

a Savannah goodbye — and had walked out to the pool in his funeral suit

because the house was full of people being kind at a volume he could no

longer hold. The chair was on the far side of the pool. Moved. Turned to face

the sunset, which his mother had never done and would not have done,

because the sunset was when the gnats came off the marsh and she had

opinions about gnats. And in the skimmer, riding the little tide of the filter's

pull, was a wine glass. Stemmed. With a lipstick's ghost on the rim and an

inch of white wine gone warm in the bowl.

"I stood there in my suit with my mother's program in my pocket," Mr. Hollis

said, "and I took the glass out of the water, and I washed it in my own sink,

and I put it in the cabinet with ours. And I told no one. Not Margaret. Not my

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sister, who would have had something to say. I decided — " He stopped, and

worked at it, and Colin watched a man excavate a sentence from a summer's

depth. "I decided grief was making me invent things. That I'd moved the

chair myself in the morning and forgotten. That a glass could have gotten

there some way that made sense if I wasn't so — cracked open. My mother

was not twelve hours buried and I stood in my own yard and called myself

unreliable, because the truth of it was too ugly to pick up. Some person sat in

my mother's chair and watched the sun go down on the day I buried her, and

I did their dishes for them, and I have thought about the washing of that glass

— " His voice went, briefly, and he let it go and found it again lower. "Sign

me. Wherever it says. Sign me for all of it."

Benson had him dictate it slowly, and he did, in a harbor pilot's cadence,

bearings and times, the chair, the glass, the gnats. At the door he took Colin's

hand a third time and held it a moment past the handshake's natural life.

"You put your own pool in a lab," he said. "Nine little bottles. Margaret said

it was the most Savannah thing she'd ever heard — a man too polite to call

the police on his own water until the water could call them itself." He almost

smiled. "Bring me the rest when you know it. I can stand the rest. What I