There had been guests. That was the part that was hers. Three women, not
residents β friends of Val's from the brokerage world, a lender, a stager, a
woman who'd flipped two houses in the historic district β who had paid, for
two summers, two hundred dollars a Wednesday to swim where they swam.
They had been told, by Val, in Val's voice of a woman explaining an
amenity, that it was an exchange program: the association's reciprocity
arrangement, pools volunteered by owners who were away, a perk of Val's
professional circle extended at cost. They had believed her, Becca said, or
had believed her enough, which Becca had come to understand was the same
thing with better table manners.
She described one Wednesday for them, because Colin asked her β not for
the record yet, just so the thing would have a shape in his head besides a
column in a notebook. The guests arrived at the chosen house in two cars,
mid-morning, with tote bags, the way women arrive at a spa. Val was already
there, at ease in a yard she'd never been invited into, pouring something pale
from the association's cooler into cups she'd brought from her own kitchen,
because Val disliked drinking out of other people's glasses even while she
was lying in their water. There was a moment β Becca said she had thought
about this moment more than any of the others β when the stager, the
46
youngest of the three guests, stood at the edge of the Petersen pool on the
Wednesday of the surgery, though none of them knew it was the Wednesday
of the surgery, and said, "Whose place is this, again?" and Val, floating, had
answered without opening her eyes: "Ours, on Wednesdays." Becca said she
had laughed at the time. She said she had written the house down in the book
that night and put a star beside the date, though she could not have said then
what the star was for. Twice, across the two summers, a guest had paid in
cash, in an envelope, and those Wednesdays got stars too. "I think I was
keeping two books," she said. "The one Val told me to keep, and the one that
knew." They paid through the payment app, to Becca, because Val had
arranged it so: the hostess collects. The hostess, Val said, keeps the book. So
Becca had kept the book β screenshots of every transfer, the dates, the
houses, in a notebook she had bought for the purpose with a blue marbled
cover, hostess-neat, because some filing-cabinet part of her that Walter's
classroom had built would not let her run even a dirty errand without clean
records.
"Fourteen thousand dollars," she said. "Roughly. Across the two summers. I
counted it last night for the first time β I made myself. Fourteen thousand,
and Val kept about eleven of it. My part was the rest, a little at a time, and it's
spent, it was always spent before it landed β cards, rent, my mother's car
repair, I don't even have a thing to show for it, which somehow makes it
worse in my head at three in the morning. She told me the records were the
danger. She said it more than once, Colin. She said, if anyone ever asks, the
money came to you, Becca. Your name's on the account. Your name's on the
book. She said it like she was warning me about the weather." She turned the
phone over in her hands. "She was building me. All this time I thought I was
keeping the book for her. She was keeping me β for the day somebody
found the book."
47
Walter said nothing, which Colin understood was Walter's contribution: a
silence that had graded ten thousand papers and was not going to flinch at
this one.
Benson, who had been told by Colin where he was going and had arrived
without announcement at the street end of the porch twenty minutes in β
Becca saw her and did not stop talking, which everyone present understood
afterward to have been the decision the whole evening turned on β Benson
came up the steps and took the chair Walter offered and let Becca finish.
Then she said, gently and exact, "Records make you a witness, Becca. Lying
about them is what would make you a criminal β and you've just stopped."
She let that sit. "The money is a count in a fraud charge, and your cut of it is
a fact you'll state before anyone asks you to, because I will be standing next
to you when you state it. What you carried for Val was her book and her door
key. What she carried for you was a plan with your name in the indictment
where hers should be. Detective Kim will want the notebook and the
screenshots, from your hands, with you telling it in your own words. I'll
arrange it. You'll not be ambushed, and you'll not be alone in the room."
Becca cried then, without noise, the way people cry when the arithmetic
finally comes out a number they can survive. "The lab found my bronzer,"
she said, half to Walter, with something that wanted to be a laugh. "Two
summers of lying, Mr. Simmons, and the thing that tells on me is my own