be empaneled, a calendar to be survived, and Val, until the morning the
charges landed, still the president of the Heron Bay Estates Homeowners
Association, with a gavel, a mailing list, and a copy of the covenants she had
been treating for two summers as a menu. "She's going to do something with
the time, Colin," Kim said. "People like her don't experience a delay as a
reprieve. They experience it as a work period." She set her cup down and
gave him the practical part without varnish. The vials stayed where they
were, in the pump room, untouched, because their chain of custody currently
ran through a locked door and a careful man and she did not want it
improved upon. If Val called a meeting β and Kim said if with the flatness
of when β he was to attend, sit where he could be seen, bring nothing, hand
out nothing, and say as close to nothing as the bylaws allowed. "She'll need
you to perform, Colin. Angry, or frightened, or unreasonable β she'll take
any of the three and read it into the minutes. Your whole contribution to her
meeting is going to be a man in a chair declining to be the exhibit. Can you
do that?" He told her he had spent two summers being a man in a house
declining to notice his own pool, and that he was out of practice at
performing anything, and Kim, gathering her bag, said that was the first thing
he'd said all month that sounded like a strategy.
51
The certified envelope came on Saturday morning, and Colin signed for it at
the door in his robe, and carried it to the kitchen table, and knew the sender
before he opened it by the green card's handwriting. The association's annual
meeting β traditionally October's business, traditionally dull as a tide chart
β had been moved up by emergency action of the president to the coming
Friday evening. The agenda was enclosed. Item one, in a typeface that had
been chosen to be read at a distance: Resolution 1: the Avery matter β
revocation of voting rights and referral of the homeowner for harassment.
He read it twice. Behind him, through the kitchen door, the pump room stood
open from his morning rounds, and the nine vials stood in their row on the
shelf in the order of their Wednesdays, labeled in his hand, the whole patient
argument of the summer in nine small glass witnesses. The guest list was
complete now, in every particular β the serums and the bronzer and the
cream, the mileage and the floats, the earring in its envelope, the wine glass
washed and shelved by a grieving man, the notebook with its little stars, the
forty-one checks. Every one of them accounted for, every one of them
named. And Val, who could not know how complete it was, had just done
the one thing none of them could have arranged for her: she had called a
room, and set the date, and put her own circle in the front row of it like a jury
she had already picked, and placed herself at the head of it with a gavel, in
front of the whole association, six days before the law she didn't know was
finished would have its say.
Colin took the phone off the counter and called Benson, and she answered on
the second ring with the sound of a woman already smiling at something, and
he said, "Good. I've been hoping for a room with everybody in it. Tell
Detective Kim to bring a notebook. And tell Ron Dunn to bring his forty-one
checks."
52
The clubhouse had never held this many people, and it showed. Every chair
the association owned was out, and when those ran out they had borrowed
thirty folding chairs from the chapel on Meeting Street, and when those ran
out people stood along the back wall under the framed photographs of past
boards, three deep in places. The air conditioning gave up somewhere around
the second row and simply made a noise of effort. Colin could smell floor
wax and lilies from somebody's funeral arrangement still standing by the
piano, and under that the faint green breath of pool chemicals from the
storage room, where he had changed a pump seal for this building himself,
two winters back, and refused the check.
Val had arranged the room the way she arranged everything in Heron Bay
Estates: as a picture of how the community was supposed to look. The board
sat at the long table up front with the flag behind them and the seal of the
association on the wall, and in the first row of chairs, angled slightly toward
the room like a choir, sat the circle. Five women in pastels. Pink, peach,
butter yellow, a blue like the inside of a shell, a green so pale it was nearly
white. Coordinated, the way everything about them had always been
coordinated β the lunches, the walking group, the inspection committee that
existed, in the end, mostly on the letterhead Val had designed. They sat with
their handbags on their knees and their faces arranged for sympathy, and they
looked, in the fluorescence, like a jury that had already been photographed
for the verdict.