accused member's evidence shall be heard in the same session as the charge,
before any vote, and the accused shall not be limited in the presentation of
documentary exhibits." She held up a thin binder with a flagged page. "I
have a copy for the secretary. The member's evidence is not a courtesy,
Madam President. Under your own amendment, it is the next item of
business."
The room made a sound that was not quite a sound. Val looked at the binder,
and then at the board table, where the secretary — a careful man named
Oakes who had survived four presidents by treating the bylaws the way other
men treated weather — was already reading his own copy and nodding, once,
with the air of a man stepping back from a fence.
"The member," Val said, and smiled, and Colin watched the smile cost her
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something real, "may present his evidence. The chair would remind the
member that this is a community meeting, not a circus."
"Thank you, Madam President," Benson said, and sat down, and Colin stood
up with the banker's box in both hands and walked past the circle in their
pastels to the evidence table set beside the podium — a folding table with a
cloth on it, holding a neat stack of his own violation notices bound in a
ribbon, like a bride's bouquet of paper. He set his box down next to them. He
did not begin by speaking. He began by opening the box and taking out the
vials, one at a time, and setting them in a row on the cloth.
Nine vials. Glass, the kind a lab uses, each with a white cap and a label in his
own hand, black grease pencil on tape, dated. He set them down in a line the
way a man lays out tools he intends to use in order, and the room watched his
hands do it, and the room, which had been arranged against him, began —
very slightly, like a pond when the wind changes — to rearrange itself
around the fact that he was in no hurry at all.
"My name is Colin Avery," he said, "and I keep pools." He said it to the
room generally, not to Val, and not to the circle. "I've kept them for thirty
years, in this county, most of them within a mile of where you're sitting.
Some of you I've kept pools for. And I want to explain something about a
pool that most people never have cause to learn, because it isn't in the
manual. A pool keeps what you put in it."
He touched the first vial.
"Everything that goes into the water leaves a signature in it. Sunscreen.
Perfume. The medicine in a cream somebody rubs on their shoulder. The dye
in a cosmetic. The oils off a person's skin, which are as particular to them as
the oils off their fingertips. A good pool man reads water the way you read a
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guest book. I have read mine every week of my adult life. And so, three
summers ago, I started keeping a library." He looked up. "Every week,
before I balanced my pool, I drew a sample and dated it and shelved it in my
garage, in the dark, where water keeps. I did it because on Wednesday
afternoons, when I was three counties away looking at other people's water,
somebody was using mine, and I wanted to know who, and I am not a man
who believes in asking a question he can answer himself."
The room was very quiet now. Somewhere at the back a folding chair
creaked and stopped.
"These nine are the Wednesdays." He moved along the row, tapping each cap
lightly, not picking them up. "Nine Wednesdays, across three summers,
when my truck was logged out of the county and my gate was locked and my
pool — my pool, behind my fence, on my property — was, according to the
association's position, inspected. I want to be fair about the dates. I matched
them against my work calendar, which the state keeps a copy of, because I'm
licensed. I matched them against my toll records. Where I was is not in
dispute. Where I was, was not home."
"The member will confine himself—" Val said.
"The member is confining himself to his evidence," Benson said, without
standing. "Which the chair has admitted."
Colin nodded at the vials. "I sent these nine samples, and nine control
samples from weeks when I was home and nobody came, to a laboratory in
Pooler. An accredited laboratory, whose chemist will testify if this goes
anywhere it needs a witness chair. What the lab found in the Wednesday
samples, it did not find in mine. I asked Ms. Benson to read the findings,
because they use words I have to translate, and I'd rather the room heard
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them plain first and kitchen second."
Benson stood and opened the report, and read the way she did everything,
like a woman reading instructions for a machine she meant to operate. She
read the method first — the extraction, the chromatography, the peptide
analysis — and the room bore it the way rooms bear the national anthem,
politely and without comprehension, and then she arrived at the findings, and