she slowed down.
"The Pooler laboratory identifies, in eight of the nine Wednesday samples, a
synthetic peptide compound consistent with a prescription-grade cosmetic
serum. The compound is not a pool product. It does not occur in rainfall. It is
made by one company, sold by prescription consultation, and it degrades in
chlorinated water within about seventy-two hours, which permits its presence
to be dated with unusual precision."
"In kitchen English," Colin said, "somebody with expensive skin care was in
my pool on Wednesdays, regular as church. And I know whose face cream
that is, and so does she, because there is exactly one woman in Heron Bay
Estates who has told this community, at two luncheons I have been present
for, that her serum is flown in from a clinic in Atlanta and costs more than a
pool pump." He did not look at the front row. He did not have to. "The lab
can't say a name. Chemistry doesn't know names. Chemistry just says: this
woman, or a woman using this one woman's four-hundred-dollar serum, was
in the water. On eight Wednesdays."
Lorraine Faye, in the butter yellow, had put her hand to her own face. It was
a small movement and an enormous one โ the hand rising of its own accord
to the cheek, to the serum, the way a hand goes to a pocket to confirm the
wallet is still there. She caught it halfway and made it into an adjustment of
her hair, and nobody in the room was fooled, and Walter Simmons sighed the
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way a man sighs at a funeral when the coffin is smaller than he expected.
"The second compound," Benson read, "is a dihydroxyacetone preparation
โ a sunless tanning bronzer โ combined with a cosmetic green pigment of
a type sold to correct the bronzer's orange cast. In one Wednesday sample the
concentration is consistent with recent, whole-body application by at least
one swimmer."
"Bronzer," Colin said. "The kind you put on so the water won't show you
pale. And the green in it is a dye, and dye does what dye does. It comes off
on things. It came off on my pool steps." He nodded to Oakes, the secretary,
who had been briefed by Benson an hour before the meeting, and the
projector โ the association's own, used for the garden club's rose slides โ
threw onto the white wall behind the board table a photograph that filled it:
Colin's pool steps, his own steps, taken in flat morning light, and across the
pale plaster, unmistakable, a trail of green footprints. Small feet. Going up
out of the water, across the coping, and away toward the gate. A murmur
went around the folding chairs like wind around a house. "My steps are white
plaster," Colin said. "I keep them white. I have photographs of those
footprints on four separate Thursdays, dated, before I scrubbed them down.
The lady who left them owns a bronzer with green pigment in it. She's told
the garden club so. She calls it her secret."
In the front row, Becca Halston had gone the color of the wall behind her.
She did not touch her face. She sat with her hands very still in her lap, in the
pink, and looked at the photograph of the footprints as if it were a door she
had known for three years was going to open.
"The third compound," Benson said, and here her voice changed, only
slightly, the way a voice changes when it arrives at the part of the will that
names the children, "is a prescription corticosteroid cream. A specific
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formulation, compounded at one pharmacy in Savannah, dispensed under
one patient's name, which the laboratory was able to match to the
formulation's compounding record. It appears in seven of the nine
Wednesday samples."
She closed the report. "The pharmacy record is subpoenaed in the civil
filing," she said. "I am not going to read the patient's name into this room. It
is in the report the board has been given, and in the copy the association's
insurer has been given."
Colin looked at the vials, and at the long table, and let the silence do
arithmetic. Benson had told him, in her office with the door shut: don't say
the name. Let the room find it. A room always finds it faster than you can say
it, and believes it harder.
It was Ron Dunn who found it first. The treasurer of the association, a man
of sixty-eight who had kept its books for eleven years and its confidences for
longer, stood up at the board table with the ledger still unopened in front of
him. He stood slowly, holding the edge of the table, and he looked down the
front row to the peach dress, to the tissue still folded in her hand, and he
asked his wife a question in the voice of a man at a kitchen table at midnight,
a voice that carried to the back wall because it made no effort to.
"Marcia," he said. "The cream is in seven of the nine. Where were you on
Wednesdays, love?"
Marcia Dunn did not answer. She looked at her husband, and then at Val,
with the expression of a woman watching a dock line come untied in a