current, and she said nothing at all, and the nothing went on for a count of
ten, and twenty, and in that silence the whole architecture of three summers
โ the committee, the inspections, the letterhead, the luncheons โ was
61
audible settling, the way you can hear a house settle at night if you have lived
in it long enough to know its noises. Walter Simmons took off his glasses
and cleaned them, which was what he did instead of weeping at other
people's moments. Somebody in the back, a man, said, "Lord," very quietly,
to no one.
Val found her voice first, because she always had. "This is a disgrace," she
said. "Chemical insinuation, parlor tricks with test tubes โ the member has
had his carnival. The committee's inspections are a matter of record, and I
will not have these ladies traduced by a man with a garage full of pond
waterโ"
"The gate, Madam President," Benson said. "Let's do the gate."
The projector changed slides. Oakes's hands were shaking now and he made
no attempt to hide it, and Colin understood that the shaking was its own
testimony: the secretary had believed in the minutes.
The stills were from the camera over Colin's gate, and they showed only the
gate โ Benson had been exact about that in the office, and he repeated it
now, before the first frame settled. "I want the room to notice what these
pictures are not. They are not pictures of my pool. They are not pictures of
anybody swimming. I never put a camera on my own water; a man doesn't do
that in a civilized place, whatever he's been accused of tonight. These
pictures are my gate, from above, on Wednesday afternoons. A gate is a
public sort of place. A gate is where you come in."
Frame by frame, then, in the white light: the gate in his fence, and three
women, and four, and once six, with a cooler and a tote and towels rolled
under arms like conspirators in a musical. Faces, unmistakable, in the flat
honesty of a security camera. Lorraine Faye laughing at something, her head
62
thrown back, in the second summer. Becca Halston carrying a tray of glasses
wrapped in a beach towel. Gwen Park holding the gate for the others โ the
smallest job, done kindly. And then the frame Benson had saved, the one
Oakes advanced to last and left on the wall: the code pad beside the gate, lit
by the afternoon, and a hand entering the code โ a woman's hand, close,
large on the wall, with a ring the room knew: a flat emerald in a heavy gold
setting, worn on the right hand, that Val Kessler had inherited from her
mother and displayed the way other women displayed grandchildren. Her
own fingers. On his keypad. Knowing the code.
"The inspection committee," Colin said quietly, "did not pick my lock, and it
did not climb my fence. It let itself in with my code, which was given to the
association for emergencies, in writing, for burst pipes and breaker panels. I
find I mind that more than the swimming. A person can forgive a swim. The
code was a trust."
He let Oakes take the picture down. The wall went white and ordinary again,
and the room breathed.
"Now the houses," he said. "Because mine was not the only pool, and
Wednesdays were not only mine, and I don't want this to be a story about one
man's water. Ms. Benson has the association's own inspection calendar โ the
committee's schedule, from the records request the board answered in March.
Eleven houses. Eleven pools, in a rotation, on Wednesdays, across three
summers โ always a house whose owners were away. The schedule knew
they were away. I am going to read the addresses, because the addresses have
people in them who are sitting in this room, and I think they've waited long
enough to hear their own street said out loud."
He read them the way he had read the vials, one at a time, with the date of
each Wednesday's use where he had it. The Bensons of Tupelo Lane โ no
63
relation to his attorney, and she'd told him to say so. The Okafors. The
Lindqvists, who had moved away in the second summer and told the
welcome wagon the neighborhood had gone strange in a way they couldn't
name. The Reyes house. The Whitfields. The Calloways. And then he
stopped, because the next two were not his to simply read.
"The Petersen house, on Wren Street," he said. "The Wednesday was the
fourteenth of August, last summer." He looked toward the back of the room,
where a woman had risen from the folding chairs as if the address had lifted
her. "Mr. and Mrs. Petersen were in Atlanta that day. I've asked Mrs.
Petersen if she wants to say why. She said she would."
Mrs. Petersen was sixty-one and small and had dressed tonight in navy, like a
woman going to a different kind of meeting, and she stood with her purse
held in both hands and spoke to the room and not to the board table, in four
sentences, each set down like a plate.