"Our daughter is thirty-four. That Wednesday she was in surgery in Atlanta,
at Emory, for six hours, and her husband and I were in a waiting room with
our phones off, because that's what they ask you to do. We came home
Thursday night too tired to stand up, and my neighbor told me the inspection
ladies had been by while we were gone, and I was grateful. I was grateful to
them, for watching the house. I have sent Lorraine Faye a Christmas card
every year since."
She sat down. Her husband's hand found her shoulder and stayed there, and
the sound that went through the folding chairs was not a murmur this time. It
was the sound of a room changing its mind at the level of the spine.
"The Hollis house," Colin said, more gently. "Camellia Court. The
Wednesday was in June, two summers ago."
64
Mr. Hollis stood before he was asked, seventy years old, in a suit he had
clearly worn to a funeral and kept for occasions he respected, and he
confirmed it in two sentences, with a veteran's economy. "My wife died on
the Monday. That Wednesday we buried her at Bonaventure, and the
committee was in our pool while I was at the cemetery, and I have the gate
log from my own camera to prove it, which I have given to Ms. Benson.
That's all I have to say to this board, and it's more than I meant to say ever
again."
He sat. Val, at the podium, had not moved, and Colin saw that her hand β
the right hand, the emerald β had gone down flat on the podium's edge, as if
the wood were the only thing in the room still holding a shape she
recognized.
It was then that Ron Dunn opened the box under the table.
He did it without being asked and without looking at the chair. He lifted out a
stack of copies bound with a rubber band β check copies, the treasurer's
duplicates, forty-one of them β and carried them the four steps to the
evidence table and laid them down next to Colin's nine vials: the two
archives of the same three summers, side by side.
"The association reimburses the inspection committee for supplies," Ron
said. His voice had the midnight kitchen quality still, but underneath it now
was the bookkeeper, surfacing like a man coming up for air in his own
element. "Clipboards. Postage. Printing. That's what the line item says, and
that's what I was told I was signing. Forty-one checks, three summers. I have
read them now. I have read what the money actually bought, from the
receipts that were turned in with them, which I also never read, God forgive
me, because the president said sign and the president is my friend of twenty
years and the amounts were small." He looked at the stack. "Ice. Lemons.
65
Prosecco, by the case, from a wholesaler in Pooler. Towels β the association
bought towels, in colors, to match a theme. A Bluetooth speaker,
waterproof." A sound went through the room that was almost a laugh and
was not one. "I signed them. Every one of them has my name on it, and I am
not going to stand here and pretend my name isn't mine. But I am done
signing things I haven't read." He turned, then, to the board table, and put his
hand flat on the association's seal where it hung, the way a man steadies
himself on a rail. "As treasurer, I move that the president be suspended from
office pending a full independent audit of association accounts, and that this
motion be voted tonight."
The second came from the floor β from Tupelo Lane, from a man Colin had
once re-plastered a pool for β before the secretary had finished writing the
first.
Val said, "Ron." Just that. Just his name, in the voice of twenty years of
friendship, and Ron Dunn looked at his wife's empty chair in the front row
β Marcia had gone, at some point in the last ten minutes, out the side door
by the kitchen, unseen β and then he looked at Val and said, "I know, Val. I
know," and sat down in his treasurer's seat and folded his hands, and that was
the end of something that did not need announcing.
Lorraine Faye stood up in the front row. She had been crying without noise
for some minutes; her face, the famous face, the serumed face, was wrecked
and human and older than the room had ever been allowed to see it. She
walked the three steps to the board table and took the microphone from its
stand β not the podium's, the table's, the one for public comment β and
said into it, clearly, "I resign the social chair. Effective now. I've written it
for the minutes and I'll sign it." She set the microphone down with great care,
as if it were a glass she did not want to be the one to break, and then she did
66
the thing Colin would remember when the rest of the evening had faded into
minutes and motions: she walked past the empty seats of the circle and sat
down in the third row, in Benson's vacated chair, beside Walter Simmons,