among the residents, and Walter — without a word, without looking at her,
the way men of his generation performed all their largest kindnesses while
appearing to do something else — took his handkerchief from his breast
pocket and laid it across her hand where it lay open on her knee, and left it
there.
"Ms. Halston," Benson said, into the quiet. "I believe you have something for
the record."
Becca Halston stood in the front row's pastel line and broke it simply by
standing. She was forty-four and had sold real estate beside Val for a decade
and she held a small spiral notebook against her stomach with both hands,
like a hymnal. "I already gave this to the detective," she said, with a nod
toward the back wall, where Sarah Kim made the smallest movement of
acknowledgment, a pen pausing. "The original. This is my copy. I kept it
because Val said not to write anything down, and I have known Val a long
time, and when Val says don't write it down, that's when I write it down." A
breath of something went through the room. "The Wednesdays weren't just
us. Not always. Val brought guests. Friends of hers from the club, from the
old brokerage, two women from Garden City who wanted to join and were
being — looked at. Guests paid. Two hundred dollars, cash, for the afternoon
— the pool, the towels, the drinks the association bought. It was called a
guest assessment when Val wrote it in her book, which is this book's twin, I
suppose. It happened at most of the houses. I took the money because my cut
was the money I was paid to take it, and I'm not going to dress that up in this
room. By my count, which is this notebook's count, the guests paid about
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fourteen thousand dollars across the three summers. About eleven of it stayed
with Val. She said it went to community projects. There were no community
projects. There's a list in the notebook of every guest and every house, and
the detective has it, and I'll answer for my part of it wherever I'm asked."
She sat down in the front row again, in the line, and put the notebook on her
knees and her hands on top of it, flat, like a woman keeping a lid on
something.
It remained only for the quietest of them, and she came last the way she had
come to everything in that circle — on the edge of it, a half step behind.
Gwen Park stood in the green so pale it was nearly white. She had not spoken
all evening, and her part in the whole three summers, as the stills had shown,
was the smallest: the holder of gates, the carrier of the lightest bag, the one
whose presence on the footage was the entirety of her exposure. She looked
at Colin across the folding chairs, not at the board, not at Val.
"Colin," she said, "I never swam. I want that in whatever record there is. I
held the gate and I ate the sandwiches and I told myself a thing everybody at
a table was doing couldn't be what it looked like, and that was a lie I told on
purpose, and I'm sorry for it. I'm sorry I stood in your gate." She sat down —
not in the front row. She took a seat two rows back, among the residents,
beside a woman from Camellia Court who moved her purse to make room
without being asked.
The bylaws, which had undone her all evening, gave her the last courtesy
they had to give: the floor, in full, for her defense, without interruption.
Benson had explained it to Colin in the office — she will get her time, and
you will not say one word during it, because the room has to watch you
afford her what she never afforded you. So he stood by the evidence table
with his hands still, next to his nine vials and Ron Dunn's forty-one checks,
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and he listened.
Val did not rage. That was the thing nobody had prepared for, least of all
Colin. She stood at the podium in the cream suit with the gavel laid down at
last, and she spoke quietly, and in order, and like a woman making the final
presentation of her career to a room she still believed could be brought
around to seeing the property correctly.
"I want to say what the committee was," she said. "Not the version in the test
tubes. The true one. This community was dying when I took this office. I
don't mean the grass. I mean the idea of it. People bought here and vanished
into their houses. The amenities went unused and then they went shabby,
because unused things do. Those pools—" she lifted a hand, not toward
Colin, toward the room at large, toward the whole dark subdivision beyond
the clubhouse windows, "—eleven pools sat behind eleven fences, heating in
the sun, used four weekends a year by people who flew to islands to swim in
other water. They were underused assets in a community whose dues I was
elected to protect. The committee visited them. We inspected them. The
inspections were real. I have the reports. We noted the cracked coping at the