chairmanship and his own handkerchief both folded into the evening behind
him.
Colin was reaching for the tailgate latch when he heard the shoes on the
asphalt.
Val Kessler crossed the parking lot alone. No gavel, no circle, no folder, no
clipboard โ a woman in a cream suit carrying nothing but a ring of keys, the
association's keys and her own together on the one ring, the way she had
carried them for nine years, and she stopped at the distance of one car width
from him and stood in the lamplight with her empire reduced to the sound
those keys made when her hand moved. She looked at the box, and at the
truck, and at him, and whatever she had rehearsed in the car this time was not
what came out. What came out was smaller, and private, and honest in a way
her defense had never managed to be.
"You could have just changed your gate code, Colin."
He considered her. He considered the nine vials, and the forty-one checks,
and Margaret's casserole winter, and the footprints on his steps, and the
emerald ring on his keypad in the white projector light, and all the answers
there were, every one of them true and every one of them beside the point
she had finally, accidentally, arrived at.
"You could have just knocked, Val," he said.
72
The plea was taken on a Tuesday in October, in a courtroom with radiators
that knocked and a flag faded to the color of weak tea, and Colin Avery sat
through it in the suit he kept for funerals and bank business, his hands folded
over his knees like a man at a service whose hymns he had not chosen. Laura
Benson sat beside him with a legal pad she did not write on. She had told
him in the corridor that there would be no trial, that the water had made a
trial unnecessary, and that his only remaining job in the whole business was
to be present while it ended โ a job he was qualified for, she said, having
practiced it in other rooms.
The gallery held the geography of the summer in miniature. Two of the
eleven households had come โ a couple from Cypress Lane whose pool had
been used nine times, who sat with their coats folded over their laps and
nodded to Colin when he took his seat, the nod of people who had compared
notes with him across a winter of insurance forms and police interviews and
had nothing left to prove to each other. A reporter from the Savannah paper
sat at the end of the row with her notebook closed, which Colin took for a
good sign: the story had finished being a story and become a record, and
records are mostly read by the people in them. Behind him, midway through
the morning, he became aware of Ron Dunn in the back row โ not a
defendant that day, not a witness, just a man who had driven downtown to
watch the end of a thing he had helped begin by never asking what he was
signing, and who stayed until the gavel fell, and left without speaking to
anyone, carrying what he carried in the new way he had learned to carry
things: in the open, at his side, like a coat.
Valerie Kessler stood at the defense table in a navy dress with her hair done,
smaller than her legend and older than her photographs. Two summers of
Heron Bay gossip had made her ten feet tall; the courtroom returned her to
73
her actual dimensions, which were those of a woman of fifty-eight with good
posture and no remaining audience. Her lawyer did the talking that lawyers
do, and then the clerk read the summary of facts into the record, in the flat
voice of a man reading a parts list, which somehow made it worse to listen to
and harder to argue with.
The master gate-code registry, kept by the defendant in her capacity as
president of the homeowners association. Eleven households. A recurring
Wednesday gathering, styled by the defendant in her messages as a swim
club, for which guests were charged admission โ the guests believing, as
they had every reason to believe, that they were paying members of a club
the homeowners had authorized. Association funds applied to party supplies.
The homeowner of the principal property absent on most of the relevant
dates, in the course of his employment servicing other people's pools,
unaware.
And then the exhibits. A gray evidence carton was set on the clerk's table,
and the prosecutor lifted out the vials one by one to have them marked โ
State's exhibits, a long run of numbers โ each vial labeled in Colin's square
hand with a date, each one a sample of his own pool water drawn on the day
written on its label. He had done it for twenty years, on his own pool the
same as on every client's on his route: draw the sample, run the readings, log
them, shelve the vial until the season turned. A tradesman's routine, kept for
no audience, the way a carpenter keeps his pencils short. Detective Sarah
Kim, who sat two rows behind the prosecutor's table with her hands still, had