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carries in a small room. Coconut, which is not a smell his yard had any
business producing. Something sweet and alcoholic under it, champagne or
the ghost of it, and under that a third thing, a department-store sweetness, a
perfume with ambition. He stood with his bag on his shoulder and read the
air the way he had read the pool that morning in another city. None of it was
his. All of it was fresh β hours fresh, not days. He set the bag down on the
drive instead of carrying it in, which was not a decision so much as a
recognition that the house had stopped being the first thing.
The side gate was shut. The side gate was also wrong. His gate latch β a
marine-grade latch he had chosen the way he chose everything that touched
water, for what it would look like in ten years β hung at an angle that made
his teeth hurt to look at, canted off its line by the width of one screw. He put
two fingers under it and lifted, gently, the way you lift a lid you suspect. The
latch rose on the one screw that remained in the striker plate and moved with
the loose, wallowing freedom of a thing that had been forced by someone in
a hurry who had then tried, afterward, to make it look unforced. Not opened
with the code, then. The keypad above it was dark and clean. Somebody had
come over or through this gate with a tool and a confidence, and the gate had
kept the mark of it the way water keeps everything: plainly, and without any
interest in being believed.
He went through into the yard with the bag still on the drive behind him, and
the pool was waiting in the last of the light, and he knew before he was
halfway down the path. The water was wrong. It had a milkiness to it, a faint
opalescence that hung in the top foot and killed the sparkle he had read that
morning in a photograph of his own mind β for he had been carrying the
morning's water in his head all day, the way you carry the face of a house
you love. This was not that water. This was water with a history in it, water
9
that had been used. He came to the coping and knelt, out of forty years of
habit, and put his hand in flat, and lifted it, and watched it sheet off his skin.
Sunscreen. The water had the slick, resisting glide of a body of water that has
taken on oils, and the ionizer's readout, when he stepped into the pump room
doorway, was showing him a copper demand he had never once seen on this
system β the machine working, and working hard, to hold a line against
something organic and foreign that had been in the pool in quantity.
It was the steps that told him the rest. The entry steps at the shallow end were
white β a pale aggregate finish he had chosen because June said a pool
should look like the inside of a shell β and on the white steps, faint as breath
on glass and unmistakable to the man who had written, for his own crews,
the maintenance protocol for copper-ion systems, were footprints. They were
green. Not algae green, not the honest green of a chemistry neglected, but the
particular chemical green of copper meeting the bronzing agents in spray tan,
the stain that blooms where a treated foot presses and stands and presses
again on a wet white surface. Colin knew that stain the way a doctor knows a
rash. He had warned clients about it for a decade: your copper system will
find the tan that came out of a bottle, and it will write it on your steps in
green, and no apology will scrub it out short of an acid wash. In and out, the
prints went. In and out, all down the steps and fading across the shallow
floor, a traffic pattern of feet that had spent the afternoon entering and
leaving his wife's pool with the unhurried rhythm of people at a country club.
He did not touch anything else. That was the pool man in him and it was also
something older β the part of a man that has learned, from job sites and
from one long hospital corridor, that the first minutes of a discovery belong
to the evidence and not to the feelings. He went back to the drive for his bag,
not for his clothes but for the camera he kept in the side pocket for site
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documentation, and he worked his own backyard the way he would have
worked a warranty claim for a client: wide shots first, then the latch, then the
steps from three angles in the falling light with a coin laid beside one print
for scale. Behind the pump housing, where the shadow of the unit fell across
the deck, he found the cork. Champagne, a real cork, mushroomed and still
faintly cold-smelling, with the wire cage beside it twisted off in the haste of
people who open bottles outdoors. On June's chair β the canvas chair, her