Walter Simmons kept his garage the way he had kept his classroom for forty
years, which is to say that everything in it had been labeled by a man who
believed the world could be understood if you were only willing to look at it
in the right order. There were coffee cans of sorted screws with the sizes
written on the lids in grease pencil. There were mason jars of seed, by year.
There was a workbench along the back wall that had not held a car in a
decade because it was busy holding a titration stand, a brass microscope
older than Colin, a hot plate, a rack of reagent bottles in brown glass, and a
ring stand with a burette clamped to it like a held note. Walter's wife had
been gone six years. The garage was not a shrine. It was a laboratory that had
outlived its school, and Walter had simply moved the school home.
Colin set the foam rack of vials on the bench between the microscope and the
coffee mugs, and Walter looked at them the way another man might look at a
row of suspects.
"Nine," Walter said.
"Nine Wednesdays," Colin said. "That's what the controller says. Heater
runtime, jet pump, dosing pump working overtime to hold chlorine against a
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load it shouldn't have had. Nine Wednesdays while I was in Charleston on
the hotel job. I sampled the water every morning all summer out of habit β
thirty years of habit β and I never read them. I just racked them. Like a fool
racking evidence against his own peace of mind."
"You racked them like a professional," Walter said. "Fools throw evidence
away. Sit down, Colin. Mind the stool, it's got a opinion about weight."
He worked the way he had taught, narrating for an audience of one who
didn't need the narration and got it anyway, because teaching was how
Walter thought. pH first, from the current sample Colin had drawn that
morning: seven point nine, high, the water still tired. Then the Wednesday
vials in sequence, oldest to newest, drop by drop, the phenolphthalein
blushing pink and dying back, Walter's hand steady as a metronome on the
stopcock. "Chlorine demand," he said. "Something organic, and plenty of it,
Wednesday after Wednesday. Your dosing pump wasn't chasing a leak,
Colin. It was chasing people. Sunscreen, mostly β that coconut ghost on the
nose is avobenzone breaking down, I'd stake the mortgage I no longer have
β but not only."
The microscope took longer. Walter made slides with the patience of a man
defusing something, and Colin stood behind him and looked when he was
told to look. Skin cells, in their hundreds, sloughed and drifting like a
snowfall in a jar. A hair, dark, curled, not Colin's. And glitter β fine as dust,
pearl-white, catching the light in the field of view like something at the
bottom of a shaken snow globe.
"That," Walter said, "is not geology. That's cosmetics. There's a shimmer in a
woman's face preparation that costs more per ounce than the bourbon you
used to keep for June's brother. Your filter's been eating it all summer."
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Then the crystals. Walter evaporated a few drops of the third vial on a watch
glass, warmed it, and put it under the lens, and made a sound in his throat
that Colin had heard him make exactly once before, at a cookout in 2009,
examining a neighbor's claim that his tomatoes had been sabotaged by the
power company.
"Tartaric acid," Walter said. "Little envelope-shaped crystals. Colin, pools do
not manufacture tartaric acid. Grapes do. Wine does. Champagne does it with
the most conviction. Somebody has been drinking champagne in your water
and letting the glass sweat into it, nine weeks running. And underneath the
coconut and the grapes there's a third thing, medicinal, faint β a treated
thing. I can't name it with what's on this bench. I won't pretend to. But it's
there, Wednesday after Wednesday, like a signature somebody kept signing
without knowing."
Colin told him about the footprints then β the green prints on the pool steps,
small and precise, that he had found the morning after it all came apart, and
Walter nodded before he'd finished, the way he nodded at a student who
arrived at the answer by a road he hadn't assigned.
"Dihydroxyacetone," he said. "Spray bronzer. On wet feet, against the copper
in your algaecide, it oxidizes green as a penny in a fountain. It's not just a
footprint, Colin. It's a footprint with the chemistry written on it. Those ladies
stood on your steps while the tan was still fresh and the water turned it the
color of old money." He straightened up from the bench, and the delight that
had been in him while he worked β the pure teacher's pleasure in a problem
that resolved β went out of him all at once, and what was left was an old
man angry on his friend's behalf, which was a heavier thing to watch. "Forty
years I taught children that water keeps no secrets, Colin. It dissolves the
truth and holds it up to the light. These ladies have been confessing to your
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pool all summer. They just didn't know the pool could talk."
The rack itself had a history neither of them mentioned, because they were