men of a certain age and the history was sitting right there in the labels. Colin
consulted, a few weeks a year, for the chemical distributor who supplied half
the pool companies in the lowcountry β testing a stabilizer here, a
phosphate remover there, the unglamorous bench work of an industry built
on clear water β and his own pool was his control tank, the one body of
water whose inputs he knew to the ounce. That was why the samples existed:
dated, sealed, racked in foam like a pharmacist's shelf, a summer and more of
his own water kept against the day a product claim needed proving. June had
called the rack the wine cellar and had threatened, yearly, to put a bow on it
at Christmas. It had never once occurred to him, in all the mornings he'd
drawn those samples before driving to Charleston, that he was building a
library of a crime β that his control tank had been borrowed, Wednesday by
Wednesday, by people who assumed that water, being silent, was the same as
discreet. The control had been contaminated in the oldest way there is. It had
been used by guests.
It was Walter who said the word evidence first, and Colin who called Laura
Benson from the garage phone because his cell was in the truck and because
there was something right about making this call from a room with labeled
jars. Benson listened without interrupting, which was her way β Colin had
learned, in the two weeks since he'd first sat in her office, that her silences
were not empty but load-bearing. When he finished she asked three
questions. Were the vials labeled with dates at the time of collection or after.
Were they sealed. Had anyone else handled them. He answered, and she said,
"Then we treat this as a chain of custody starting now, and we do it properly,
because there's a difference between a story everyone on your street believes
21
and a record a court has to." She dictated the procedure over the phone: each
vial re-labeled in her format, tamper seals initialed by Colin and witnessed
by Walter, a log sheet with times, a courier β not Colin, not Walter β to
Coastal Analytical over in Pooler, whose reports she had used in two
insurance cases and whose bench work, she said, had survived
cross-examination by men paid to be unkind. Walter signed the witness line
with his full teaching signature, the one from forty years of report cards, and
said he had always wanted to be an expert witness and was only sorry the
occasion was his friend's pool and not something grander, like a poisoning.
The courier came at four. Colin watched the sealed box go into the back of a
white van and felt, absurdly, like a man watching a child board a bus β
something of his was going out into the world to say things he could not
unsay, in rooms he would not be in.
"It'll take a week," Benson said, on the phone that evening. "Maybe ten days.
In the meantime, Colin β the samples are one witness. Go and find the
others before anybody thinks to coach them."
The other witness had been sitting in his equipment closet for a year, behind
the winterizing plugs and a box of test strips that had expired in the spring,
and Colin had walked past it twice a day all summer without a thought. The
camera over his side gate had not been his idea. In 2021 somebody had gone
down the street with a Sawzall and a grudge against copper, cutting the lines
out of three pool houses in one night, and his insurer had arrived in the
morning with a check, a lecture, and a camera system installed at their
expense and their specification: one dome over the equipment fence, one
over the gate, both of them feeding a squat gray DVR the size of a phone
book. The gate camera saw the gate. It saw the keypad, the latch, four feet of
gravel path, and β because the installers had been working fast in August
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heat β the very edge of the pool deck, a sliver of coping and the top of his
market umbrella, no more. It did not see the water. It had never seen the
water. Colin had checked the angles once, in 2021, and then forgotten the
whole apparatus so completely that when the installer's annual email came he
had deleted it unread.
He pulled the drive on a Sunday afternoon, when the street was at its quietest
and his courage was at its most available, and he watched it at the kitchen
table with the blinds at the angle June used to set them for the evening, and
he watched Wednesday by Wednesday, in order, the way Walter had taught
him to work the vials.
The first Wednesday was the clumsiest. The gate camera caught the
equipment fence at 11:38 in the morning: the latch working, working, then
giving with a violence that rocked the little dome in its mount β the
jimmying, caught in the act by a camera nobody remembered, two figures
already through and out of frame before Valerie Kessler stepped into view