Diane crouched beside the chair and opened the waterproof pouch. Tom
couldn't see inside it from the water, but he saw her hand come out holding
something small and clear that caught the sunlight. A syringe. A clear plastic
syringe, the barrel catching the light as she turned it, and Tom's mind did the
thing it did under pressure — went cold and fast and procedural. Unknown
substance. Unknown intent. Unauthorized entry. Do not touch anything.
Document everything.
Her hands were shaking. Tom could see it even from the pool — the fine
tremor in her fingers as she worked the syringe free of the pouch, the way
she glanced over her shoulder at his house twice, quick, guilty looks, like she
was afraid the windows were watching. She wasn't supposed to be afraid.
People doing legitimate things didn't shake. And then she said something
under her breath, too low for him to catch, something that sounded almost
like an apology — or a prayer — and Tom felt the last of his disbelief drain
away, because whatever this was, Diane Holloway hadn't wanted to do it.
Which meant somebody or something had made her feel she had to. Which
meant it was bigger than a violation notice.
Diane's hand disappeared beneath his folded towel.
13
For one long second Tom couldn't move. Then the water exploded around
him as he stood, and he crossed the patio with water streaming off his arms,
and his voice came out louder than he'd intended.
"What are you doing?"
Diane spun. The expression that crossed her face lasted less than a second,
but Tom saw it the way he'd seen a thousand microexpressions in a thousand
depositions and security reviews: pure, unguarded fear. Eyes wide, lips
parted, the hand with the syringe jerking back like she'd been burned.
Then the mask came down — the HOA-president mask, the thin smile, the
tilted head — and it was Diane Holloway again, standing barefoot in his
backyard in a swimsuit, holding a syringe behind her back like a teenager
caught with cigarettes.
"I could ask you the same thing," she said.
Tom stopped six feet away. Water dripped off him onto the hot stone. "I'm
standing in my backyard."
"And I'm conducting an inspection."
He looked pointedly at the fence. "An inspection."
"Yes."
"By climbing over a locked fence."
"The association," Diane said, straightening, "has the authority to inspect
exterior conditions when there is reason to believe a violation exists."
"Then why didn't you use the gate?"
She ignored that, the way she'd ignored his spreadsheet at the March meeting
— the practiced, total non-hearing of a woman who'd decided in advance that
14
nothing he said would register.
"Diane." Tom kept his voice flat. "The gate is locked. It has been locked for
two years. You climbed a seven-foot fence. In a swimsuit. There is no
version of the covenants where that's an inspection."
"The covenants grant the board broad discretion in matters of community
safety."
"What community safety issue exists in my backyard at four-thirty on a
Saturday?"
For a fraction of a second, something flickered behind the mask —
calculation, Tom thought, or the effort of inventing. Then: "I received a
report of a possible chemical imbalance in your pool. As president, I have a
duty to — "
"From whom?" Tom said. "Who reported it? And since when does a
chemical imbalance require a syringe?"
She ignored that too. Tom looked at the lounge chair.
"You put something under my towel."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I watched you."
"Then you must have misunderstood what you saw."
"I watched you climb over my fence carrying a syringe. I watched you walk
to my chair. I watched you put something under my towel." Tom kept his
voice level. Methodical. Witness-statement calm. "What is in the syringe?"
"What syringe?"
15
"The one you were holding thirty seconds ago."
Diane glanced at her empty hand — the syringe was gone now, presumably
under the towel with whatever she'd already placed there — and gave a
small, humorless smile.
"I think," she said, "you should be very careful about what you say next."
Something cold moved through Tom's chest. Not because he believed her.
Because he understood, all at once, that this wasn't a confrontation.
Confrontations had explanations and apologies and exits. Diane wasn't
explaining. She wasn't apologizing. She wasn't leaving. She was waiting —
and Tom realized, with a clarity that felt like ice water, that she was waiting
for whatever came next the way someone waits for a timer to go off.
She looked at the lounge chair, then back at him, and said it in the same tone
she used to read violation notices aloud at meetings — reasonable, official,
faintly regretful.
"You know, Tom — if the police found illegal drugs beside your swimming
pool, that would be a very serious problem for you. For your custody
arrangement, especially."
The neighborhood sounds came back all at once: the mower, the sprinkler,
the kid yelling about the bike. Tom stared at her.
Illegal drugs. Beside his pool. The syringe. The towel.
He understood. It wasn't an inspection. It wasn't intimidation. It was a frame
— crude, desperate, and unmistakable. Somebody had climbed into his yard
to make him look guilty of possessing something he had never owned, and
the somebody was standing in front of him telling him, almost gently, what
would happen if he didn't cooperate with whatever came next.
16
For one vertiginous second, Tom saw it the way a family court judge would
see it: the syringe, the "drugs," the single father with a pool and a
twelve-year-old daughter. He saw Lena's face. He saw Greg's. He saw
Chloe's bedroom window upstairs, the curtain still, and thought of her up
there with her camera, and the fury that rose in him was so complete it felt
like stillness.
Diane had made exactly one mistake. She'd assumed the person she was
threatening was the man from the HOA meetings — the polite one, the
reasonable one, the one who paid the twenty-five-dollar administrative