The clock on the nightstand read 9:14 a.m. when the laughter woke him.
Tom Harding lay still for a moment, one arm thrown over his eyes, and tried to place the sound. It was a Saturday in mid-June, bright already behind the blackout lining of the curtains, and the house was supposed to be empty except for him. He had fallen asleep on the couch the night before with construction schedules spread across his chest — submittals for the Research Triangle logistics center, a revised pour sequence he had wanted to re-read before Monday — and at some point after midnight he had dragged himself upstairs and left the television on downstairs. That was his first, entirely reasonable explanation.
The TV, he thought. He had left the TV on.
Then came the splash.
It was not a television splash. It had weight to it, and displacement, and it was followed immediately by a woman's voice, high and delighted, shouting from somewhere very close and very outside.
"Oh my God, Karen!"
Another laugh answered it, and then a second voice, and then music found its footing — a low, thumping bass that came up through the floorboards and settled in the frame of the house — and under the music, distinct as a coin dropped on tile, a bottle clinked against glass.
Tom sat up.
He was forty-two years old, and he had owned this house for nine weeks. Closing had been in early April, on a Tuesday morning in a title company office off Six Forks Road, and he still woke up some mornings with the brief, dislocating feeling of being a guest in someone else's good fortune. Three bedrooms. Brick. A kitchen large enough that he had eaten standing at the island for the first two weeks because buying a table felt presumptuous. A quiet cul-de-sac in Briarwood Hills, outside Raleigh, where the mailboxes all matched and the lawns were cut on an unspoken rotation. And in the back, behind a tall cedar fence he had walked board by board on his second day and found solid, a private pool on pale stone decking.
Lot 17. His lot. His fence. His gate, his insurance, his taxes. He had read every page of that into fact at closing, because Tom read everything. At work, where he had recently been promoted to senior project manager at a commercial engineering firm, his coworkers joked that he would read the warranty on a spoon before using it. It was not entirely a joke. He had read the warranty on his refrigerator. Twice. The second time had been to settle an argument with himself about the ice maker.
He swung his feet to the floor.
The laughter came again, clearer now. Women. At least two. Plurally, undeniably present, and not on a screen.
Tom crossed to the window in his undershirt and shorts, barefoot on carpet that still smelled faintly new to him, and took hold of the curtain.
For a second — he would remember this second later, and write it down with a timestamp, because that was who he was — he expected a rational picture. A neighbor's party carried over a fence line. A radio at the Lin house. Something on the other side of cedar and distance that sound had exaggerated.
He pulled the curtain aside.
Three women were in his pool.
At the deep end, a woman floated on her back with a drink held aloft in one hand, careful as a waiter, her dark hair fanned in the water. In the shallow slope near the steps, a second woman sat inside a pink inflatable ring, knees up, sunglasses pushed onto her head, turning slowly in a current of her own making. And across the center of the pool, commanding it the way a parade float commands a street, a third woman reclined on a giant white swan inflatable — neck arched, beak gilded, wings spread wide enough to shadow the water on both sides — like she had rented the place for the weekend.
The woman on the swan wore oversized sunglasses and a wide sun hat and a floral swimsuit, with a white cover-up draped over the swan's wing beside her, trailing one edge in the water. She was blond, tanned in the deliberate way, and entirely, almost professionally, at ease. In one hand she held a stemmed glass. As Tom stood at the window, still holding the curtain, she turned her face up toward the house — toward his window, directly, as if she had known he would appear there and had been waiting for the cue — lifted her glass a few inches in salute, and waved.
It was not a startled wave. It was not an apologetic wave, or a caught-red-handed wave, or a wave that asked permission after the fact. It was a hostess's wave. Neighborly. Proprietary. The wave of a woman greeting a late arrival at her own party.
Tom stared.
Behind the glass, in the ordinary quiet of his bedroom, with his schedules still downstairs and his coffee not yet made and his name on the deed in a file cabinet two rooms away, he said it out loud to no one, in perfect disbelief.
"What the hell?"
He let the curtain fall, and took the first step toward the stairs.
By the time Tom reached the back door he had put on a shirt and found his shoes, because some order had to be restored even if it was only the order of being dressed in his own house. He had not yet decided what to say. That troubled him more than the women, in a way — Tom was a man who liked to have read the relevant document before a meeting began — but there was no document for this. There was only his patio, occupied.
He opened the door and stepped out onto the pale stone decking, and the morning took inventory of itself for him, item by item, the way his mind always worked when it was stressed: it counted.
One: a Bluetooth speaker, not his, sitting in the center of his outdoor dining table, playing the music he had heard through the floor — something bright and brassy with a bass line that made the umbrella pole hum.
Two: three bags. A striped canvas tote by the steps, a woven beach bag spilling sunscreen and a paperback by the lounger, a third bag, straw, set neatly by the door — by his door — as if its owner intended to come and go.
Three: a cooler, white with a blue lid, placed beside his grill with the confidence of long habit.
Four: his pool towels — the thick navy ones, his, bought at a home store in April and folded in the storage cabinet by the shallow end — taken from that cabinet, which stood open, and draped over his chairs. One of them was in the water's reach, darkening at the corner where the pool lapped the deck.
And in the water itself, the three women, who had all turned to look at him now. The woman at the deep end kept floating, drink held high, watching over her sunglasses. The woman in the pink ring stopped her slow rotation with one foot against the pool floor. The woman on the swan adjusted her hat, settled herself more comfortably, and smiled at him as if he were the entertainment arriving on schedule.
Tom walked to the edge of the decking and stopped where the stone met the coping. He was aware of his heart doing something uncivilized in his chest, and he made his voice come out level.
"Morning," he said.
The woman on the swan raised her glass again, an echo of the wave. "Morning."
"This is private property," Tom said.
She tilted her head, sunglasses glinting. "Your pool?"
"Yes," he said. "My pool. My yard. You're trespassing."
She laughed — not cruelly, which somehow made it worse, but with the warm amusement of someone correcting a child who has used the wrong fork. "My name is Karen Peton," she said, as if that were an answer. As if it were, in fact, the entire answer. "I'm on the board. I've lived in Briarwood Hills seventeen years, and this pool has always been used by residents."
"No, it hasn't," Tom said.
That gave her a beat of pause. Not a long one. She recovered with a smile that had practice in it.
"You've lived here, what, eight weeks?" she said.
"Nine."
"Sweetheart," she said, and the word landed with seventeen years of weight behind it, "you own the house."
"And the lot," Tom said.
"And the lot," she conceded, in the tone of someone conceding the garnish on a plate. "But the pool — the pool is part of a historical community-use arrangement. The Marchettis understood that. Everyone on this street understands that. It's how this neighborhood has always worked."
George and Helen Marchetti. The previous owners, now in Florida, who had shaken his hand at closing and wished him well and given him a binder about the pool equipment that he had, of course, read cover to cover. Nowhere in that binder — nowhere in the deed, the covenants he had read at his kitchen table over three nights, the survey, the disclosures — was there any such arrangement.
"Then show me," Tom said.
Karen's smile thinned by a degree. "Show you?"
"Show me the agreement. HOA covenant. Easement. License. Anything." He counted them off, because counting was how he kept his temper in a holster. "Any document that says you can be in my yard."
"People like you always want paperwork," she said.
"People like me?"
"New owners," she said, and she took a sip of her drink, unhurried, letting the swan drift a slow quarter-turn. "You move in with your folders and your surveys and you think a neighborhood is something you can read. Some things here run on trust, Tom." She said his name as if she had been issued it by the board. "On being neighborly. That matters more than paperwork."
"When you're entering my fenced yard, it does," Tom said. "The paperwork is the only thing that matters. And you don't have any."
From the pink inflatable ring, the second woman stirred at last. She was younger than Karen, or softer, and she had been watching the exchange the way a passenger watches a pilot argue with weather. "Karen, maybe we should just—"
"No," Karen said, without looking at her. The word was gentle and absolute, like a hand set flat on a table.