By Thursday, there were four shards in the zip bag, and my pool guy told me something I didn't want to hear.
His name was Eddie, and he'd serviced my pool for two years — a quiet man in his sixties who treated pool chemistry like religion. I called him Wednesday night after I found the third piece, a curved sliver near the steps, and he came Thursday morning with his test kit and his net and the patient expression of someone who'd seen everything pools could do.
"Somebody's putting it in there," he said, after twenty minutes. He held up the skimmer basket, where he'd found a fifth shard I hadn't seen, thin as a fingernail. "Glass don't migrate, Daniel. It don't blow in on the wind. And this — " he tapped the shard with one blunt finger, " — this is bottle glass. Somebody's breaking bottles and carrying the pieces over here."
"Could it be kids?" I asked, though I already knew.
Eddie shook his head. "Kids throw the whole bottle. This is somebody breaking it somewhere else and scattering the pieces by hand. That's deliberate. That's somebody who wants somebody to step on it."
He looked at me then, and I saw him decide whether to say the next part. "You want my advice? Get a camera. And don't let that little girl in the water till you figure this out."
Telling Emma was the hardest part — watching her face fall when I said the pool was closed until further notice, seeing her try to be brave about it. Rachel understood immediately. "What do you need from me?" she asked. "Just keep her out of the pool," I said. "I'll handle the rest."
What I needed was the HOA's financial records — not the summaries, the real ones. I wrote a formal request that afternoon: all invoices, contracts, bank statements, and board minutes for the past three years, with specific attention to Kane Property Services and the special assessment. Certified mail, return receipt requested. Copy in the "HOA" folder, which was growing faster than I'd expected.
While I waited, I did what Harold had taught me to do when the paperwork stalled: I went and looked at the real world.
Kane Property Services had billed for "emergency tree removal — oak, north common area" in January. I walked the north common area that Friday with my phone camera. The oaks were all standing — no stump, no sawdust, no disturbed mulch, no sign any tree had been removed in years. I photographed every tree, timestamped, and filed them.
The February invoice said "emergency electrical — gatehouse panel replacement." I drove by the gatehouse Saturday morning and asked the guard — a young man named Chris who'd waved me through a hundred times — whether the panel had been replaced recently. He laughed. "That panel's been there since I started. Two years. Nothing's been replaced except a lightbulb I changed myself." I wrote down his name, the date, and exactly what he'd said.
The March invoice was my favorite: "emergency plumbing — clubhouse main line, after-hours response," billed at $18,400. I knew the clubhouse manager, Diane, because Emma had taken swim lessons there the summer before. I called on a pretext and steered the conversation to the plumbing. "We haven't had any plumbing work in over a year," she said cheerfully.
Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars for work that never happened. I sat in my car in the clubhouse lot and stared at my notes, and the cold feeling spread from my stomach to my chest. This wasn't sloppy bookkeeping. This was a pattern — invoices for phantom work, all from one vendor, all approved by one woman.
That evening I knocked on Alan Brooks's door. Alan was the HOA treasurer, a retired bank manager in his seventies who'd always struck me as a decent man — the kind who volunteered for the board because he thought somebody responsible should do it. If anyone else on that board had actually looked at the numbers, it would be him.
He opened the door in a cardigan, reading glasses on a chain, and his face did something complicated when he saw me. "Daniel," he said. "I was wondering when you'd come."
"Can we talk about the assessment?"
He glanced past me at the street, then let me in. His living room was full of books and model ships, and on the coffee table sat a stack of HOA financials — the same summaries I'd been sent.
"I've asked Margaret for the backup documentation three times," he said quietly, before I'd sat down. "The inspection report. The bid comparisons. The contractor licenses. She says it's all in order." He picked up the top sheet and put it down again. "I'm the treasurer, Daniel. I'm supposed to sign off on this. And I can't get a straight answer about where three and a half million dollars is going."
"Have you seen the Kane invoices?" I asked.
His mouth tightened. "I've seen them. Eighteen months of emergencies. I asked why we never bid the work out, and Margaret said there wasn't time." He looked at me directly. "I've been in banking forty years. I've never seen a property go eighteen months with nothing but emergencies."
"Will you help me?" I asked. "If I keep digging — will you back me up?"
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded, once. "Somebody has to," he said. "But be careful. Margaret doesn't lose gracefully. And she has a long memory."
I walked home under the oaks with Alan's words ringing in my ears, and stood at the pool's edge in the dark looking at the water. The pool light was off. The surface was black glass, perfectly still.
Somewhere in that stillness, more shards were waiting for the morning. And somewhere in Margaret Cole's files were answers she didn't want me to find.
I was going to find them anyway. Forensic accountants don't get bored, and we don't get scared off. We just keep reading the ledger until it tells the truth.
The next quarterly HOA meeting was in eleven days. I marked it on my calendar in red ink, and I started preparing my questions.