Chapter 2
She came over the fence the way someone does when they have practiced it in their head but not with their body: carefully, awkwardly, one leg at a time, gripping the top rail with both hands and swinging herself down on my side with a soft grunt. She was wearing a bright-blue one-piece swimsuit, the kind you wear to a public pool, and a waterproof waist pouch strapped tight around her middle. Her hair was tied back. She did not look around when she landed. She looked at the lounge chairs, and then at me, and for a half second our eyes met across the water, and she did not flinch. She just kept going, as if I were part of the furniture.
I knew her. Everyone in Maplewood Estates knew her. Rachel Donnelly, the association president, blonde, confident, the woman whose name was on half the letters in my mailbox. I had never seen her in a swimsuit. I had never seen her anywhere near my backyard. And yet here she was, inside my fence, in the middle of the afternoon, dressed for swimming in a pool she had no right to be near.
She crouched by the lounge chair nearest the shallow end β the chair where Maya's towel had been draped the day before, and where my own towel was draped now. She moved quickly but not frantically, the way people move when they have a plan and a short window. Her hand went to the waist pouch. She unzipped it with her teeth, almost, one hand holding it steady, and she drew out something small and clear that caught the sunlight for just an instant. A syringe. Capped, clean, the size of a finger. She held it the way you hold something you do not want to drop, and then she slipped it under my towel, into the fold where the fabric bunched against the frame of the chair, where nobody would see it unless they were looking for it, or unless they shook the towel out.
Then she stood, brushed her hands on her swimsuit as if she had just finished gardening, and turned toward the pool. Toward me.
I was still in the water, chest-deep in the shallow end, and I was thinking very fast and very clearly, which surprised me, because I had expected panic. What I felt instead was a kind of cold, procedural anger, the anger of an engineer watching someone deliberately introduce a fault into a system. She had not stumbled into my yard. She had climbed a fence. She had not dropped something by accident. She had hidden it. And she was wearing a swimsuit, which meant she had dressed for this, which meant she had planned it, which meant that whatever story she was about to tell me had been written before she ever touched my fence.
I thought about Maya, and that thought changed everything. Maya had swum in this pool the day before. Her towel had been on that same chair. If I had not been in the water watching, if I had come out later and shaken out my towel without looking, if Maya had come home and grabbed a towel the way eleven-year-olds grab towels, without checking β I stopped that line of thinking, because it led somewhere I could not afford to go while the woman was still standing on my deck.
She took a step closer to the pool's edge. She smiled, a practiced, neighborly smile, and she opened her mouth to say something, probably the first line of whatever story she had prepared. I did not let her get there first. I stood up out of the water, slowly, so she could see all of me, so there would be no mistake about who was in this yard and who was not supposed to be, and I said her name.
"Rachel."
She stopped smiling. And for the first time since she had come over my fence, she looked like someone who had just realized the yard had a witness in it. Her waist pouch was still unzipped, hanging open against her hip, and her bare feet were planted on my concrete deck as if she belonged there, as if the fence she had just climbed were a minor detail and not the whole story. Water ran off my shoulders and down my arms and dripped onto the deck at my feet, and I stayed where I was, between her and the deep end, between her and the chair, because I was not going to let her walk back over to that towel and adjust anything, and I was not going to let her leave before I understood exactly what she thought she was doing. The sun was still bright. The neighborhood was still quiet beyond the fence. And in my own backyard, with a syringe hidden under a towel ten feet away, I waited for the association president to explain herself.