My Neighbor Thought I Was Away and Dumped Broken Glass Into My Pool

Chapter 16

Detective Ortiz called on a Tuesday morning and asked if I could come to the station.

"Paperwork," she said. "You'll want to see this."

Ava was at school. Her attendance had been perfect for three weeks, and the school nurse had stopped sending me the worried notes. I drove to the county building and sat across from Ortiz in a small room with no windows. She slid a folder toward me.

"Emails," she said. "Between Ellen and Rhodes. The state attorney printed them for the victim files."

I opened it. The first one was dated five months earlier. Ellen's name at the top.

"Victor — the girl was sick again last night. Rash on her arms and legs. Doctor says keep her out of the pool for a week. I think the cycle is too high. Please tell me we can reduce it. — E."

My hands went cold. The girl. That was Ava.

Rhodes answered the next morning. "E. — We don't adjust for individuals. Reduce the flow and the wells read dirty. Keep it exactly where it is. He'll drain it on his own schedule and then we finish the work. Stay calm. — V."

I read it three times. They hadn't just known. They had discussed her the way you discuss a scheduling problem.

The third email was Ellen again. "Victor — she had blood work done. The doctor mentioned solvents. If her father asks questions we are exposed. I want to shut the loop down."

His reply: "No. Shut it down and everything stops. The school breaks ground in four months. We get through inspection, then we cap it properly. Nothing changes."

Ortiz watched me. She didn't say anything. She let me turn the pages.

There were twelve emails in the folder. They spanned eight months. Early ones were careful, full of abbreviations and project codes. Later ones were shorter. Ellen kept raising Ava. Rhodes kept pushing her down.

"I read the log entry," I said. "The one about her rash."

"These are worse," Ortiz said. "The log says she noticed. The emails say Rhodes ordered her to ignore it."

One message stopped me completely. Ellen had written at 2:14 in the morning: "Victor — if something is wrong with that child I need you to say it plainly. I can't sleep."

Rhodes never answered that one. There was no reply in the folder at all.

I closed it and sat there with my hands flat on the table.

"Why are you showing me this?" I asked.

"Because you'll testify," Ortiz said. "And I want you to know exactly what you're testifying about."

I drove home with the windows down even though it was too cold for it. Ava's backpack was on the kitchen counter where she'd left it that morning. There was a half-finished drawing on the table — a pool, blue crayon, stick figures with their arms up.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time looking at it.

That night, after Ava was asleep, I sat on the back steps and looked at the empty pool. The glass was gone. The water was gone. There was nothing left but concrete and a black stain where the pipe had been.

I thought about Ellen, alone in that gray house, writing an email at two in the morning to a man who wouldn't answer her.

It didn't make me forgive her. It made her worse. She had been afraid, and she had kept going anyway.

Ortiz walked me out to the parking lot. "There's one more thing," she said. "We found the emails because Ellen printed them. She kept paper copies in a shoebox under her bed. Rhodes told her to delete everything. She didn't."

"Why not?"

"She said she wanted proof that she'd asked him to stop. In case it ever came to this." Ortiz shook her head. "She was building her own defense while your daughter was getting sicker."

I drove home thinking about that shoebox. Proof. As if the point had ever been about who could prove what.

Ava was doing homework at the kitchen table when I got back. Math problems, all in neat rows. She looked up and smiled, and there was nothing in her face that knew about emails or shoeboxes or men who wrote "we don't adjust for individuals."

"How was your day?" she asked.

"Long," I said. "Yours?"

"Good. We had pizza at lunch."

I sat down across from her and watched her work through the problems. Her pencil moved fast. She was good at math. She liked things with right answers.

I envied her that. I envied anyone who still believed every problem had one.

"Dad," she said without looking up, "are you okay?"

"Yeah, sweetheart. Just tired."

She nodded and kept writing. I sat there until she finished, and then I checked her answers, and every single one was right.