Chapter 2
I had my hand on the back door handle when I saw her.
Ellen Voss was climbing my fence.
She was sixty-one years old and moved like it, one leg hooked over the top rail, both hands white-knuckled on the wood, her face tight with effort. She wore gardening gloves and a faded work jacket. Strapped across her back was a canvas bag. Another one already sat on the ground at the foot of the fence, inside my yard.
I froze. My first thought was that she'd fallen or gotten confused. Her husband George had been dead for three years. She lived alone in the gray house next door with the detached garage, and I'd worried about her more than once β the way you worry about an older neighbor when you see her trash cans sitting out two days late, or her porch light burned out for a week.
Then she stood up, walked straight to the edge of my pool, and opened the bag.
The logo was printed on the side in cracked blue letters: Voss Pool & Spa. George's company. He'd installed half the pools in Cedarbrook Estates back when the development went up, mine included. She must have had a hundred of those canvas bags stacked in that garage.
She reached in and pulled out a fistful of broken glass.
It caught the late sun as it fell β green bottle glass, clear shards, a long triangle that had to be part of a window pane. It hit the water with a sound like ice cracking on a lake. She reached in again. And again. Bottle glass, mirror fragments, a flat square that looked like it came from a picture frame. When the first bag was empty, she dragged the second one over and started on that one too.
I stood in my dark kitchen with my hand still on the door handle and watched my sixty-one-year-old neighbor dump trash into my daughter's birthday pool.
She wasn't just dumping it. She was spreading it. She went to my own shed, took my pool brush off its hook like she'd done it a hundred times, and swept the glass toward the deep end, pushing it along the bottom so it scattered wide. Pieces glinted, then sank, then vanished into the blue. She worked methodically, the way you'd seed a lawn, and every few strokes she'd stop and study the water, checking her work the way George probably used to check a pool he'd just cleaned. By the time she finished, the water looked almost normal. You had to know to look. You had to be looking for it.
My throat had gone dry. I thought about shouting, about running out there, about grabbing her arm β and then I thought about what happened after. She'd say she was confused. She'd say she didn't remember. A sixty-one-year-old widow with gardening gloves, and me, the angry man yelling at her across the fence. Nobody would have believed the glass was deliberate. The video would believe it. The video would remember every second.
Nine kids were coming at ten tomorrow morning. Nine barefoot kids doing cannonballs into that water. I thought about the flamingo floatie. I thought about the cake in the fridge with Ava's name in blue icing. I thought about Ava upstairs with a rash on her neck, asleep, trusting that the grown-ups had handled everything.
Part of me wanted to throw the door open and scream. But another part β the part that had spent seven hours driving home with a sick kid β went very cold and very still. If I confronted her now, it would be my word against hers. A confused old woman, she'd say. She'd deny it. The glass would still be in the pool, and I'd have nothing.
Ellen climbed back over the fence. She paused at the top rail and looked straight at my house β at the dark windows, the shut blinds β and for one cold second I was certain she could see me standing there. Then she dropped down on her own side and was gone, and the yard was empty again, and the only proof of what I'd just watched was the faint ripple still spreading across the pool.
My phone was on the kitchen counter, right where I'd left it when we came in. I picked it up with both hands to keep it steady, and opened the camera.
My thumb was shaking so hard I almost dropped it on the tile. I caught it against my chest and held it there for a breath.