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"How come you're allowed in?" I murmured as we crossed the porch.
"I told Hawthorn there might be a peripheral co
"Why would I make trouble? I'm as curious as you are."
At the front door we paused, stepping aside for the two paramedics from the fire department who were packed up and departing, presumably no longer needed.
We moved into the house and through the big country kitchen. The interior was quiet. No audible voices, no droning of the vacuum, no ringing telephones. I didn't see Serena or any of the household staff. The French doors stood open, and the patio, like a movie set, seemed crowded with people whose status and function were not immediately clear. Most loitered at a respectful distance from the pool, but the relevant members of the team were hard at work. I recognized the photographer, the coroner, and his assistant. Two plainclothes detectives were taking measurements for a sketch. Now that we'd been admitted, no one seemed to question our right to be present. From what we could ascertain, it hadn't yet been established that a crime had been committed, but the scene was being treated with meticulous attention because of Esselma
Both Esselma
Cheney left me to my own devices. He was only marginally more entitled to be there than I was, but he felt free to circulate, while I thought it was smarter to keep a low profile. I turned and looked off toward the adjacent properties. By day, the rolling lawns were patchy, the grasses interseeded with a mix of fescue and Bermuda, the latter currently dormant and forming stretches of tatty brown.
The flowering shrubs that surrounded the patio formed a waist-high wall of color. I could see exactly where the gardener had been working that morning because the hedge he'd been clipping was crisply trimmed across one section and shaggy after that. His electric clippers lay on the concrete where he must have dropped them before he jumped into the water. The lap pool looked serene, its dark surface reflecting a portion of the steeply pitched roof. Perhaps it was an artifact of my overactive imagination, but I could have sworn the faint scent of cooked flesh still lingered in the morning air.
I wandered across the patio toward the breezeway that co
I noticed activity at the side of the house closest to the pool: the electrician talking with the two detectives. He gestured his explanation, and I could see all of them looking from the electrical panel to the equipment shed that housed the pump, the filter, and the big heater for the pool. The electrician moved over to the side of the pool near the far end. He hunkered, still talking, while one of the detectives peered down into the water, squinting. He got down on his hands and knees and leaned closer. He asked the electrician a question and then took off his sport coat and rolled up his sleeve, reaching into the depths. The photographer was summoned, and the detective began to detail a new set of instructions. She reloaded her camera and changed the lens.
The other detective crossed to the coroner's assistant, and they conferred. The coroner had stepped back, and the two paramedics began to prepare the bodies for removal to the ambulance. From where I was standing, I could see the news ripple across the assembled perso
I laid a hand on his arm, and he glanced back at me. "Excuse me. I don't mean to butt in, but what did you say?"
"I said there's a problem with the GFI. Wire's come loose, which is why the circuit breaker didn't trip like it should have. One of the pool lights is busted out, and that's what sent current through the water."
"I thought the term was GFCI, ground fault circuit interrupter."
"Same thing. I use both. GFI's easier, and everybody knows what you mean." The electrician was a clean-cut kid in his twenties, one of that army of experts who make the civilized world run a little more smoothly. "Damnedest thing I ever saw," he remarked to the deputy. "Break an underwater flood like that, you'd have to take a stick and poke it out from on top. Detective's going to find out when the pool was last serviced, but somebody really blew it. We're talking a big lawsuit. And I mean big."
The fingerprint technician said, "Think the gardener could have done it?"
"Doing what? You don't punch out a pool light by accident. I told the detective, that glass is tough. It takes work. If it'd been at night with the pool lights on, somebody might have noticed. Daytime like this and all that black tile, you can hardly see the near end, let alone the far."
From the other side of the patio, the detective motioned the electrician back, and he moved in that direction. Where I was, the deputy and the fingerprint technician had shifted the discussion to somebody who'd been electrocuted by his electric lawn mower because his mother, trying to be helpful, stuck the three-pronged plug into a two-pronged extension cord. The insulation on the neutral wire was defective, which caused direct contact between the cord and the metal handle of the mower. The deputy went into quite a bit of detail about the nature of the damage, comparing it to another case he'd seen where a child bit through an electric cord while standing in a puddle of water in the bathroom.
I kept thinking about the tape recording, thinking about the phrase 'she goes in at the same time every day'. Maybe Esselma
"I don't want you discussing Mr. Esselma
"It's not about him. This is about something else."
He studied me for a moment and then glanced away. "Keep it brief," he said.