Blood in the Water(19)

He slowed his car to look and tried to see. For a moment or two there was nothing. Then the flicker came back. It rose and fell and rose again. It shuddered and died. It rose again. It shuddered and seemed to twist.

Fire, Arthur thought.

He brought his car almost all the way around and stopped at the small parking lot next to the pool house. He looked around. Most people traveled by golf cart inside Waldorf Pines. There were no golf carts parked in the parking lot. He looked at the pool house. It looked the same as it always did. He looked at the roof of it. There was nothing going on there that had not been going on there the last time he saw it.

He turned off his engine and waited. This was the back of the pool house he was looking at. The front faced the golf course, because people liked to swim and watch the play at the same time. He watched the back windows. He looked at the caution tape. He wondered where Michael Platte was, but not for long, because Michael Platte was never where he was supposed to be.

Arthur got out of the car. He put his keys in his pockets. He left his briefcase on the front passenger seat where he had put it when he left home. He closed the car door behind him and stood, listening.

The sound was definitely there. It sounded like paper crackling.

He walked across the gravel to the pool house door and stopped. The crackling sound was louder and louder. The closer he got to the doors, the louder it was. If he stepped back, it was very faint, almost as if he were making it up.

He went to the doors and tried them. He was sure he would find them locked. They were supposed to be locked. Instead, the door swung open easily.

He stepped into the foyer. There was a big glass case for trophies on the far wall. There were no trophies in it. The case looked forlorn and a little lame.

Arthur tried to listen again, but now he could hear nothing. He might really have been making it all up. He was upset with himself. He didn’t like looking like an idiot. He didn’t like looking like one of those old fussbudget perennial bachelors from the movies of the Fifties, either. He knew the kinds of things people said about him.

The door snicked closed behind him, ending in a heavy thump. The lights were not on. He didn’t know how to get them on. He tried to hear the noise again. He got nothing.

The pool was to his left. The changing rooms and showers were to his right. He went first to the changing rooms. He pulled the door of the men’s room wide open and looked inside. There was nothing to see. He backed up and pulled at the door of the women’s room, but he felt a little wrong doing it, as if women might still be inside. He stepped through and the door closed behind him. He was in pitch darkness now, but in a way that was reassuring. If there was pitch darkness, there couldn’t be a fire, or not much of one, not yet.

He went back into the lobby and looked around again. Then he went toward the pool. There had been something about the pool at the last residents meeting. Something about the water being left in it until it could be properly drained by the people coming in to do the repairs. Something. He didn’t remember what.

The doors to the pool were big and heavy. He thought he could hear water sloshing on the other side of them, but he was sure he was making that up. The water wouldn’t be sloshing. There wouldn’t be anybody in it.

He stared into the darkness. The darkness was very, very dark. There were no windows here. He let the door shut behind him. The darkness became even darker. He began to feel along the wall, slowly and slowly, inching his way in case there were things left lying on the floor that could trip him.

He found the first set of switches when he thought he’d gone a mile and a half, even though he knew he couldn’t have, because he hadn’t turned a corner.

He flicked the switches on one after the other.

A couple of dim lights came on and then the sound of air being pumped through a grate or a pipe—maybe he had turned on the air conditioner? He didn’t know what he was doing. He’d never tried turning the lights on in the pool.

One of the dim lights was coming from under the water itself. That was all right. The pool had heat and light so that people could swim in the winter and at night.

Arthur turned and looked into the water, and for just a moment he did not know what he was seeing. There was somebody in the water, yes, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the water itself. It was the wrong color, the wrong shade, something. There was something in there, something dark against the palish clearish blue, but—

But it didn’t matter, because that was when the building went up in flames.





PART I





ONE

1

It was six o’clock on the morning of Monday, the fifth of November, and it was cold. It was so cold that Gregor Demarkian found himself staring down at the jacket his wife had laid out for him across the back of the living room couch and wondering if she’d gone insane. Insanity was never to be completely ruled out when it came to Bennis Hannaford Demarkian, but the forms that insanity took were not usually thin cotton jackets presented for wearing in the freeze that heralded the run-up to winter. Bennis was much more likely to do things that would not be considered illegal only because she was a very good friend of the mayor.