“No.”
“Be careful, Nora.”
I waited while she found the words.
“Mara’s fund was never wealthy, but it held enough money to pay instructors and equipment costs for years.”
“I have the annual statements.”
“Not that account,” she said.
“There was an earlier memorial account, before we established the present trust.”
I remembered seeing an old blue folder in her study when we were preparing the house for sale.
Evelyn had taken it to Vermont with her.
She told me the old account had been closed after its funds were transferred and that Mark had handled some banking errands during the transition.
“Do you think he took anything?” I asked.
“No,” she replied immediately.
“I think Brenda learned enough from the paperwork to sound convincing to people who never saw the new arrangement.”
She said she would mail copies of the old closing documents.
Before we hung up, she asked whether the blue slate around the pool still cracked in winter.
I said I had replaced the worst pieces.
“Good,” she said.
“Mara slipped on that slate every summer.”
It was the first time in years that she had spoken about the pool without sounding as though she were standing beside the flood again.
On Saturday morning Brenda appeared at my front door carrying a covered casserole dish.
The gesture was so unlike her that I checked the porch camera before opening the inner door.
“I thought we should talk as neighbors,” she said.
“You can talk from there.”
She looked at the camera mounted above the light fixture and adjusted her hair.
“You’re making a terrible mistake by turning a misunderstanding into a police matter.”
“What misunderstanding?”
“The pool’s community status.”
“It has never had community status.”
She tilted the casserole dish toward me as though it could soften the facts.
“Mark didn’t know the whole story.”
“Neither did the people who paid you.”
Her face stiffened.
“Those were donations.”
“Some receipts describe memberships and guaranteed access.”
“People understood the project was still being organized.”
“Did they understand you had no authority to provide the pool?”
She shifted her weight.
“Nobody likes a woman who ruins every good idea with legal language.”
I thought about Ben Ortiz standing at the shallow end.
“Nobody likes being sold something that belongs to somebody else.”
She stepped closer to the screen door.
“You don’t know what you’re risking.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m warning you that the neighborhood will remember this.”
