Chapter 4 - The Side of the Terrace You Can't See
I waited until he poured his second cup.
Robert is the kind of man who is most himself at the counter before seven, shirt half buttoned, hair still wet, reading the paper on his phone like the house belongs to someone else.
I set the envelope down next to his cup.
He didn't pick it up.
He didn't even look at it at first.
He looked at me, and something in his face closed.
"Where did you get that?"
"Arthur brought it last night.
She sent it herself."
He set his phone down and finally opened the envelope.
He flipped through the pages like a man who had already read them, because he had.
I could tell by how fast he got to the last page.
"You knew," I said.
"I picked up a copy on Tuesday," he said.
"Phil Renner called me.
He didn't have to.
I already knew she was doing it."
"And you didn't think to tell me?"
"Tell you what, Claire?"
He finally looked up, and his voice stayed level, which was worse.
"That my mother has decided, at eighty-one, to hand her medical decisions and her money to the one person in this family who has never actually been in the family?"
I let that land.
It was a sentence he'd been rehearsing.
"So you saw this on Tuesday," I said.
"And Saturday she went into the water."
"She fell," he said.
"You were standing right there."
"I was.
And I still don't know what I saw."
He drank his coffee, set it down, and said the thing that I think he had actually come downstairs to say.
"I was protecting her.
She's not well.
She's been forgetful for months.
She was about to do something reckless with the foundation, and she doesn't understand what she signed.
That's a bad decision, Claire.
That's all this is."
"She had a notary and a lawyer."
"She had a lawyer who has never handled a dime of her money," he said.
"Ask yourself why."
And then he walked out to the terrace to take a call, coat over his arm, like the conversation had been settled.
I stood in the kitchen for a minute, and then I did something I would not have done a month earlier.
I wrote down the time.
Robert says he was on the terrace the entire afternoon of the anniversary lunch.
Paula, the woman who has run the kitchen for nineteen years, came in at eight with bread and eggs, and I asked her the question in a way that didn't sound like a question.
"Paula, do you remember Saturday?
When everything happened at the pool?"
"I'll never forget it, ma'am."
"Was Robert up here with you when it started?"
She stopped with the bread in her hands.
"No, ma'am.
He was down there."
"Down where?"
"By the far gate.
Past the pool house, near the hedge."
She looked at me like she hated what she was saying.
"I noticed because he never goes down that way.
I saw him come up the lawn after, when the shouting started."
The far gate is where the service entrance is.
It has its own path to the pool house, and the pool house is where the panel for the cameras is.
I told her thank you and to forget I asked.
I waited until Robert drove out at ten for the office, and then I walked down through the damp grass to the pool house.
It smells like chlorine and cedar inside, and the small room in back has the security monitor and a locked cabinet for the DVR.
The cabinet was not locked.
The panel screen was awake, which it doesn't do on its own.
It does that when someone has been using it.
I pulled up the clip list.
Last Saturday has six saves, from noon to three.
The timeline says the pool camera recorded continuously until 1:42 PM.
Between 1:42 and 1:44, the entry says NO DATA.
Then it comes back for the rest of the day, from the far driveway camera, which doesn't point at the pool.
I have worked in tech support for the foundation's office for eight years.
I know what a NO DATA gap on a home recorder means.
It means somebody opened the menu, selected the last clip, and hit delete, and the machine did what it was told.
The pool at 1:42 is when Vivian went in.
I stood in that room with my hand on the monitor, and I want to be honest about what I felt, because it wasn't fear.
It was something colder.
It was the feeling of standing on the far side of a terrace you have been told your whole marriage that you're not allowed to walk on.
I took out my phone and photographed the screen, the timeline, the gap, and the clock.
Then I locked the cabinet behind me, turned the light off, and walked back up the lawn.
When I got to the kitchen, Robert had texted me from the car.
"Dinner tonight?
Just us.
I think we should talk."
I typed back three letters.
May you like
Yes.
Then I went into the guest bathroom, closed the door, and called Philip Renner from a number he had never seen before.
