"He was going to come out the back," Fern said. "I told him if he went over that wall his mother would kill him and I would help."
"I'm fine," Nico said through the towel. "I didn't even cough. Mom. Are you okay? Is Mr. Hollister okay?"
"I don't know," I said. "They took him to Regional."
"Is it bad?"
I didn't lie to him. I never have, about lungs. "It might be," I said.
By seven o'clock the access road was a block party nobody had planned. The police had strung tape across the maintenance gate and the pool's front gate, and residents stood behind it in clusters in the long gold light, with their phones out, filming the hazmat team, filming the firefighters, filming each other. The mother who'd been in the shallow end with her two little ones found me and hugged me without saying anything and then walked away crying. One of the teenagers from the diving well, a tall kid whose name I didn't know, came up and said, "That was crazy, the way you yelled," and then, "Thank you," and then went back to his friends.
Darrow, the board member with the turned-up collar, was standing at the tape with his wife, and when I passed him he said, not quite to me, "Well, the Pool Inspector finally got her wish."
Fern stopped walking. I've known her for six years and I have never seen her stop walking in the middle of a sentence someone else was saying.
"Lowell Darrow," she said. "There is a man in an ambulance who might not come home. There were babies in that pool. If you have nothing better to say, I'd suggest you say it to yourself, at home, with the door closed."
Darrow's wife took his arm. They went.
I gave a second statement at nine o'clock that night, to a detective who drove out from the station in an unmarked gray sedan. Her name was Graciela Ibarra. She was in her late thirties, very tall, with reading glasses pushed up into thick black hair, and she sat at my kitchen table and drank a glass of water and asked me the same questions Officer Valdivia had asked, in a different order, which I recognized as a technique and didn't resent. Then she asked me the one I'd been waiting for.