"You can say it from there," I said.
She nodded, as if that were fair, which it was.
"Everett was diagnosed two years ago last May," she said. "Early Alzheimer's. The doctor said that the best thing for him was to keep doing what he knew how to do, as long as he could, something with routine, something he was proud of. Thirty-four years of pools. It was the only thing he still talked about without losing his place. So when the board talked about dropping the pool company, I thought—" She stopped. "I thought it was a gift. I thought, he'll have this. Every afternoon. He'll have his test kit and his radio and his clipboard, and he'll be Everett. I pushed it through. I let Kenton talk me into the chemicals because it meant the numbers looked better and nobody would argue. I told myself I was saving the association money. I wasn't. I was buying my husband a job."
She looked down at her hands.
"Then that June, the kids got sick. And Everett came home that night and told me the chlorine smelled wrong. He said it over and over. 'It smelled wrong, Glyn, it smelled wrong.' And I called Kenton, and Kenton said he'd checked his records and the delivery was fine, and he said—very kindly, he was very kind about it—that maybe Everett had mixed up the containers. That it happens with older guys. That he'd keep it between us."
She lifted her eyes to mine.
"And I believed him," she said. "Because I was already afraid of it. Every day I was afraid Everett was going to do something wrong and someone was going to get hurt, and then someone did, and there was a man standing there telling me it was exactly the thing I was afraid of. So I believed it. I started going into the pump house with him. I started doing the logs myself, at night, in his handwriting, because his handwriting was going and I didn't want the inspector to see. I put his old certification number on them because I couldn't afford for anyone to look closer. And when you wrote your letter, and that young mother wrote hers—" Her voice cracked and then steadied. "I thought you were coming for him. I thought if anyone looked, they'd find out my husband had hurt children, and they'd take the pool away from him, and then they'd take everything else. So I made sure nobody could look. I banned your boy. I fined that family over a bottle of sunscreen. I did all of it, and I told myself every single night that I was protecting a sick man from cruel people."
She was crying now, quietly, without doing anything about it.
"And on Thursday," she said, "when you said you'd recorded the delivery, I thought you had him on video doing it again. Mixing them up. Hurting someone. I thought you'd finally caught him. I didn't even think about the phone, about the call. I just thought, not him, not like this, not on the news. I didn't—I didn't even look at what I was deleting. I just wanted it gone."
"Glynis," I said.