"Detective Ibarra played it for me," she said. "In the hospital. The whole four minutes. She wanted to see my face when I heard Kenton say, 'Same as last time.'" She laughed, a horrible small sound. "Same as last time. Everett did it right. Both times. He poured what the label said. For a whole year I've been lying to protect him from something he never did. And the only proof he never did it was on the phone I tried to wipe."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that would have been true and kind at the same time, and I've learned, in my work, that when you can't have both you should at least not lie.
"How is he?" I said finally.
"Off the BiPAP. They moved him to a regular floor yesterday." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "His lungs are scarred. The doctors say he'll always have trouble with them now. And he's—the hospital set him back. They say that happens. He asks every day what happened to the pool. I tell him it's closed for maintenance. He says, 'Good, somebody ought to look at that feeder,' and then he asks again an hour later."
She stepped back from my door.
"That's all," she said. "That's what I came to say. I won't come back unless you ask me to." She turned to go, and then turned back. "Your boy. Is he all right?"
"He's fine," I said. "He was inside."
"Good," said Glynis Hollister, and walked down my driveway and up the sidewalk toward her house without looking back.
Kenton Brandvold was arrested on a Tuesday in early August, at the warehouse unit near the airport, by Cholla Springs detectives and two investigators from the state's environmental quality department, who'd been brought in once the county lab results came back. Tobiah Grenfell had a photographer there. The picture that ran on the front page of the Independent showed Kenton in his Desert Shine polo being walked to a car with his wraparound sunglasses still on, his hands behind him, and in the background, behind a roll-up door, a wall of blue jugs with white stickers on them, dozens of them, a whole warehouse of things that said what they were not.
The county attorney charged him with seven counts of endangerment, one for every person known to have been near the pool on the Thursday, plus aggravated assault for Everett, under a theory that I understood only partly and that his lawyer called "a stretch" in the paper. Then came the fraud charges, for the invoices. Then came the hazardous materials violations, which were state charges and federal referrals and which, as far as I could tell from the article, had more subsections than my HOA's bylaws. Two of the other associations Desert Shine supplied found the same handwritten labels in their pump houses. One of them had had an unexplained incident the summer before, too, a lifeguard taken to urgent care with a cough that wouldn't quit, written off at the time as heat.