Page 79 of Breathing Under Water

“Thank god. I’m sorry Leo went on this wild-goose chase for me. If I had known what he was planning, I swear, I never would have been on board with it. You have to believe me.”

“We’re not mad, McKenna. Not at you. Leo shouldn’t have gone off by himself like that, but we understand why he wanted to help you. We still want to help you.”

Some of the tension I’d been holding in my shoulders releases at her words. I nod appreciatively, though I don’t think there’s anything they can do.

“That’s why I called the guy,” Berry continues. “To ask if he still had the drone.”

Even though I know better, I feel my hopes rising.

“Oh my god, does he have it?”

“He does,” Phil says, leaning forward. I can tell he’s preparing to deliver bad news. “But he deleted all the footage from the camera module when he first received the package from his uncle.”

I slump back against the cushions. So it was all for nothing. Leo risked his safety, sent his family into days of panic, wreaked havoc for so many people, and it was all for nothing.

“But my dad here”—Phil puts a hand on his father’s shoulder—“is apparently some kind of tech-hoarder, and he still had the footage on his computer.”

Hollis nods as I say, “On his computer? I don’t understand.”

Phil and Hollis explain in tandem that when Leo first got the drone, Hollis wanted to watch one of the flights, so Leo set up the drone to stream to his grandfather’s computer. Afterward, Leo told Hollis how to turn off the functionality, but Hollis never bothered. Anything the drone recorded was also saved locally to Hollis’s computer.

“Wait, so you have the video? Like right now?”

Phil pushes an iPad across the coffee table, tapping the screen to bring it to life. There’s a frozen image waiting on the screen, a traffic light, bright red against a dark night sky.

“All you have to do is press Play,” Hollis says.

I follow his instruction, and then I’m watching a video of flight footage. It’s a little disorienting as the camera flies over houses and yards, streets with moving cars, then dense forest areas. All this time, I’d been imagining the video would look like the kind of grainy night vision images you see in movies with military action scenes. But this looks more like something I’d have shot using my phone. I watch the screen get lighter and darker and then lighter again as the drone flies over different locations, streetlights, shopping centers, homes.

“You should skip ahead, Dad,” Berry says.

Hollis slides his finger along the bottom of the screen, and then I see the Hollyhock pool come into view. The deck lighting must have been attached to the generator, because there’s enough ambient glow that I can make out the whole area. It’s also clear that the drone didn’t arrive until after the vandalism already happened. I can tell as soon as the pool comes into view that the liquid in it is not regular pool water. There’s a sheen to the surface that’s full of swirling patterns.

“So we’re too late?” I look up at Berry, whose eyes are still focused on the screen. “All this effort, and it doesn’t even show anything?”

“Keep watching,” she says.

And that’s when I see it.

A figure comes out of the shadows, a person in a dark raincoat. They run over to the pool and pick something up from the edge, like a forgotten item. Their hair is tied back in a long ponytail, and I can tell that I’m clearly looking at a woman. Someone with hair much longer than mine, and darker.

And then she turns, and I see her face plain as day.

I gasp. “Vanessa? That’s my coach’s daughter.” And if there was any doubt as to what she was doing there, I can also see the item she’s holding now. A paint can.

She looks directly at the drone. Maybe she heard some sort of noise coming from it or caught sight of a light flashing in the dark sky, and then she runs out of the frame.

“There’s absolutely no question,” I tell them. “That was Vanessa Catapano.” I look back at the screen now, where the video continues to play the drone’s flight over the golf course. “But why on earth would she want to damage the pool of the club that her own family’s been going to for years?” I wonder for a second whether she felt the same as I did about the cancelation of the special-needs lessons, if she was trying to get revenge on the club herself. But that doesn’t make sense.

Berry reaches across the table and puts her hand on my arm. “The who and the why of it don’t really matter anymore, sweetie. The most obvious thing from this video is that the person who vandalized the pool was not you.”

And then it hits me. “This clears me. It proves it. My scholarship. My housing. I can get it all back!”

They’re all smiling at me, nodding happily. As if we’ve been a team all along. As if they didn’t assume the worst of me, just like everybody else.

“We owe you a big apology,” Berry says. “A lot of people do.”

Before I can answer, Phil says, “Leo mentioned you’ve been sleeping in your car.”