Page 5 of Two Couples

“What do you think the note means?” Emily said.

“It’s obvious,” I said.

“This wind is too much,” Keith said. “We should go inside while we decide what we’re going to do.”

“Are you all out of your minds?” Patrick asked. “We’re calling the police. It’s what you do when you find a body in your swimming pool.”

“Think about the chaos,” Emily said. “They’ll question all of us. They might even arrest us! I’d lose my job if the hospital found out I’d been arrested on⁠—”

“That’s not going to happen,” Patrick said.

“How would we convince them we just found him here?” Emily’s lower lip trembled slightly. She put her hand over her mouth, pressing her fingertips against her jaw to stop the tremor.

Mirroring Emily’s attempt to suppress the fear revealing itself on her face, Keith rubbed the dark stubble on his own jaw. “Cops are notorious for not believing a word you say. They don’t care about your side of things, or even the truth. They want to close cases. They form an opinion based on their gut instinct. Then, they investigate that line and only that line. Once they jump to a conclusion, there’s no talking them out of it.”

“That’s cynical,” Patrick said. “And not true.”

“Trust me, it’s absolutely the truth. It happened to me. When I was a teenager.”

Patrick stared at him, his lips parting slightly as if he wanted to ask why Keith was questioned by police when he was a teenager. He finally broke his gaze, once again telling us we’d lost our minds.

“We haven’t lost our minds,” I said. “We’re being careful. We’re thinking about how they’re going to see this…” My voice broke as I said the words. “Em’s right. It’s our house, our pool. And the gate is locked. They’ll assume it was one of us. All of our careers would be at risk.” It sounded uncaring and self-absorbed, but I’d worked hard to get where I was.

Our real estate company had offices all over Central and Northern California. They’d be rid of me so fast, they’d probably snatch away sales that were already in escrow, freaking out about their reputation. I hung on to Emily, wishing it was Patrick who was offering me comfort. I understood how Keith felt. I knew what it was like to not be believed. It’s the most infuriating, frustrating experience in the world—telling someone what you witnessed and being called a liar. It crushes your soul.

“You’re only thinking about yourselves,” Patrick said. “Your own inconvenience, your own discomfort instead of a man who⁠—”

I interrupted him. “That’s not true! They will think we killed him.”

Patrick laughed. “Why would they think that? We weren’t even here. An autopsy will show when he died, and we know⁠—”

“We don’t know that,” Keith said. “We went out to dinner.”

“We have a receipt from the pizza place to prove where we were,” Patrick said.

“That doesn’t mean no one left the restaurant,” Emily said. “Like we said—it’s our house, our pool. There’s no way to prove it wasn’t one of us.”

“Cops look at the simplest explanation,” Keith said. “It was the husband. It was the wife, the employee⁠—”

“But we don’t know him!” Patrick said. “Why would we kill a stranger and leave him in our own pool? Don’t you realize how crazy that sounds?”

“They could think he was an intruder,” I said. “Or that he threatened us. Maybe he wrote that note, before this happened.” I gestured toward the pool.

“They aren’t going to put aside four easy suspects like us and start looking for a total stranger unconnected to our house,” Emily said. “And obviously he didn’t just fall in after trespassing.”

“Now you’re making stuff up,” Patrick said. “You don’t want to call because you think it will affect our careers or spoil our vacation. But we have to face this.” While he was talking, Patrick had grabbed the net used to skim leaves off the surface of the water. He scraped it along the bottom of the pool, lifting his phone out of the water and placing it gently on the concrete. He picked it up and tried to unlock it.

“Put it in rice,” Emily said. “That works better than you’d think.”

“Give me your phone,” Patrick held out his hand toward Keith.

“I said, I don’t think we should get the police involved until we can⁠—”

“So you’re going to let a dead guy float in our pool until… when?”

“We need time to think,” Keith said. “There’s no rush.”

“There sure is.” Patrick wiped his phone on the side of his shorts, as if that might get it working. He checked the screen again.