The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into
The mistake
It was near the end of the footage that Brenda made her mistake.
She did not know the cameras were there. That is the thing. Two little gray boxes under the eave, and in nine years of standing at that fence grading us, she never once looked up. The back camera does not just see. It hears. My son-in-law set it up with sound, and I had forgotten that until the moment it mattered most in my whole life.
Brenda was at the deck table, laying out cake, and Loretta Pruett was helping her, and the two of them got to talking the way people talk when they think they are alone. The speaker was between songs. The camera caught every word as clear as if they were standing in my kitchen.
Loretta asked her, laughing, how in the world she got the gate open, because she thought the Kesslers kept it locked.
And Brenda, my neighbor Brenda Vance, laughed back and said, “Oh, I have had a key to that gate since last fall. Diane never even knew I copied it.”
I went cold all over in the July heat.
There is a reason she had access, and it is the part that still turns my stomach. The winter before, when Roy’s sister was dying, we drove down to be with her at the end and we were gone eleven days. I asked Brenda, because she was right there and I was not thinking straight in my grief, to keep an eye on the house and bring in the mail. I gave her the spare gate key off the mudroom hook so she could get to the water shutoff if a pipe burst, because it was February and cold. I trusted her with it for eleven days during the worst week of my husband’s life.
She made a copy. She stood in some hardware store and had my key cut, and she kept it, and she let herself onto my property whenever she pleased for the better part of a year, and I never knew.
But that was not even the worst thing she said. Loretta asked her, still laughing, whether she was not a little bit worried about doing this in the Kesslers’ yard, given how much bad blood there was.
And Brenda said, and I am going to give it to you word for word because I have watched it enough times that it is burned into me, “Bad blood. Please. I am the one doing this whole road a favor. I filed a complaint with the county last week that this pool is over the setback line and they are sending a man out Tuesday to look at making them tear the whole thing down. So we better enjoy it now, girls. This eyesore will be a pile of scrap by August.”