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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Pool
The red and blue lights turned the limestone facade of Granville Academy into something garish, something that belonged on a cable news chyron rather than in the quiet hills of Westhaven, Connecticut. Detective Paul Rudiger ducked under the yellow tape strung between two Ionic columns—columns that had been imported, he'd been told, from a demolished bank in Newport—and followed the wet footprints across the marble foyer toward the natatorium.
The pool was Olympic-sized, because of course it was. At a school where the annual tuition rivaled a state university's, you didn't build anything half-measure. The water was still lit from beneath, that eerie aquamarine glow that made everything look like a movie set. Except for the body on the pool deck, covered now by a black tarp, water still seeping from beneath it in a slow, dark crescent.
"Male, mid-thirties to early forties," said the responding officer, a young woman named Petrucci whose notepad was already full. "Pulled from the deep end about forty minutes ago. Paramedics called it on scene."
Rudiger crouched beside the tarp but didn't lift it yet. He looked at the pool, at the smeared water on the limestone deck, at the overturned cocktail table near the glass doors that opened onto the athletic wing. Beyond those doors, he could hear the muffled sound of three hundred people in formalwear being herded into the gymnasium, their evening of champagne and silent auctions interrupted by something no amount of money could smooth over.
"Who found him?"
"Three women. They're in the headmistress's office now. Shaken up pretty badly." Petrucci flipped a page. "Kathryn Leyland, Bree Halloran, and Philippa Hammond."
Rudiger wrote the names down. He'd learn soon enough that in Westhaven, those three names carried weight—different kinds of weight, earned in different currencies, but weight all the same.
"Anyone see what happened?"
"They say he fell. Hit his head on the deck and went in. They say they tried to get him out but couldn't."
Rudiger studied the pool again. The underwater lights made the water look impossibly clean, impossibly calm. Like nothing violent had ever touched it.
"All right," he said. "Let's go back to the beginning."
Six weeks earlier, the pool had been empty for resurfacing, and the biggest crisis at Granville Academy was whether the autumn gala's theme should be "Harvest Moon" or "Gilded Garden."
It was, by any reasonable measure, not a crisis at all. But reasonable measures had never governed life at Granville.
