I’d go out, see that the pool measurements were normal, and then I’d go right back to bed and forget that I’d entertained the notion that my sister’s notes might have some truth in them. I was the logical one. The one who made my living helping people in crisis. Yet here I was, sneaking around to measure the depth of the swimming pool at midnight, to see if it really was bottomless. Ridiculous.

The flagstone path that led around the side of the house to the gate was still warm under my bare feet, the stones holding the heat from the day. I pushed on the gate latch, and it opened with a loud screech. I made a mental note to give it a squirt of oil in the morning. I tried the switch that turned on the floodlights my grandmother had installed for early morning swims. But no swimming at night. Not ever.

The lights did not come on. The bulbs were probably missing out here, too, and we hadn’t thought to replace them.

So Lexie entered the water in complete darkness that final time. Slipping out of her shorts and T-shirt, leaving them on the edge where Diane and the police and paramedics found them the next day. A thought occurred to me: What if it wasn’t Lexie who had removed and broken all the light bulbs? What if she’d woken up in the dark and couldn’t turn on any lights? Heard a noise from the pool and come out to investigate? What if she hadn’t been alone?

I shook my head. There was no sign of foul play. No sign of an intruder. The police had pronounced it an accidental drowning.

A woman with a long history of mental illness and erratic behavior, including suicidal ideation, enters her pool and is found the next day by a concerned family member. It wasn’t such an odd story.

What’s your story, Morning Glory? What makes you look so blue?

I switched on the flashlight, cutting through the darkness. I willed myself to move closer to the pool. The sharp mineral smell of the water was mixed with something vaguely unpleasant. Sometimes, like now, the pool smelled dank and sulfurous, more like rotten eggs than the clean, healing water Gram used to promise it was. If we had a cold, the flu, a headache, she claimed a dip in the pool would cure it. I thought of Gladys Bisette asking if Bill could come for a swim to help his old war injury. Of Diane filling a jar for Terri, who probably believed it helped her MS. It was amazing really, the power of the mind. But still… what left those scratches on Ryan’s leg? Who lured my father in this afternoon?

And what about the time I came down here on my own?

I’d done it on a dare. Lexie said she didn’t think I had the guts to go out to the pool on my own in the middle of the night. She’d teased me for days until finally, I was furious enough to prove her wrong. I snuck out of bed close to midnight, crept down the stairs and outside to the pool. It was pitch-dark, and as I waited for my eyes to adjust, I heard a splash in the water. I called out to my sister, sure it was her, trying to spook me. But it wasn’t her, was it?

I shook the thoughts away. Being by the pool was freaking me out big-time. The best thing to do would be to go back inside. But not without taking a look. Just checking. “Let’s get this over with, then,” I said out loud.

I did a sweep with the flashlight beam, saw the empty patio, the still pool. The dark water sucked in the light; became a black hole with its own gravitational force, trying to pull everything around it in. I could not see the hills behind it, but I felt their presence and imagined, for half a second, that they were inching forward.

Keeping my eyes averted from the blackness where I knew the hills to be, I moved to the back side of the pool, where the outlet was, to the corner where we’d stashed Lexie’s raft. No way was I going out in that thing in the dark. I’d measure the edges, though. An experiment, I told myself.

Come on, Jax. Try it. Just for shits and giggles.

I shone the light into the raft and found the coil of marked measuring tape with the metal weight hooked on the end. “Here goes nothing,” I said, hoping the sound of my own voice would break the nervous fear jolting through me. I carried the unwieldy coil to A1 at the left-hand corner, toward the front gate. Careful of the slippery edge, I lowered the weight. As I fed the measuring tape down, it bounced along the wall of the pool and I found myself holding it fiercely, as if it might get yanked out of my hand. Surely the weight would hit bottom soon—and then it did. Of course it did. Holding the line taut, I crouched down, shining the light on the markings. 6.8 meters. I moved over to A2 and got roughly the same measurement. Moving carefully along the long edge of the pool, stopping every foot, I worked my way all the way down to A45. All spots measured between 6.8 and 7.4 meters, which would be something like 20 to 24 feet. Deep for a swimming pool, but by no means bottomless.

I felt a little disappointed—it seemed a huge letdown to see proof that there was a bottom. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren’t real after all. I had a perfect vision of Lexie at ten, blue swimming cap and goggles on, shouting, “I’m going to swim all the way to the other side of the world!”

I opened my eyes, tossed the weight out farther from the edge a couple of times. I couldn’t drop the tape down straight, so I couldn’t get a precise measurement, but it was also roughly the same depth. I was crouched down, flashlight in hand, looking at the measurements on the rope when I heard a small splash from behind me, near the back end of the pool. Startled, I dropped the flashlight into the pool. I watched it sink, the light illuminating the water for a few seconds until it died.

“Shit,” I said, scrambling to my feet, turning around and squinting into the darkness, searching for some sign of movement. “Is someone there?” I pulled the rope up, held on to the last few feet of it, the lead weight swinging. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would have to do.

I searched the shadows, the dark shapes of chairs, tables, the umbrella, the half-deflated raft. All of it looked ominous in the dark; shadowy monsters watching, waiting, holding their breath to see what I would do next. I heard only the low murmur of the outlet stream at the far end of the pool. I stood up, legs feeling like Jell-O, and walked to where it sounded like the splash had come from. I swung the weight at the end of the rope, thinking I’d aim for the head if anyone was there. I saw no movement. The water was still, unbroken. It was my imagination. I hadn’t really heard anything at all.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

“Shut up already,” I told her. Told myself. Because Lexie wasn’t really talking to me. Just like I didn’t really hear a splash.