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The dead man was not a good swimmer.

Julia Mann had been sitting on the beveled pool edge for several minutes, propped on her palms, her legs in the water. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been sitting there, but the heels of her hands suddenly started to hurt in the way so many things in her life started to hurt. One minute she couldn’t feel them at all and the next they were agonizing. Hands, head, heart…all the same. Feel nothing, feel nothing, harpoon through the chest. She felt a giggle pushing through the panic in her throat and fought it back. She lifted her hands and curled them, little pieces of dirt and tile dropping into the water, leaving tiny divots she tried to press out against her thighs. She could smell whiskey, which helped.

Something glinted at the bottom of the pool, and as she jerked forward to look more closely, one hand slipped and she nearly toppled in. The moon’s reflection in the pool broke into slices, gurgling slaps and splashes counterpointing the constant hum of the pool filter.

“Whoopsy…” she said, realizing the glinting was one of her shoes, the other still on her foot. There was barely anything to hold it there, just golden straps as thin as cat whiskers in a spray across her instep and a heel not much wider. A sudden impulse, a quick flex, and the second tilted and spiraled its way down to join the first. This time she let the giggle out. One high heel is basically an impediment to walking, anyway. She didn’t need it. It was evening; judging by the height of the moon, it was late. She cast a sideways glance across the surface of the pool to where the man bobbed and moved gently. He was nicely dressed, though not for swimming, a dark suit setting off the silver of his hair, his tie hanging straight down as though his head was a long-stemmed tulip. Funny, he’d kept his shoes on, even though he clearly wasn’t going anywhere. She looked down at herself. A dress. Dark, like his suit, elegant, like the tulip. Had they been going somewhere together? Well…not anymore.

The water was pinker than it had been, diffusion being the abiding principle it is. She flashed on chemistry class, Mr. Libicki so earnest as he dropped a granule of iodine into the water, the snap of someone’s bubble gum behind her, the smell of chalk and slowly leaking gas from an ancient Bunsen burner…She wondered if Libicki was as dead as the man in the pool. He must be. That class was forty years ago and he’d been older then than she was now.

“And that’s pretty fucking old,” she said out loud, making a careless hand gesture that knocked what must have been her glass of whiskey into the water. She watched in dismay as the alcohol joined the diffusion party, the tumbler end-over-ending to the bottom of the pool. She felt a little nauseous, suddenly. Dammit. A skittering metallic sound made her jump, and she pulled her feet from the water and tried to sit up. Utter fail. She lay on her back for a moment and waited for her head to stop spinning. A clear night, the sky black velvet above her, the stars scattered diamonds.

This whole evening had sucked. It had started badly, to be fair; the middle had been confusing; and the end was plunging swiftly downhill. Luckily, it was blurry as hell and fading fast. She turned her head, trying to recall why the man had gone in the pool in the first place. Why he had even been here. Who he even was.

Big sigh. None of this made sense. Where was her drink? And wait…that noise. She rolled onto her hands and knees and levered herself up, telling herself if she started to fall to make sure it was away from the water…smart cookie, Julia, always one step ahead.

Reality was trying to tell her something, but she didn’t want to hear it. She got to her feet, which was more of a performance than she normally would have tolerated, her skin clammy, her feet slipping on the tile. She looked around and spotted it, because it was an interloper here, no more welcome than a snake. Long, shiny and much better suited to poking through the shutters of a saloon door, maybe, or sitting broken over a cowboy’s thigh. A rifle, the wooden butt half over the edge of the pool, the trigger guard what had stopped it from toppling in. She took three unsteady steps toward it, bent, picked it up and threw it away as far and as hard as she could. It spun end over end, just as her shoe had.

She made a satisfied noise, then felt it die in her throat.

That was a mistake. She shouldn’t have done that.

She looked again at the man floating in the pool.

Had she done that, too?

Black clouds of confusion swept back across her memory, and she looked in her empty hand for the drink she swore blind she’d been holding not two seconds ago.

No glass.

No whiskey.

She turned and looked again at the body floating in the water. Maybe he was looking for her drink. He’d been looking for a while.

Then she turned away and started to run.