He tried the door but it was locked, and rang the bell and then he called up to the windows, but no one answered. He didn’t know what to make of the little girl, outside alone like that, but there was lots he didn’t know about people like the Woods, not everything they did made sense to him. All he had was his dirty old sweater to give the girl, but she took it, wrapping it around herself like a blanket. He got to work on the lawn, thinking maybe the noise of the mower would wake up Mrs. Wood and she’d remember her little girl was outside alone by the pool, that she’d accidentally locked the door somehow. Mr. Carter, I don’t know how it happened, I fell asleep somehow, thank God you were here.

He finished the lawn, the girl watching him silently with her doll, and got the skimmer from the garage to clean the pool. That was when he found it, along the edge of the path: a baby toad. Weren’t no bigger than a penny. He was lucky he’d missed it with the mower. He bent to pick it up; it weighed nothing in his hand. If he hadn’t been looking at it with his own eyes he’d have said his hand was empty, that’s how light it was. Maybe it was the girl watching him from the patio, or else Mrs. Wood sleeping behind him in the house; but it seemed, right then, like the toad could set things right somehow, this tiny thing in the grass.

—C’mere, he said to the girl. C’mere, I’ve got something to show you. Just a little baby of a thing, Miss Haley. A little baby thing like you.

He turned then to find Mrs. Wood, standing in the yard behind him, not ten feet away; she must have come out the front, because he hadn’t heard a sound. She was wearing a big T-shirt, like a nightgown, her hair all whichaway around her face.

—Mrs. Wood, he said, why there you are, glad to see you’re up now. I was just about to show Haley here—

Get away from her!

But it wasn’t Mrs. Wood, not the one he knew. Her eyes were gone all wild and crazy. She looked like she didn’t know who he was.

—Mrs. Wood, I just meant to show her something nice—

Get away! Get away! Run, Haley, run!

And before he could say another word she’d shoved him, hard, with all her strength; he tumbled backward, his foot tangled on the skimmer where he’d left it on the pool deck. He reached out, a reflex, his fingertips catching and holding the front of her shirt; he felt his weight taking her with him, nothing he could do to stop it, and that was when they fell into the water.