I acted like I had not heard him right, said easy as I could that I would grab a skimmer net from my van, and I walked around the side of the house, and out of his sight I called the police, because twenty years on pools teaches you that dead-black water and something rising out of it and a man suddenly shouting at you to cover it and get out is not a thing you sort out yourself with a net. You walk away calm, and you call the people whose job it is.
I kept my voice light, told the dispatcher the address and what I had seen, and she told me to stay near my van, keep normal, and not go back to that pool. Within twenty minutes the police were turning up the drive.
What that black water gave up was the answer to a question a family two towns over had been asking for years.
A person had been missing for a long time, a case gone cold, and the man selling that house had known where they were the whole time.
I will not lay out the hard details. They belong to a grieving family and to the courtroom the case is bound for now. What I can tell you is that the police drained that pool with great care, and that what they recovered brought an end, after years, to a search that had never stopped hurting.
The man who called me, so calm at first, smoking off to the side, wanting it opened quick because he was putting the house on the market, was not calm for long. He had lived over that secret for years and nearly sold the house right out from under it, and it was only his hurry, and a pool that does not go dead black on its own, that undid him.
The family of the missing person came when the police reached them. For years they had lived without knowing, which is its own kind of dying, told to give up, told to move on. Now they knew. It was not the ending they had prayed for through all those years, but it was an ending, and they could finally lay their person to rest and grieve instead of wonder.
The mother of the one who had been lost wrote a letter, care of the police, that they passed to me. She said for years she had begged God for an answer, any answer, and that it came, of all ways, through a pool man who trusted a wrong feeling enough to set down his net and walk to his van.
Twenty years I have opened pools and skimmed leaves and never found anything worse than a drowned mouse. That day I found the reason to make the hardest phone call of my life, and because I made it, a family that had waited years in the dark finally got to bring their person home.
This is a heavy subject. If it weighs on you, please reach out to someone you trust or a local support line. There are people ready to listen.