Free The Law of Similars by Chris Bohjalian

had made her feel better. He'd sounded so serious.
    "Good. After all, most of the time your asthma's completely under control. But this homeopathy thing? Who knows what that could do."
    Anyone who's lived in Vermont for any time at all knows the old joke about Burlington: It's a great place to live because it's so close to Vermont.
    I had heard the joke all my life. My family had moved to Burlington from a Connecticut suburb of Manhattan when I was a toddler, and it was very soon after settling there that my father founded Green Mountain Grizzlies. My parents, like so many other flatlanders who migrated north to the city on the lake, fell in love with Burlington exactly because they could say that they lived in Vermont without having to endure rural poverty, roads that smelled of manure, and the isolation that was a natural by-product of the mountains of snow and rivers of mud that arrived between November and May.
    Burlington sits on a hill that slopes gently into Lake Champlain. At the top of the hill are the rows of stately Victorian homes and Gothic Revival cottages built by lumber and potash barons throughout the nineteenth century, as well as the greens and quadrangles dotting the campus of the state's two-century-old university. The downtown itself has evolved into a lakefront of boathouses and bike paths, with perhaps a half-dozen blocks, all told, of expensive specialty shops, coffee bars, and small office buildings--none taller than seven stories.
    The place is constantly cited by magazines and newspapers as one of America's most livable cities, which was probably why Elizabeth and I bought a farmhouse in the mountains twenty miles to the south as soon as we could. The neighborhoods in the city where we were likely to live were just getting too damn mannered.
    And while our jobs might demand that we work in the town, we sure as hell didn't have to join the throngs who were drawn there from around the country by the high-tech giants that were employing literally thousands of aspirational Vermonters by the end of the 1980s. After all, if we had stayed in the city long enough, we might have wound up joining a Kiwanis Club, like fully two-thirds of the bankers in Elizabeth's department. Worse, we might have ended up volunteering for the Chamber of Commerce, like Philip Hood.
    Hood, the State's Attorney for Chittenden County, had the sole corner office, and the only one that faced Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. That was, in my mind, a perfectly reasonable perk, given the fact that Phil actually spent more time at his desk and less time in court than any of the other lawyers.
    As Phil's chief deputy, I knew I had the best office of the dozen other state prosecutors in Burlington--the best view of the city, the most light, the shortest walk to the copier and the printer and the coffee machine--but it was Margaret Turnbull who had the best toys. That made sense, of course, because she handled easily eighty percent of the child-abuse cases that came our way. And so whenever she wanted to discuss whether a case should go to trial or what sort of sentence to offer the accused--that human litany of fathers and uncles and new boyfriends of Mom, that group of men who were despicable, unrepentant, and (in Margaret's and my minds) patently guilty, even if the evidence wasn't there--I'd go to her office. I liked beaching the plastic whales beside the glass snow globes (one of which was filled with a real starfish and actual sand), and walking her Barbies and Kens around the edge of the desk. I liked the small cubes and puzzles and blocks.
    Sometimes the toys would remind me of Abby, and in the back of my mind I'd be thinking of new games I could invent to entertain my daughter. Other days, however, I'd see the dolls and lose complete sight of the fact that I was a father: I'd view them instead as profoundly erotic little models of people--men with washboards for stomachs, and women with fetish-thin waists--and I'd forget the