Free The First Detect-Eve by Robert T. Jeschonek Page A

evidence of a murder before, I recognized it for what it was when I saw it.
    *****
    When the worst of the crying had passed, I told Adam to dig a hole for Abel’s body. It seemed fair at first, because I’d been doing most of the suffering...but it left me to take care of the body, which turned out to be the harder job. There is nothing so horrible, I found, as tending the body of your own dead child.
    Abel was fifteen winters old and taller than I was at the time, but as he lay there on the straw, I could only see him as the tiny baby I had cradled in my arms. He had been so gentle and pleasant as a baby and had never grown out of it, unlike his brother. After leaving Eden, I had thought I would never be happy again...but Abel had made me happy.
    And now, his perfect face was crawling with insects. In Eden, where all creatures lived in harmony and death never came, I had never imagined that insects could do such terrible things to one of us.
    Crying again, I rolled him into a cow hide so I wouldn’t have to look at him anymore. Adam dragged him to the hole he’d dug and pushed him in, then covered his wrapped body with dirt.
    When he was done, we stood by the mound of earth and held each other. He started to say a prayer, but I told him to keep it to himself, which he was kind enough to do. I wanted no part of praying to the Voice; none of this would have happened, I thought, if the Voice hadn’t driven us out of the Garden in the first place.
    It was the first, and worst, funeral I ever attended, though we didn’t think to call it that then. It was the first funeral in the history of the world.
    *****
    That night, as I sat in front of the campfire Adam had built before passing out drunk, I went over the possibilities in my mind. The list of possible killers.
    As you might expect, it wasn’t a long list. There were only three people in the whole world back then that we knew of, and I knew that I hadn’t done it, so that left Adam and my other son, Cain.
    Cain, who had been conspicuously absent since before the death of Abel.
    Now, when it comes to understanding murder, I certainly wasn’t as sophisticated as I am nowadays...but I still realized that Cain’s disappearance could not be a coincidence. This left two possibilities which to me were equally bad.
    Either Cain had been involved in Abel’s murder...or had been murdered himself.
    Either way, nothing but misery lay ahead for me. There I was, the first mother in the world, and one of my darling children had killed the other. Or both were dead at the hand of another. Either possibility made me shudder with dread.
    If only I’d known back then that in this violent world of ours, such fates are not uncommon among the children of any woman.
    Sometimes, I wish that I could whisper back along the years to myself. “The world is much worse than you think,” I would tell her. “This is nothing compared to what you have yet to face. It will pass.”
    In a way, I think it would be a comfort to her.
    *****
    Of course, though I had absolutely no doubt that Cain had some role in Abel’s murder or was a victim himself, I likewise knew he wasn’t the only one who could have been involved.
    I didn’t want to believe my husband could have done it, but I had to admit I hadn’t been watching him every minute of the day when Abel was found dead. We had worked together in camp for much of the morning, but he had gone off for a while to harvest berries in the forest. We found Abel not far away, so I thought it was possible that Adam could have killed him in the time we were apart.
    Thinking back, I remembered how troubled Adam had been since our departure from Eden. He had agonized over disobeying the Voice, had prayed and prayed for forgiveness...and become more and more depressed when forgiveness never came. He had used the grapes to forget, but it never lasted long; he never seemed to get over losing his perfect little world.
    So I knew he hadn’t been in the best state