Free Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian

out of here for a while,” said Ginny. Then she added, “That’s Dan back there. He said he wanted to do something, so Walter showed him how to cut the grass. It’s his first time.”
    After we had the key, Heather signed Ginny’s copy of
Angels and Aurascapes
. The dust jacket was a carefully blurred photograph of awoman with windblown hair emerging nude from the sea, with what I presumed at first glance was a large beach umbrella behind her. It was only on the second look that I realized the umbrella was actually a seashell the size of a schooner sail and the sylph was a modern-day Venus. As we left, Heather told Ginny she would stop by later so she could chat with Katie and, if they were interested, her grandparents. I suppose I should have felt threatened. Mostly I was bemused.
    Then Heather and I went to the house where not two full days earlier George and Alice had died. We had taken my car, an American-made compact with camel-colored seats that felt awfully shabby compared to her Saab, and we drove up into the hills that circle the village of Haverill like an amphitheater. We passed the library and the grange and the volunteer fire department, where a group of boys in knee pads and shorts were riding their in-line skates and skateboards on the sloping asphalt before the company’s three-bay garage. We passed a sugarhouse, dormant since the first week in April, where two attractive but slightly dim yellow Labs that belonged to a family named McKenna were barking at the remnants of a fallen tree, as if the gnarled, rotting trunk were a crocodile. Occasionally, despite my frustration and grief, I found myself stealing a surreptitious glance at Heather’s legs as she sat in the passenger seat beside me. Her skirt had ridden up high on her thigh. Her stockings were nude, the type Alice had worn to the bank in the spring and, I assumed, in the early autumn—though I had never watched Alice dress in the early autumn.
    We even passed the Brookners’ pond, where I had baptized Alice, a shallow bowl of brown water no more than forty or fifty yards from the road. Over the years the occasional car had driven by while I’d been in the midst of those infrequent baptisms. The vehicles always made the immersion more moving to me, because they made it such a powerfully public statement: strangers passing by behind glass, perhaps unbelievers,witnesses to the short but unfathomable statement each soul was making that moment in the water—
I believe
. Now joined with Christ Jesus by baptism, just as Christ was raised from the dead, someday so shall I.
    There.
    And we passed the cemetery at the top of the hill, with its markers and headstones and underground boxes of ash, the souls, it seemed to me that afternoon, gone not to heaven but merely to seed.
    “This really is a pretty corner of New England,” Heather said as I drove, and her voice pulled me from my little reverie of self-pity and gloom. I turned from the cemetery to her. Her earrings, I noticed, were gold studs with a small blue stone in each. “I hope you appreciate the aura of intimacy that envelops it.”
    I had absolutely no idea what to say to that and so I simply nodded and turned my eyes back to the road.
    “AND YOU WERE here Monday morning?” Heather asked me. There was a slight torpor to her voice, but her eyes were moving like the pendulum on a metronome as she carefully surveyed the living room.
    “Oh, I was here through early Monday evening.” The investigators from the state’s crime lab had taken what they needed and left. And while they had scrubbed away a good portion of the tumult in their work, there was still plenty left for those of us who wanted to help. Beside a window next to the couch where George’s body was found, was a small china cabinet with beveled-glass doors. With my hands in thick rubber gloves, I had used a sponge to wipe skull and brain from one long pane of glass. Then I had pulled bone chips and hair from the screen window