Free Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian Page A

just above it. The bullet, after perforating the skull and traveling through the cranium, had been extracted from the wall not far from that window by a member of the crime lab.
    “And this was the room where it happened?” she went on. The fact she had to ask was a testimony to our work.
    “Indeed.”
    “You know,” she said, “in books and movies, couples always fight in their bedrooms. Isn’t that something? It’s as if writers and filmmakers want to vilify the domestic center of love. But, in my opinion, that’s one of those great artistic conventions that’s absolutely wrong.”
    “Is this wisdom gleaned from your parents’ history or your conversations with readers?”
    She picked up a small pile of compact discs that were lying on the floor beside a particleboard entertainment center. I recognized the artists that Alice liked best and presumed that the rest of the discs had been selected by George. I realized I knew which ones she had transferred onto her own iPod. “Both,” Heather said as she flipped through the discs the way, once, I would have looked through a pack of baseball cards.
    “If people don’t fight in their bedrooms, where do they battle?”
    As if they were delicate antique plates, Heather placed the discs back on the floor where she had found them. “You really have led a sheltered life. You’ve never lived with anyone, have you? Not ever?” She said it with good humor, as if she were making fun of a costume I might have chosen for a Halloween party or a souvenir T-shirt I had brought back from Cape Cod. It was as if she were commenting upon something that was really of little importance to me.
    “Not ever,” I said simply. Then, a bit defensively, I added, “As I recall, my parents didn’t have a special room to work out their issues. They bickered everywhere they felt like it.”
    A line of photo albums sat on a shelf like volumes from that most dispensable of books in the digital age, an encyclopedia. Heather stared at them for a long moment, clearly desirous of reaching for one and opening it.
    “So where do most people fight?” I asked again.
    “The kitchen. Followed by the rooms that have the television sets. In some homes that’s a living room. In others it’s a den.”
    “The TV’s a bad influence?”
    “Oh, I don’t think TV is a good influence. But it’s not the reason. It just happens to be in those rooms that people inhabit the most often.” She finally gave in to her desire to see the pictures of George and Alice Hayward that were more revealing than the small head shots of each that had been in the newspapers, on television, and on the Web the past two days. She pulled the album that was most accessible from the shelf and began to flip through the pages. And then, much to my surprise, the smallest of whimpers—barely more than a sigh—escaped her lips, and she sat down in the chair opposite the couch where George’s body had been found. Her knees almost seemed to buckle like the legs of a portable card table. She wiped at her eyes, but it was too late. She was crying, and it was obvious.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know quite how this happened.”
    Usually I am fairly competent when it comes to crying women—or, for that matter, with crying men. A minister, even an unmarried one, embraces with impunity. But I wasn’t myself those days; the truth was, even now I’m not wholly sure whom I had become. And so I allowed her to regain a semblance of her usual composure—a demeanor, I had concluded, that was at once sounflappably serene (I would say
ethereal
, but, given her interest in angels, that would suggest I attributed a layer of autobiography to her books that she never intended) and so completely earnest that I had begun to understand her popularity. Certainly she was beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful women in this world. It was that she was telegenic: an individual whose competence was manifest and whose