Entropy by Robert Raker

there.
    â€œI presume you heard about his file?” he asked.
    â€œYeah, I know about it.” I rolled up my sleeve and angled my arm so he could see the mark on the inside of my elbow.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. I looked behind his shoulder and thought that the weather might be letting up.
    Water could teach you persistence if you let it.
    It took us longer to trudge through the crop than I had expected, but we eventually broke through the last few rows of corn and stood at the top of a small hill that led down to the lake. Nothing looked real. From our vantage point, about 200 feet up on a slope, we could see the lake and some of the acreage surrounding it. There was no mistaking what they had found. In the middle of the water, seemingly face up, was the body of a girl, completely naked from the waist down. The coroner dropped to his knees and closed his eyes.
    If an artist took a pencil sketch of Isabella Mull’s crime scene and laid it on the grass over the top of what we witnessed, one would have struggled to have noticed any dissimilarities. Not much changed in a place like this.
    Isabella had been spending the night on McIlheny’s expansive farm with several of her friends. Local high school football was very popular in Central and Western Pennsylvania, and the town was no exception. Players were celebrating a state title, the town’s first in over twenty years. The boy she adored at that time in her life was going to be there with several other classmates, as well as most of the team members.
    She had wanted to kiss him. And with those innocent urges she discovered the burgeoning insecurity of womanhood, the nervousness and frustration in the cycle of emotions and thoughts. Behind a barn she held him, kissed him, her face burning under twinges of firelight that appeared to singe the tips of the corn stalks and the long strands of her hair, so delicate that it almost dissolved in-between his fingers. She wanted to pull him closer, sleep with his taste on the naïve edges of her mouth, while not quite understanding the complexity and intensity behind the apprehension and gratification she experienced. She might not have even been sure why her heart had begun to beat faster. Isabella pulled back from him, tugging on the sleeves of his jacket. She smiled. It was all innocent and harmless. It was the last time she would press her hands against the tightness of his abdomen. No one really had ever developed a clear picture of what had happened next that night …
    â€œJesus Christ!” Fasman murmured, removing his glasses. He struggled to hide them in the inside of his jacket.
    â€œIt isn’t her, is it?” he asked.
    â€œNo. No, it’s not her,” I said.
    â€œThank God.”
    â€œSomeone should call him,” I said. The coroner turned his attention to the open space behind me. It was in his eyes, the images, the pain, the numbness in remembering the ambushed muscle and bone. Each of his eyes seemed almost hollow, artificial circles of glass no longer able to absorb color or light.
    â€œHe’s already here,” he said, nodding in the direction of the approaching figure of Mull.
    Under his weather-stained trench coat he was wearing a maroon dress shirt and a black tie. I wondered if he was perhaps having dinner with his wife, holding her hand across the table like he did years ago, before everything had become so entangled and disjointed. For too brief a moment he would stare at the small, imperfect marks her lips left on the outer edge of a wine glass. And in the smudged color he always thought she looked best in, remember not only what it was like to be audaciously in love with her, but to feel the sense of security that he once encountered in the tone of her voice and the subtle, tender movement of her hands.
    With his casual shoes possessing no real grip, he slipped on the sloping land. His body slid along the mud and sodden grass. It came to rest