Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian

refrigerator with beer and milk and Hostess cupcakes, which as a boy I had always preferred cold. Over breakfast on Friday morning, she asked me all the right questions about my future and whether (and here she was delicate) the deaths of two of my congregants were more of a personal or a pastoral crisis. I answered evasively by explaining that only one was a congregant and that I tended not to use that term in any event. On Friday the sky was a cerulean blue, and I walked alone for hours around the streets on which I had lived as a child and a teenage boy, loitering for a few moments before the slightly imposing Tudor in which I had grown up—a house not far from the swim and tennis club where my older sister would spend long summer days with her friends but that I always found less inviting and tended to avoid. I passed the school, an elegant, lengthy Georgian structure that looked like it belonged on a college campus, then the ball field and the library. That library and ball field and the village itself were far more likely to be my summer haunts than was the swim and tennis club. The town was a collection of hills, the roads laid out chaotically along the cow paths from the nineteenth century, the trees now tall and thick and statuesque, the houses substantial. Most of my neighbors, I would realize in high school, had money and advantages, but as a boy I had been largely oblivious to both. I was more aware of Mike Ferris’s humongousbaseball-card collection, for example, and how content and secure I would feel trading cards and arguing baseball with him in his family’s screened porch as a thunderstorm would rumble in from the west.
    That Friday as I walked along the sidewalk in the village, I detoured into the bookstore and bought
Angels and Aurascapes
and
A Sacred While
.
    I had brought my laptop with me, and in the afternoon, as if I were consciously trying to give the investigation that soon would be launched interesting fodder, once again I surfed the Web for information about Alice Hayward (there was nothing I didn’t already know) and about domestic abuse and death by strangulation and gunshot. Some of those sites would come back to haunt me during the investigation, but it was all very innocent. While online I read reviews of Heather’s books and visited her website, and I found myself spending far more time with her blog than I would have anticipated. In the evening, after I took my mother to dinner at a French bistro in town that she had always enjoyed, I read from both of Heather’s books.
    And then on Saturday morning, I awoke and pondered my next destination. I had options other than Heather Laurent, including acquaintances who had remained in Westchester County. And there were my friends from seminary—one in Illinois, another in upstate New York, and a third in Pennsylvania. There was my friend in Texas. Instead, however, I found myself drawn toward lower Manhattan: I veered on to the Saw Mill River Parkway, then the Henry Hudson, and then the West Side Highway. I exited at Canal Street and turned on to Greene. I honestly wasn’t sure whether I would ring the bell at Heather Laurent’s building or just glance around her neighborhood for a few moments. There are fine lines between interest and obsession and stalking, but I think I was still well within the bounds of mere intellectual curiosity. And I may also have been experimenting on some level with a flirtatious quid pro quo: She had dropped in unexpectedly onme that Tuesday; now I was returning the favor on Saturday. I hadn’t decided what I would do if she weren’t home. Wait or leave a note or simply depart. For a few moments, they were all equal in my mind.
    But I did press the call button, and she was home, and I felt a little rush of pleasure at the sound of her voice over the crackling intercom. She invited me up and said there would be doors to four lofts when the elevator doors parted, and hers would be the one farthest to the left. It