The Law of Similars by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page B

place I bought in the city would have been easier to maintain than the money-and-time sucker we live in right now. But Abby loved her day care and her friends, and I just didn't want to drop another big change into her life."
    "Or into yours."
    "I guess. I have a lot of wonderful memories tied up in that house."
    Carissa opened the back door of her station wagon and tossed the good-sized shoulder bag she carried with her onto the seat. "You said you'd lived in Burlington before moving to East Bartlett. Is there anything you miss?"
    I opened the front door of her car for her, and for a moment we stood with the metal shielding our legs from the crisp November wind.
    "The view, maybe. Elizabeth and I had an apartment that was right on the lake. It had a really amazing view of the Adirondacks."
    "Anything else?"
    "Oh, I don't know. Maybe being able to walk to restaurants and movies. Who knows? Perhaps I wouldn't be able to count my dates on one hand if Abby and I had moved to the city."
    "I think you know that would be a good thing."
    "Moving to Burlington?"
    "No, not at all. Dating. That's all I meant. Dating."
    I nodded, and waited for her to slide into her car. When she was settled behind the wheel with her key in her hand, I asked, "Want to join me some night, then? For dinner?"
    She smiled, but she was shaking her head with what looked like great resolve. "It's very sweet of you to ask, but you know that's completely impossible. It would be wildly inappropriate."
    "Wildly," I repeated.
    "Yes. Wildly. But thank you for asking."
    "Are you seeing someone?"
    "I'm not even going to answer that, Leland."
    "Wildly inappropriate?"
    "Wildly." She started the car and reached for the door handle. "I'll call you in a day or two--probably two--with a remedy," she said, then pulled shut the door. She mouthed good night through the glass, and then that foot with the thin cotton sock was pressing down on the brake as she shifted her car into reverse and backed it into the street bordering the green.
    I waved, and she waved back. In my other hand I was holding the little paperback book on homeopathy she had loaned me. A more thorough introduction, she had called it. I dropped the book into my wide overcoat pocket to protect it from the snow and then burrowed my hands under my arms. The pizza parlor in town was still open. I'd get a calzone I could reheat once I'd put Abby to bed, and then I'd read all about arsenic, tarantula, and belladonna.
    Please don't prescribe tarantula, I thought to myself. Spiders really do repulse me.
    I would not be present when Carissa gave her statement to the police three days after Christmas, but my boss, Philip Hood, would wait in the very next room.
    He was not in the same room, because he didn't want to risk being called as a witness in a trial. But he was a presence during her statement nevertheless, making absolutely certain that the questions that mattered to him as State's Attorney were asked.
    Sometimes I envision that meeting; I see Carissa and her attorney in her lawyer's Burlington office.
    She used the counsel I recommended, a woman named Becky McNeil who had beaten Phil and me and at least one or two other prosecutors at some point in her career.
    In my imagination, Carissa is sitting beside Becky, the two of them on the same side of the massive cherry table in the meeting room in her firm that overlooks College Street. The detectives from our office are sitting across from them, and because they both happen to be male, it looks a little bit like a settlement conference for a divorce: the men on one side of the divide, the women on the other.
    But of course the stakes are considerably higher. Richard Emmons has not yet been declared brain-dead, but there is little doubt in anyone's mind that brain-dead is where the body in the ICU bed is going.
    Three times, one of the detectives excuses himself from the table and leaves the room, and tells Phil exactly what Carissa has said. He tells Phil about the