out toward the boat. I think that he, too, is wondering.
“It’s a sexual thing?” I ask.
He tilts his head, considering. “She’s very attractive,” he says. “But it’s a bit more than that. She’s… Intriguing.”
“And we’re not intriguing,” I say. “We’re just good.”
“We’re not that good,” he says, and he smiles. He has perfect teeth.
I put my hand on his arm.
He is stunned. I can feel that, the small jolt through the body. But he does not pull away.
“Jean,” he says.
I lean forward and put my mouth on the skin of his arm. Did I misread the trickle of sand on the backs of my legs?
When I look up, I can see that Rich is bewildered. I realize this is the first time I have ever seen him lose his composure.
“Why?” he asks.
I study him. I shake my head. Deliberately, I could say. Or, To do it before Thomas does it to me. Or, Before I have absolute proof he has done it to me. Or, simply, Because I want this, and it’s wrong.
Without touching me with his hands, he bends to kiss me. The kiss is frightening — both foreign and familiar.
I lift my sweatshirt up over my head. Oddly, I am no longer cold, and I have long since stopped shivering.
I can hear his breathing, controlled breathing, as if he had been running.
I feel the top of his head, that smooth map.
He kisses my neck. Around us, gulls and crabs swoop and scurry in confusion, alarmed by this disturbance in the natural order of the universe. I taste his shoulder. I put my teeth there lightly.
He holds me at my waist, and I can feel his hands trembling.
“I can’t do this,” he says into the side of my head. “I want to.” He traces a circle on my back. “I want to,” he repeats, “but I can t.
And as suddenly as it opened, a door shuts. For good. I lean my head against his chest and sigh.
“I don’t know what came over me,” I say.
He holds me tightly. “Shhhh,” he says.
We stand in that posture, the clouds moving fast overhead. There is, I think, an intimacy between us, an intimacy I will not know again. A perfect, terrible intimacy — without guilt, without worry, without a future.
Calvin L. Hayes, a member of the coroner’s jury who participated in the inquest held over the bodies of Anethe Christensen and Karen Christensen, took the stand for the prosecution and explained in some detail what he had observed: “We arrived on the island between eight and half-past eight P.M. We landed and proceeded to the house formerly occupied by John C. Hontvet. Upon entering the house there is first a small entry from which opens a kitchen. When we entered the kitchen we found the furniture strewn all over the floor, the clock lying on the lounge face down; clock was not going. I did not look at the face of the clock; it fell evidently from a small bracket just over the lounge in the corner. The body of Anethe Christensen lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, the head towards the door through which we entered. Around the throat was tied a scarf or shawl, some colored woolen garment, and over the body some article of clothing was thrown loosely. The head was, as you might say, all battered to pieces, covered with wounds, and in the vicinity of the right ear two or three cuts broke through the skull so that the brains could be seen running through them. There was a bed-room opening from the kitchen; in that was a bed and trunk, the trunk opened, the contents scattered over the floor. The body of Anethe was placed upon a board upon a table, and an examination made by the physicians who were present. We then proceeded to the other part of the house. The arrangement of the other end of the house was similar to the end into which we first went. We went into an entry, from there into a room that corresponded to the kitchen, out of which another bed-room opened. In that bedroom, face down, we found the body of Karen Christensen. The windowsill of the first bed-room I spoke of was broken off, window in the south-west end of house. The body of Karen Christensen had a white handkerchief knotted tightly around the neck, tied at the back of the neck, so tightly that the tongue was protruding from the mouth. Upon