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the world. But all of that seemed to be heavy stuff for an eight-year-old. Besides, she wasn't sure she believed any of it, though it was the explanation for evil, violence, and death with which she herself had grown up.
        Fortunately, Toby spared her from the admission that she had no answer.
        "If I was God, I woulda made just one mom and dad and kid of each kind.of thing. You know? Like one mother golden retriever and one father golden retriever and one puppy."
        He had long wanted a golden retriever, but they'd been delaying because their five-room house seemed too small for such a large dog.
        "Nothing would ever die or grow old," Toby said, continuing to describe the world he would have made, "so the puppy would always be a puppy, and there could never be more of any one thing to overrun the world, and then nothing would have to kill anything else."
        That, of course, was the paradise that supposedly once had been.
        "I wouldn't make any bees or spiders or cockroaches or snakes," he said, wrinkling his face in disgust. "That never made any sense. God musta been in a really weird mood that day."
        Heather laughed. She loved this kid to pieces.
        "Well, He musta been," Toby insisted, turning his attention to the television again.
        He looked so like Jack. He had Jack's beautiful gray-blue eyes and open guileless face. Jack's nose. But he had her blond hair, and he was slightly small for his age, so it was possible he had inherited more of his body type from her than from his father. Jack was tall and solidly built, Heather was five four, slender. Toby was obviously the son of both, and sometimes, like now, his existence seemed miraculous.
        He was the living symbol of her love for Jack and of Jack's love for her, and if death was the price to be paid for the miracle of procreation, then perhaps the bargain made in Eden wasn't as lopsided as it sometimes seemed.
        On TV, Sylvester the cat was trying to kill Tweetie the canary, but unlike real life, the tiny bird was getting the best of the sputtering feline.
        The telephone rang.
        Heather put her book on the arm of the chair, flung the afghan aside, and got up. Toby had eaten all the sherbet, and she plucked the empty bowl from his lap on her way to the kitchen.
        The phone was on the wall beside the refrigerator. She put the bowl on the counter and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
        "Heather?"
        "Speaking."
        "It's Lyle Crawford."
        Crawford was the captain of Jack's division, the man to whom he answered..Maybe it was the fact that Crawford had never called her before, maybe it was something in the tone of his voice, or maybe it was just the instincts of a cop's wife, -but she knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Her heart began to race, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. Then suddenly she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, and expelling the same word with each exhalation: "No, no, no, no."
        Crawford was saying something, but Heather couldn't make herself listen to him, as if whatever had happened to Jack would not really have happened as long as she refused to hear the ugly facts put into words.
        Someone was knocking at the back door.
        She turned, looked. Through the window in the door, she saw a man in uniform, dripping rain, Louie Silverman, another cop from Jack's division, a good friend for eight years, nine years, maybe longer, Louie with the rubbery face and unruly red hair. Because he was a friend, he had come around to the back door in stead of knocking at the front, not so formal that way, not so damn cold and horribly formal, just a friend at the back door, oh God, just a friend at the back door with some news.
        Louie said her name. Muffled by the glass. So forlorn, the way he said her name.
        "Wait, wait," she told Lyle Crawford, and she took the receiver away from her ear, held it