The Why of Things: A Novel Read Online Free

that they have not roped off the quarry with crime scene tape, or stationed officers to keep watch. As far as Eve could tell, no one last night did much of anything except stand around and wait for the divers to bring the body up from the quarry floor—the body that as they waited might still have been a living person.
    She takes the porch steps two at a time down to the grass, which is still wet with dew. Blades of it catch in her toes as she makes her way to the edge of the driveway, where she first noticed the tire tracks last night. The tracks on the grass are barely visible now, but Eve can still just make them out, leading up onto the grass from the driveway, and then across the lawn about twenty unwavering meters to the quarry’s edge. Eve walks in the middle of the tracks, scanning the grass for any sort of clue as to what might have happened: a cigarette butt tossed out the window, a candy wrapper, anything. She pauses when she comes to the tree where her and her sisters’ initials are carved, where the truck left a nick as it passed. In the daylight, she is even more amazed that a truck was able to maneuver between this tree and the next one over.
    Eve frowns and follows the tracks up a small slope of grass to the ledge from which the truck plunged into the water. This strikes Eve; it’s the quarry’s tallest, about ten feet in height, and the one she and Sophie have always jumped from for the greatest thrill. She gazes across the water toward where the gasoline and debris have drifted; aside from these things, it’s almost as if nothing happened here at all. A row of lilies send up unbloomed stalks, their spider leaves dangling over the quarry’s edge, and leaves drift as they always do among the insects on the water’s surface. She wonders, if the incident had taken place a few months earlier, whether anyone would have ever known. The gasoline might have gradually disappeared. They might have thought the garbage was just that: beer cans left behind by partiers one winter night. They might have gone swimming this summer just yards above a dead body, strapped into his truck.
    She leaps down onto a lower ledge—the ledge where they laid the dead man last night—and touches the rock’s surface tentatively, as if it might hold some memory of the body, those clammy limbs. She realizes that this is how she will always think of the ledge from now on—the ledge where they laid the dead man—though she has sunbathed on it hundreds of times, and eaten picnic lunches there, and it is also the spot where she had her first kiss, with Evan Arnolds four summer ago. She peers down into the water; at first, she sees nothing but darkness, but then she can just make out a vague, wavering shape in the depths, like a large, white jellyfish; it calls to her irresistibly. She looks across the quarry toward the house, wooden and rambling. Sunlight glints on the windowpanes. Soon, if they’re not already, her family will be getting up. She strips down to her bathing suit, and before she has time to think herself out of it, think of what else might be down there and what exactly she’s diving toward, she flings herself headlong into the water.
    Beneath the surface, the water seems to eat up even light; the sunlight, which above was bright with early morning, here is a struggling yellow haze. It isn’t that there is murk in the water, none of the wavering bits of algae that float in a lake, no specks of dirt. The water is perfectly clear; Eve has collected it in glass jars, looked at drops of it under a microscope, and it is even more clear than water she collected for comparison from the sea. It is something invisible, she thinks, that breaks the sunlight down, or maybe what it is is visible darkness. Eve swims down, holding her arms at her sides so as to make herself as streamlined as possible; she lets her feet do the work. The water, which on the surface was so warm it seemed without temperature, grows colder and colder as