“It’s all in the eyes,” he explains. “She’s listening, see.”

“She?”

He flashes another silver-tipped smile. “You’re not a dog person.”

I find myself laughing suddenly, charmed by him. “Can you just hold on to her so I can get out of here?”

“No problem.” He points to the ground once, and the dog sits, cued for his next command. When he flattens his palm, she drops to her belly. Over the back of his left hand I notice half a dozen x’s inside a circle.

“What does your tattoo mean?” I ask, pointing.

“Lessons.” His pupils are so black they seem to bounce. “Things I shouldn’t ever forget.”

The woman beside him says, “Don’t believe anything he tells you. Once he tried to say they stand for the men he killed in battle. Go ahead, ask him which one.”

“Which battle?” I ask, playing along.

“Waterloo.”

(ten)

Eden was the first person I ever met who believed in past lives. Before then, I’d had a wild sampling of religion through various placements, from Mormonism to Pentecostalism to born-again Presbyterianism, without feeling persuaded by any of them. But Eden’s universe was bigger and more complex than any I’d ever heard of, and far more intuitive. To her, the idea that we reincarnated was an obvious extension of the cycle of life. All life. Everything spun on a constantly moving wheel of birth, growth, and decay, the ocean around us and the Milky Way above, and all the galaxies beyond ours, numberless as the ferns unfurling along the side of the road. God wasn’t up there, in some celestial kingdom, but here in the world, in dirt clods and dew, in the patience of the spider that lived behind the sugar jar, in the exquisite strands of her web. Death wasn’t the end any more than a single shuddering wave on Portuguese Beach could stop moving. She’d made her peace with it, but I was still struggling.

—

After Jenny’s body was found, an investigation stretched out for months. Ellis Flood and his team interviewed half the town, or so it seemed, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. Her father and Caleb, all of Jenny’s friends, and her coworkers at the vineyard in Boonville. Jack Ford was a natural early suspect. He was an odd man and always had been, and everyone knew he drank too much. Besides his wife, who had left him suddenly when Caleb and Jenny were six, leaving no sign of her whereabouts, he wasn’t close to many people, including his children. More than once I’d seen Caleb flinch when Jack called his name—but that wasn’t evidence. Ellis Flood found nothing at all to incriminate him, and the search went on.