Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  On the other hand, it was going to take some serious investigation to prove that he had gone to the Cape on the hill that Sunday night in July and shot George Hayward in the head.

  Drew had had his weekly meeting with the church Youth Group that evening, and the gathering had lasted until a few minutes after nine. When he finally reemerged after fleeing, he told us that he had gone home to the parsonage as soon as that meeting was over. He insisted he hadn’t gone anywhere near the Haywards’ house that night—and we had nothing to link him to the murder itself. The only prints on the gun, the load, or the gun cabinet were George’s—though some on the handle and one on the trigger were badly smudged, which was important, because it thus seemed possible that a second person had handled the firearm after George. There was no indication that Drew’s car had been in the gravel driveway that night and no tracks that matched any of his shoes on the lawn—at least none that remained by the time we realized that Drew should be considered a suspect. We could see from Drew’s Internet service provider that he’d been online from nine-fifteen until ten-thirty, answering e-mails and surfing the Web, but we would need a court order—or his laptop, which later we would subpoena—to learn the sites and Web pages he had visited. Then, he insisted, he had gone to bed. I was hoping that Alice might have called him earlier in the evening—battered women often seem to phone someone close to them just before their boyfriend or husband blows for the last time—but there was no evidence that she had.

  And yet he had disappeared a few days after what was looking more and more like two homicides, rather than a suicide and a single murder. That was what kept coming back to me. The guy was a friggin’ minister, and he’d jumped ship at the time when the town needed him most. That really got to me—that and the teeny-tiny detail that he was boffing a parishioner who would be murdered.

  FOR NEARLY A week, from a Wednesday till the following Monday, none of us had the slightest idea where the good reverend had gone. No one in Haverill knew, and his own mother said that she hadn’t seen him since the previous Saturday morning. We left messages everywhere, including on his cell phone. I’d been thinking all along about the fact that the church secretary had noticed his passport on his desk the morning of the funeral, and so on Friday I sent a fax to the State Department to see if he had left the country. He wasn’t officially a suspect at that point—though unofficially in my mind he sure as hell was—but we certainly wanted to talk to him.

  And he hadn’t left the country. Hadn’t even boarded an airplane and flown anywhere domestically.

  Which meant, if he was on the move, that he was probably traveling somewhere in his car. (I didn’t completely discount the idea that he might have paid cash for a bus ticket, but somehow the patrician Pastor Drew didn’t strike me as the sort who would mingle with the bus-station crowd.) And while this is a big country, it’s really not that difficult to find someone on wheels. There are the credit-card receipts at gas stations or the cash withdrawals from ATMs or the reality that there are a lot of cops and troopers out there on the road. I had heard back from the State Department on Monday and was wondering if it was time to put out a bulletin on the reverend when, lo and behold, he finally returned one of Emmet’s calls. And as soon as Emmet hung up with Drew, he called me. It was midafternoon, and I was in my office.

  “We have contact,” he said, his voice so deep and refined that he always sounded oddly plumy to me for a Vermonter. I attributed that to the reality that Emmet was all business. Some people mistook the crispness that was a part of his demeanor as a state trooper for coldness. Usually that served him well, but not always. The reality is that he was tall and lean, his nose was a wedge, and his close-cropped hair was the dark gray of ash in a woodstove: He could be an intimidating presence when he wanted.

  “Really?”

  “I just got off the phone with him.”

  “And? Did he have an explanation for why he fell off the radar—or why he wouldn’t call back?”

  “He said he hoped we didn’t think he was avoiding us.”

  “Now, why would we think that? Because no one in the world had the slightest idea where he was—”

  “He was in—”

  “Because he didn’t return any of the messages you left at his home, his church, or on his cell phone?”

  “He was in the Adirondacks. That was his explanation. He said he went with a friend to upstate New York for a couple of days and he was in some rugged corner of the mountains without cell-phone coverage.”

  “He was camping? He didn’t strike me as the type.”

  “No, he wasn’t camping. But he was in what he described as a relatively primitive log cabin.”

  “In the Adirondacks … ”

  “Near Statler.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “No reason you would have,” he said. “It’s a general store and a billboard, apparently.”

  “And there’s no cell coverage there?”

  “Nope.”

  “He didn’t check his messages at home? He didn’t call in to the church?”

  “No, he did not. He said he was calling me back from the interstate, an hour or so from Albany—though he wasn’t coming home. He was heading to New York City. His cell showed he had messages, and so he was returning the calls from the highway.”

  I sat back in my chair and took a sip from the water bottle on my desk. I raised my eyebrows to try to relax. “Is he alone? I don’t recall him having any personal Adirondack connections.”

  “He says he’s with that friend. He added that she was driving.”

  “So you knew he was a responsible driver, I suppose.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What’s her name?”

  He paused for a moment, and in my mind I saw him looking down at his notes. “Heather Laurent,” he answered finally.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why? Should I know that name?”

  “Well, you shouldn’t. You have a penis. But women love her books. She writes bestsellers about angels. Frankly, I think she’s a complete and total lunatic. Remember when I was so sick last month with bronchitis and I stayed home? I saw her on one of the morning talk shows going on and on about her latest book. And maybe it was because I was oxygen-deprived and half delusional from the medication, but I swear I thought she was talking about angels like they were our freaking neighbors.”

  “Well, he’s a minister. I would think angels would give them something to talk about.”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking no. My sense is her take on angels isn’t exactly going to mesh with his. She’s somewhere between New Age and wack job. Her angels, I have a feeling, find you parking spaces when you need one. What did he say about her?”

  “Really very little.”

  “I think she was in Vermont a couple weeks ago. I vaguely remember something in the newspaper.”

  “Mostly I asked Drew about his relationship with Alice and George Hayward,” he said, and then he told me in detail what he had learned—and what Drew wouldn’t reveal. Emmet is a pro, and so he didn’t let on that we had reason to believe from Alice’s journal that either she had one hell of a fantasy life or she and Drew were more intimately involved than anyone knew. And Drew stuck to a pretty simple story: Alice was one of his parishioners, George was not, and he’d offered Alice pastoral counseling.

  “Would you say you two were friends?” Emmet said he had asked, and Drew had replied, “Absolutely. We were very good friends.” The detective then inquired whether the minister could recall the last time he’d been to the Haywards’ house, and Emmet said there was a pause and he had wondered whether Drew was deciding whether to admit he’d ever been there. In the end he told the detective he’d been there most recently in, Drew believed, May—other, of course, than the Monday after the Haywards had been murdered. At that point he had asked Emmet why we were looking for him.

  “Oh, we’re just tying up loose ends,” Emmet had replied. But he did ask the minister wh
ether he was returning to Haverill anytime soon and where he could be reached if he wasn’t. The answer was Heather Laurent’s loft in Manhattan for at least a few more days and then, maybe, with a couple of different friends around the country. But Drew also said he might simply return to Vermont after leaving Manhattan and get some things from his home before taking that longer road trip. Either way, Drew added, he’d most likely be in areas with cell coverage.

  “Did he ask you if he needed a lawyer?” I asked Emmet.

  “No.”

  “He sounds very accommodating.”

  “I said I’d call him if I had any other questions.”

  “Do we have something that we know has his fingerprints on it—or even his DNA?”

  “We don’t.”

  “What about when we were at the Haywards’ the day after their murder? Remember what a scrubber Drew was? How helpful he was?” I said, and it seemed possible now that he had been working like mad to make sure that he’d left behind no evidence of his involvement at the scene Sunday night. Perhaps inadvertently he had left us a lead.

  “I vaguely recall him Windexing the windows, but he would have been wearing rubber gloves by the time he grabbed the spray bottle.”

  “He moved the coffee table.”

  “That’s right. But he was probably wearing the gloves by then, too.”

  “And I recall him drinking some kind of diet soda from a bottle,” I said, hoping, if he was implicated, he had gotten sloppy.

  “If so, it may still be under the sink. They had a recycling tub under there.”

  “Good. And if Drew does come back to Vermont, let’s drop in on him or see if he wants to stop by the barracks. Perhaps we can ask him some more questions before he realizes he needs an attorney and winds up in custodial care.”

  “Will do,” Emmet agreed. Then: “And you said Heather Laurent was a bestselling writer?”

  “Yup.”

  “I wonder how she and Drew became friends. Think they went to school together?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Let me look into her, too. Maybe she fits in here somewhere.”

  “But don’t talk to her until you’ve talked to Drew again—if possible.”

  “I understand.”

  I couldn’t imagine Drew traveling with the Queen of the Angels, and so as soon as Emmet and I hung up, I Googled her. I saw she was as pretty as she had struck me on television. And I learned that her father had murdered her mother and then killed himself. I decided then that the two were something more than friends, which made me ponder further the motives that drove the Reverend Drew. I began to wonder whether this Heather Laurent had been involved in the Haywards’ murder as well. A love triangle? Possible. I saw online that she had appeared in Vermont on the Monday the bodies were found, which meant that she might have been here on Sunday night. And absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything. I know that. It is, for better or worse, the fallout from my job.

  SOMETIMES LATE AT night, I will peer into each of my boys’ bedrooms. Most nights they sleep in their own beds in their own rooms, their doors open, but that summer it wasn’t uncommon for Lionel to grab his pillows and a blanket and curl up either at the foot of Marcus’s bed or in the beanbag chair beside it. He had only been out of a crib for a year and a half. And though he was potty trained, he still slept in pull-ups—just in case. Paul says I will stand there for long minutes in my nightgown, just staring. Intellectually I know there’s a connection between what I see at work most days and the time I spend watching my boys sleep: The weirder my caseload, the more likely I am to act like a sentinel.

  They are both very deep sleepers. Their pediatrician once said she believed that little boys sleep more deeply than little girls. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I know that my sister and I never seemed to slumber the way our brother did. My father would wake me up when it was time to start getting ready for school, and I would hear him the moment he started turning the knob on my bedroom door. In the months when we were investigating the murders up in Haverill, I found myself standing with obsessive frequency over my boys’ beds or that beanbag chair and watching the two of them. When Lionel was in Marcus’s bedroom, the air would be filled with the aroma of baby shampoo, and I would just stand there and study how my three-year-old would curl his small body into the beanbag chair as if he were back in the womb, his knees against his chest, while Marcus would sleep flat on his stomach, his legs as straight as an Olympic diver’s as he entered the water. They were often in matching pajamas, though I have actually tried to discourage that. It’s Lionel who insists on being a Mini Marcus and dressing as much like his older brother as his older brother will allow. Marcus, it seems, is much more tolerant in that regard than I would be. That summer the boys were sleeping in pajamas with a montage of comic-book superheroes, men and women who sort of do what I do, but without needing a judge’s permission or a jury’s agreement. And both boys would be sleeping so soundly that I would have to watch very carefully to detect the slightest rise in either Lionel’s slender shoulders or Marcus’s back. It’s as if all that energy they start to expend from the moment they open their eyes—Exhibit A, breakfast—has completely drained their tanks by bedtime.

  Occasionally that August and September, I would find myself wondering what sorts of things Katie Hayward had fallen asleep to—or what sorts of noises had woken her up in the small hours of the morning—and as I learned about Heather Laurent’s history, I would find myself contemplating the fights and screams that had kept her awake in the night, too. What do you do if you’re a girl and your father is beating the crap out of your mother? Or what if he’s simply one of those fiendish monsters who knows how to twist the dagger ver-bally—knows just what barbs will hurt the most and really get under his wife’s skin? I knew that at some point soon we would be interviewing Katie again, and I didn’t relish the prospect. She was only fifteen, now an orphan, and I had been told that she was doing about as well as one could expect. She was living with her pal Tina Cousino’s family in Haverill so she could remain in the same high school and retain the same friends. But teenagers are always funky to interview. Often they’re not trying to mislead you, but still their answers are all over the place. We weren’t home Friday night, we were at the movies. No wait, that was, like, Saturday. We got back around ten. No, maybe midnight. I don’t remember. But it was after dinner. At least I think it was. Like, why does it matter, anyway?

  Sometimes I would be pulled from my reverie by Paul. I remember one night in late August, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my stomach. I was already in the summer nightshirt in which I slept, a man’s Red Sox jersey that falls almost to my knees, and he whispered, “They never move.” It was true. When one of us would go get them in the morning, there was a reasonable chance that Lionel would still be a crab in the beanbag chair and Marcus would still be about to crack the plane of the water. But what of Katie when she had been the age of either of my boys, when she had been six or three? Or even that lunatic Heather Laurent? How had they slept? Had they pulled pillows over their heads so they wouldn’t hear their parents’ fights or the names that their father would reserve for their mother? At what age do you figure out that your dad is a bastard? That your mom’s life is a train wreck and she’s keeping it together with makeup and lies? We had a photo from the murder scene of the impression that the back of Alice Hayward’s head had left in the Sheetrock in the living-room wall the night George had killed her. If we went back to the house and ran our fingers behind the framed prints and photos on the walls, would we find other indentations? The idea crossed my mind. Even then we knew a fair amount about how George’s anger would smolder before bursting into one sudden burn and then abruptly flame out. Until the night he killed Alice, he tended not to hit her anywhere that was visible. This wasn’t an absolute rule, of course. There had been bruises before on her face. But usually he would smack her in the ass or on the lower back. The back of her head. Based on the de
tails that Alice had shared with Ginny O’Brien, he may even have deluded himself on occasion that this was creepy but interesting sex play—though it doesn’t appear to have had a damn thing to do with sex. Just because he never broke a bone and only once or twice blackened an eye, just because she only went to the ER one time, didn’t mean that George Hayward wasn’t violent or that the violence hadn’t been escalating. Ginny herself told us that she should have seen this coming. Alice had made it clear to her friend that it had been an extremely rocky July, but somehow she thought she could handle it. It seemed like what sometimes occurred was that George would manufacture an accident: He would drive her backward into the massive hutch in the dining room. He would push her into the triangular point where two lengths of kitchen counter merged. He would knock her into the banister at the foot of the stairs. He was totally capable of calling her a cunt—a useless cunt, a stupid cunt, a pathetic cunt—and later he would write her long letters of apology. Now and then he would write her poems. And he wasn’t without talent. No one did remorse the way George Hayward could, which may have had something to do with why Alice tolerated him for as long as she did. That, of course, and the fact that once she had loved him. They had loved each other. Still, if George had read the wife-beater’s manual—and somewhere there really must be a how-to book that all these pricks read—it wasn’t long after they were married that he hauled off and hit her that first time.

  OFTEN I FOUND myself wondering this: What precisely was Drew thinking after the crime lab had left, when his hands were in the blue gloves and he was cleaning up the remnants of George Hayward’s brains late Monday afternoon? Had he expected the night before that he would be doing precisely this? Given how much thought he’d put into making Hayward’s death look like a suicide, had his mind wandered to the chance that he would be the one who would quite literally clean up the mess? Was this his way of punishing himself? Or was he simply doing all that he could to make sure that he had left no trace of his crime behind?