Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  “I hear you and Detective Emmet Walker are thinking of joining the Haverill United Church,” Aaron said, his voice its usual silky-smooth icing with just a dollop of boredom tossed in. He was a tall man who had thinning dark hair and rimless eyeglasses with titanium earpieces. He always moved in my mind like a diplomat: His posture was extraordinary, and the world seemed to part before him. He was one of the few men I knew in Vermont who could get away with a ventless Armani suit—no small accomplishment, since a lot of the guys here dress like farmers at a funeral. My sense is that when we beat him—and with the sorts of cases he handled, his clients were convicted as often as they were acquitted—his principal emotion was frustration: He knew that most of his clients were guilty as hell, and he really didn’t care that at least half the time they were going to wind up in prison. Mostly he wanted to win because winning was such a fundamental part of who he was.

  And when we lost to him? At least his clients weren’t likely to be repeat offenders.

  “Well, I can’t speak for Emmet,” I said, “but Haverill’s too friggin’ long a drive from my house. I try not to spend that much time in the car on a Sunday morning.”

  “So then why in the world would you want to talk to Reverend Stephen Drew? This can’t possibly have anything to do with that Hayward fiasco.”

  “I know, I know: I just love my dead ends. But I am nothing if not thorough. And Drew was one tough guy to reach for a while there.”

  “You know, he helped clean up the Hayward house. That’s the kind of man he is.”

  “Yeah, I saw him. I was there, too.”

  “Of course you were.”

  “I gather you’re going to be his lawyer?”

  “Yes indeed. Frankly, you seem to be hanging a lot on a pastor’s crisis of faith and his decision to take a break from the pulpit. The minister—and understand I am using this word sarcastically—fled about three and a half hours from Haverill. He was in the Adirondacks, across the lake from Vermont.”

  “He’s not going to be dropping by the barracks again anytime soon, is he?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nor take that polygraph.”

  “I think not.”

  “But you know what he is going to do? He’s going to give us a finger print and a mouth swab.”

  “Not without a nontestimonial order from a judge.”

  “Which shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, because I knew I had Alice Hayward’s journal. I would’ve loved to have told him about it that moment on the phone, but it wouldn’t have made sense to share its existence with the guy’s defense attorney at that point in the investigation. All I needed to do then was share the material with the judge. Still, I’m human, and that was one of those times when I wish I could have dropped that little IED at his feet and seen his face when it exploded. In my mind I could see Aaron actually recoiling in the massive, ergonomically perfect Herman Miller that he called a desk chair but I thought, the one time I visited his office, looked more like something he’d wrestled from the Cathay Pacific first-class cabin. I was pretty confident that the reverend either hadn’t known that Alice Hayward kept a journal or hadn’t yet told his attorney. Either way, it was going to be very bad news for Aaron.

  Besides, soon enough he would get to see the journal for himself. But by then Stephen Drew would be what we tell the press, when they ask, is “a person of interest.” Not yet a suspect. But someone we need to spend a little quality time with.

  ALMOST OVERNIGHT, IT seemed, everyone was aware that Stephen Drew had been sleeping with Alice Hayward. I spent my life telling reporters from three states that I couldn’t possibly comment on an ongoing investigation. But the more folks we interviewed in Haverill and at the bank where Alice worked, the more our suspicions got out. People would had to have had their heads in the sand or been schoolmates of Marcus or Lionel not to have figured out what we believed had most likely occurred that awful night at the Haywards’. Some parishioners, I imagine, clung to the possibility that there was a killer (or killers) out there who had murdered both Alice and George—preferring, apparently, random horror to the idea that their pastor was capable of sleeping with a part of his flock and then murdering a neighbor. And, I guess, indiscriminate savagery was still a not-inconceivable option—as was some weird love triangle involving Mother Seraphim. But the laws of reasonable inference suggested that George had strangled Alice and then Stephen had shot her husband. Let’s face it: It might be sunny when you wake up in the morning, but if the lawn is sopping wet and there are puddles in the driveway, it’s pretty likely that it rained in the night.

  And those parishioners were in the minority: The absolute last thing that most people wanted—especially the fine, upstanding citizens of Haverill, Bennington, and Manchester—was for this to have been some arbitrary slaughter committed by a third party who was still lurking undiscovered in the lengthening shadows of the Green Mountains. The local chambers of commerce and the state representatives grew real antsy at that prospect, and I could see early on that they were going to make my boss Jim’s life hard if it turned out that George Hayward had been murdered by anyone other than the local pastor in Haverill.

  I FELT ESPECIALLY bad for Katie Hayward. The amount of crap she was having to shoulder just boggled the mind. She hadn’t been at the house on Monday morning, and so I hadn’t met her, but it was clear this poor girl’s nightmare was only getting worse. She wasn’t merely an orphan now whose father had probably killed her mother; her mother was sleeping with the town pastor, and the newspaper, TV, and Web stories just kept coming. A couple of times, I called the social worker who was assigned to the girl to check in, and it sounded like Katie was doing about as well as could be expected. So far there had been relatively little (and I honestly don’t know what to make of this expression) “acting out.” But there had been a few days of near catatonia. And she’d gotten a tattoo (illegal, but harmless), which didn’t surprise me because her social worker was known for her tattoos. Katie’s was an open rose on her left shoulder that she had gotten in honor of her mother; Alice loved roses and had bushes of salmon-colored wild ones along the wall of the house that faced the vegetable garden. School had finally started, and everyone seemed to think that this was a good thing for Katie. The teenager had gotten over the awkward—now, there is an understatement of a word—moments that had surrounded her like a fog her first days back in the classroom.

  Still, Emmet had to go back and talk to her some more, and as a mother I felt like a ghoul asking him to do that. But I had to. I also had him talk to some of Katie’s friends, including Tina Cousino. Katie said she knew that her mom kept a journal, but she had never read it. She wasn’t even sure where her mom kept it. And she said she didn’t believe that her mom was involved with Stephen Drew:

  K. HAYWARD: I know some people think there was, like, something going on between my mom and Stephen. But that just seems too weird.

  WALKER: By Stephen, you mean Reverend Drew?

  K. HAYWARD: Yeah. He likes us to call him Stephen. I think the only time I ever heard him called Reverend was when there was some visiting minister in the church who was all weird and formal. He kept saying Reverend Drew this and Pastor Drew that.

  WALKER: What do you mean by “something going on” between your mother and Stephen?

  K. HAYWARD: You know. Like having an affair.

  WALKER: Was Stephen ever at your house that you know of?

  K. HAYWARD: I guess. I know he helped my mom with my dad.

  WALKER: Counseling her.

  K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh.

  WALKER: When was he there?

  K. HAYWARD: I don’t know.

  WALKER: Did you ever come home from school and find him there?

  K. HAYWARD: No.

  WALKER: Did he ever have dinner at your house?

  K. HAYWARD: I think so.

  WALKER: You think so?

  K. HAYWARD: It was a long time ago.

  WALKER: So he did?

  K. HAYWAR
D: I guess.

  WALKER: Just the one time?

  K. HAYWARD: Yes.

  WALKER: When was this?

  K. HAYWARD: Winter, maybe? Or, like, spring.

  WALKER: Can you be more specific as to a month?

  K. HAYWARD: No. I’m pretty sure it was after Valentine’s Day and there was still some snow. But not much.

  WALKER: But it was definitely when your father was living out at the lake?

  K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh.

  WALKER: Were there other times he was at the house?

  K. HAYWARD: Probably. But I don’t remember any.

  WALKER: Then why do you think that?

  K. HAYWARD: Maybe because everyone says he was there now. I don’t know.

  WALKER: But you do not recall ever seeing him at the house other than that time he was there for dinner.

  K. HAYWARD: No.

  According to Alice’s journal, it had been a Monday night in early March when Drew had had dinner with her and her daughter. This is what I mean about teenagers being harder to interview than spies. It’s not necessarily that they’re trying to mislead you or withhold a key piece of evidence. It’s just that their hardwiring is so freaking different from a grown-up’s or a child’s.

  WALKER: So he never came by for … I don’t know … a quick bite to eat after church? A lunch, maybe?

  K. HAYWARD: Definitely not after church. While the kids are in Sunday school, the adults have this thing called Second Hour. They’re supposed to sit around and talk about Stephen’s sermon in the big common room, but whenever I would pass through there to get juice or something when I was in Sunday school, they were, like, talking about muffins and stuff.

  WALKER: Muffins?

  K. HAYWARD: You know, stuff that isn’t important. They’d be talking about the muffins that some old person had baked for the Second Hour. Grown-ups like snacks, too.

  WALKER: What was it like when he had dinner that night with you and your mother?

  K. HAYWARD: Awkward. Totally awkward.

  WALKER: Why?

  K. HAYWARD: Because I sort of don’t go to Youth Group anymore. And I did when I was in middle school and for part of ninth grade.

  WALKER: And you felt guilty about no longer going?

  K. HAYWARD: Well, yeah!

  WALKER: Why else was it awkward?

  K. HAYWARD: Look, it wasn’t awkward because my mom and Stephen were together. Okay? That wasn’t it. My mom and Stephen hooking up? Too weird, I don’t want to go there. Besides, my dad …

  WALKER: Go on.

  K. HAYWARD: I hoped things would get better between them.

  WALKER: Between your mother and father.

  K. HAYWARD: Yes.

  WALKER: Get better in what way?

  K. HAYWARD: Not fighting.

  WALKER: But we’re discussing a period when your father was away.

  K. HAYWARD: I just don’t think my mom and Stephen were … you know.

  WALKER: Okay. And when your father returned, they were fighting less?

  K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Maybe. Something happened the Friday night before they died.

  WALKER: Your parents had a fight?

  K. HAYWARD: Yes. But maybe it was Saturday. It’s kind of a blur.

  WALKER: Do you know why they fought?

  K. HAYWARD: I wasn’t home.

  WALKER: Then how do you know they had a fight?

  K. HAYWARD: I just do. You can tell. Dad must have hit Mom.

  WALKER: There was a bruise? A mark?

  K. HAYWARD: Not one I could see. But there almost never was. I think only a couple of times he hit her on the face. He was, like, a businessman. He was careful. But …

  WALKER: Go ahead.

  K. HAYWARD [starting to cry]: But he felt terrible about it afterward. He always felt horrible. That’s the thing. Until that night … until the night they died … I thought things would get better between them. Between my mom and dad. He came home from the lake, and I didn’t know if things would ever be totally normal. But except for a few bad nights, like that Friday or Saturday, I was sure they were working stuff out. My mom thought so, too! That’s why I don’t think she would have wrecked it by getting involved with Stephen!

  WALKER: Not even before your father came home?

  K. HAYWARD: No! No, no, no. Things were getting better until that night, and I guess that’s why …

  WALKER: What?

  K. HAYWARD [crying harder]: I guess that’s why he killed himself after he killed her. Because, like, things had been getting better.

  Later Emmet would ask her if she had any familiarity with Heather Laurent before her parents had died—whether her mother or Stephen had ever mentioned her—but it was clear that the girl hadn’t met her until that last Tuesday in July. Before then she’d never heard of the pastor’s new squeeze, and her mother had never spoken the woman’s name. And neither of Laurent’s books were anywhere in the Hayward house. Prior to her parents’ murders, Katie Hayward knew as much about Heather Laurent as she did about the medieval popes.

  I PORED OVER a photocopy of Alice Hayward’s journal. Even as a teenage girl, I never kept a diary. It wasn’t that I was afraid someone would read it and something might come back to haunt me. It was, to be totally honest, that I’ve just never been all that introspective. And so the idea that this customer-service representative of a community bank kept a diary fascinated me, and I studied every entry for clues.

  Alice had begun keeping the journal almost a year before she would get the relief-from-abuse order, and so altogether the diary lasted close to eighteen months. None of the entries were more than a paragraph or two, and sometimes she would seem to go weeks without cracking the little book’s spine. What intrigued me as much as anything was how her handwriting changed in the course of that year and a half. At first, when she was largely chronicling the latest time that the bastard she called her husband had smacked her hard in the back or called her a cunt, the penmanship was tiny and cramped, almost no space between the letters of each word. Five times, Stephen Drew—as Stephen Drew—appeared in the diary before Alice got the court order that kicked her husband’s sorry ass out of the house. She wrote that she had seen the reverend at his church office on three occasions and at an unspecified locale on two others, and though she wrote that she and Stephen were discussing her husband, she didn’t offer much detail. An entry from late October was pretty typical:

  OCTOBER 25: Met with Stephen for over an hour. Told him about George’s threat last night and how much he had drunk. Stephen thinks like Ginny. I should get out. When George gets like he did last night, I think they’re right. I know they’re right. But last Friday he was so different. It was like St. Croix. So I think of St. Croix on the one hand and how much my stomach hurt when he knocked the wind out of me last night on the other.

  St. Croix was a reference to a vacation just the two of them had taken the previous winter. And the threat? No idea. Katie Hayward had no recollection of a particular warning toward the end of October or even a memorably violent fight. Nor was she aware that her father had punched her mother so hard in the gut as Halloween neared that she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

  It was in November that the cross would first appear. It was less than three months before Alice would request and receive the relief-from-abuse order, which of course led me to wonder: Why was the reverend lobbying for Alice to leave George? Was it because she would be safer or because he wanted to have her to himself? And it was right about this time that her penmanship went from letters that were invariably small and crowded together to more florid curlicues and swoops. A few great sweeping P’s and M’s and O’s. A lot of capital letters. I imagine the penmanship looked a little bit like mine had when I’d been in middle school. If this not-so-mysterious “cross” was indeed Stephen Drew, there were seven entries that the prurient mind—or the prosecutor’s—could interpret as chronicling an intimate afternoon or evening with the pastor. Three were in that period before George Hayw
ard was sent packing, and four were between late February and early May. None, alas, was explicit enough to confirm that Drew and Alice were lovers. But all of them had the feel of a schoolgirl crush:

  DECEMBER 14: †’s hair reminds me these days of Christmas. It always has the aroma of evergreen. We were alone, and we talked about my situation. Our situation. I view everything differently when I see it through his eyes. Suddenly the things that I thought were my fault aren’t. All those things that I had viewed as my mistakes? Not my mistakes at all. I always come away a little hopeful, a little confident that there is a plan and things will get better. He is the gentlest person I know. And he opens up to me in a way he doesn’t with other people, in the same way that I can open up to him.

  MARCH 11: The whole house was ours tonight. Unimaginable happiness. The day was good, too. Katie and I had breakfast together, which we usually don’t because she is so busy with makeup and figuring out her clothes and trying to find her math homework. And I’m busy getting ready for work. But I made waffles. I woke up before my alarm, and I surprised her with waffles. Such a good time. And then there was †. At one point, when I saw † in the afternoon, he said together we should make some decisions about my future. He’s right. It is time. And then there was the night. Heavenly.

  The March 11 entry certainly implied that Alice Hayward and Reverend Drew were romantically involved, but I had spent enough time with Aaron Lamb in the courtroom to know this: Before a jury he was capable of arguing convincingly that on March 11 Alice and her pastor had had a discussion about her estrangement from her husband during the day, and then later Alice had had a cozy evening at home with her daughter—capitalizing upon the mother-daughter bonding she had initiated with waffles at breakfast.