In the end we interviewed nearly thirty women and men who were acquaintances of the Haywards and might have known something—anything—about why the two of them had come to such a tragic end. When we were finished, we knew that Alice was a customer-service representative for a community bank who was more alone than anyone realized and that George was a businessman who was starting to grow tired of what he did. (Without his supervision, by the end of September the toy store and the rib joint had closed. The original clothing store was still in business, but it was unclear whether it would last even through the December holidays.) No one expressed a particular closeness to George, but no one seemed likely to want to kill him. At the same time, everyone was saddened by Alice’s death, but George had done such a first-rate job of isolating her from possible friends that no one at the bank seemed especially devastated by her murder, either. They were distressed, naturally, perhaps a little troubled by their proximity to murder, but they had moved on. And none of the people we spoke with seemed to have any motive for killing either of the Haywards or any information that was going to bring us nearer to indicting someone who might.
PAUL’S AND MY wedding anniversary fell on a Saturday that autumn, and the two of us had dinner plans that evening. But the day began when all three of the men in my life brought me waffles in bed and cards that each of them had made. Lionel’s was a wobbly amoeba created from pink and red construction paper that in his mind was undoubtedly a heart. Marcus’s was a painting of Cupid that he had downloaded from the Web, printed, and pasted into the background of a photo of Paul and me in the backyard. (It actually looked to me like the little Roman was drawing back his bow to murder one of us, but I reminded myself that only I would see a killer in Cupid.) And Paul’s was a cute card from the drugstore, but the best part was the coupons for “romantic dinner for two” and “afternoon at the spa” that he typed up and folded inside it.
“I made the waffle batter, and Lionel picked out what would go in them,” Marcus informed me with great earnestness and pride, while behind him Paul raised his eyebrows and nodded a little warily. Clearly my breakfast didn’t need a warning from the surgeon general, but these might not be Food Network–quality waffles. I looked at the white, brown, and dark black flecks scattered along the grid.
“Coconut, chocolate, and burned coconut,” Paul offered helpfully. “But not badly burned.”
“And peanuts,” Marcus said.
“Walnuts,” Paul gently corrected him.
I pushed the pillows against the headboard and patted the mattress so my little boys knew to join me on either side of the bed, which they did in an instant. Outside, the sun was up, and there was the reassuring thump I heard many autumn Saturdays, the sound of our neighbor Rudy, an architect, tossing wood into the shed that later that day he would stack with mathematical precision. I poured a little maple syrup—which I discovered Paul had warmed in the microwave—onto the waffles and took a bite. Then I smiled at my boys and at Paul, and I don’t think I thought for a moment the rest of that weekend about all of the disappointing marriages and broken families there are in this world, and the myriad ways love seems to go bad.
WHEN WE INTERVIEWED Ginny O’Brien the second time, journalists and bloggers already were convicting Stephen Drew. Consequently, Ginny was more forthcoming than she had been initially. It seemed less important to protect the confidences that Alice had offered, since they were no longer secrets shared between friends. And, of course, we knew more, and so we knew which questions to ask.
EMMET WALKER: Alice told you that she and the reverend had an intimate relationship?
VIRGINIA “GINNY” O’ BRIEN: Yes.
WALKER: They were sleeping together?
O’ BRIEN: Yes.
WALKER: When did she tell you this?
O’ BRIEN: Last winter.
WALKER: Can you be more precise?
O’ BRIEN: It was before Christmas. I don’t know how long she and Stephen had had a relationship then, but she first told me about it a few weeks before Christmas. She was all giddy, and so I got all giddy. George was just too dangerous. I understand what she had first seen in him—Lord, I know what lots of people had first seen in him—but underneath it all he was just plain despicable. Horrible. I would have been so happy if she had just left him and married Stephen. Stephen’s not perfect, but everyone would have been better off, and she’d still be alive today. Can’t you just see her as a pastor’s wife?
WALKER: I never met her, ma’am.
O’ BRIEN: Of course.
WALKER: Did Alice come right out and say that she and the reverend were having intercourse, or did she simply imply it?
O’ BRIEN: She said it. They were having sex. But I’m sure she only told me.
WALKER: And this started before she got the temporary relief-from-abuse order?
O’ BRIEN: Long before. Like two or three months before. I don’t know this for a fact, but I always assumed it was Stephen who had talked her into getting the restraining order. She wasn’t listening to me, so she must have been listening to him.
WALKER: How long did the affair continue?
O’ BRIEN: Until sometime late in the spring. She got the restraining order, and George left. I was sure that she would start divorce proceedings and soon enough she and Stephen would be living happily ever after.
WALKER: Why didn’t that happen?
O’ BRIEN: Stephen.
WALKER: What do you mean, “Stephen”?
O’ BRIEN: He didn’t want to get married.
WALKER: Did Alice tell you that she and Stephen had actually discussed marriage?
O’ BRIEN: Not exactly. It never went that far. She just had the sense that …
WALKER: That what?
O’ BRIEN: That she wasn’t good enough for him. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that ridiculous and sad?
WALKER: Yes, it is.
O’ BRIEN: Of course, Stephen probably didn’t help matters in that regard: He’s a little … I don’t know … aristocratic. At least he thinks he is. And he never seemed to want to move the relationship along. Maybe he felt guilty. WALKER: Guilty because he was having an affair with a married woman?
O’ BRIEN: And a parishioner. I mean, one of his sermons this spring was really interesting and—given what I knew about Alice and him—pretty darn revealing.
WALKER: What did he say?
O’ BRIEN: He went on and on about how awful he was. He even used that word: awful. He said he was the worst of the sinners. I mean, we all knew he wasn’t. This was pulpit stuff, I figured, to make a point that God loved even him.
WALKER: That was the point in the end?
O’BRIEN: I think so. I just remember that it made some people in the congregation love him even more.
WALKER: But not you.
O’ BRIEN: Oh, I like Stephen. I just thought in that sermon he was a bit of a hypocrite. So what if you’re sleeping with Alice Hayward? She shouldn’t have been with a monster like George. Just announce to the world that you two are in love and be done with it. Marry her! Move on! Instead they broke up soon after that sermon. Well, they stopped sleeping together. It’s not as if they were ever really a public item. It’s not like there was something to “break up.”
WALKER: Who initiated it?
O’ BRIEN: The breakup? I think it just faded. George wanted to come back, and he vowed he had changed. He’d probably done such a job on her head over the years that she really didn’t believe she deserved anyone better than him. And maybe Stephen really did think he was a sinner to be sleeping with Alice and that’s why he didn’t pursue something more. And Alice certainly wasn’t going to press him. She didn’t have that kind of confidence.
WALKER: She didn’t have the confidence to press Stephen for a commitment?
O’ BRIEN: That’s right.
WALKER: Where would they rendezvous?
O’ BRIEN: You mean for sex?
WALKER: Yes.
O’ BRIEN: At her house.
WALKER: Not the parsonage.
O’ BRIEN: I don’t think so. It was too close to the church. It’s in the middle of town. And anyone could drop by.
WALKER: Did Alice ever mention anywhere else?
O’ BRIEN: Once when Katie was with a school trip to Montreal—an overnight for French class—they went to the hotel on the waterfront in Burlington. It was all very clandestine. She checked in, just in case he was recognized by some Burlington pastor or something. Sometimes his photo was in the Baptist newsletter. But he insisted on paying for it. They had a good time. Ordered room service and never left the hotel room.
Sure enough, on the second Thursday in March, Alice Hayward had stayed for a night at the Hilton in downtown Burlington. Her room was on the top floor, and it faced Lake Champlain. Had a lovely sunset over the Adirondacks. And the charges had been paid for with Stephen Drew’s MasterCard.
TINA COUSINO, KATIE Hayward’s best friend, was a very cool customer. Emmet said he had no idea that eyelids could hold the weight of so much shadow and liner or that there were parents in this world who would allow their sixteen-year-old daughters to wear so much mascara. The result was a pair of eyes that belonged, he said, to a clown that either wanted to look very scary or happened to be very sleepy. Her hair had been dyed the color of root beer and fell in a single flat wave halfway down her back. She had dozens of bracelets on each arm between her wrist and her elbow, some made of silver and some made of rubber and some made of tin. She had a sickle moon of metal studs running along the helix of each ear. Most of her answers were monosyllabic, but eventually Emmet was able to get what he needed. According to Tina, Katie knew well that her father had abused her mother and she didn’t have especially fond feelings toward the man. But she also didn’t talk about her parents all that much. From the few times she had, Tina had gotten the impression that Katie viewed her father as far more pathetic than terrifying. Katie was aware of the contrition that followed his bouts of violence and had even seen some of her father’s poetry. One night she had made fun of it with Tina. But she had never given her friend the impression that her mother was capable of sleeping with someone other than George, and the idea that Alice Hayward had been involved with Stephen Drew came as a complete shock to Tina. Among her longer responses? She found it “totally weird, totally disturbing” that her friend’s parents had died while she and Katie had been thirty-nine miles away at a Fray concert in Albany. She knew the mileage, she volunteered, because the next day when she heard what had happened, she’d gone to MapQuest. The distance, she said, seemed to matter.
STEPHEN’S MOTHER AND his sister had no idea that he’d been involved with a parishioner named Alice Hayward. They had never heard of most of the women he’d dated in Vermont. The only name that rang a bell was the name of the woman he had asked to marry him, but no one in Stephen’s family realized that the relationship had progressed so far. No one, it seemed, even suspected that it was more than a friendship.
“I always thought he was gay and just didn’t want to tell me,” his mother said. “I wouldn’t have been upset.”
His sister had disagreed. “Gay? Stephen? No, he’s into women. He’s just not into relationships. He’s really not into people. What he’s doing as a minister is a complete mystery to me.”
I KNOW THE difference between mourning and grief. I have seen enough of death—in my own life and professionally—to know that the differences aren’t subtle at all. My brother-in-law, who in some ways I was as close to as my own brother, died when he was only thirty-one. He was commuting to work on his bicycle. He was at the very end of his training as a cardiologist. According to a witness, he was riding his bicycle on the shoulder of the two-lane road that linked his small house with the four-lane road that led to the hospital and adjacent medical school where he worked, when he was nipped by the wide side mirror of a pickup truck. The truck never stopped, and the witness, another physician in a car behind the pickup who was also commuting to work, was too focused on my brother-in-law’s body as it careened through the air like a crash-test dummy to register the license plate. He was thrown from the bike into the trunk of a thick maple tree and then back onto the pavement. His skull slammed into both, shattering his helmet like a ripe pumpkin rind, and he died from massive head trauma. In hindsight this was clearly for the best, because his neck had also been broken and in all likelihood he would have been paralyzed from the chin down if somehow he had survived. My brother-in-law would not have done well as a quadriplegic.
And my college roommate died of cancer as a relatively young mother, leaving behind two daughters, each of whom is only a year or so older than each of my boys. For months I saved the last message she left on my cell phone when she had tried to reach me in her final days in the hospital: Hi, Catherine, it’s me. They can’t do anything more. I love you. She sounded tired, but in no way relieved. I was in a conference in San Francisco, and she was dying in Maryland. I went right away, but she deteriorated so quickly that she never made it to the hospice. By the time I arrived, she was already so doped up on morphine that she never even had a clue I was in the room.
And, of course, I have seen the children of women who were murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and the parents of women who were slaughtered by strangers, their bodies left unceremoniously in the woods. I have seen the mothers of little girls who were raped and smothered. (Smothering seems to be the method preferred by uncles and stepfathers when they want to kill the elementary-or middle-school girl they have just sodomized. They seem to desire plastic bags.)
Sometimes you just expect the waves and waves of sorrow to wash over you. Swamp you completely. That, in my mind, is real grief. And mourning? That’s when you’ve reached the stage where you can build a stout seawall against those colossal breakers and go about your life. You might be sprayed by the surf, but you are not incapacitated. In the days after my brother-in-law died, my sister and her in-laws were grieving. They were shell-shocked and disconsolate and incapable of doing little more than getting dressed in the morning. My roommate’s husband hadn’t that luxury because of his daughters. He wasn’t allowed to grieve. And so he had to make do with mere slow-motion mourning.
On the other hand, he’d had time to prepare for what was coming. My sister and her in-laws hadn’t.
That’s the thing about the families who lose someone to a homicide or a violent accident: There’s no time to build that seawall. There’s no time even for sandbags.
I thought about this whenever my mind wandered to poor Katie Hayward. I wondered what it must be like suddenly to be so completely and utterly alone. The kid didn’t even have siblings. Sometimes I wish I could do the interviewing myself. I can’t, for the simple reason that it could result in my having to testify in court, which would compromise the prosecution. But Katie was one of those people I would have wanted to speak with as a parent as well as a prosecutor. Do it myself so I could talk to her as a mom. Apparently she was continuing to hold up reasonably well. There had been a few sleepless nights in September and some long days when she ate little and spoke less. Once a teacher found her sobbing in a school bathroom stall. But she was doing her schoolwork, melding well with the Cousino family, and she had auditioned for and been cast in the school musical. She had written an opened for the school newspaper condemning what she called the administration’s cavalier energy policy.
All of this meant that I couldn’t wait to find out what Heather Laurent had said to Katie when she had returned to Vermont in September. I wanted to know what Mother Angel had been doing in Haverill before she had decided to drop in on David. In two days Emmet and another trooper were taking an overnight road trip: first to meet Amanda Laurent in Statler, New York, and then to Manhattan to formally interview Heather herself. But that afternoon Emmet had gone back to the Cousino house in Haverill with Katie’s social worker, Josie, a powerhouse of a woman with dreadlocks and tats, to speak to the teenager about her most recent chat with the Queen of the Seraphim. I didn�
��t want us to push too hard after what the poor kid had been through—and I doubt that Josie would have let us—but I had to know what Heather had said to the teenager and what the woman had asked.
EMMET WALKER: And so Ms. Laurent came by your school.
K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. She came to my lunch table with Mrs. Degraff.
WALKER: Who is that?
K. HAYWARD: My guidance counselor. Heather—it’s, like, okay if I call her Heather, right?
WALKER: Yes.
K. HAYWARD: Because she wants me to.
WALKER: Did Mrs. Degraff know Ms. Laurent?
K. HAYWARD: No. But she had heard of her. Heather writes books. Anyway, you have to get a visitor’s pass to walk around the school, and you get those at the front office. That’s so some crazy doesn’t walk around with a gun and get all Columbine on us.
WALKER: I understand.
K. HAYWARD: And Mrs. Degraff was called in when Heather said she had come to see me. She told Mrs. Degraff she was good friends with Ginny O’Brien—which, if Ginny had heard, would have caused her to, like, totally soak through her pan—
WALKER: Go ahead.
K. HAYWARD: It would have made Ginny crazy happy.
WALKER: And so you and Heather and Mrs. Degraff chatted.
K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. But Mrs. Degraff wasn’t there most of the time.
JOSIE MORRISON: I would have been present, but no one called me. And I think Heather Laurent was probably very helpful. I’ve read her books.
WALKER: What did you talk about?
Secrets of Eden Page 17
