K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Stuff.
WALKER: No specific recollections?
K. HAYWARD: Mostly just how my life totally sucks, I guess. And how it’s okay to feel that way. She’s been through this, you know. She knows better than most people what I’m going through.
WALKER: What did she ask you?
K. HAYWARD: You know. The usual. Like, how was I doing? What was I feeling? She asked what everyone asks. And she gave me her cell-phone number, so I can call her if I’m about to wig out.
MORRISON: And remember, Katie: You have plenty of support right here, too. You can always call me, too. Daytime. Nighttime.
K. HAYWARD: I know.
WALKER: How are you doing?
K. HAYWARD: Okay. I guess.
WALKER: What did you tell her—Ms. Laurent?
K. HAYWARD: Look, do I have to talk about this? It was one thing to talk to Heather. She knows what I’m going through. It’s one thing to talk to Josie. If everyone else would just leave me alone …
WALKER: I’m sorry. Did Heather tell you why she was in Haverill?
K. HAYWARD: Well, at first I thought she had been with Stephen.
WALKER: Your pastor.
K. HAYWARD: Well, the pastor. I don’t know if he’s my pastor. I guess he’s back in Vermont, but he’s not back in church. And it’s not like I’m real involved with the church these days, anyway.
WALKER: Did she say what she was doing with the minister?
K. HAYWARD: The rumor is she was doing the minister.
WALKER: Pardon me, ma’am?
MORRISON: Katie, you really need to save that tone for me. That was a joke, Sergeant.
WALKER: I see.
K. HAYWARD: No, she didn’t say much. And she wasn’t there to see him, anyway. I’d thought she was, but I was wrong.
WALKER: Did she say anything?
K. HAYWARD: She used to like him. That’s what the rumor is. But she doesn’t anymore.
WALKER: How do you know that?
K. HAYWARD: Well, I don’t know it. Not for sure, anyway.
WALKER: But why would you suspect it—that she and Stephen are no longer seeing each other?
K. HAYWARD: Because she is totally into angels and she said he isn’t.
WALKER: She told you that Stephen Drew doesn’t like angels?
K. HAYWARD: Sort of. She said he had built a wall against angels.
WALKER: Do you know what she meant by that?
K. HAYWARD: No idea. But look. Everyone says he was sleeping with my mom. Everyone. Then everyone says he was sleeping with Heather. That’s probably what she meant.
WALKER: You told me the first time we spoke that you didn’t believe that your mother and Reverend Drew were intimate. Have you changed your mind?
K. HAYWARD: Intimate?
MORRISON: Sleeping together, Sweetie.
K. HAYWARD: Oh, I get it. Yeah, I’ve been following what people are saying. You can’t help it, you know? And I guess I was wrong. Way wrong. Maybe they were sleeping together. Everyone in the whole world seems to think so.
WALKER: What else did Heather say?
K. HAYWARD: She told me to keep my heart open to angels. To take care of myself. And to be careful.
WALKER: Be careful?
K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. That’s why she came to the school. Don’t you think? To warn me and to, like, let me know I could call her whenever.
WALKER: It felt like a warning?
K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. It definitely felt like a warning.
WALKER: A warning about what? Or whom?
K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Maybe some evil angel—if there is such a thing. Maybe grown men in general. It’s not like she and my mom have had great success with your gender. I’m just saying …
WALKER: Just saying what?
K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Look, this is all totally confusing. But you know what? If my mom did have an affair with Stephen, I’m glad. She needed something nice in her life. At least I think I’m glad.
WALKER: Why the doubt?
K. HAYWARD: Well, we’ll never know if that’s why my dad … um, you know.
WALKER: No, I don’t know.
MORRISON: Killed her mother, Sergeant. We’ll never know if that’s why Katie’s dad killed her mom.
FROM A SACRED WHILE BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. 129)
In 2006, Florida lawmakers passed a law that protected the billboard from one of the great environmental threats to its existence: the tree. During the debate a state representative in favor of the bill testified, “Tourism depends on billboards, not on trees.”
This is one of the biggest differences between the Northeast, where I grew up, and Florida. Our tourism depends on trees. Vermont, for example, doesn’t even allow billboards.
Roughly 4 million tourists descend upon the Green Mountains alone each and every autumn to peep at the leaves and savor what poets like to call “the fire in the trees.” There are a great many reasons people celebrate the fall foliage, not the least of which is that it is indeed very pretty. For a few weeks in late September and early October, the New England maple blushes a shade of cherry far more vibrant than a preschooler’s most colorful Magic Marker, the ash glows as purple as the billboards on Broadway, and the birch trees bloom into a neon that’s downright phosphorescent. The woods grow more scenic, more lush, and more visually arresting—especially when the sky above is Wedgwood and the vista is framed by the rising wisps of our own autumnal breath.
But here’s a reality that fascinated me as a young adult: Fall foliage is not the Grand Canyon. Or Yosemite. Or even Niagara Falls. It’s not jaw-dropping, pull-me-away-from-the-edge-of-the-cliff, never-seen-anything-like-it spectacular.
So why the attraction? Why the cars, the crowds, the buses lumbering like moose up and over each mountain gap? At least part of what draws us is this: death. Not all of it, certainly. Some of the pull is romance in a four-poster bed and an inn with a dog and a fireplace. The leaves are a pretext to escape an urban condo with a view of another urban condo.
But we also understand that the phantasmagoric colors we see in the trees are millions (billions?) of leaves slowly dying. We might not know the biology behind the change, but we realize that the leaf is turning from green to red because imminently it will fall to the ground, where it will sink into the forest floor on its way to becoming humus.
The science is actually pretty simple: The tree is aware that the cold is coming and the leaves haven’t a prayer. Consequently it produces a wall of cells at the base of the leaf, precisely where the stem meets the twig, thus preventing fluids from reaching the leaf. At the same time, the leaf stops producing chlorophyll, the chemical behind photosynthesis and the reason leaves are green. Without the chlorophyll, the leaf’s other chemicals become obvious, such as the maple’s red carotenoids. Soon the leaf withers and dies.
But what a handsome death it is. No dementia, no incontinence, no children or loved ones bickering over whether to pull the plug or order one last round of chemo cocktails. Humans should be so lucky as to turn the kaleidoscopic colors of the forest when we pass.
Of course, the whole of autumn is about transience. The entire natural world seems to be shutting down, moldering, growing still. The days are short, the nights are long, and everything looks a little bleak—except for those leaves. Those kaleidoscopically lovely maples and birches and oaks allow us to gaze for a moment at the wonder of nature and to accept the inevitable quiescence of our own aura. Like so much else around us, it’s not the leaves’ beauty that moves us: It’s the fact their beauty won’t last.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There were a couple of reporters who expected an indictment any day now as the last of the leaves fell from the trees, and they were confident that when the time came, we would be arresting Stephen Drew. They called my office often that autumn and were constantly nosing through court papers. They were convinced that what had occurred that night in July was really pretty simple. Somehow Alice Hayward had
gotten word to the parsonage that her husband was going ballistic, but by the time her ex-lover arrived, she was dead and her husband was passed out drunk. So Drew killed him.
Other reporters wouldn’t guess at a timetable for an indictment but groused that it was taking so long. And the longer it took, the more bizarre were the theories their readers started posting on their newspaper or television websites. The Haywards had been murdered by a Charlie Manson–like group of teens, a small cult whose leader was so brilliant that he had been able to cover up all traces of their presence. The Haywards had been manufacturing crystal meth at a sugarhouse in the woods and were killed by a customer. George Hayward’s retail ventures were fronts to launder money, and George and his wife had been murdered by some connection from Albany or the Bronx. Alice had shot George, and then later someone had—for reasons no one could conjure—strangled her.
I, of course, kept coming back to the simpler realities. There was Stephen Drew, and there was Heather Laurent. Though I thought it unlikely that Heather was involved, as a result of her admitted visit to the house the Tuesday after the Haywards’ deaths her prints and tracks were everywhere when we returned to gather more evidence. She had also been in Vermont the Sunday night the pair was killed and had some sort of connection to the venerable Pastor Drew. And oh, by the way, she was a total nut job. So I couldn’t write her off completely.
Still, I read the stories in the papers and on the Web, and I watched the drama unfold on the local news. And when reporters called, I told them—as I did all the time with all sorts of cases—that I really had nothing to say.
EMMET WALKER AND Andy Sullivan with the Vermont State Police were joined by a detective from their New York State comrades when they ventured to Statler and by a detective from the NYPD when they descended upon SoHo. They returned to Vermont late on a Wednesday night and came to my office in Bennington first thing Thursday morning to tell me what they’d learned. I had something that resembled a small feast waiting for them to thank them for their very long days—and nearly fourteen hours in the car—earlier that week. Not too far from our office is the sort of mom-and-pop bakery that specializes in angioplasty-inducing cinnamon buns and cake doughnuts. It always has the heavenly aroma of a confectionery sugar explosion. Somehow the place has survived both the economic ruts that a city like Bennington is prone to as well as the periodic bouts of gentrification. I brought back a basket of goodies for the boys, because cops of all kinds really do like doughnuts. It’s not a myth.
“The place was a horror-movie set,” Emmet said, chuckling a little bit and licking the sugar from a doughnut off his fingers. “I could just see the opening credits before my eyes as we walked around the cabin.”
“And was it an actual log cabin?” I asked. We were talking about Amanda Laurent’s home in the Adirondacks.
“Well, from a kit,” he said. “And it wasn’t the fact it was made of logs that disturbed me. It was dark, but lots of homes are dark. It was the carvings. Her partner—”
“They’re not married?”
“She said no. But they’ve been together a long time. Name is Norman Beckwith. He’s a bird carver.”
“And not real talkative,” said Andy. His chin was in the palm of his hand. Andy was a year or two shy of thirty, a nice young guy whose head was perfectly shaped for his buzz cut. His face was wholly without lines, and he looked a bit like a little boy from the Kennedy era who was playing dress-up in his dad’s trooper duds. Hard to imagine him actually needing to shave. Even at a traffic stop in his Ray-Bans, he couldn’t have been very intimidating.
“No?”
Emmet shook his head. “No. Really only came out of his studio under duress. Tall. Gaunt. Pale. He had one of those thin beards that followed the line of his jaw. It was just starting to turn white. Hair was a little greasy, but combed back. Dark brown and, like his beard, also starting to go gray.”
“And Amanda?”
“If you saw her on a city street, you would have said either heroin addict or over-the-hill runway model. Skeletal. Sunken eyes. Cheekbones that looked like razor ridge. Flat hair. A honey blond. But she’s very smart and very funny. Nothing like Norman. She’s his agent. He makes these birds, and she sells them. She smokes like a coal plant.”
“But it was the carvings that really gave me the shivers,” Andy volunteered.
“How so?”
“There must have been twenty-five or thirty of them,” the younger trooper said. “Eagles. Falcons. Kestrels. All birds of prey and all looking really pissed. And they were perfect. Most of them, anyway. Amanda sells them for him to these high-end galleries that focus on decoys and wooden animals, and to regulars who actually drive to his studio in Statler. At first I thought they were taxidermied birds. They were on shelves and tables, and a few were on the floor because there wasn’t enough shelf space on the walls. But what was weird was that their beaks were open. Wide open. And they looked sharp enough to cut glass.”
“Andy’s right,” Emmet said, and he raised his eyebrows in agreement. “They had attitude. They looked like they thought we were field mice. They wanted to eat us.”
“And only kill us after they’d started eating,” Andy added.
“You said most of them were perfect. Which ones weren’t?” I asked.
The two troopers glanced briefly at each other and then rolled their eyes almost simultaneously. “There was a wall with what I thought might have been ospreys, but the wings were wrong,” Emmet said.
“I didn’t know you knew so much about birds.”
He shrugged. “I know a bit. Anyway, the wings seemed fluffier. And they were shaped more like a harp and clearly weren’t going to offer the raptor the sort of wingspan a bird like that needs for a glide. So I asked Norman about them. And he said I was right, the wings weren’t really right for a raptor.”
“Very nice. Extra points for Emmet Walker on Name That Bird!”
“Go ahead and joke. But here’s what else he said. Well, mumbled. He said he had given those birds angel wings in honor of Amanda and Heather Laurent. Each of those ospreys has—and this is a quote—’the wings of an avenger.’”
“And this is in honor of Amanda and Heather?”
“So he said.”
“Why are they avengers?”
Emmet smiled a little wryly. “He didn’t have a good answer. He said that some angels are just meant to be avengers. That’s their assigned task.”
“He didn’t say what they were avenging?”
“Nope.”
“Any ideas?”
“No again. Sorry.”
Outside the window I saw storm clouds the slate gray of autumn. “So what else did you crazy kids talk about?” I asked.
“Well, the key thing is this: The basics of Stephen Drew’s story check out—or at least Amanda corroborated the basics of his story. She says that Drew and Heather Laurent were there for almost a week, and when we got out a calendar, she picked the right six days. She also said she had no idea that her sister had been involved with Stephen Drew until they showed up there.”
“Was her visit a surprise?”
“No. She had called them ahead of time. But she hadn’t told them she was bringing her new boyfriend.”
“So they hadn’t met him before.”
“That’s correct. I got no indication from them that they were aware of any relationship between Stephen Drew and Heather prior to the deaths of the Haywards.”
“Had they heard about the Haywards before Heather and Drew got there?”
“They’d seen the story on the news. They still assumed it was a murder-suicide.”
“Your cell phones work there?”
“No, they didn’t. That part of Drew’s story checks out, too.”
“She say anything about her father’s history of abuse or her parents’ deaths?”
“Finally, but only after I had pushed her a bit.”
“And?”
“We’ll have to go through the transcript
carefully once it’s typed up, but nothing that suggested she saw anything except the most obvious parallels to the Haywards’ deaths. She worried about the teenage daughter, mostly. Said the girl is in for a world of pain. But I think we already knew that.”
I’m really not a stress eater, but I found myself reaching for a maple-crème doughnut. I had hoped for something more helpful from the long road trip to Statler. “What about her sister? Heather? Anything interesting emerge from your time in Manhattan?”
“We saw Anne Hathaway—the movie star.” This was Andy.
“Well, that must have made it all worthwhile.”
“She was shopping,” he went on. “Seems to have been visiting some one in the building across the street from Ms. Laurent. I recognized her before Emmet.”
“Good for you, Andy.”
“Well, you asked,” he said, his tone a little hurt.
“Our escort was an NYPD detective named Adrian Christie,” Emmet continued. “He was from Jamaica, and he knew who Heather Laurent was going in. His wife had just read A Sacred While in their book group this month. He made all the introductions. He was really very helpful.”
“What did you think of Heather?”
“She’s pretty. I thought she was actually prettier than her dust jacket. And to go back to your first question: Yes, some interesting things did emerge. First of all, she won’t admit that she and Stephen were lovers, but she is quite clear about this: They are no longer friends. She says that she met him on the Tuesday after the murders—”
“But she was in town that Sunday night. We have records that she had checked in to the Equinox about four-thirty that Sunday afternoon.”
“Doesn’t deny it. Had to be in Albany for a public radio taping Monday morning and an appearance at Bennington College in the evening. It all checks out. She says it was Tuesday when she went to Haverill for the first time, and that was when she met Stephen Drew for the first time. She says their friendship”—and he emphasized the word with an uncharacteristically facetious pop—“really didn’t last all that long. A little more than a month—though when you piece together Drew’s whereabouts, they were together almost all of that time in either Statler or Manhattan. As far as we can tell, they spent a couple of days in SoHo, about a week in Statler, and then another week in Manhattan. Drew then returned to Vermont, but only briefly. Pretty quickly he rejoined Heather Laurent at her place in the city and stayed for another week or so.”
Secrets of Eden Page 18
