Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  “Why the breakup?”

  “He hadn’t told her that he’d had an affair with Alice Hayward. He only ’fessed up to her after his attorney told him that Alice kept a journal and he was going to have to give us a mouth swab.”

  “And this made her mad.”

  “Well, it angered her as much as anything can anger her. She’s not a person with what you might call anger-management issues. She’s pretty serene. On the surface she actually comes across as a bit of an airhead—but, in fact, I believe she is very, very smart. She said Drew was more of a son of the morning star than he liked to admit.”

  “The ‘Son of the Morning Star’ was George Armstrong Custer,” I said. “He got that nickname because he used to attack at dawn. The Crows gave it to him. I only know that trivia because Paul is a bit of an American-history geek.”

  “That’s not what she meant.”

  “Too bad.”

  “She was referring to Lucifer: Isaiah, chapter fourteen, verse twelve.”

  “Satan?”

  “A fallen angel. It was Dante and Milton who made him Satan.”

  “Emmet, you are a source of unending wonder to me. Have you read Dante and Milton?”

  “No. I just did a little research before coming here this morning.”

  “So what do you think? Was Heather Laurent involved in some way? You trust her?”

  “I think she’s a strange one. But her strangeness moderates against manual strangulation and shooting someone in the head. It moderates against conspiracy.”

  “So your money is on Stephen Drew?”

  Before he could respond, Andy piped in. “That guy is ice.”

  “I take that as an affirmative, Detective Sullivan?”

  He nodded. “Emmet and I talked about this on the way home from New York City. Unless George Hayward has a freakishly long arm and was able to hold the gun real far away, we both put our money on the pastor.”

  IT IS LARGELY a coincidence that I have the name of a medieval saint from Siena. My Italian mother—whose last name was Brusa—was vaguely aware that there was a St. Catherine, but my great-grandparents had emigrated to Barre, Vermont, in 1901 so my great-grandfather could work in the granite quarries there, and by the time I was born in 1975, my family was deeply Americanized. My great-grandfather was a stone carver, and though he spent the better part of his adult life blasting great blocks of rock from the ground—a job that would, eventually, cause him to die slowly and painfully of silicosis—he nonetheless left behind a poignant legacy in the Hope Cemetery just outside of the town. Three of the most photographed tombstones are his: the little girl nuzzling two sheep that marks the spot where a nine-year-old victim of influenza named Marissa was buried in 1919; the lion with a mane that looks like a halo, his mouth open in a full-throated roar, that sits atop the decomposing body of one of the mayors of Barre; and the graceful young woman on bent knee, her eyes turned up toward the heavens with a look of beatific comfort on her face, who marks the patch of earth where my great-grandmother was buried, far too young, in 1927. Yes, Antonio Benincasa had chiseled the monument for his own wife when she predeceased him. It was, my older relatives insisted when I was a child, one of the world’s truly great, genuinely tragic love affairs.

  But by the time I arrived, the granite dust was long gone from the clothes and the lungs of the Benincasas. My father and my grandfather (the one who didn’t edit Vermont Life) were both lawyers, and I know I made my family happy by taking the LSATs and going to law school. It gave my younger sister clearance to become a wedding planner and my younger brother the freedom to go to New York City to make his fortune—my grandparents and great-uncles actually used expressions like that—as an art director in an ad agency. I certainly have no regrets.

  And I do feel an undeniable pride in the fact that I am named—if only inadvertently—for a Sienese saint. Although my grandparents never visited their mother and father’s homeland, my parents returned for visits, and so have Paul and I. The year before Marcus was born, we spent two weeks in Tuscany, and while we were in Siena, I felt a bit like a rock star whenever I whipped out my credit card and people saw my name. In some ways St. Catherine was one of those great medieval lunatics: Visions of Christ with his apostles when she was six, scourging herself with an iron chain and fasting as an adolescent, lopping off her gorgeous brown hair as a young woman. Hair shirts. The works. Religious fanaticism at its absolute fourteenth-century best. But she also nursed and buried victims of the plague, had one-on-ones with the city’s most reviled criminals, and talked a pope (whom she called “Papa” or “Daddy” in some of her letters) into putting the papacy back where it belonged. She worked hard for peace among the small Italian republics and fiefdoms. This was not a shabby CV. And she was one hell of a writer—or, as was likely the case, she was capable of dictating one hell of a letter. Let’s not forget that she was a woman in the fourteenth century and one of twenty-four children. Both realities lobbied against literacy. Some biographers believe that she learned to write only at the end of her life. Still, she left behind three hundred letters and The Dialogue of Divine Providence, a chronicle of her religious raptures.

  In any case, I have always viewed my name and its connection to St. Catherine as an unexpected, undeserved gift, even if the closest I have come to a religious vision is falling asleep in a catechism class when I was in the fifth grade and dreaming of the sand dunes on Cape Cod. While my work pales compared to hers—you don’t see me nursing neighbors about to succumb to the Black Death or advising the Vatican on policy—I hope that my efforts bring a measure of justice to some of the victims in my small corner of the globe.

  When Paul and I were in Tuscany, we went to the San Gimignano Museum of Torture. San Gimignano is a spectacularly beautiful medieval village built on a hill, which pretty much describes seven hundred other villages in Tuscany. If you look at a map of the region, you’ll see that every other village is Montesomething. Paul and I had rented bicycles, and if we’d been a little more energetic in a single day, we could have biked in a circle from Montisi to Montefollonico to Montepulciano to Montalcino and then back to Montisi. The difference between San Gimignano and most villages is that it has seven massive medieval towers looming over the town and more tourists per cobblestone than the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, Vermont. It’s a sort of Disneyland for the Chianti-and-pecorino-cheese crowd. And, of course, it has that torture museum: a three-story collection of antiquarian torture devices, most of which involve wrought iron, ropes, or very sharp points. Its ostensible message, if it has one, is that humans once had little regard for human life and were capable of inflicting truly appalling pain on one another in the name of religion or country or mere self-righteousness. There are the basics, such as the rack and the iron maiden and a functioning guillotine (which was, ironically, supposed to end torture by killing the victim instantly). There is a dungeon. And there are displays of devices that only a real psychopath could have come up with, a disproportionate number of which seemed to involve impaling people. Everything is explained in five languages, and the diagrams can only be called grisly. I had seen my share of disturbing images in the magazines in my grandparents’ attic growing up, and I had visited some pretty despicable crime scenes—but still I grew a little nauseous inside the museum. And yet I also wasn’t oblivious to the reality that I was, in some ways, the twenty-first-century version of those guys who thought, six hundred years ago, that a bone-crunching manacle or a good old-fashioned pair of rib-cage-ripping tongs had their place in the judicial system. I know that my anger at certain kinds of criminals—the stepfathers who molest and murder their stepdaughters, the husbands who batter and murder their wives—is pretty near boundless. But I view myself as civilized. Moreover, an awful lot of the time—perhaps most of the time—the self-proclaimed arms of justice in the Middle Ages were torturing the innocent, not punishing the guilty. It wasn’t about a specific crime, it was about a specific belief.

  Nevertheles
s, I wondered that day in the museum and I speculate sometimes even now what I will do if I ever have before me a capital offense. In Vermont that would demand something like a kidnapping across state lines with a death resulting. Or using the Internet as part of the abduction. At the moment I work for the county, so I won’t face this dilemma unless my career takes me to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Burlington. But someday I might wind up there. And when I thought about the blood and the bodies I had seen in the Haywards’ living room and the kid who was transformed overnight into an orphan, I would find myself angry and appalled and a little unnerved at the pain and the violence that we still inflict on one another daily.

  IN ADDITION TO a variety of reporters wanting an indictment, there was my boss, Jim Haas. When I was throwing papers into my attaché and preparing to leave for the day, he knocked gently on my door. It was open, but Jim was feigning deference—which meant, as it did always, that he wanted something. And while I might have assumed it would have something to do with the death of the Haywards, I did have other cases, and so I honestly didn’t know which of the dead victims or breathing criminals—the sex offenders, the embezzlers, the drug dealers—was about to postpone my picking up Marcus and Lionel at their after-school programs. Paul had a soccer game at a high school twenty-five miles distant, and so I was getting the boys that afternoon. Jim looked tired and aggravated, and he had loosened his necktie. He paused in the frame after tapping the door’s hollow metal with his knuckles.

  I was already on my feet, and so I murmured a greeting but didn’t stop scanning the papers I was retrieving and the folders I was collecting from different corners of my desk.

  “Got a minute?” he asked.

  “Barely.”

  “I want to talk about the Haywards.”

  I grunted something that could have been interpreted as a willingness to listen.

  “Are we any closer?” he asked.

  “Than when we talked on Monday? Nope.”

  “But you still believe it’s the pastor.”

  “Yes, but only because I don’t have anyone better.”

  “What can I do to help? What would it take to get an indictment?”

  “Against Stephen Drew?”

  “That’s right.”

  I thought about this for a brief moment. “Well, evidence would be good,” I said finally.

  “You have none … ”

  “None that says he murdered either George or Alice. I have plenty that says he was having an affair with Alice. I have a motive for killing George. But nothing to link him either to the murder of his lover or, more likely, the murder of his lover’s husband. Any special reason for the sudden urgency? It’s not like we’re in an election year.”

  “Very funny.”

  I smiled, but I honestly hadn’t meant it as a joke.

  “Really, it’s not sudden,” he went on. “But I just got off the phone with Sondra Norton, and she says that people are scared. Some are beyond scared. They’re mad. No one likes an unsolved murder—or, in this case, two unsolved murders. It makes folks edgy, especially now that Stephen Drew lives in the neighborhood.”

  Sondra ran the shelter for battered women and their children. She was also one of our representatives in the Vermont House. And Stephen Drew, for reasons of his own, had now left the parsonage in Haverill and was living like a three-dimensional wanted poster in an apartment in downtown Bennington.

  “We all know there isn’t a killer on the loose who’s preying on people he doesn’t know,” I said. “Whoever killed the Haywards knew them and had a clear motive. Sondra must know that, too. She’s grandstanding. After all, it is an election year for her.”

  “Sondra doesn’t grandstand. You know that.”

  “She does great work. She’s a great person. But I don’t think she has to worry about the safety of her constituents. Whoever killed the Haywards isn’t about to strike somewhere in downtown Bennington.”

  “You’re not worried about the reverend?”

  “I think he had a concrete motive.”

  “You snap once, it’s much easier to snap a second time.”

  “I really don’t believe anyone needs to add extra locks to their doors.”

  “That’s not the point. I’ve also heard from both county senators. I’ve heard from our mayor. And I seem to be hearing from the media far more often than I would like.”

  “Is that the point, Jim? Is that what this is about? People are frustrated? You’re frustrated? You’re spending more time than you want to holding people’s hands on the telephone?” Immediately I knew I had sounded more exasperated than I should have. He stood a little more erect, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Alice Hayward was a battered wife who was murdered. Strangled. Someone wrapped his hands around her throat and crushed her larynx, broke the bones in her neck, compressed the carotid arteries, and caused her to asphyxiate. And that someone was almost certainly her husband. Almost certainly. But it also might not have been her husband, because another person—and it sure as hell wasn’t Alice—took his gun and discharged the weapon into the right side of his skull, splintering bone, causing brain trauma, hemorrhaging, and a serious mess on the family’s living-room windows, walls, and couch. That is the point.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sometime this week or next, when we can clear everyone’s calendars, I’d like us to sit down with the folks at Criminal Investigation and see exactly what we have and what avenues we haven’t pursued.”

  “I have a gut feeling you’d like me to be there.”

  “Go with your gut,” he said, and then he turned on his heel and left.

  PERHAPS A DOZEN times in my life, I’ve run into people while we’re investigating them. Bennington County is like that: It’s a deceptively small corner of Vermont. I’ve run into suspects and perps out on bail while squeezing chickens at the supermarket, while getting gas at the convenience store (with Marcus in his car seat in the back), and at the annual colonial fair over Father’s Day weekend in June (with, thank you very much, my whole family present). Of those dozen or so encounters, all but once the individual knew exactly who I was. And of those times when it was clear that the suspect and I knew precisely where we stood with each other, only twice have I felt the hairs rise up along the back of my neck. One time was when I was having new brake pads put on my car and the wagon tuned up for winter. One of the mechanics, I realized, was an angry young guy charged with aggravated assault and felony unlawful mischief: He had walked into a downtown bar with a steel pipe in his hands and beaten the crap out of some poor dude who’d smiled at his girlfriend. He ended up breaking the guy’s arm. Then, on his way out, he smashed the bar’s plate-glass window for good measure. With his grandparents’ help, he had managed to post 10 percent of the twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail. (It never ceases to amaze me how many people are out on bail and shouldn’t be. Presume this guy was innocent? Yeah, right. I could have filled a dinner party with witnesses. I was also convinced that he was the person who’d been burglarizing vehicles for weeks in a city parking lot and robbed an older couple one night as they unlocked their minivan using—surprise!—a steel pipe as a weapon. And yes, later we would charge him with those crimes, too.) We saw each other at the car dealer just after I’d arrived at the service counter, while I was waiting for them to sign me out a loaner for the day, and our eyes met. He looked seriously pissed at me: His bangs were plastered to his forehead, and he glowered like a petulant schoolboy. Then he motioned with his head out toward my car, which was in the lot just outside the service-garage window.

  “That yours?” he asked.

  “It is.”

  He studied it for a moment as if he were checking out a girl in a bar and then wrinkled his nose dismissively as if it didn’t measure up in some way. Finally he turned back to me and smirked. “We’re gonna get some ice tonight, I hear,” he said. “A lotta ice.” Then he disappeared back into the shop. That night, after I had picked up the car, I w
as sure my brakes weren’t going to work when I needed them most. For almost a week, I found myself braking long before I normally would have—just in case.

  The other suspect who unnerved me when I ran into him outside the safe confines of court was none other than the Reverend Stephen Drew. I knew he was living in Bennington, and I knew he was renting an apartment not far from the courthouse. Nevertheless, it took me a moment to put a name to his face when I came across him on the sidewalk about fifty yards from the courthouse entrance. It was almost six o’clock in the evening, and there was a chill wind blowing in from the west. There were still another two weeks of daylight saving time, but it was overcast, damp, and dusky outside—and there was almost no one on the street. I was racing to the bookstore, which I knew was about to close, because I wanted to pick up a couple of picture books for a pal of Lionel’s who was having a birthday party that coming Saturday. And there the minister was. He was leaning against the brick side of a recessed doorway, and he had the collar turned up on a gray jacket that fell to midthigh. He pushed himself off the wall and blocked my path.

  “You’re Catherine Benincasa,” he said. “We met the last Monday in July. I’d recognize you anywhere.” It is always a tad alarming when a suspect in a murder investigation calls you by name on a deserted street at twilight, and his tone was somewhere between menacing and weary. The nearest people were either the security guards back inside the double doors at the metal detectors of the courthouse or the patrons at a bar shut tight against the cold nearly a block away.

  “I am,” I said warily. “Hello, Reverend Drew.”

  “Stephen. Please. I was just about to give up.”