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 Hayward 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.
Likewise, the short passage that Alice added on December 14 didn't exactly have the two of them rolling around the floor together beside a Christmas tree. The fact that she says they were alone wasn't proof of anything, since Drew obviously was going to be counseling her in private. I knew even as I reviewed the diary that I was going to need a lot more evidence to charge him with murder.
What I found most interesting as the State's resident cynic was this: Drew had become a cross in the diary long before George Hayward had left. If the pair had been playing Hester and Dimmesdale, it seemed possible that the affair had commenced as long as eight weeks before George Hayward had been ordered to keep his distance. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in their counseling sessions. I could just hear that Waspy, clipped voice of Drew's as, perhaps, he urged her to leave George--which obviously was exactl
y the right advice, unless his ulterior motive was inside his own khaki pants. And I couldn't help but wonder whether the fight between Alice and George that finally led her to get the relief-from-abuse order had been triggered by her involvement with her minister. Either Drew had given her the confidence to get rid of her pathetic excuse for a husband (a very good thing) or he was manipulating his way into her bedroom (a pretty despicable misuse of power). There was no entry until little more than a week after she had kicked George out of the house, which wasn't illogical, since Alice clearly wasn't an inveterate diary keeper and she must have been busy reorganizing her life once her husband was gone:
FEBRUARY 17: George still at the lake, Katie and me holding down the fort. She is okay.
I don't feel like a single mom, but I guess I am. House is quiet since Katie's out a lot. Funny: Not sure I feel safer not having George around in the night. I know I am. But now it's just us girls, Katie and me and Lula. I still keep the gun in the tubs with my clothes in the closet. I don't want it around.
Back is still sore, but arm and elbow less swollen.
The sore back and swollen elbow were the only references to the violence that had led her to finally get that restraining order.
Still, I did learn more about Alice Hayward, and it was evident that she really wasn't the self-help-magazine poster child for battered wives everywhere. She wasn't a perfect fit with the profile. Sure, George was the primary breadwinner and clearly subsidized an outwardly very nice lifestyle for them, but she wasn't totally dependent upon him financially. She had a job and an income. Moreover, she wasn't the daughter of an abused wife.
I did, however, wonder if her self-esteem wasn't so low that it had started to burrow underground--and that did fit the sketch. The brute she was married to was quite capable of undermining her faith in herself. He might not have been using her skull as a pinata, but he still knew that he could inflict pain anytime he opened his mouth:
Obviously I wasn't trying to burn the pork chops. But I did. I ruined them just like he said. I ruined dinner. If he'd just left me alone.
He says it was my fault Katie stayed out too late with Tina and a boy named Martin we've never met. He's probably right. But I tried to reach her on her cell, I did my best. I did!
I can't make a plumber appear like magic. Maybe other people can.
When did I get so wrinkled? When did I get so fat? He's right. Sometimes I just hate myself. I even hate my hair.
Called me a cunt, and I asked him what he meant by that. He got red in the face, and I got scared, and he reminded me that I had been flirting with Katie's English teacher. Was I? I thought I was just trying to be nice because Katie is so talented and he's shown so much interest in her writing. But maybe I did cross a line. Maybe I did go too far. So embarrassed now. So angry at myself. He didn't hit me.
Said I looked like a slut. A fat slut. Not even a pretty slut. He said I humiliated us both.
How could I have picked exactly the wrong drapes? I did. I am such a jerk sometimes. Such a jerk.
It didn't seem to me from her diary that she was staying with George for the sake of their daughter. The girl by then was a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose. If anything, Alice had the common sense to see that getting smacked around and verbally abused by her man wasn't precisely the sort of role-model behavior a teenage girl ever should see. But she did understand this about her marriage: George was better to her when Katie was around--and she herself was safer.
George is different when Katie's in the house. Not always. But sometimes. It's like he's on his best behavior. I know Katie has seen us fight, and lately she's gotten in the middle (which somehow I can't let happen ever again). But I also know George is less likely to hit me when she's home. So maybe she tells herself all parents fight. He drinks less when she's here, and that means he's really more himself. The man I know he can be and the way he used to be all the time. Not perfect. But not mean.
I wish I knew how to talk to her about this. I wish I was smarter. I wish I wasn't so embarrassed. But her father and I just have so much history. It's weird. She doesn't know the best of her dad, and I don't think she knows the worst. But I'm sure she knows a lot more than she would ever admit.
One more thing about Alice was textbook: She would defend George's behavior by blaming it on alcohol. The idea that when he was steering clear of beer, things were better seemed to reinforce the connection in her mind that it was barley and hops that were bruising her, not her spouse. I thought it was notable that he didn't drink on their wedding anniversary:
Flowers, chocolates, a massage with those soft hands of his--the whole deal. It's been a really excellent week. Made love tonight, and it was good.
There were two separate sheets of heavy, granite-colored resume-bond paper folded into the diary, and each one held a poem George had written to her in blue ink. They were both fourteen-line sonnets. One included an indictment of his own behavior:
Of all the things I've broken,Of all the things I've seen come apart,The moments I'd wish you'd spoken Were the moments I'd broken your heart.
The other suggested the remorse he felt after he'd hurt her:
And so, trust me, I know what I have. What I don't see is where the anger begins.But when I come for you with roses and salve,Know at least I am aware of my sins.
The diary included no mention of Heather Laurent: not as an author whose books Alice was reading and not as a presence in either her life or the life of her pastor. I hadn't really expected to find the Queen of the Angels in the journal, but so much of the investigation was proving a source of surprise that I wouldn't have been left breathless if she'd had a small cameo.
I WAS CONVINCED that Alice was kidding herself when she wondered in her diary how much Katie knew. I was confident that the kid knew plenty, and I was sure of that well before she'd even been interviewed again. You can clean up a wife beater and dress him up nice, but he's still a wife beater, and eventually his true colors will come out.
When I was growing up, people who only knew my family casually would have been quick to award my parents the marriage blue ribbon for best in show. And given the sorry state of a lot of marriages out there, I've come to the conclusion that it really was pretty good. But much of their marriage was show, an excellent facade they offered to the world--and, sadly, to each other. In reality their marriage was a far cry from storybook. Sometimes, however, I think it could have had a little magic to it if they'd been the sort who talked more. They almost never fought, which may actually have been a part of the problem. They died married, my dad first from lung cancer and my mom next from Alzheimer's. There was a six-month period when my brother and my sister and I were practically commuting via airplane from our homes in Bennington, Boston, and Manhattan to Fort Myers, Florida, where our parents had moved after our dad had retired. My dad was in excruciating pain, and my mom was getting lost in the bathroom. Getting old? Not for the faint of heart. You really need a spine when it's time to check out.
My parents' big problem was that they weren't especially compatible, and then they rarely talked about how to bridge their differences. I have no idea what they saw in each other at first, and it may have been as simple as the idea that they both were settling. They thought they were in love, they wanted to be in love, and they worked hard all their lives to fake it. My dad was thirty-five when they married, and my mom was thirty-two. She wanted kids badly, so her biological clock must have sounded in her head like a car alarm. But the thing is, they never quite figured how to say what they really wanted, either to communicate their desires or to be comfortable with what the other was asking. The few times they may have tried, it didn't seem to have a real happy outcome. Once I remember hearing through the bedroom walls the sort of conversation that creeped me out then and makes me a little sad even now. I was twelve, old enough that I knew more than the basics of procreation and recreation between the sheets, but not old enough to have tried anything at all. It was near midnight, and I had b
een in bed for at least an hour. I'm not sure why I woke up. But I did. My mom was clearly trying to convince my dad to try something a little out of the ordinary in the sack, and he was clearly resisting. He was forty-eight then, and my mom was forty-five. And I got the sense that sex wasn't hugely satisfying for her and that she wanted it to be before she was ninety (an age she wouldn't even approach in the end) and it was too late. She was alternately pleading and wheedling with my dad, and my mind was awash with lurid possibilities, which was making me more than a little queasy since these were my parents. I was just about to pull the pillow over my head when my dad said, raising his voice so that I could hear clearly the panic and the disgust and the fear, "You know I can't perform that way!"
Perform. It's a pretty harmless, pretty antiseptic word. I know that the word performance, especially when it's linked with review, can be a little unnerving. But I don't think it freaks out most people the way it does me. Whenever one of my associates refers to an opening or closing argument as a performance or suggests that he or she didn't perform well, I'm catapulted back to my seventh-grade bedroom and the sheets with sunflowers muted by laundry detergent and days drying on a rope line in the sun. I've told my husband that he has to strike the very word from his vocabulary around me.
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