Secrets of Eden

by Chris Bohjalian

  In any case, I'm confident that there are any number of nouns and verbs that Katie Hayward will hear over the course of her life that will instantly bring her back to the Cape on the hill and the horrific things she overheard there.

  ALICE'S PARENTS IN Nashua, New Hampshire, had a pretty good idea that George occasionally whacked their daughter around. They knew the details in the relief-from-abuse order, and one time with her mother Alice had brought up the term extinguishment of parental rights, suggesting that she feared someday her husband would do the absolute worst. She told her mother that she had researched George's rights to Katie if "something" ever happened to her and she was planning to see a lawyer in the autumn--that is, if things grew nasty again. (As far as we could tell, she never had gotten around to contacting an attorney.) George's parents in upstate New York knew considerably less, and it seemed that the four in-laws never spoke. When I read the reports of the interviews, it didn't seem implausible that Fred and Gail Malcomb would raise a daughter who might tolerate a certain amount of abuse: an only child who clearly wasn't spoiled, a father who was distant and believed in corporal punishment ("within reason," Fred stressed), and a mother who was submissive to the point that she would often look to her husband for approval before she answered a question. Likewise, Don and Patrice Hayward were not improbable candidates to bring up a boy who would grow into a man capable of hitting his wife. Theirs was a family of boys: five of them. No girls. Don didn't even allow female pets, so every one of the dogs that paraded through George's life when he was young was male, and there never were any cats. Seemed inevitable that sometimes all that male bonding or all that testosterone left over from ice-hockey practices or games ("ice warriors," Don called his sons) would result in a little brawling in the house. But, Don insisted, he never hit Patrice, and Patrice didn't disagree. He also said it was unbelievable to him that his son would ever have hit Alice, "no matter what she did to deserve it," and that the relief-from-abuse order was based on trumped-up accusations. He said the only reason his son returned to Haverill from the lake house and tried to salvage the marriage was for the sake of his daughter.

  I made a note to myself about the reality that when George was grown he had both a daughter and a female dog: Was that a source of frustration for him? Disappointment? Why had he allowed his family to bring a female home from the animal shelter? Ginny would tell us that Alice had lost a baby boy to a miscarriage not long after she and George had arrived in Haverill. Alice believed that if the baby had lived, things might have been different. Ginny doubted that, and I did, too. But it was at least conceivable that George's longing for a son might occasionally have made him even more of a thug.

  The fathers of both victims worked, the mothers stayed at home. Fred Malcomb was employed as a manager at an ice-cream factory. Don Hayward owned a small insurance company. Neither had retired at the time of their children's deaths.

  The most interesting--and, perhaps, the most revealing--remark volunteered by Don Hayward? In the follow-up interview, after the Haywards had been informed that it appeared George had been murdered, Don grew a little combative and asked, "So how do you know she didn't kill him? Alice? How can you be so sure that little you-know-what didn't shoot him herself--you know, before someone else came in and strangled her? She never much liked him, you know. That's the truth. Even after all he did for her and all he gave her, she never much liked him."

  Emmet considered explaining the details of gastric emptying times and how the contents of the stomachs of the deceased suggested that Alice had been dead for hours before someone shot George. But in the end he didn't bother, since by then Don was rattling on about all the remarkable things George had accomplished in his life as a businessman and Patrice was sobbing.

  FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. 311)

  I've always assumed that for most people there is great comfort in being home and--more important than that--a profound, almost visceral sensation of safety. And by home I mean quite literally inside the house. Certainly this is the impression I have gotten from my friends who are married or partnered, as well as from my friends who had childhoods that were more normal than mine. You come home and metaphorically (or actually) you start the fire. You hang up your jacket in the hall closet. You run the baths for your children, you watch your cat groom herself on the bar stool nearest the radiator. You cook. You eat. You hold someone you love. And the whole world with all of its dangers and troubles--its savagery and its pettiness--becomes something other, something beyond your front door. In theory, no one hurts you at home.

  For my mother, however, I have always assumed that when she would shut that front door for the night, she felt far from secure. It was like being in the cage with a sleeping tiger, which I presume is at least part of the reason why she drank. She never knew what might awaken the animal. Even at the end of her life, I am not sure whether she knew what specifically might set her husband off, what might cause him to hiss at her or rage at her or destroy something small that she cherished: A plate. A wineglass. A photograph. Once he took one of her favorite black-and-white prints from their wedding album--an image of her with her grandfather--and tore it into long strips of confetti while she cried and begged him not to. I assume she was never completely sure what might lead him to hit her.

  And then, of course, there were all those nights when, drunk, she would taunt him. Challenge him with a derision that was self-destructive and could lead only to an escalation in their cycle of violence.

  Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen my father's face at his funeral. My mother's at hers, too. The desire had a different motivation in each instance: In the case of my father, I wanted to see whether he was peaceful in death. Did all the anger and frustration that caused him to scowl--that left his eyebrows knitted in so many of those frayed snapshots--die with his flesh and body and blood? He had been a handsome man, with cheekbones as pronounced as a ledge: But was it the darkness that actually made him attractive? As for my mother, I wondered what her countenance was like when her eyes weren't darting nervously like a rabbit's or shrunken by scotch to mere slits--when she wasn't anxiously trying to anticipate her husband's moods. Would she, finally, have a face that allowed the beauty that had been subsumed by all that disappointment and fear shine through?

  The last time I had seen either of them alive had been over Christmas. The only angels I had been conscious of back then had been the porcelain ones that decorated the fireplace mantel and the glass ones that my sister and my mother and I hung on the balsam we stood every year in the bay window in the living room. (It would only be later that I would become aware of the angels among us, the sentient and beatific with wings.) At one point when my sister and I were standing in our kitchen after our mother's funeral, when we were surrounded by all those grown-ups and all the food that neighbors had brought that neither of us had any interest in eating, Amanda turned to me and asked me what I thought the morticians had done to our parents' bodies between their deaths and their funerals. It was a good question. In hindsight, we both needed more closure than either of us had been offered. Anybody in our situation would.

  A few years later, when I was taking a course in college on aberrant psychology, I would come to understand that it was not merely the morticians who had worked upon my parents' bodies in the period between the murder and the suicide and when their bodies were lowered in mahogany caskets into the earth. It had been the medical examiner who had, in all likelihood, peeled back their faces and weighed their hearts and swabbed the inside of my mother's vagina.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It's not easy to weird out a pathologist, but Heather Laurent succeeded. I already had a meeting with the crime lab on another case, and so I drove up to David Dennison's office the day after he called so he could tell me precisely what Heather had said and, apparently, done. By then we had checked out the basics of Heather's history--though we hadn't interviewed her yet--and pretty much all that she had written in her boo
ks about her parents' deaths was true: Her father had indeed shot her mother and then hanged himself in the family attic, leaving behind two teenage daughters. Nice. What a guy.

  David's office was a first-floor corner just off the mortuary (and he always preferred that we call it a mortuary instead of a morgue, since the word mortuary, he believed, conveyed a greater respect for the dead), and the mortuary was a sprawling series of rooms you entered via the ER at the hospital in Burlington. Convenient, no? If you wound up in the ER and made it, you went upstairs to the hospital; if not, they wheeled you on a gurney through the double doors marked AUTOPSY SERVICES.

  The resources were impressive for a state as small as Vermont, because for over a decade we had a governor who'd been a physician. Eventually he was able to secure the funds for a first-rate facility, the sort of place where you really can treat the dead with the honor they deserve. When the legislature was debating the funds for the new space, David testified famously (famously in Montpelier, anyway) that he wanted a kinder and gentler mortuary. We only have a dozen or so homicides a year here, but for one reason or another--usually what we call an untimely death--David and his staff still autopsy about 10 percent of the people who die. And since we usually lose about five thousand people, the pathologists autopsy close to five hundred Vermonters annually. And then there are the corpses with organs and tissue to harvest. David is adamant in his belief that the tissue donation room has the best air in the state.

  And the day before, Heather Laurent had showed up out of the blue at Autopsy Services about four o'clock in the afternoon. David had had me paged, but I was in court, and Emmet was in Haverill interviewing Ginny O'Brien and Tina Cousino.

  "I have to assume that Heather Laurent is a suspect," David said when I arrived.

  "She may be involved somehow, but I wouldn't say she's the lead horse. Not by a long shot. Why would she be at the top of your list?"

  "Because she's insane."

  "You think?"

  "Well, not literally. But she is a kook. And I'm not saying she should be the lead candidate, either."

  "She's loaded, you know."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "She comes from buckets of money and has made a boatload more with her books. Why did she come here? And what did you do when she did?"

  We were sitting in his office, and he motioned at the chair in which I was sitting. "Mostly we talked."

  "Here. In your office."

  "I went out to reception when Vivian said Heather Laurent was here to see me. I told the woman it was inappropriate for us to speak."

  "But you did anyway."

  "She wanted a tour."

  "Why?"

  "Because she had never seen the inside of a mortuary. She asked to see the bodies."

  "Bodies ... generally. Right? She had to know that the Haywards have been in the ground in New York and New Hampshire for a good long time."

  "Yes. Bodies generally. She told me about her parents, which I already knew. But it seems she never got to see their bodies after they had died. The last she saw of them, they were alive. It had been over Christmas. Next thing she knew, they were in caskets. She wanted to know what had probably happened to them in between."

  "Other than being shot in the one case and hanged in the other."

  "Yes. Other than that."

  "I didn't even know she was in Vermont."

  The shelf on the wall behind his desk was awash in Beanie Babies, small plush animals filled with plastic pellets instead of traditional stuffing. His two daughters, when they had been little girls, insisted on giving him the creatures because they had a vague idea that the office of a man who spent his life taking cadavers apart and putting them back together could use a little cheer. For the first time I noticed that two of them--a zebra and a lavender dachshund--were each wearing a doctor's white coat. The dachshund even had a stethoscope, which struck me as ironic only because I didn't imagine that David listened to a lot of beating hearts most days. I wanted to pick one up and throw it at him.

  "Don't worry: The tour I gave her was seriously abridged."

  "I can't effing believe you gave her any tour at all. You're the one who's the lunatic--not her. Are you embarrassed? I sure as shit hope you are."

  His face was a little square and usually rather regal--especially given how early he'd grayed. But now he looked like a scolded child, and his eyes, always a bit drawn, grew small. "I think you're making too much of this," he said defensively.

  "Emmet hasn't even interviewed her yet! We didn't even know she was here!"

  "Well, now we know."

  "Where is she?"

  He paused. "She went home. To Manhattan."

  "Lovely. Did she say why she was here?"

  "I told you, she wanted to learn what had probably happened to her parents' bodies."

  "I mean in Vermont: Why was she in Vermont?"

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't ask?"

  "We were too busy talking about why she had dropped by my office--though she did say she had just come from seeing Katie Hayward at the high school."

  "Oh, for God's sake."

  "I know--"

  "Did she say what she and Katie had talked about?"

  "No."

  I was irked and felt a little flushed. I took a deep breath. "So: How extensive was this tour you gave her?"

  "Not extensive at all. It's not like I was going to walk her through the chain of custody for the Haywards--for any of the bodies that arrive here. I showed her my office, an autopsy room, and the tissue donation room. Since it was the reason she'd come here, I told her what I presumed had been done with her parents."

  "And then she left."

  "That's right."

  "What did she say about the Haywards?"

  "She was saddened."

  "Oh, please."

  "And she wanted to know about the nightgown Alice Hayward had been wearing when she'd been killed."

  "Did she say why?"

  "She said she was curious and caught me off guard. So I told her."

  "You told her?"

  "I did, I'm sorry. I was walking her to the door and it just slipped out. Later it crossed my mind that she wanted an alibi: You know, a moment when someone--i.e., yours truly--could testify that she had asked him what color it was. But I'm being paranoid, right?"

  "One can hope."

  "I really am sorry."

  "Her buddy, Pastor Drew? Did she say anything about him?"

  "Not her buddy any longer."

  I sat forward in my chair. "Really?"

  He shook his head. "No. You didn't know?"

  "We're not exactly girls in the hood, David. No. I did not know. What did she say?"

  "I was talking to her about her own parents and what sorts of things the medical examiner--and, I added, the mortician--had probably done with them. I was being very vague."

  "Sensitive," I said sarcastically. "That's you."

  "Thank you. I really was telling her only the basics, but she kept wanting to know things about how her own parents had died. The physiological specifics. It was, in her opinion, the exact reverse of the Haywards. In the Haywards' case, it was the male who was shot and the female who was strangled; in the case of her own mom and dad, it was the female who was shot and the male who was strangled."

  I nodded, simultaneously interested and a little disappointed in myself that I hadn't made this association on my own. I wasn't sure if it mattered, but it was a connection of some sort. "Go on."

  "So I was explaining to her the differences between ligature strangulation--you know, with a scarf or a rope--and manual strangulation. I was babbling on about strap-muscle hemorrhages and the likely calcification of bone in her father's neck--"

  "All things she needed to know."

  He raised an eyebrow but otherwise ignored me and continued, "--and Heather interrupted me. 'Manual strangulation is much more personal,' she said. 'You're staring into your victim's eyes. You have to be very ang
ry.' I thought that was a wee bit of an understatement. Very angry? You have to be a fuel tank that just exploded! But I was polite and agreed. And that's when she said, 'I just don't see how Stephen Drew could have missed the rage that must have been consuming George Hayward.'"

  "And you said?"

  He shrugged. "I was evasive. I said people are human. They miss things. And that's when she let on that she and the minister weren't real tight. Her response? 'And some people only see what they want to see. Some people's hearts are harder and more selfish than others'. They resist the more virtuous angels among us.'"