Secrets Of Eden (2010)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "And Alice's voice? What do you recall about hers?" Heather asked.

  There is much that I could have told her about Alice Hayward's voice. I could have described how silky and low it would become in a murmur in bed, or the vibrato it took on when she cried. One of the times when she was in my office--this was before I had crossed the Rubicon into her bed--her voice grew eerily even, almost clinical, when she was explaining to me the source of the chiaroscuro of yellow and hyacinth on her cheek. Most of the congregation accepted her claim that she had walked into an open medicine-cabinet door in the bathroom in the night. She had a swimmer's body, and sometimes, when we were alone, she would sound to me like she had a swimmer's voice: a bit throaty, occasionally hoarse, always a little more fragile than her lovely physique. Remind me who I am, she said to me one of our first mornings together in her and her husband's bed. Sometimes I can't believe I'm the sort of woman who gets to have a lover. I found the word gets powerfully endearing, as if I were a prize and adultery a privilege. She was blossoming, and I soaked in her every word.

  With Heather, however, I shared none of that. I wasn't yet prepared to reveal the secrets I knew of my most recent lover. Instead I answered with an evasiveness that people later would say marked so much of my behavior that summer and was emblematic of a dangerous character flaw. A desiccated soul, an arctic heart. In hindsight, I should have told Heather something. Anything. I would have been better off that moment and, I imagine, in the months that followed. But I said nothing.

  And when I look back on that Sunday, I should have seen the parallels between that elderly deacon and Heather Laurent--or, for that matter, between Heather and any of the people I had met in my life who had had about them the penumbra of an angel. But on that morning, a week to the day since the Haywards had died, I was far more focused on the dark of the world than I was on the light. I knew what had occurred seven days earlier in the Cape on the hill, and it seemed to me that if there was an otherworldly element residing somewhere deep inside each of our spirits or cores, it was far more likely to be demonic.

  THE IDEA THAT I was fleeing was ridiculous. It was absurd in that I answered my cell phone each and every time it rang--at least when I had it with me--and it was absurd in that I was traveling with a reasonably recognizable woman. (Yes, I know a writer is seldom as famous as a movie star: If Angelina Jolie wanders into a library, the fans and the media will swarm; if Margaret Atwood wanders into a cineplex, the lines for the popcorn barely will waver.)

  I hadn't told my mother where I was going, because I honestly hadn't known myself when I left Bronxville. The same is true in regard to the Pastoral-Relations Committee and the deacons at the church in Haverill. Likewise, Heather hadn't known at the time that she would go visit her sister in upstate New York, bringing with her in tow a minister who wasn't sure what he should be doing with his life or what it had meant that he had baptized a woman a half day before she would be strangled. I was quite content in Heather's bed in her loft. She was, too, I believe, after all the traveling she had done in the preceding months. But whatever need she had to cocoon and replenish her (and I will use one of her words here) aura, it was subsumed by her worry about Amanda and her concern for that basket case of a pastor from Vermont. And so we disappeared into the Adirondacks.

  And while it is tempting to express some understanding for the appalling ways that Catherine Benincasa or reporters or bloggers would misinterpret my movements--to begin a sentence with Still or Nevertheless--that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I don't understand it. And though many people believe I am anything but forthright, in the end I was more candid than I wanted to be or expected to be or was even obliged to be. I know my crimes and I know my mistakes. I live with them.

  But I also know that whatever else I may have done (or, worse, failed to do), I positively did not flee. It honestly hadn't crossed my mind that there might be a need.

  Of course, none of us ever knows as much as we think we do. None of us. If there is a lesson to be learned from my fall--notice I did not say my rise and fall, because it's not as if the ascent to the pulpit of a country church represents an especially glorious accomplishment--it is this: Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume no one really knows anything that matters at all. Because, alas, we don't. All of our stories are suspect.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My husband is a great guy. It doesn't take a dirtball like George Hayward or Stephen Drew for me to see that. I think those two have a lot more in common than the reverend ever would be willing to admit.

  But that's the thing about men like that. Total denial. Everyone talks about how a battered woman has a complete unwillingness to admit to herself what's really going on in her life, and I can tell you that the river Denial is indeed pretty freaking wide in the minds of a lot of those victims. The worst, for me, are those cases where some boyfriend or stepfather is abusing the woman's daughters, and when we finally charge the bastard--when the daughter finally comes forward--the woman defends the guy! Takes his side! Insists her own kid must be making this up or exaggerating. Trust me: No twelve-year-old girl exaggerates when Mom's boyfriend makes her do things to him with her mouth.

  And, clearly, Alice Hayward was no stranger to denial herself. When I returned to my office that Monday after viewing the mess up in Haverill, I learned that Alice had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order that winter. Had managed to kick her husband's ornery ass out of the house and--somehow--gotten him to go live for a couple of months at their place on Lake Bomoseen. And then, like so many battered women, had taken him back. Hadn't even shown up for the hearing a week after the papers were served.

  But the men's rationalizations are even worse. They'll curl your hair.

  Now, Stephen Drew wasn't using some poor woman's face as a floor sander, and he wasn't inflicting himself on some defenseless middle-school girl. (Note I am not being catty and adding "as far as we know." Because, in my opinion, we do know: He wasn't.) But he certainly abused his place and his power, and he sure as hell took advantage of women in his congregation. For a minister, the guy had ice in his veins. Lived completely alone, didn't even have a dog or a cat. He really creeped me out once when he went off on this riff about the Crucifixion as a form of execution. Very scholarly, but later it was clear that even his lawyer had wished he'd dialed down the serial-killer vibe.

  And he was, like a lot of the real wife beaters, a great self-deluder.

  And, perhaps, a great actor.

  That morning I met him, he told me how he'd baptized Alice Hayward the day before and how he should have seen this coming from something she'd said when she came out of the water. I couldn't decide whether he was overintellectualizing the fact that there was a dead woman in her nightgown on the floor and a dead guy with half a face on the couch, or whether he was so completely in shock that he was finding reasons to feel guilty himself. It wasn't like he had strangled the woman. It wasn't like he had shot the creep on the sofa.

  Shows you what I know.

  It was one of my associates, David Dennison, who first questioned what really had occurred at the Haywards' the night they both died. David is the medical examiner. He's tall and scholarly-looking, and his hair is almost translucently white. His eyes are sunken, a little sad even, but he's a very funny guy. I've worked with three pathologists in two states, and I've learned that most MEs are pretty witty. I think if you're going to do that for a living, you have to appreciate black humor. He's also an excellent witness, and as a prosecutor I need that in an ME. Cop shows on TV have ruined me: I don't dare put a dull guy on the stand if I want to keep a jury awake.

  In addition, David is a total control freak, and I want that, too. I have seen him go up to a person at a crime scene who is clearly there for the first time and politely take their hands and put their fingers together as if they're praying. The last thing he wants--the last thing any of us want--is for someone to accidentally screw up a key piece of evidence by touching it.

  David didn't
say much to any of us that Monday morning we all converged on Haverill. His office is up in Burlington, a good two and a half hours away, but he got to the crime scene by lunchtime. Everyone from the village was either somber or stunned, but the few words I overheard him exchange with Drew were collegial and about as pleasant as one could hope for. Drew, like many of the people who eventually wind up as suspects, was very, very helpful. He told us lots about the Haywards--about both George and Alice. After all, he'd been providing some counsel for Alice. (That was actually what he said to me: "I offered her some counsel." It was only later that we'd figure out that a hell of a lot of that "counsel" had been between the sheets.) And he was a real scrubber. He donned those rubber gloves and just went to town on the gore in one corner of the room. (In the days that followed, this also would strike me as a tad suspicious.) He was a cool customer, not the sort of person I would have expected to panic suddenly and flee.

  In any case, it was David's preliminary autopsy report that caused me to sit up in my office chair and reassess in my mind what had occurred. According to David, the cause of death for Alice was precisely what we all had assumed: strangulation. The manner was homicide. Aspects of George's death, however, were a little murky: Though the cause was still that gunshot wound to the head, David had not cited the manner as suicide. Instead he had typed in that single word that would help trigger the whole investigation: pending. In his opinion there were factors in George's death that left him wondering, and his report suggested that homicide was a possibility. In other words, it was conceivable that someone other than George had pulled the trigger of the gun that Sunday night--and, likewise, that someone other than George could have strangled Alice. It wasn't likely, in that bits of George's skin were under Alice's fingernails and it was clear that she had scratched the hell out of his face. But people are bizarre. For a time I kept open the possibility that George and Alice had fought violently but it was a third (or fourth) person who had murdered Alice.

  The first red flag for the ME was George Hayward's head wound. When a person decides to put a bullet into his brain, he tends to press the barrel against the temple. At the hairline, usually. Or, if the gun is not actually touching the skin, it's still pretty close: A suicide is either a contact or a near-contact wound. Besides, a person's forearm is only so long; you really can't aim a gun at your temple from a distance of greater than six or seven inches, and most suicides bring the gun a lot closer than that. The result is that most of the powder is driven into the skin and there is a dense deposit of soot. When a pathologist washes away that soot, he is likely to find abrasions and stippling, all those burning bits of powder embedding themselves into the flesh. The farther the gun is held from the bullet's point of entry, the less pronounced those marks will be. In David's opinion the bullet that killed George Hayward was certainly not a contact wound and--based on the negligible amounts of powder and stippling and soot--not even particularly close. The gun might have been fired from as much as a few feet away.

  Second, there was the pattern of the blood and bone and brain that had sprayed the living room: the remains that people like the Reverend Drew and Alice's best friend had cleaned up on the screen and the china cabinet, and had tried and failed to remove from the couch. David thought it was possible that the spatter was the result of a bullet pulverizing the skull in a suicide. But from the moment he had entered that room, he told me later, a part of him had wondered at the angle.

  Finally there was George Hayward's right hand. There was residue on it from the gunshot, but not a lot. And while no one puts a great deal of stock in gunshot residue these days, he still thought there might have been more if Hayward had indeed pulled the trigger. (The fact that there were traces meant nothing: In a small room, residue can be anywhere once a gun is discharged.)

  Toxicology--the blood and urine tests--would take two or three weeks, but David suggested that a lot more could be inferred right now with another look at the gun. Just how severe was the blowback? Or, to be blunt, how much of the bastard's brains were up the gun barrel? (Make no mistake: Though it seemed possible now that George Hayward was a murder victim, he was still a complete and total bastard.) David also suggested that after the weapon had been examined, someone in the crime lab should conduct a series of test fires with the same load to offer a baseline on the stippling it was likely to elicit. Once we did that, we could get a fairly precise sense of the distance the gun had been from Hayward's temple.

  Now, none of this would have led me to start wondering what sort of involvement Stephen Drew might have had with the deaths of either George or Alice Hayward if the guy hadn't gotten out of Dodge the second the bodies had been shipped to New York and New Hampshire for burial. Had he stuck around, it might have taken considerably longer before any of us in the state's attorney's office would have turned our eyes upon the local pastor. One of my associates, for instance, conjectured that the murders might have been an attempt to cover up a robbery and the burglar had known of George's history of domestic abuse. In other words, someone had murdered the pair of them and then made it look like it was George's handiwork. And there was also the possibility this was all some sort of horrible thrill killing, not unlike the 2001 murders of two Dartmouth College professors in their own home: Perhaps someone had strangled Alice while George had watched and then offed him. But why make that look like something it wasn't? And when the house once more was viewed as a crime scene and thoroughly investigated, there was no indication that anything had been stolen and no reason to believe that either of the Haywards or their teenage daughter had had some sort of secret life as a drug dealer.

  What we did find, however, were a variety of clues that Alice Hayward had been receiving more than mere pastoral counsel from that minister who'd fled Haverill hours after conducting her funeral service.

  AFTER I READ the autopsy report for the first time, I rang David Dennison. He was expecting the call.

  "I had a feeling the word pending would pique your interest," he said.

  "Are you just trying to make my caseload completely suck? The Hayward mess wasn't supposed to have any effing complications."

  "Has anyone told you that you have the mouth of a teenager?"

  "Teenagers don't say effing. No censorship there. And Paul says I sound more like a sailor, thank you very much. And he spends his life around teenagers: I think if I sounded like one, he would have told me by now."

  "So what do you think?"

  "I think it all seemed so simple when we were at the house that day."

  "It did look nice and neat."

  I glimpsed once more the photos of Alice Hayward that had been taken at the scene. Her eyes, starved for air, were bulging, the whites dotted with burst blood vessels, and her mouth was forever fixed in a rictus of agony and fear. "No it didn't, David. It looked horrible."

  "You know what I mean," he said, his voice not really defensive. Then he shared with me his suspicions about what might in fact have occurred, given the way portions of George Hayward's brain were sprinkled liberally across the wall and the couch. When he was done, he added, "And I expect more serious questions when we get back the blood and urine work in another week or two."

  "What do you think the lab will find?"

  "That George Hayward was too drunk to kill himself. This is all preliminary, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if as many as four hours separated the two deaths."

  "You're kidding."

  "Good God, did you count the beer bottles?"

  "I did."

  "The guy smelled like a frat basement on a Saturday morning."

  "I tried to avoid fraternity basements, thank you very much."

  "And his dinner was all but digested. Mush. Hers? I could have counted the string beans and peas. So here's one scenario. He strangles her around eight or eight-thirty. Then, filled with remorse or panic, he drinks. Well, drinks some more. A lot more. And finally he passes out. Then, around midnight, someone shoots him."

  "Sounds a
little far-fetched."

  "Wait till we have the blood-alcohol numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if we're talking the neighborhood of point-three or more. Alcohol poisoning. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out he was flirting with lethal."

  "But you can't be that precise on the times of death. Plus or minus two hours, they both could have died around ten," I said.

  "Possible. But gastric emptying time is about four hours. People lie, but stomachs don't. Assuming they ate dinner together--say, seven or seven-fifteen--she's dead before eight-thirty. Him? Could be closer to midnight."

  "Of course, if Hayward was that drunk, it's also possible that he didn't kill Alice, either."

  "Well, yes," he agreed, and I didn't have to verbalize what both of us were thinking. Sometimes none of us has the slightest idea what really goes on in a house when the shades are drawn and the doors are closed. There are the postmortem realities--how a body decomposes or cools to room temperature, how it stiffens or putrefies or lets loose with one last bowel movement--but what that body was doing in the moments before it died is often unfathomable. And, in the case of a homicide, often freakish and weird. There might have been things going on in that Cape that were emphatically beyond our wildest conjectures and people passing through whose presence would have astonished the neighbors.