Secrets Of Eden (2010)

by Chris Bohjalian

  And passing through with the Haywards' welcome complicity: There had been no indications of forced entry at the house on the hill. The doors were unlocked, and the windows--though filled with screens--were open.

  Yet we did know this: George Hayward would beat the living crap out of his wife when the spirit moved him. That pastor had said so, that pal named Ginny had said so, and the couple's one kid, the teenage girl, had said so. And this meant that whoever had killed the one or the both of them had been aware of George Hayward's nasty little hobby. When we found Alice's body, her rear end and lower back were flecked with two-and three-day-old contusions and welts, which meant that George had beaten her the weekend she was baptized. David said her kidneys were so badly bruised that she'd probably been peeing blood on the day that she died.

  "Had she had sex that day?" I asked. "Consenting or otherwise?"

  "No indications. No semen in the vagina."

  "Well. At least it isn't a rape."

  "Small consolation when you've been strangled."

  "True."

  "And I do think George murdered Alice."

  "You do?"

  "Absolutely. His skin was under her fingernails. Those are her scratch marks on the left side of his face."

  "Well, then," I said, "I think I should send an investigator to Haverill, don't you? I think I should have someone go shake some trees."

  "I agree."

  A few days later, we would all be wondering where the pastor had gone and why he wasn't answering his cell phone.

  JIM HAAS HAD been the state's attorney for the county before I arrived, and my sense was that he would be the state's attorney after I had moved on. He was no longer the prodigy he'd been ten years ago, when, in his mid-thirties, he had rooted out the drug dealers from Albany and the Bronx who were snaking their way into the county high schools, and convicted the Arlington novelist who had murdered his wife and tried to make it appear as if it had been a random home robbery and slaying. I had just arrived after working for two years in the prosecutor's office in Concord, New Hampshire, and I had been impressed as hell with Jim's first accomplishment. But the second? Oh, please. I can count on one hand the number of women in northern New England who were killed in my lifetime in random home robberies. We all know women are often murdered by the men who profess to love them the most. But Jim really enjoyed leading our small office and mentoring younger lawyers like me, and he savored the strange currents that seemed to waft through Bennington and southwestern Vermont. We had our extremely funky, always-a-little-goth college just outside the city; there was that great New England world-weariness that comes from being a mill town that no longer has a whole lot of industry--which made us a bit like Pittsfield and Albany, our urban neighbors across the state lines; and there was the reality that we were surrounded by iconic little Green Mountain hamlets filled with longtime locals and second-home interlopers from Manhattan, Westchester, and Fairfield County.

  When I went by Jim's office to brief him on the Hayward case, the mayor had just left and I could tell that Jim was basking in the reality that the mayor had come here rather than expecting Jim to come to him. I considered reminding him that Mayor Peter Grafton liked meeting the people at the Blue Benn Diner while chowing down on the corned beef hash, and our office was between the Blue Benn and his. Peter had probably met with Jim on his way into town and still had egg on his breath.

  That morning Jim was wearing the sort of microfiber blazer that looks very good on razor-thin male models but was stretched a bit like Saran Wrap on a guy as stocky as Jim. He isn't overweight--he's actually pretty handsome, with clear green eyes that I've seen him use to great effect on female jurors and a mane of dark brown hair that has only recently started to thin--but if I were to guess, I'd say he carried around close to 220 pounds on a frame of roughly six feet.

  "You know," he said, sitting down behind an Empire desk the size of a mini golf green and motioning me toward the chair beside it rather than opposite it, "already I'm hearing from politicians who see an opportunity in this nightmare. City councilors. State legislators. I hate politicians."

  "No you don't. You love them, Jim. You are one."

  "Let me rephrase that: I hate it when politicians try to exploit something tragic for their own gain. I hate it when they try to grandstand."

  "Me, too."

  "Already there are people planning to campaign on this. Use violence against women as part of their platform--but with absolutely no specifics, no program, no plan."

  "At least they'll be against it."

  "How can you joke like that? You're a woman!"

  "That's precisely how I can. Because I am a woman."

  "It's like when that patient hanged himself at the state psychiatric hospital. Suddenly every politician wanted a new director. A new hospital. New ways of caring for the mentally ill. There was chaos and noise, and in the end absolutely nothing changed."

  "I remember."

  "Now they'll make it sound like it's the state's attorney's job to prevent domestic abuse."

  "Jim--"

  "They'll want to set up task forces. They'll want hearings. Legislation. At least this one is easy for us. Cut and dried--and I promise you, I would not have used that expression just now if George Hayward had used a knife."

  "Jim?"

  "Go ahead."

  "David doesn't think George Hayward killed himself." He rocked forward in the great palm of his leather chair. "What?"

  And so I told him about the head wound and the ME's conjecture. I shared with him the possibility that if George Hayward had not shot himself, then it was--at least for the moment--conceivable that he had not strangled Alice, either.

  "There's someone else?" he asked, a slight catch of dryness in his throat. That was it.

  "Apparently. But at this point all I'm telling you is that George Hayward may not have been a suicide."

  He sighed, and I imagined he was contemplating all of the ways I had just complicated his life, and how so much of his small office's resources were about to be committed to what had seemed, just a few minutes ago, a relatively simple domestic cataclysm.

  MY HUSBAND TEACHES earth science and chemistry at the high school in Bennington, and he is worshipped by his students. Every third graduating class seems to dedicate the yearbook to him, and he is constantly lampooned in their variety shows--but in ways that make it clear he is more beloved than spring break. Once when I was helping him chaperone a dance, half the senior girls viewed me as some haglike interloper. One literally asked me who I was and what I was doing there. She asked me how I knew Mr. Ribner. Well, he's my husband, I answered politely. How do you know Paul? The boys revere him, too, especially the soccer players. He played soccer through college, and the high-school soccer team now has something of a reputation as a powerhouse in the state. They've been state champs four times in the six years that he's coached the team.

  Sometimes after our own boys are in bed (which is always a major production, because one is three and one is six, and they are both relentlessly energetic), we will be comparing notes on our day. He will be talking about some refugee kid--a student with nothing--who's raised some incredible sum of money in the walkathon for the local homeless shelter and also happens to be a spectacular forward, and I will be telling him about (for example) some minister in Haverill who was fucking some battered woman he was supposed to be counseling and then took justice into his own hands and shot her husband.

  I'm no biblical scholar, but even I know who has the final say when it comes to justice and revenge, and it isn't the local pastor. Weeks later one of the Vermont newspapers would christen Drew the "Vigilante Reverend," but I always thought that implied there was more fire in the guy's soul than was actually there. It also, it seemed to me, gave the guy a veneer of likability he didn't deserve.

  Of course, I seem to be an exception among women. Obviously Alice Hayward saw something in him. So did Heather Laurent. And I'm confident there were other women in Haver
ill, too, and someday they'll come forward. Even now there are rumors and suspicions and no small amount of whispering. But he's certainly not my type: He's almost too pretty. His hair is too perfect. And the camera just loves him. Those first pictures of him in the newspaper that Tuesday morning? We're talking the dad in a J. Crew catalog.

  Still, I honestly didn't see Drew as a suspect at first, even when David suggested that George Hayward might have been murdered. It was only when one of the original investigators, Emmet Walker, went back to nose around Haverill the week after the funeral and learned that Drew had left town that I began to wonder. Emmet, along with a younger trooper named Andy Sullivan, stopped by the church. The secretary there introduced them to some old fellow named Gavin who said he was filling in as pastor until Drew either returned or decided that he would never be able to. Both Gavin--whose full name was Gavin Muir Maxwell, as solid a name as you can find, in my opinion, for a retired Baptist minister who works now as a sort of substitute teacher for shepherdless flocks--and the church secretary were talkative. They reported that Drew had left Thursday evening, the night of Alice Hayward's funeral, and that he had said he wasn't sure where he was going. But the secretary, a lovely woman named Betsy Storrs, who I practically want to make my new godmother (my actual godmother is long dead), told Emmet that she saw the reverend's passport on his desk before he went into the sanctuary to conduct Alice Hayward's service, and the day before that she had heard him on the phone trying to find out the limits on his Visa and MasterCard.

  "Did you see him remove any papers from his office?" Emmet had asked.

  "We have a lot of state secrets here," Betsy had replied solemnly. "Next to Los Alamos, there are more important documents here than anywhere in the country."

  "So he didn't take anything?"

  "Of course he took things," she said, shaking her head, and she showed him how the pastor's personal drawer in the gray metal filing cabinet was now only half full. "The fact he took his passport and so many of his personal papers is why I don't expect him back anytime soon. I am telling you, he was very, very shaken by this. This hit him in a way that caught all of us completely off guard. I thought I knew Stephen well--at least as well as anyone in this town--but I'm telling you, I never saw this one coming."

  Emmet didn't think she was angry. But he was confident that she thought the minister held his cards very, very close to his chest.

  FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. 119)

  My sense is that angels come to us: We don't come to them. We don't solicit them, we don't ask for them--though, certainly, we may address prayers in their direction. But we don't knock, because, after all, we would be knocking on air--on aura. Their presence, however, is undeniable in my mind, and when we need them, they may appear without fanfare at our front doors. They are watching. And it will always be a source of wonder to me how often we miss the obviousness of their arrival, mistaking them for a neighbor or family or friend.

  Or stranger.

  Too often we presume that the unexpected strangers in our lives bode ill, or we are skeptical of their designs. We think we know more.

  And while I am well aware that there is indeed all manner of malevolence in the ether, there is benevolence there, too. And just as there is random horror--murder, suicide, child abuse, car accidents, disease, famine, war, ethnic cleansing--there is also indiscriminate kindness. Not merely miracles, though I have experienced them. But simple human connection, either brokered by an angel or sourced by one. That is why I try to encourage people to be receptive to that new person who seems to have appeared in their life out of nowhere.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When I was a kid, I used to pull down a trapdoor in the ceiling hallway along the second floor of my grandparents' house and climb up into the attic. I did it all the time when I was seven and eight years old, because my grandparents lived only about fifteen miles away, and so my family was visiting them all the time. I wasn't supposed to be up there, but when my parents were having coffee with them after dinner or brunch or sitting in their backyard on these ancient wooden lawn chairs that must have weighed as much as a small car, it's where I would go. My brother and sister never joined me. When they were there, too, they'd park themselves in front of the TV. What was up there that interested me so much? Old magazines. My grandfather--my mom's father--had been an editor for Vermont Life, and he had boxes of dusty copies of that magazine, as well as plenty of Time and Life and True Detective. Sometimes I would try to entice my brother to join me by making a very big deal about some vaguely provocative photos of Marilyn Monroe I'd found in an old Life and some even more suggestive photos of female hippies at Woodstock in an issue of Time. But he never took the bait, and so I was always up there alone.

  By dragging a small upholstered easy chair from my grandparents' bedroom to a spot just below the trapdoor, I was able to stretch just enough to reach the cord that opened it. Attached to the door were a series of clunky wooden steps, and they always reminded me of the basement stairs at my own family's house. The attic had windows along three of its walls, and so even though there was no electricity up there, there was enough light to thumb through the old magazines and look at the pictures. I would usually sit on an old rocking horse with pretend stirrups because I was afraid there were mice up there and I didn't want my feet touching the floor, and I would read what I could understand and simply study the pictures beside those articles that either bored me or were way over my head. Obviously, most of what I came across was way over my head.

  But the articles that I believe I spent the most time with--and the ones that have stayed with me ever since--were the ones about violent crime in New York and San Francisco and Miami, Florida. Stories about husbands who murdered their wives, drug dealers who machine-gunned federal agents, serial killers who had children buried in their basements and backyards. Scared the crap out of me--but I was totally fascinated. My grandfather's Vermont Lifes with their pictures of bright red barns and rustic sugarhouses? Those stories about apple orchards and fiddlers and ice fishing? They were of less interest to me at that age. So there I was some Sunday afternoons in a velvet dress and crimson tights, my hair no doubt in a ponytail, studying black-and-white photos that would have made Weegee proud. Who can say what drew me to that sort of thing so early on, but I couldn't keep away. When I'd had enough--when I was almost too scared--I'd run like a racehorse out of there. I couldn't wait to rejoin my siblings by the TV or my parents outside in the sun. Later, when Paul and I were dating and the relationship was growing serious, I brought him to that house to meet my grandmother. (My grandfather had passed away years earlier.) While we were there, I brought him upstairs to the attic and showed him the magazines--ostensibly so he could see the issues of Vermont Life that my grandfather had worked on. My grandmother was going to be selling the house soon, and she surprised me by asking me if I wanted the magazines. Not the Vermont Lifes, which she said were going to the state historical society. The issues of Time and Life and True Detective. I passed. But to this day I have no idea how she knew that I was attracted to them.

  AT BREAKFAST MY boys can be holy freaking terrors. Not every day, but often enough that Paul once put a shower curtain on the kitchen floor beneath their chairs to try to make a point. Another time I made them eat their cereal without milk--no fluids at all in the bowls--for a week. Yup, I'm the mom who punished her kids by denying them milk. Very nice, I know. I can just see the headlines when the Department for Children and Families comes to take them away. The problem is that Lionel, my three-year-old, drives Marcus, my first-grader, crazy because he doesn't understand why the other males in the house get to go to school and he doesn't.

  "Toddler Town is just like a school," Marcus will tell him patiently, a real little diplomat, but Lionel somehow sees a big difference between his day care and his brother's elementary school and Paul's high school. And so either he will take his cereal spoon and smash it into Marcus's bowl so it catapults the Cocoa Fobs o
r Pepperoni Clusters (or whatever presweetened nightmare we're feeding them that day) into the air or he will use his fingers like a shovel and start scooping the stuff out onto the table as if he's trying to build a sand castle with his bare hands on Cape Cod. And, of course, Paul and I are trying to get out the door--and get the two boys out the door--and that only adds to the chaos.

  The Haywards were murdered at the end of July, and so in the days when the investigation was starting to ramp up, Lionel had his usual Toddler Town, Marcus had a summer day camp called Kid-Friendly Arts or (I swear, I am not making this up) K-FARTS for short. No one officially associated with the organization ever calls it that, and the letterhead and materials never use that acronym, but all of the parents refer to it with that enticing little shorthand. Apparently the organization is in the process of changing its name. In any case, the timing of the murder of the Haywards meant that Paul and I didn't have to get the boys to school, but most mornings we still had to move things along at breakfast. Usually Paul would drop the boys off at Toddler Town and K-FARTS, since he didn't have to be anywhere ever in the summer (no, I'm not bitter). One morning in August when Emmet called, I was in the midst of sponging off the kitchen table and making sure there wasn't visual evidence of the crap I feed my kids on their mouths. He was on his cell, and he wanted to know if I had reviewed the papers and the materials he'd left at my office the day before. I hadn't, because I'd left work a little early to take a deposition in a case involving a drunken speedboat driver and a water-skier who--as a result of the driver's recklessly downing margaritas on the dock--was never going to water-ski or walk again.