Secrets Of Eden (2010)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Occasionally that August and September, I would find myself wondering what sorts of things Katie Hayward had fallen asleep to--or what sorts of noises had woken her up in the small hours of the morning--and as I learned about Heather Laurent's history, I would find myself contemplating the fights and screams that had kept her awake in the night, too. What do you do if you're a girl and your father is beating the crap out of your mother? Or what if he's simply one of those fiendish monsters who knows how to twist the dagger ver-bally--knows just what barbs will hurt the most and really get under his wife's skin? I knew that at some point soon we would be interviewing Katie again, and I didn't relish the prospect. She was only fifteen, now an orphan, and I had been told that she was doing about as well as one could expect. She was living with her pal Tina Cousino's family in Haverill so she could remain in the same high school and retain the same friends. But teenagers are always funky to interview. Often they're not trying to mislead you, but still their answers are all over the place. We weren't home Friday night, we were at the movies. No wait, that was, like, Saturday. We got back around ten. No, maybe midnight. I don't remember. But it was after dinner. At least I think it was. Like, why does it matter, anyway?

  Sometimes I would be pulled from my reverie by Paul. I remember one night in late August, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my stomach. I was already in the summer nightshirt in which I slept, a man's Red Sox jersey that falls almost to my knees, and he whispered, "They never move." It was true. When one of us would go get them in the morning, there was a reasonable chance that Lionel would still be a crab in the beanbag chair and Marcus would still be about to crack the plane of the water. But what of Katie when she had been the age of either of my boys, when she had been six or three? Or even that lunatic Heather Laurent? How had they slept? Had they pulled pillows over their heads so they wouldn't hear their parents' fights or the names that their father would reserve for their mother? At what age do you figure out that your dad is a bastard? That your mom's life is a train wreck and she's keeping it together with makeup and lies? We had a photo from the murder scene of the impression that the back of Alice Hayward's head had left in the Sheetrock in the living-room wall the night George had killed her. If we went back to the house and ran our fingers behind the framed prints and photos on the walls, would we find other indentations? The idea crossed my mind. Even then we knew a fair amount about how George's anger would smolder before bursting into one sudden burn and then abruptly flame out. Until the night he killed Alice, he tended not to hit her anywhere that was visible. This wasn't an absolute rule, of course. There had been bruises before on her face. But usually he would smack her in the ass or on the lower back. The back of her head. Based on the details that Alice had shared with Ginny O'Brien, he may even have deluded himself on occasion that this was creepy but interesting sex play--though it doesn't appear to have had a damn thing to do with sex. Just because he never broke a bone and only once or twice blackened an eye, just because she only went to the ER one time, didn't mean that George Hayward wasn't violent or that the violence hadn't been escalating. Ginny herself told us that she should have seen this coming. Alice had made it clear to her friend that it had been an extremely rocky July, but somehow she thought she could handle it. It seemed like what sometimes occurred was that George would manufacture an accident: He would drive her backward into the massive hutch in the dining room. He would push her into the triangular point where two lengths of kitchen counter merged. He would knock her into the banister at the foot of the stairs. He was totally capable of calling her a cunt--a useless cunt, a stupid cunt, a pathetic cunt--and later he would write her long letters of apology. Now and then he would write her poems. And he wasn't without talent. No one did remorse the way George Hayward could, which may have had something to do with why Alice tolerated him for as long as she did. That, of course, and the fact that once she had loved him. They had loved each other. Still, if George had read the wife-beater's manual--and somewhere there really must be a how-to book that all these pricks read--it wasn't long after they were married that he hauled off and hit her that first time.

  OFTEN I FOUND myself wondering this: What precisely was Drew thinking after the crime lab had left, when his hands were in the blue gloves and he was cleaning up the remnants of George Hayward's brains late Monday afternoon? Had he expected the night before that he would be doing precisely this? Given how much thought he'd put into making Hayward's death look like a suicide, had his mind wandered to the chance that he would be the one who would quite literally clean up the mess? Was this his way of punishing himself? Or was he simply doing all that he could to make sure that he had left no trace of his crime behind?

  The idea that Alice's choice in men ran to guys like George Hayward and Stephen Drew made me very, very sad. One afternoon at the office, I watched some video of her at Katie's ninth birthday party. The theme was "fun at the beach," which interested me because the snowdrifts climbed partway up one of the windows of the Hayward house and there were icicles hanging like stalactites from the hydrangea outside their living room. There must have been eight or nine girls and a couple of boys there, all looking to be third-and fourth-graders, and I saw a few of their moms hovering in the background or herding the kids the way you herd cats: energetically, but not with any sense that you're really going to accomplish a whole hell of a lot. Everyone was in shorts and sandals, and there were several Hawaiian shirts. A few kids were in bathing suits. There was a clown in big beach trunks, a muscle T-shirt, and gigantic flippers. As I watched Alice manage the chaos and a kind of Nerf volleyball, I could understand completely what guys saw in her: She was pretty and sweet and efficient. Part banker, but also part cruise director. There was one string bean of a boy who was scared to death of the clown and had wedged himself between the couch and the wall, and the camera caught Alice reassuring the child that the clown was harmless and friendly and was there to make people laugh--and then, when the boy wasn't convinced, taking him by the hand and leading him up the stairs to Katie's room, where she said he could play until the clown had gone home. I found the moment a little chilling, because I was pretty sure that it was George who was manning the camera, and at one point, as she was showing the kid which of Katie's toys were the least girlish--some trolls and board games like Monopoly Junior--she turned and said right into the lens, "He'll be safe in here. If we close the door, he won't hear anything at all that might scare him."

  It was times like that when I would think how incredibly lucky I was.

  EMMET CALLED DREW again and asked him if he had decided yet whether he was going to return to Vermont. The reverend took no umbrage at the question and said he thought it was likely. He was, at the time, still playing house in Manhattan with the Queen of the Angels. By then I had read her books. And though I didn't see how she might be involved with this nightmare, neither could I discount her involvement.

  Still, my suspicions remained pretty simple: Drew had gone to the Haywards' that July night, either by coincidence or because he feared that George was going to hurt Alice. Although there was no record that she had called him, perhaps she had said something to him that day. Perhaps she had even said something to him at the baptism. Who knows? And so he goes to the house and finds Alice dead and George passed out drunk on the couch. The guy has his handgun out, either because he's been threatening Alice with it before he strangled her or because he was planning to kill himself. And Drew is furious--no, not furious. Drew isn't the sort who gets furious. Fury is beneath him. Instead he is disgusted. Appalled. So he takes the gun from the coffee table or a cushion or perhaps even from George's limp hand and shoots him. Kills him right there on the couch. He believes if he discharges the gun close enough to the guy's head, it will look like a suicide. Perhaps he had gotten the idea from Heather Laurent's tragic family history. I thought it was possible that he and Heather had been pals a long while, and so the idea of making it look like George had killed himself after killing his wi
fe was already in his head. I might even get murder one on this theory.

  A longer shot, but one I had not yet written off, was the possibility that Drew had done in both of the Haywards. Or, perhaps, Drew and the Angel Advocate together: The angels will come for her, Stephen. She's so very unhappy. She'll be much better off as an angel! Again, this wasn't likely given the public persona of Heather Laurent. From her books and the clips of her I had watched on YouTube, she didn't strike me as the type who looked real favorably on homicide. But I've been wrong about people before, and I will be again. You just never know.

  In any case, when Emmet spoke with Drew that second time, the minister realized that we had begun to suspect his involvement.

  "I'm beginning to think you have some serious questions about me," he told the detective sergeant, his voice in Emmet's opinion suggesting only bemusement.

  "Well, sir, we would like to sit down with you and talk to you a bit more about your relationship with Alice Hayward."

  "I already told you everything there is to know. I was her pastor."

  "I understand."

  "There's really nothing more worth sharing."

  "We would like to know what she told you about her relationship with her husband."

  "Isn't whatever she told me private? Isn't it protected by some sort of ministerial confidentiality?"

  "We're not worried that Alice confessed some horrible crime to you in the confessional," Emmet replied.

  "Then what could I possibly tell you that might be of value?"

  Emmet said he was deciding precisely how much to reveal about our suspicions, or whether he should mislead the reverend a little bit to get him talking, when Drew made our lives awfully easy. He suggested, "Look, why don't I stop by your barracks? There you can ask me whatever your hearts desire."

  Emmet was shocked but agreed. Happily. Drew said he was returning to Vermont the next week and would clear up whatever was bothering us.

  When we were discussing his second phone call with the pastor, Emmet asked me if I still thought that Drew had fled.

  "Absolutely."

  "Then why do you think he's so comfortable coming in now?"

  "He panicked," I said. "But now he's regained his equilibrium. His arrogance."

  "Think he'll really show up?"

  "Versus?"

  "Versus you getting a phone call from a lawyer in the next couple of days telling us that he isn't going to talk after all."

  "I don't know. We'll see."

  Eventually Drew would get a lawyer. But it wouldn't be until after he had met with two state troopers at the Shaftsbury barracks and--much to the frustration of his attorney in the weeks that followed--given us a rather lengthy statement.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Paul and I view the last days of August very differently. For me--for most of the parents in this world--there is incredible relief. You're no longer cobbling together a schedule of day care and day camps and baby-sitters to make sure that one of your kids isn't pretending he's Batman and jumping from a second-story balcony or taking his pedal-powered fire truck and driving it down the stairs and through the plate-glass living-room window. (No, my kids never did either of those things. But my brother did both. It's amazing to me that he's alive today.) But for Paul it's the end of vacation. Summer's over, and he has to go back to work. And while he seriously enjoys teaching--I love him dearly, but he just laps up all that attention he gets when he stands and talks at the front of a classroom--he is also the first one to take the back-to-school circulars that start coming in the mail in July and getting them the hell out of the house and into the recycling bin in the garage. It's like they have the Ebola virus on them or they're radioactive. If it comes from Staples in July, it's gone within seconds.

  I remember Paul was savoring one of his very last days of freedom when David Dennison called me with the news that George and Alice Hayward's urine and blood workups had finally arrived. As he'd suspected, there were no traces of drugs. Also as he'd expected, Alice had been sober and George had been very, very drunk at the end. His blood-alcohol count was .37, high enough to cause a coma in most individuals. Dennison said that people metabolize alcohol differently, and this guy clearly had a pretty high tolerance. But it was almost inconceivable that he'd been capable of shooting himself in the end. In Dennison's opinion it was likely that Hayward had been passed out when someone else had come into the house and shot him in the head. I did ask the obvious: Might Hayward have tried to shoot himself but been so many sheets to the wind that he'd nearly botched the job? Aimed so high on his temple that it looked more like a homicide than a suicide? Dennison said it was possible but not probable. In the ME's mind, it was now clearer than ever that George Hayward had been murdered.

  THE PAPERWORK FOR Alice Hayward's temporary relief-from-abuse order was no more chilling than most. Horrifying, but not extraordinary. To wit: He wasn't holding the palm of her hand down on the burners on the electric stove when they were on, he wasn't torturing (or killing) a beloved cat or dog, and he wasn't sodomizing her with a beer bottle. I had seen all of that in restraining orders in the past. The last straw for Alice? The night before she had gone to the courthouse, George had pushed her down the stairs and she feared that he had broken her arm. She cited a history of violence, and given the litany of abuse she was sharing, the biggest surprise was that this was the first time she'd gone to the hospital for an X-ray. Once, she thought, George had broken a finger when he'd held her hand in a drawer and slammed it shut, but she reported that she had managed to free her other fingers and it was only a pinkie. But he had been getting worse, especially now that Katie was older and more frequently out of the house. Twice in the past ten months, he had hit her in the face; prior to that, he had tended not to risk hurting her in places that were easily noticeable.

  She had come to the courthouse on a Monday, the judge had approved the temporary order that afternoon, and the papers had been served while George had been at work. The hearing to make the order final had been scheduled for the following Tuesday, a week and a day later, but neither George nor Alice had shown up. Usually that suggests the couple is back together, which only means we will probably see the woman again and the circumstances will be even more dire. In this case, however, I would learn that the Haywards had not reconciled. At least not yet. George Hayward accepted the papers the afternoon they were filed and retreated to the family cottage with his tail between his legs.

  Nevertheless the court clerk had called the women's shelter the Monday that Alice had arrived at his office to link her with an advocate there, and so I asked Emmet to see whether an advocate and Alice had ever connected. I also asked him to check in with George's parents in Buffalo and Alice's in Nashua. I wasn't expecting to learn much from either exploration, but you just never know.

  WHEN THE RIGHT Reverend Drew met with our investigators at the state police barracks, Emmet found him merely mystified at first and then--when he realized what kind of mountain of shit he had willingly walked into--defensive and guarded. Then angry and more than a little scared. He went from suggesting we had to have better things to do than ask him lots of questions about the tragedy in Haverill to the outrage we see pretty often from the educated and the entitled. They think they can bluster their way through this, or that a little righteous indignation will make a fingerprint or DNA evidence irrelevant. Yeah, like that's going to happen.

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT EMMET WALKER: So you left the church just after nine P.M. that Sunday night.

  STEPHEN DREW: Yes.

  WALKER: Where did you go?

  DREW: I told you, I went home.

  WALKER: Alone?

  DREW: Absolutely. With whom would I have gone?

  WALKER: Did you leave your house again that night?

  DREW: No.

  WALKER: You were in the house until Monday morning.

  DREW: That's right.

  WALKER: Did you speak to anyone on the phone Sunday night? Did anyone come by?

&n
bsp; DREW: Are you looking for proof that I was at the parsonage? Do I need an alibi?

  WALKER: Sir, I am just filling in the details of the investigation.

  DREW: Please, there is no need to call me sir.

  WALKER: Okay.

  DREW: If you want to be formal, then call me Reverend.

  WALKER: Yes, Reverend. Did you speak to anybody on the phone on Sunday night? Did anybody come by? A neighbor? A parishioner?