Secrets Of Eden (2010)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Other reporters wouldn't guess at a timetable for an indictment but groused that it was taking so long. And the longer it took, the more bizarre were the theories their readers started posting on their newspaper or television websites. The Haywards had been murdered by a Charlie Manson-like group of teens, a small cult whose leader was so brilliant that he had been able to cover up all traces of their presence. The Haywards had been manufacturing crystal meth at a sugarhouse in the woods and were killed by a customer. George Hayward's retail ventures were fronts to launder money, and George and his wife had been murdered by some connection from Albany or the Bronx. Alice had shot George, and then later someone had--for reasons no one could conjure--strangled her.

  I, of course, kept coming back to the simpler realities. There was Stephen Drew, and there was Heather Laurent. Though I thought it unlikely that Heather was involved, as a result of her admitted visit to the house the Tuesday after the Haywards' deaths her prints and tracks were everywhere when we returned to gather more evidence. She had also been in Vermont the Sunday night the pair was killed and had some sort of connection to the venerable Pastor Drew. And oh, by the way, she was a total nut job. So I couldn't write her off completely.

  Still, I read the stories in the papers and on the Web, and I watched the drama unfold on the local news. And when reporters called, I told them--as I did all the time with all sorts of cases--that I really had nothing to say.

  EMMET WALKER AND Andy Sullivan with the Vermont State Police were joined by a detective from their New York State comrades when they ventured to Statler and by a detective from the NYPD when they descended upon SoHo. They returned to Vermont late on a Wednesday night and came to my office in Bennington first thing Thursday morning to tell me what they'd learned. I had something that resembled a small feast waiting for them to thank them for their very long days--and nearly fourteen hours in the car--earlier that week. Not too far from our office is the sort of mom-and-pop bakery that specializes in angioplasty-inducing cinnamon buns and cake doughnuts. It always has the heavenly aroma of a confectionery sugar explosion. Somehow the place has survived both the economic ruts that a city like Bennington is prone to as well as the periodic bouts of gentrification. I brought back a basket of goodies for the boys, because cops of all kinds really do like doughnuts. It's not a myth.

  "The place was a horror-movie set," Emmet said, chuckling a little bit and licking the sugar from a doughnut off his fingers. "I could just see the opening credits before my eyes as we walked around the cabin."

  "And was it an actual log cabin?" I asked. We were talking about Amanda Laurent's home in the Adirondacks.

  "Well, from a kit," he said. "And it wasn't the fact it was made of logs that disturbed me. It was dark, but lots of homes are dark. It was the carvings. Her partner--"

  "They're not married?"

  "She said no. But they've been together a long time. Name is Norman Beckwith. He's a bird carver."

  "And not real talkative," said Andy. His chin was in the palm of his hand. Andy was a year or two shy of thirty, a nice young guy whose head was perfectly shaped for his buzz cut. His face was wholly without lines, and he looked a bit like a little boy from the Kennedy era who was playing dress-up in his dad's trooper duds. Hard to imagine him actually needing to shave. Even at a traffic stop in his Ray-Bans, he couldn't have been very intimidating.

  "No?"

  Emmet shook his head. "No. Really only came out of his studio under duress. Tall. Gaunt. Pale. He had one of those thin beards that followed the line of his jaw. It was just starting to turn white. Hair was a little greasy, but combed back. Dark brown and, like his beard, also starting to go gray."

  "And Amanda?"

  "If you saw her on a city street, you would have said either heroin addict or over-the-hill runway model. Skeletal. Sunken eyes. Cheekbones that looked like razor ridge. Flat hair. A honey blond. But she's very smart and very funny. Nothing like Norman. She's his agent. He makes these birds, and she sells them. She smokes like a coal plant."

  "But it was the carvings that really gave me the shivers," Andy volunteered.

  "How so?"

  "There must have been twenty-five or thirty of them," the younger trooper said. "Eagles. Falcons. Kestrels. All birds of prey and all looking really pissed. And they were perfect. Most of them, anyway. Amanda sells them for him to these high-end galleries that focus on decoys and wooden animals, and to regulars who actually drive to his studio in Statler. At first I thought they were taxidermied birds. They were on shelves and tables, and a few were on the floor because there wasn't enough shelf space on the walls. But what was weird was that their beaks were open. Wide open. And they looked sharp enough to cut glass."

  "Andy's right," Emmet said, and he raised his eyebrows in agreement. "They had attitude. They looked like they thought we were field mice. They wanted to eat us."

  "And only kill us after they'd started eating," Andy added.

  "You said most of them were perfect. Which ones weren't?" I asked.

  The two troopers glanced briefly at each other and then rolled their eyes almost simultaneously. "There was a wall with what I thought might have been ospreys, but the wings were wrong," Emmet said.

  "I didn't know you knew so much about birds."

  He shrugged. "I know a bit. Anyway, the wings seemed fluffier. And they were shaped more like a harp and clearly weren't going to offer the raptor the sort of wingspan a bird like that needs for a glide. So I asked Norman about them. And he said I was right, the wings weren't really right for a raptor."

  "Very nice. Extra points for Emmet Walker on Name That Bird!"

  "Go ahead and joke. But here's what else he said. Well, mumbled. He said he had given those birds angel wings in honor of Amanda and Heather Laurent. Each of those ospreys has--and this is a quote--'the wings of an avenger.'"

  "And this is in honor of Amanda and Heather?"

  "So he said."

  "Why are they avengers?"

  Emmet smiled a little wryly. "He didn't have a good answer. He said that some angels are just meant to be avengers. That's their assigned task."

  "He didn't say what they were avenging?"

  "Nope."

  "Any ideas?"

  "No again. Sorry."

  Outside the window I saw storm clouds the slate gray of autumn. "So what else did you crazy kids talk about?" I asked.

  "Well, the key thing is this: The basics of Stephen Drew's story check out--or at least Amanda corroborated the basics of his story. She says that Drew and Heather Laurent were there for almost a week, and when we got out a calendar, she picked the right six days. She also said she had no idea that her sister had been involved with Stephen Drew until they showed up there."

  "Was her visit a surprise?"

  "No. She had called them ahead of time. But she hadn't told them she was bringing her new boyfriend."

  "So they hadn't met him before."

  "That's correct. I got no indication from them that they were aware of any relationship between Stephen Drew and Heather prior to the deaths of the Haywards."

  "Had they heard about the Haywards before Heather and Drew got there?"

  "They'd seen the story on the news. They still assumed it was a murder-suicide."

  "Your cell phones work there?"

  "No, they didn't. That part of Drew's story checks out, too."

  "She say anything about her father's history of abuse or her parents' deaths?"

  "Finally, but only after I had pushed her a bit."

  "And?"

  "We'll have to go through the transcript carefully once it's typed up, but nothing that suggested she saw anything except the most obvious parallels to the Haywards' deaths. She worried about the teenage daughter, mostly. Said the girl is in for a world of pain. But I think we already knew that."

  I'm really not a stress eater, but I found myself reaching for a maple-creme doughnut. I had hoped for something more helpful from the long road trip to Statler. "What abou
t her sister? Heather? Anything interesting emerge from your time in Manhattan?"

  "We saw Anne Hathaway--the movie star." This was Andy.

  "Well, that must have made it all worthwhile."

  "She was shopping," he went on. "Seems to have been visiting some one in the building across the street from Ms. Laurent. I recognized her before Emmet."

  "Good for you, Andy."

  "Well, you asked," he said, his tone a little hurt.

  "Our escort was an NYPD detective named Adrian Christie," Emmet continued. "He was from Jamaica, and he knew who Heather Laurent was going in. His wife had just read A Sacred While in their book group this month. He made all the introductions. He was really very helpful."

  "What did you think of Heather?"

  "She's pretty. I thought she was actually prettier than her dust jacket. And to go back to your first question: Yes, some interesting things did emerge. First of all, she won't admit that she and Stephen were lovers, but she is quite clear about this: They are no longer friends. She says that she met him on the Tuesday after the murders--"

  "But she was in town that Sunday night. We have records that she had checked in to the Equinox about four-thirty that Sunday afternoon."

  "Doesn't deny it. Had to be in Albany for a public radio taping Monday morning and an appearance at Bennington College in the evening. It all checks out. She says it was Tuesday when she went to Haverill for the first time, and that was when she met Stephen Drew for the first time. She says their friendship"--and he emphasized the word with an uncharacteristically facetious pop--"really didn't last all that long. A little more than a month--though when you piece together Drew's whereabouts, they were together almost all of that time in either Statler or Manhattan. As far as we can tell, they spent a couple of days in SoHo, about a week in Statler, and then another week in Manhattan. Drew then returned to Vermont, but only briefly. Pretty quickly he rejoined Heather Laurent at her place in the city and stayed for another week or so."

  "Why the breakup?"

  "He hadn't told her that he'd had an affair with Alice Hayward. He only 'fessed up to her after his attorney told him that Alice kept a journal and he was going to have to give us a mouth swab."

  "And this made her mad."

  "Well, it angered her as much as anything can anger her. She's not a person with what you might call anger-management issues. She's pretty serene. On the surface she actually comes across as a bit of an airhead--but, in fact, I believe she is very, very smart. She said Drew was more of a son of the morning star than he liked to admit."

  "The 'Son of the Morning Star' was George Armstrong Custer," I said. "He got that nickname because he used to attack at dawn. The Crows gave it to him. I only know that trivia because Paul is a bit of an American-history geek."

  "That's not what she meant."

  "Too bad."

  "She was referring to Lucifer: Isaiah, chapter fourteen, verse twelve."

  "Satan?"

  "A fallen angel. It was Dante and Milton who made him Satan."

  "Emmet, you are a source of unending wonder to me. Have you read Dante and Milton?"

  "No. I just did a little research before coming here this morning."

  "So what do you think? Was Heather Laurent involved in some way? You trust her?"

  "I think she's a strange one. But her strangeness moderates against manual strangulation and shooting someone in the head. It moderates against conspiracy."

  "So your money is on Stephen Drew?"

  Before he could respond, Andy piped in. "That guy is ice."

  "I take that as an affirmative, Detective Sullivan?"

  He nodded. "Emmet and I talked about this on the way home from New York City. Unless George Hayward has a freakishly long arm and was able to hold the gun real far away, we both put our money on the pastor."

  IT IS LARGELY a coincidence that I have the name of a medieval saint from Siena. My Italian mother--whose last name was Brusa--was vaguely aware that there was a St. Catherine, but my great-grandparents had emigrated to Barre, Vermont, in 1901 so my great-grandfather could work in the granite quarries there, and by the time I was born in 1975, my family was deeply Americanized. My great-grandfather was a stone carver, and though he spent the better part of his adult life blasting great blocks of rock from the ground--a job that would, eventually, cause him to die slowly and painfully of silicosis--he nonetheless left behind a poignant legacy in the Hope Cemetery just outside of the town. Three of the most photographed tombstones are his: the little girl nuzzling two sheep that marks the spot where a nine-year-old victim of influenza named Marissa was buried in 1919; the lion with a mane that looks like a halo, his mouth open in a full-throated roar, that sits atop the decomposing body of one of the mayors of Barre; and the graceful young woman on bent knee, her eyes turned up toward the heavens with a look of beatific comfort on her face, who marks the patch of earth where my great-grandmother was buried, far too young, in 1927. Yes, Antonio Benincasa had chiseled the monument for his own wife when she predeceased him. It was, my older relatives insisted when I was a child, one of the world's truly great, genuinely tragic love affairs.

  But by the time I arrived, the granite dust was long gone from the clothes and the lungs of the Benincasas. My father and my grandfather (the one who didn't edit Vermont Life) were both lawyers, and I know I made my family happy by taking the LSATs and going to law school. It gave my younger sister clearance to become a wedding planner and my younger brother the freedom to go to New York City to make his fortune--my grandparents and great-uncles actually used expressions like that--as an art director in an ad agency. I certainly have no regrets.

  And I do feel an undeniable pride in the fact that I am named--if only inadvertently--for a Sienese saint. Although my grandparents never visited their mother and father's homeland, my parents returned for visits, and so have Paul and I. The year before Marcus was born, we spent two weeks in Tuscany, and while we were in Siena, I felt a bit like a rock star whenever I whipped out my credit card and people saw my name. In some ways St. Catherine was one of those great medieval lunatics: Visions of Christ with his apostles when she was six, scourging herself with an iron chain and fasting as an adolescent, lopping off her gorgeous brown hair as a young woman. Hair shirts. The works. Religious fanaticism at its absolute fourteenth-century best. But she also nursed and buried victims of the plague, had one-on-ones with the city's most reviled criminals, and talked a pope (whom she called "Papa" or "Daddy" in some of her letters) into putting the papacy back where it belonged. She worked hard for peace among the small Italian republics and fiefdoms. This was not a shabby CV. And she was one hell of a writer--or, as was likely the case, she was capable of dictating one hell of a letter. Let's not forget that she was a woman in the fourteenth century and one of twenty-four children. Both realities lobbied against literacy. Some biographers believe that she learned to write only at the end of her life. Still, she left behind three hundred letters and The Dialogue of Divine Providence, a chronicle of her religious raptures.

  In any case, I have always viewed my name and its connection to St. Catherine as an unexpected, undeserved gift, even if the closest I have come to a religious vision is falling asleep in a catechism class when I was in the fifth grade and dreaming of the sand dunes on Cape Cod. While my work pales compared to hers--you don't see me nursing neighbors about to succumb to the Black Death or advising the Vatican on policy--I hope that my efforts bring a measure of justice to some of the victims in my small corner of the globe.

  When Paul and I were in Tuscany, we went to the San Gimignano Museum of Torture. San Gimignano is a spectacularly beautiful medieval village built on a hill, which pretty much describes seven hundred other villages in Tuscany. If you look at a map of the region, you'll see that every other village is Montesomething. Paul and I had rented bicycles, and if we'd been a little more energetic in a single day, we could have biked in a circle from Montisi to Montefollonico to Montepulciano to Montalcino and then back
to Montisi. The difference between San Gimignano and most villages is that it has seven massive medieval towers looming over the town and more tourists per cobblestone than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Waterbury, Vermont. It's a sort of Disneyland for the Chianti-and-pecorino-cheese crowd. And, of course, it has that torture museum: a three-story collection of antiquarian torture devices, most of which involve wrought iron, ropes, or very sharp points. Its ostensible message, if it has one, is that humans once had little regard for human life and were capable of inflicting truly appalling pain on one another in the name of religion or country or mere self-righteousness. There are the basics, such as the rack and the iron maiden and a functioning guillotine (which was, ironically, supposed to end torture by killing the victim instantly). There is a dungeon. And there are displays of devices that only a real psychopath could have come up with, a disproportionate number of which seemed to involve impaling people. Everything is explained in five languages, and the diagrams can only be called grisly. I had seen my share of disturbing images in the magazines in my grandparents' attic growing up, and I had visited some pretty despicable crime scenes--but still I grew a little nauseous inside the museum. And yet I also wasn't oblivious to the reality that I was, in some ways, the twenty-first-century version of those guys who thought, six hundred years ago, that a bone-crunching manacle or a good old-fashioned pair of rib-cage-ripping tongs had their place in the judicial system. I know that my anger at certain kinds of criminals--the stepfathers who molest and murder their stepdaughters, the husbands who batter and murder their wives--is pretty near boundless. But I view myself as civilized. Moreover, an awful lot of the time--perhaps most of the time--the self-proclaimed arms of justice in the Middle Ages were torturing the innocent, not punishing the guilty. It wasn't about a specific crime, it was about a specific belief.