Secrets of Eden

CHAPTER ONE

As a minister I rarely found the entirety of a Sunday service depressing. But some mornings disease and despair seemed to permeate the congregation like floodwaters in sandbags, and the only people who stood during the moment when we shared our joys and concerns were those souls who were intimately acquainted with nursing homes, ICUs, and the nearby hospice. Concerns invariably outnumbered joys, but there were some Sundays that were absolute routs, and it would seem that the only people rising up in their pews to speak needed Prozac considerably more than they needed prayer. Or yes, than they needed me.

On those sorts of Sundays, whenever someone would stand and ask for prayers for something relatively minor-a promotion, traveling mercies, a broken leg that surely would mend-I would find myself thinking as I stood in the pulpit, Get a spine, you bloody ingrate! Buck up! That lady behind you is about to lose her husband to pancreatic cancer, and you’re whining about your difficult boss? Oh, please! I never said that sort of thing aloud, but I think that’s only because I’m from a particularly mannered suburb of New York City, and so my family has to be drunk to be cutting. I did love my congregation, but I also knew that I had an inordinate number of whiners.

The Sunday service that preceded Alice Hayward’s baptism and death was especially rich in genuine human tragedy, it was just jam-packed with the real McCoy-one long ballad of ceaseless lamentation and pain. Moreover, as a result of that morning’s children’s message and a choir member’s solo, it was also unusually moving. The whiners knew that they couldn’t compete with the legitimate, no-holds-barred sort of torment that was besieging much of the congregation, and so they kept their fannies in their seats and their prayer requests to themselves.

That day we heard from a thirty-four-year-old lawyer who had already endured twelve weeks of radiation for a brain tumor and was now in his second week of chemotherapy. He was on steroids, and so on top of everything else he had to endure the indignity of a sudden physical resemblance to a human blowfish. He gave the children’s message that Sunday, and he told the children-toddlers and girls and boys as old as ten and eleven-who surrounded him at the front of the church how he’d learned in the last three months that while some angels might really have halos and wings, he’d met a great many more who looked an awful lot like regular people. When he started to describe the angels he’d seen-describing, in essence, the members of the church Women’s Circle who drove him back and forth to the hospital, or the folks who filled his family’s refrigerator with fresh vegetables and homemade carrot juice, or the people who barely knew him yet sent cards and letters-I saw eyes in the congregation grow dewy. And, of course, I knew how badly some of those half-blind old ladies in the Women’s Circle drove, which seemed to me a further indication that there may indeed be angels among us.

Then, after the older children had returned to the pews where their parents were sitting while the younger ones had been escorted to the playroom in the church’s addition so they would be spared the second half of the service (including my sermon), a fellow in the choir with a lush, robust tenor sang “It is well with my soul,” and he sang it without the accompaniment of our organist. Spafford wrote that hymn after his four daughters had drowned when their ship, the Ville de Havre, collided with another vessel and sank. When the tenor’s voice rose for the refrain for the last time, his hands before him and his long fingers steepling together before his chest, the congregation spontaneously joined him. There was a pause when they finished, followed by a great forward whoosh from the pews as the members of the church as one exhaled in wonder, “Amen… ”

And so when it came time for our moment together of caring and sharing (an expression I use without irony, though I admit it sounds vaguely like doggerel and more than a little New Age), the people were primed to pour out their hearts. And they did. I’ve looked back at the notes I scribbled from the pulpit that morning-the names of the people for whom we were supposed to pray and exactly what ailed them-and by any objective measure there really was a lot of horror that day. Cancer and cystic fibrosis and a disease that would cost a newborn her right eye. A car accident. A house fire. A truck bomb in a land far away. We prayed for people dying at home, in area hospitals, at the hospice in the next town. We prayed for healing, we prayed for death (though we used that great euphemism relief), we prayed for peace. We prayed for peace in souls that were turbulent and for peace in a corner of the world that was in the midst of a civil war.

By the time I began my sermon, I could have been as inspiring as a tax attorney and people would neither have noticed nor cared. I could have been awful-though the truth is, I wasn’t; my words at the very least transcended hollow that morning-and still they would have been moved. They were craving inspiration the way I crave sunlight in January.

Nevertheless, that Sunday service offered a litany of the ways we can die and the catastrophes that can assail us. Who knew that the worst was yet to come? (In theory, I know the answer to that, but we won’t go there. At least not yet.) The particular tragedy that would give our little village its grisly notoriety was still almost a dozen hours away and wouldn’t begin to unfold until the warm front had arrived in the late afternoon and early evening and we had all begun to swelter over our dinners. There was so much still in between: the potluck, the baptism, the word.

Not the word, though I do see it as both the beginning and the end: In the beginning was the Word…

There. That was the word in this case. There.“There,” Alice Hayward said to me after I had baptized her in the pond that Sunday, a smile on her face that I can only call grim. There.

The baptism immediately followed the Sunday service, a good old-fashioned, once-a-year Baptist dunking in the Brookners’ pond. Behind me I heard the congregation clapping for Alice, including the members of the Women’s Circle, at least one of whom, like me, was aware of what sometimes went on in the house the Haywards had built together on the ridge.

None of them, I know now, had heard what she’d said. But even if they had, I doubt they would have heard in that one word exactly what I did, because that single syllable hadn’t been meant for them. It had been meant only for me.

“There,” I said to Alice in response. Nodding. Agreeing. Affirming her faith. A single syllable uttered from my own lips. It was the word that gave Alice Hayward all the reassurance she needed to go forward into the death that her husband may have been envisioning for her-perhaps even for the two of them-for years.

THE NEXT MORNING a deputy state’s attorney, a woman perhaps five years younger than me with that rare but fetching combination of blue eyes and raven-black hair, would try to convince me that I was reading too much into that single syllable. The lawyer was Catherine Benincasa, a name I would have remembered a long while even if our paths had not continued to converge throughout the late summer and autumn, because she was named after the saint who convinced Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome in 1376, after three and a half generations of exile in Avignon. But I reminded Catherine that she had not been present at the baptism. If she had, if she had known all that I did about Alice’s pilgrimage to the water-if she had spent the time that I had listening to her and offering what counsel I could-she would have understood I was right.

When Alice had emerged from the pond beside a wild rosebush with some of its delicate flowers still in bloom, she had fixed her eyes for a moment on the cluster of people in a half circle at the lip of the water. Their collective gaze was as bright as the sun. My parishioners were dressed for a picnic, and they were joyful. I watched Alice give her daughter a small wave. Katie had turned fifteen that summer and had suddenly, almost preternaturally, been transformed from a girl into a woman (or, as her mother had put it to me once when we were alone, her voice rich with love, “a tart with a heart”). The baseball caps, an affectation that had once been as much a requisite part of her clothing as her sneakers or shoes, were gone, and she had allowed her dark hair to grow long. She had replaced her overalls and T-shirts with skirts and short summer dresses and skinny jeans that seemed to cling to her long legs like Lycra. She wore flip-flops and ballet flats instead of the sneakers or the black patent leather shoes with neon spangles she had worn to church as a little girl and christened her “happy Janes.” She had a small stud in her nose and great hoops in her ears. She looked nothing like the child I would recall eating a blue Popsicle on the steps of the village’s general store or the reserve outfielder I had coached for two years on the town’s Little League team, a player more likely to harvest dandelions in the grass than run down fly balls. She was disarmingly precocious and always had been. Now she wrote for the school newspaper and the school literary magazine, and she was one of those children who seem to defy the logic of genes: She was, in my opinion, smarter than both of her parents. She was a good kid who had become a good teen-too intelligent for drugs and too ambitious to get pregnant. She had survived the worst a man like her father could offer and moved on. In two years, I told myself, she would get out of Haverill, whether it was to a small state college in a remote corner of Vermont or to someplace more impressive in Massachusetts or Maine or New York. My money was on the latter. I hoped the child was thinking Ivy or Little Ivy.

She no longer came to church or to the church’s teenage Youth Group meetings with any regularity, but she had come to her mother’s baptism that morning, and I was pleased. She waved back at Alice, perhaps a little embarrassed, but I imagine also happy for her mother, since this was something that her mother clearly desired. As Katie had grown older-more mature, more confident-I sensed that she had begun to intercede on Alice’s behalf when her father would threaten her mother. I knew of at least one punch she had prevented with her screams and her anger, and I assumed that Ginny O’Brien, Alice’s best friend in the Women’s Circle, knew of a good many more.

When Alice glanced back at me, she wiped the pond water from her eyes and used her thumbs like hooks to hoist back behind her ears the twin drapes of auburn mane that had fallen in front of her face. She then started from the pond, pulling at her long wet T-shirt the way all the women did, holding the material away from her chest so it wouldn’t cling to her breasts as she returned to dry land. Beneath that shirt she was wearing a Speedo tank suit with a paisley pattern that reminded me vaguely of the upholstery on the couch in my mother’s apartment in Bronxville, and her feet were bare. She had painted her toenails a cupcake-icing pink. Most women were baptized fully clothed in the baggiest pants and sweatshirts they could find, and-given the man to whom she was married-I found myself pondering the reality that she would never have worn only a bathing suit and a T-shirt had her husband been present. He wouldn’t have allowed it, even though the T-shirt happened to fall to midthigh. But I also wondered if this was a rebellion of some sort, a challenge, because there was always the chance he would hear and there was always the likelihood he would see one of those photos that Ginny was taking. Had I not known the details of what she endured in her home, I would have found the image of Alice Hayward emerging wet like a sea nymph from the Brookners’ pond an inappropriate, earthy, but inescapably erotic treat. She was thirty-eight when she died, the second-youngest member of the Women’s Circle, and she had been blessed with eyes that were round and deep and that rested in her pale face like circles of melted chocolate.

When she reached the grass, almost neon green that morning after a week of midsummer rains, her friend Ginny hugged her. The clouds had finally rolled east in the night, and the sun shone down upon the two women, now sisters in Christ, as they embraced.

Years earlier Ginny had joined the church by a simple statement of faith. Not quite five minutes out of a Sunday service, a little paperwork, a handshake, some polite applause. No water.

Not Alice, not at that point in her life. She wanted to leave absolutely nothing to chance, and so she wanted baptism and she wanted it by immersion. Full immersion. She had come to Christ, and she wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be kept from the kingdom by an ecclesiastical technicality.

And so we went to the Brookners’ pond after the regular worship service, the water high and clear that Sunday morning after all that late-July rain.

“Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” I asked her.

“I do.”

“Do you intend to follow him all the days of your life?”

“I do,” she said again.

I cradled the back of her head with my left hand and held her clasped fingers like the handles of a shopping bag with my right, and then leaned her backward beneath the surface of the cold, mountain-fed waters, baptizing her in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

There.

Like Christ, she had been buried and reborn. She had risen, been resurrected. The symbolism is unmistakable, as clear as any metaphor in the Bible. I wondered when I baptized Alice why so few members of the congregation chose immersion. The wetness means more than the words.

HER HUSBAND, GEORGE, hadn’t set foot inside the church in at least four or five years, and he had not come to his wife’s baptism. Later I would ask myself whether it would have made a difference if he had seen his wife baptized. I would see in my mind the deep, eggplant-colored bruises from his thumbs on her neck, as well as the marks on his face where she had gouged out whole chunks of his cheeks with her fingernails. (I had expected that the right side of his face would have been completely obliterated, but it wasn’t. A little swollen, a little distorted, but not nearly the ruin I had imagined. We could all see the scratch marks there.) Alice may have walked into the water with resignation that Sunday morning, but she had fought hard for her life that Sunday night-if only reflexively. If only because she thought of her daughter and experienced one last, fierce pang of maternal protectiveness. If only because the way that he killed her was brutal and she couldn’t help but battle back against the pain. And so the question of whether George’s attendance at the spectacle (and, trust me, immersion is spectacle) would have saved Alice’s life dogged me. That question, as well as the myriad others that followed it relentlessly like the rhythms of a sermon-would he have been transformed by his wife’s faith? would he have given therapy a chance? would he have stopped pulling fistfuls of Alice’s hair like black rope? would he have stopped yanking back her head like a church bell? would they both be alive today?-bobbed amid the waves of images that roll behind all of our eyes.

I followed Alice from the water, my own blue jeans heavy around my hips because they had sponged up so much of the Brookners’ pond. Some of my fellow pastors, especially my peers in the South, wear weighted black robes that allow them to wade into the water without fear that the robe will float about them like algae. Not me. Weighting a robe in my mind transformed meaningful ritual into pretentious theatrics. Besides, I liked wearing blue jeans into the water, I liked the way they represented the ordinariness of our daily lives as we presented ourselves to God. And the fact is, I actually performed very few baptisms by immersion. This is Vermont. Our church, a union of the old Baptist and Congregational fellowships that had thrived in the nineteenth century when the community had been larger, didn’t even have a baptismal tank, and Alice was the only person I baptized that summer by immersion, the sole parishioner to join the church in that manner.

“That was so powerful,” Ginny said to her friend. “Aren’t you glad you did it?” When they pulled apart, the front of Ginny’s shirt was almost as damp as Alice’s.

“I am,” Alice said, and I saw that she’d begun to cry. Katie noticed, too, and did what she probably did often when she saw her mother’s eyes fill with tears. She patted her on the back as if she were their family’s springer spaniel, Lula, offering gentle taps that were about as close as a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose gets to an embrace in public with her mother.

The Brookners, the family whose pond we used, were summer people, a wealthy family who came north to Haverill from a suburb of Manhattan sometime around Memorial Day weekend and lived at the top of one of the hills that surrounded the village. Michelle Brookner and the three children did, anyway. Michelle’s husband, Gordon, was an attorney who would drive up for weekends and a two-week vacation in August. From the Brookners’ pond, it was impossible to see the town itself, not even the church steeple, but we could see the verdant hollow in which the village sat, as well as the cemetery at the top of the distant ridge. I looked that way to avert my eyes from Alice’s tears.

Members of the Women’s Circle gathered around Ginny and Alice, embracing Alice as Ginny had, and I found George’s absence conspicuous in ways that it wasn’t at a routine Sunday-morning service. I wondered briefly whether I should have visited him prior to the baptism and asked him to come. Convinced him. Later, of course, I would blame myself for not insisting that he attend, just as I would blame myself for not understanding the meaning of the ritual in Alice’s mind-for denying in my head what I must have known in my heart.

When the medical examiner did the autopsies on the Haywards, he reported that Alice’s rear end and her back were flecked with fresh contusions, which meant that George had beaten her the Friday or Saturday night before she was baptized and none of us knew. At least I didn’t. Her kidneys were so badly bruised that she might very well have peed blood before she’d come to church that morning. Nevertheless, I don’t think it was that finding that set me off, because I wouldn’t learn that particular detail until much later. In my mind at least, I was gone from the church the moment Ginny had called me the day after the baptism, that Monday morning, sobbing uncontrollably, with the news that George and Alice were dead and it looked like he had killed them both. In the midst of Ginny’s wails-and she really was wailing, this was indeed a lament of biblical proportions-I somehow heard in my head the last word that Alice had addressed solely to me, that single word there, and the seeds of my estrangement from my calling had been sown.

There.

I’d nodded when Alice had said it; I’d echoed her word. I’d known exactly what she’d meant. She wasn’t referring to Romans or Colossians, to the letters of Peter or Paul. She wasn’t thinking of any of the passages in the Bible explaining baptism that we’d discussed at a table outside my church office or in the living room of her house as her immersion approached.

She was thinking of John, and of Christ’s three words at the end of his torment on the cross; she was imagining that precise moment when he bows his head and gives up his spirit.

It is finished, said Christ. There.

And Alice Hayward was ready to die.

CHAPTER TWO

Vermont rarely has more than ten or fifteen homicides in any given year, and while the majority of them begin with domestic disputes, murder-suicides are blessedly uncommon: Usually a husband or ex-husband, boyfriend or ex-boyfriend, merely shoots or strangles the poor woman with whom he might have built a life and then goes to prison for the majority of what remains of his own. Frequently he turns himself in. We are conditioned to expect one dead at the scenes of our homicides, not two. And so the Haywards’ story-a murder and a suicide together-was both horrific and exceptional.

George Hayward had come to southern Vermont from Buffalo as an ambitious young retailer who saw that Manchester could use more than high-end designer outlets and shops that sold maple syrup and quaint Green Mountain trinkets. He was the first to see that a clothing store for teens and young adults and modeled on Abercrombie & Fitch-but stressing natural fibers and stocking Vermont-made clothing-could anchor a corner of the block near the town’s busiest intersection and thrive though surrounded by national chains that sold clothes sewn together in sweatshops for less. There were just enough tourists and just enough locals and-when word filtered south to Bennington, half an hour away by car-just enough college students to keep the store afloat through its first year, and by its second it was an institution. It actually would become a destination for young adults as far away as Albany, Rutland, and Pittsfield. Eventually his magic touch would extend to a southern-style rib restaurant (skiers in the winter particularly loved it) and an upscale toy store that used retro toys as the marketing bait for baby boomers, but electronic gadgets to ensnare their kids and make the serious money. For a long time, the formula worked. In addition to the house that he built in Haverill, he acquired what he and Alice referred to as a cottage on Lake Bomoseen-a svelte stretch of water perhaps nine miles long that over the years had numbered among its guests the Marx Brothers, Alexander Woollcott, and Rebecca West. Based on the photos, however, the cottage was actually rather elegant: a post-and-beam barn frame with a wall of glass windows facing west to savor the sunsets over the rippling pinewoods.

George had been a teen model in Buffalo, and he had grown into a dramatically handsome adult. He’d actually worn a wedding band before he was married to Alice to minimize the number of women who would hit on him on the streets and in the restaurants of first Buffalo and then Manchester and Bennington. Once when he was drunk, he told friends-famously, since this is Vermont, a state in which vanity and self-absorption are still viewed by the locals as character defects commensurate with gluttony, greed, and sloth-that his magnetism had helped to ensure that he found the requisite bankers and private investors to bankroll his big ideas before he had a track record. One of my parishioners said that he looked like Prince Valiant with a better haircut: His hair was a shade more terra-cotta than blond and was only beginning to thin now that he was on the far side of forty, and his skin barely showed the wear and tear of either retail risk or age. Some years he had a mustache that was the color of faded pumpkin pine, but he was clean-shaven the summer he murdered his wife. If he hadn’t started drinking so heavily in his mid-thirties, I imagine his workout regimen would have kept even his slight, midlife paunch at bay. He was handsome and strong and could be charming and charismatic when he wanted. He had a chip on his shoulder (wholly unwarranted), and he was more savvy than smart, but he was far from humorless. He was a person of some renown in the southern Vermont business community. There were people who were firmly convinced that Alice, though pretty, was lucky to have him. Almost no one knew that she had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order against him that last winter of her life, and many people suspected that he had left her in those months they were separated.

Oh, but it was she who had risen up and kicked him out of the house, sending him to that cottage on the lake to see how life felt without her. He had attacked her once too often, and now she was going to try to make a go of it on her own.

She had been one of his salesclerks at the original clothing store while getting a degree in business administration, and it was there that they had met and fallen in love. They married soon after he had promoted her to manager at the restaurant. By the time he was embarking on the toy store, however, she was securely ensconced as a customer-service representative at a bank branch in Bennington. Given the reality that they had a young daughter, even the fanatically controlling George Hayward saw the advantages to another small but steady income stream when you were juggling local retail ventures in a world of mass merchandisers and chain stores with very deep pockets.

When she took him back as Memorial Day approached, believing him when he assured her that he was going to embark upon counseling and this time things would be different, some of our neighbors greeted his return to Haverill with relief: A family was reconciled, and a marriage had been preserved.

Imagine, then, their surprise when they heard that one disastrously drunken Sunday night he had strangled his wife and taken his handgun-not a thirty-gauge deer rifle, as the earliest rumors suggested-and shot himself.

Heather Laurent had arrived in Manchester for a day and a half of appearances that Sunday evening: the very night the Haywards would die and about twelve hours before their bodies would be discovered in our little village. Haverill is a small hill town roughly halfway between Bennington and Manchester; the general store is almost exactly eight miles east of the border with New York State. It was therefore Tuesday morning when Heather was able to read about the grim discovery in the newspaper while she ate breakfast in her hotel room at the Equinox and the line of admirers outside the bookstore in Manchester grew long as they waited for the store to open its doors for the day. She was going to be there that morning from ten to eleven, and then she was going to speak at lunchtime at a fund-raiser for the Southern Vermont Arts Center. The day before, Monday, she had visited the NPR affiliate in Albany and given a speech at Bennington College. As she read the story in the newspaper, the final touches were added to the displays of her books: a waterfall of pink satin ribbon cascading over the neat piles of her paperback, Angels and Aurascapes, and vases of blue irises and yellow daylilies surrounding her hardcover, A Sacred While, which had been published the month before.

There were two articles about the carnage in the newspaper, and it was in that second story that I appeared. The previous afternoon I had rambled on to the reporter-a woman I pegged at about twenty-five, a decade and a half younger than I and perhaps ten years the junior of Heather Laurent-about what C. S. Lewis had termed the problem of pain. From nearly fifteen minutes of the Reverend Stephen Drew’s babbling, she had pulled two quotes.“Sometimes it seems as if there’s nothing guiding this world. Or if there is something out there, it’s powerless or uninterested in us-or downright mean. Even evil,” I’d said, paraphrasing what Lewis considered the pessimist’s view of the cosmos. I may have gotten to Lewis’s summary of the Christian’s more optimistic perspective-I’d certainly planned to as a courtesy to my parishioners, even if it was a view I no longer shared-but it’s very possible that I didn’t. It’s possible (perhaps even likely) that I became sidetracked and started addressing instead another of the questions she’d asked me: How was our town handling this awful tragedy?“She was a member of our congregation,” I’d said, referring to Alice. “She was a member of my church. I knew very well he was hurting her. I should have done more.”

The reporter may or may not have noticed my transition from the plural to the personal, but Heather Laurent certainly did. And so after she had finished her speech at the arts center that Tuesday afternoon, she came to see me-she came to see us, to see me and Katie and our stunned little village-either a marionette moved by an omniscient god in a puppet show or merely an upright series of cells compelled forward by something inscrutably deep inside her DNA. A gene. A meme. Her one conscious thought? Someone had to help those poor, sad, pathetic people in Haverill. Someone had to help that pastor.

HEATHER LAURENT LOOKED very much as she did in the photographs that graced the backs of her books, though I would realize that only days later when I actually picked them up at the bookstore in Bronxville. She had a professional woman’s short hair, manageable and fast in the morning, just a shade closer to blond than brown. A round, girlish face and a pixielike nose-though there was nothing spritelike about her stature. She was almost as tall as I am, and I am exactly six feet. Unlike my sister, however, who is also quite tall, she seemed comfortable with her height: She neither slouched nor averted her eyes, both tendencies I had noticed over the years in my sister. Later I would learn that she was a classically trained dancer. She was wearing a white button-down silk blouse with a gold chain suspending a modest cross against her collarbone and sunglasses that she removed as she first started speaking to me, sliding them onto the top of her head like a hair band. She seemed almost disconcertingly happy to meet me, an ease-given the pall that hung over Haverill that afternoon-that I ascribe to the fathomless hope that flourished inside her, her faith in (her words, not mine) angels and auras. Make no mistake: Heather Laurent believed every word that she wrote.

When she first appeared at the front door of the parsonage Tuesday afternoon, I assumed she was a television reporter from a network news program. I craned my head to see over her shoulder, expecting to see behind her a van and a young person with a heavy shoulder camera. Instead I saw simply a Saab that was ice blue, a little dried mud along the sides.

“Are you Reverend Drew?” she asked me as I pushed open the screen door. It was steaming, even for July, and I heard small children playing in the shade by the shallow river across the street.

“I am. And you’re with…?”

“No one.”

“You’re not with a magazine? A newspaper?”

“I’m Heather Laurent. I thought I would see if I could be of help.”

I nodded. I wondered if I was supposed to know who she was. I imagined her as an E! network Katie Couric or a columnist for a glossy weekly I didn’t read.

“May I come in?” she went on. “I don’t want to be an imposition.” I shrugged and led her through the kitchen and the living room and out onto the back porch. Usually this late in the day on a Tuesday, I’d have finished the first draft of my Sunday sermon. That’s what Tuesday afternoons were for. I would leave my church office about noon and wander to the general store, where I would buy a sandwich and eat it there, chatting with whoever happened to stroll by in the middle of the day. I might be there as long as an hour, especially if the lectionary suggested passages that weren’t among my favorites and I was looking for inspiration. Often I’ve used that time to help people in ways that were more prosaic than profound, but utterly meaningful to them: Over the years in those lunch hours, I helped milk a llama, found the local septic-tank cleaner for the local excavator (a real emergency, trust me), and made urgent repairs to the swing set at the cooperative preschool before the children awoke from their naps. Then I would go home, since it was always easier for me to work uninterrupted at the parsonage than it was at my church office. In the summer I would take my laptop to the back porch and work there. By three-thirty or four, I would usually have fifteen to twenty minutes of reasonably uplifting biblical commentary. If it wasn’t too late in the afternoon, I would visit the hospitals in Bennington and Rutland where my neighbors-members and nonmembers of the church alike-were recovering or dying or lying unsure on movable beds. Most weeks I went to the hospital two or three times. But Tuesday-afternoon hospital visits were always a balancing act, because I had to be back in town not too long after seven, since the trustees and the Board of Christian Education and the Pastoral-Relations Committee all had their monthly meetings on Tuesday nights (though, fortunately, not the same Tuesday nights), and I was expected to be present. I wanted to be present. Usually my deadline was three-thirty: If my sermon was in reasonable shape by then, I would go to one or the other of the hospitals. If not, I would forgo a hospital visit that afternoon and go instead the next day.

The Tuesday that Heather Laurent came to Haverill, however, I hadn’t even tried to write a sermon. And I had no plans to go to a hospital. Somehow, instead of a sermon-which would have been trying enough that day, intellectually as well as emotionally-I had to find it inside me to pen some comforting remarks for Alice Hayward’s funeral, scheduled for that Thursday morning at the church. (George’s funeral was going to be a private family affair in upstate New York.) And I had failed: The comforting words had disappeared along with the uplifting ones.

When I realized that I was incapable, at least for the moment, of writing the eulogy, I had instead begun to tap out what was essentially a form e-mail that I thought I might-or might not-send to different friends across the country. Friends from seminary and friends from college. My friends who’d remained in the suburb of New York City in which I’d grown up and my friends from there who, like me, had chosen to build their lives in other, distant corners of the country. All but the second paragraph of each e-mail-that paragraph in which I dropped in select, idiosyncratic details about our joint histories-was identical. The letters were rich in anger and gloom and guilt. I told two of my friends that I was going to come see them soon. One was a friend from seminary with a parish in southern Illinois, and another was a friend from college who had grown rich in Dallas. I envisioned weeks alone in my car and all the scrambled eggs I could eat in places like Denny’s, the counters sticky, the lighting dolorous. I told everyone that I was leaving the church-no sabbatical, this, no hiatus or retreat-because I could no longer bear to throw the drowning victims of reason and birth, my congregation, life preservers with long ropes attached to nothing.

Dave Sadler, the deacon with pancreatic cancer, now had a tumor so large he couldn’t digest his food. He was starving to death in a hospice, and somehow I was supposed to reassure him that everything in the end would be all right. Caroline Pearce, three years old, had seen one of her little-girl legs sliced off by the metal that ripped through the side of her mother’s car when a pickup plowed into it as she and her mother were returning home from day care. Beside her bed in the children’s wing of the hospital-a room infinitely cheerier than the intensive-care unit where she had spent the first days after the accident, but still an awfully dark room for a toddler-I was supposed to smile. I was expected to console Nathan Bedard, a third-grader with a particularly virulent form of leukemia who’d be dead in two or three years, and I was supposed to inspirit his aunt and uncle, neither of whom had worked in almost a year and were in the process of selling the trailer in which they lived. Once the trailer was gone, they would bunk with friends and relatives-including Nathan’s parents-for a while, but they had no idea how or where they would live for the long haul.

And I was supposed to find comforting words for fifteen-year-old Katie Hayward. I was supposed to help the little girl I’d watched grow into a young woman-a wise and pretty reasonable young woman, it seemed to me, in spite of all that she’d seen and suffered-make sense of the fact that her father’s anger was boundless, and he was, in the end, capable of murdering her mother in a manner that was simultaneously intimate and violent.

From those letters I considered sending to my friends, mostly (but not all) discarded and deleted, I remember one paragraph perfectly: “I don’t think I have ever had a predilection for depression, but at the moment I feel as if a friend who has always provided me comfort and counsel has gone away. I no longer know quite what I should be saying to others and have never before felt so personally and spiritually alone.”

I tend to doubt that Heather Laurent ever saw that sentence, however, because the laptop was still on the porch when she appeared at my door, and though later we would stand beside it and listen to the murmur of the shallow river, she wasn’t the sort who would have leaned over and tried to read the words that were at least partly shrouded by the glare from the muggy, overcast sky. And when she arrived, initially she sat down in the chair at the wrought-iron table that was across from the seat in which I had been composing my e-mails.

“This is a beautiful little village,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“The tragedy doesn’t change that, you know. The tragedy doesn’t make it any less lovely.”

“Visit this place in mid-January. It gets pretty bleak.”

She smiled and ran two fingers along the chain around her neck, resting them for a moment on the small cross. “You know what I mean,” she said. “People understand the aura of a little place like this.”

Briefly it crossed my mind that this woman was a nun. It was possible, I decided, that I had just mistaken a Catholic nun for a cable celebrity. “Are you with the church?” I asked.

“The church. Is there only one?”

“Oh, this afternoon they’re all equally suspect.”

“You sound awfully disillusioned.”

“Maybe just awfully fed up.”

“Well,” she answered, “I’m not here with any church. I’m just a writer.”

“And you’re not with… anything?”

“I write books,” she said, and it was clear in the gentleness of her tone that the fact that I hadn’t a clue who she was didn’t bother her.

“Are you going to write a book about our tragedy?”

“I hope not.”

“That’s not why you’re here?” She shrugged. “Maybe you’re why I’m here. You. That girl. This town.”

My anger then was still embryonic, it was still merely in utero fury-a hostility toward the universe conceived roughly twenty-nine hours earlier. Had Heather arrived at my home a few weeks or even days later, I might have been unable to hold my tongue. I might have thrown her out of the house. On the other hand, had she arrived a few weeks or even days later, I might have been gone. I’ve no idea for sure where I’d have wound up-Texas, most likely, or southern Illinois-but I think there’s a good chance I would have pressed “send” on one (or more) of those e-mails and gotten the hell out of Vermont. Had Heather come even Saturday or Sunday of that week, she might have found an empty house and a stunned deacon or steward murmuring, “He left. He just up and left.”

But that afternoon I was able to satisfy my anger with essentially harmless morsels of sarcasm.

“Well,” I said evenly. “I guess I should be flattered.”

“Don’t be. Don’t give me that much credit. Do you have any family, Reverend Drew?”

“No. I’m alone.”

“No wife?”

“Nope.”

“A partner?”

“I date.” Usually I gave the inquisitive a bit more of a bone, but that afternoon I was in no mood to discuss the history and vagaries of my life choices. There were women in my past, but not a marriage.

“Are you from around here?” she asked.

“I’m not.”

“Have you been in Vermont-with this congregation-a long time? Or are you an interim minister?”

I looked longingly through the screen door at the pitcher with iced coffee on the kitchen table. “Are these questions the preface to a more extended inquiry, Ms. Laurent, or merely an attempt at conversation?”

“Please, call me Heather. I’d like that.”

“Next time I will,” I agreed. The first Heather I had ever known had taken off all her clothes for me. I was five, she was seven. She lived two houses away. We were upstairs in her bedroom on a summer afternoon, and she promised me she would strip if I could find her red bathing suit. It wasn’t a difficult search: I found it in the third dresser drawer I opened, wadded into a ball at the top of her underwear and T-shirts. She was the first female I ever saw naked. “And these questions?” I asked again.

“I haven’t a clue. Really and truly. I’m just giving them voice as they come to me.”

“In that case, I’m going to get some more iced coffee-though it’s been sitting out so long by now it will merely be watered-down tepid coffee. Still, you are welcome to have some. In my current state of mind, this is an act of courtesy that has demanded a herculean resiliency. If I rise to that occasion, will you tell me why you’ve come to see me?”

“I drink tea.”

“Then you’re out of luck. I don’t drink tea.”

“Have I come at a bad time?”

I leaned forward in my chair and looked deep into her face. The edges of her lips, adorned with a lipstick so lustrous and red that I thought of the vestments I wore when I’d preach on Pentecost or Palm Sunday, were curled into a smile, and I realized that she had meant this as a joke. She understood there had been few worse times in my life.

“I think this counts as one, yes.”

“Pour yourself that coffee,” she said. “I don’t need any. But I would like to stay and visit. May I?”

I rarely saw lipstick like that in Haverill. I rarely saw a silk blouse.

“I have nowhere to go,” I answered.

“No meetings? No parishioners?”

“There are always meetings. There are always parishioners.”

“But you have some time.”

I nodded as I stood up and listened to her as I opened the screen door and retrieved the pitcher.

“I have nothing at all on my calendar this afternoon or evening,” she said. “And I have a sense you can appreciate how liberating that sensation is. I just finished one of the world’s longest book tours.” Then she rose, too, and followed me inside.

“What’s your book about?”

“My new one?”

“Yes. Your… new one.”

“The world’s aura and the way we are degrading it environmentally and ecologically.”

“I suppose aura, in this case, isn’t simply another word for icecap. Or rain forest.”

“No, it’s not. But certainly there’s a connection.”

“And your other books?”

“Other book. Singular. I’ve only written two.”

“And it’s about?”

She smiled as if she knew I couldn’t possibly take seriously what she was about to tell me. “Angels. Auras. The quality of vibrations we emit and how they affect our relationship with the divine.”

“I’m sure those vibrations really matter.”

“You’re not sure at all, but that’s okay.”

“Let me guess. You were at the bookstore in Manchester last night?”

“This morning, actually. Then I gave a talk at that beautiful arts center up on the hill. Yesterday I was at Bennington College and the NPR station in Albany.”

“And now you’re finishing your day with an appearance in scenic little Haverill.”

“You’re having a real hard time with that, aren’t you?”

“Well, do you visit every village that achieves our sort of notoriety?”

“Nope.”

“Just ours.”

She nodded and then turned her gaze toward the open shelves and kitchen counters that were filled with the detritus of a single man’s-a single pastor’s-life. There were the odd, mismatched knickknacks given to me by dotty parishioners over the years: porcelain cookie jars (originally filled, of course, with freshly baked cookies with ridiculous names like snickerdoodles and choc-a-roos), one shaped like a potbellied elf and one like a plump, sitting beagle (that had, alas, lost an ear over the years); an earthenware butter dish I never used that resembled a submarine, a gift from a couple in the congregation after I gave a sermon with references to a 1960s television program I had seen that week on TV Land called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; a tin container for straws, empty, that was crafted from a Coca-Cola can; and a plastic paper-napkin holder that was shaped like a rather flat, two-dimensional log cabin. And then there were the pots and pans that once had belonged to my mother but now dangled-a little tarnished, a little dinged-like old meat from hooks above the stove, as well as the juice and water glasses from her bridal registry, not old enough yet to be interesting but still discolored with age. (When my father died, she had chosen to sell the house and move to a condominium apartment in a brick building in the village, and in her downsizing my sister and I had wound up with a sizable percentage of the contents from the pantry, the hutch, and the kitchen cabinets.) There were coffee mugs, two rows of them, many stained brown and some visibly cracked. And there were the four matching tins for flour and sugar and coffee and rice that were meant to look like miniatures of the sort of antique barrels one might have found once in a country store-or, at any rate, in a country store on a movie set-but each of them now looked only bulbous and bloated and tired. I was always a little embarrassed when a woman saw my kitchen for the first time. It wasn’t often, but invariably I was left with the sensation that I had either remarkably bad taste or an awful lot to explain.

Moreover, I rarely cooked, since so much food came to me from parishioners and friends and since I was expected to attend so many meetings at night. Besides, I lived alone, and relatively few people actually like to cook for themselves. As a result there was an antiseptic odorlessness to the room, an aura of benign disuse. In a typical year, I must have prepared no more than two dozen dinners for myself in that kitchen.

Had she looked through the open door into the den, she would have seen an ironing board strategically placed before my television set and the pile of my shirts and pants that seemed always to be the size of a beanbag chair. I ironed just enough to keep up, but not frequently enough ever to shrink the mound. She would have seen the DVDs more appropriate in the bedroom of a fifth-grade boy than a minister flirting with middle age: an account of a Red Sox World Series championship, two-thirds of the Star Wars saga. She might have noticed the books I was reading, some on the floor and some on the coffee table and some on the television itself. There were books of inspiration and biblical interpretation, as well as the novels set in courtrooms and police stations and law offices-the mysteries that I savor the way some people appreciate science fiction.

It struck me, as it did always when a person saw the inside of my house, as rather pathetic. And while the homes of most single men are rather pathetic-testimonies in some cases to a stunted childhood, sad little museums of loneliness-mine seemed more so. I was, after all, a minister. It seemed to me that I should have transcended the pitiable curiosities of the single life. Usually I took comfort that at least my house wasn’t rife with porn and NASCAR magazines, but that seemed like a small consolation that afternoon.

“How did you learn about us?” I asked. “The newspaper?”

“Initially. And then the television news. And then the Internet.”

“Ah, Haverill’s fifteen minutes of fame. Our chance to bask in the glow of the press. Lovely.”

She picked up the butter dish in the shape of a science-fiction submarine. It looked vaguely like a stingray with a school bus behind it. “You sound so angry about the media,” she murmured, her eyes scanning the vessel. “From the newspaper I would have guessed it was something else.”

“And that was?”

She looked up at me, her mouth open the tiniest bit. “I’m really not that presumptuous,” she answered. “And I hope not that arrogant.”

“No, you can tell me. I’m interested.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I thought you blamed yourself for Alice and George Hayward’s deaths.”

“I do.”

“And I thought you blamed your God.”

“I would if I had one.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Heather Laurent. “I think that’s why I came.”

The host of a radio show once asked me point-blank, “Do you really believe in magic? Honestly?”

“Honestly,” I said. “Really and truly.”

“Do you think the people who have bought your book do, too?”

I told him I couldn’t speak for the people who had bought my book. But it was clear both to me and to his listeners that this radio personality thought my extended discussions of magic in Angels and Aurascapes were the ramblings of a lunatic. Most people, in his opinion, were smart enough not to believe in magic.

And so I corrected him. “Most individuals on this planet have a religion they approach with some degree of earnestness,” I said. “And what is a religion but a belief in the unseen and a faith in the impossible? Remember what Jesus says in Mark? ‘For all things are possible with God.’ Magic is about the endless ways in this world that the impossible becomes possible-just like religion. Religion, in essence, is ritualized magic.”

I have lived a life with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better…

CHAPTER THREE

I went to Alice and George Hayward’s house when Ginny O’Brien called that Monday morning, I saw the bodies myself. After the state’s mobile crime lab had left, a number of us helped clean the place up-the blood on the wall, the fragments of skull and brain lodged in the mesh of the screen window beside the couch on which George had been sitting when he died-so neither Alice’s nor George’s families would have to. Everyone wanted to be sure that Katie would never have to see the piecemeal remains of her parents.

In the days immediately after the murder and the suicide, we learned small details about the couple’s last hours that seemed to matter a great deal at the time. Ginny O’Brien, though shaken, was still a chronological font whose memory was precise.

Apparently she saw George Hayward drinking on his porch late Sunday afternoon, the day I had baptized his wife, and he was in all likelihood drunk during dinner. It was certainly clear he was drunk after dinner: We counted thirteen open, empty beer bottles in the kitchen and the living room, only a few of which had been rinsed, and the house-and George Hayward’s corpse-reeked of alcohol. An investigator with the office of the medical examiner, a balding detective sergeant from the state police with a skull the shape of an egg, dusted each of the bottles for fingerprints. The Haywards’ last meal on this earth included a salad with plump peas and tender string beans from their vegetable garden, chicken salad that Alice probably had prepared that afternoon, and ice-cream scoops of coleslaw that she had bought at the general store in the village seconds before it closed for the day: five o’clock on summer Sundays, three P.M. on Sundays the rest of the year. There were plates in the sink that suggested this had been their menu, as well as leftovers in the refrigerator and (we would learn later) recognizable, undigested remains in Alice’s stomach.

Katie had left late that afternoon for a rock concert in Albany and then spent the night at the home of her friend, Tina Cousino, closer to the center of Haverill. Most people believed that if Katie had been home that night, it would not have prevented George from murdering Alice. The teen’s presence would merely have increased the number of bodies that Ginny O’Brien would have discovered the next day.

At some point after the two corpses had been removed from the house and the mobile van from the state crime lab had left, when many of us were still there cleaning in our rubber gloves-a little sickened, a little numb-a thought crossed my mind. An image. George strangling Alice once she was no longer capable of fighting back. Did their eyes meet for a moment before she blacked out? I had read somewhere that to kill someone by strangulation, you needed to retain your grip on the neck long after the victim had lost consciousness and ceased struggling, otherwise he or she might resume breathing and eventually wake up. But what of these two who had been married so long? What did they see in each other’s eyes as they grappled? Clearly George had kept his hands around her neck long after she had gone limp. Or had he? Was it possible that he had released her, presuming she was dead, but then she had started to come to and he actually had to go back to work? It seemed conceivable to me as I paused that afternoon in my blue gloves.

Regardless, before George would murder his wife, he would pass out himself for a time in front of the television set. This was around seven-thirty. The cordless telephone was pressed against Alice’s ear as she carried George’s and her dinner dishes to the kitchen sink and chatted with Ginny. Apparently it was not uncommon for Alice to wait for her husband to fall asleep before venturing a call to one of her friends-especially Ginny-though she was quick to insist that it was only a coincidence that more times than not George was either asleep or out when she spoke with the pastor or, far more frequently, with the various local women.

“Oh, somebody’s dropped off,” she’d said to her friend that evening, almost as if she were referring to a six-month-old baby who everyone agreed was really rather cute. Then the pair discussed George’s toy store, which Alice said was struggling, as high gas prices were decreasing the usual summer tourist traffic. He was also worried about declining interest in his ribs restaurant-the novelty had long worn off-but he had been more quiet than antagonistic as they ate. According to Ginny, they had also talked about Alice’s baptism that day, Ginny’s own two middle-school-aged sons and the different summer day camps in which they were involved, and the reality that Ginny’s mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years earlier, seemed to have gotten much worse. Ironically, Ginny did not bring up her belief that either George should get counseling-hadn’t he promised?-or Alice should leave him, or both. She did often. But not that night. They didn’t discuss Ginny’s frustration with her friend for never even showing up for the hearing after Alice had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order in February or her friend’s decision to reconcile with her husband in May.

Later Ginny would tell the police that she’d planned on discussing her fears with Alice again the next morning-reminding her that she shouldn’t fall under his sway just because he claimed he had changed-when she saw her friend at the Women’s Circle.

People who knew the Haywards only casually would never have imagined that he beat her. Alice hid well her cuts and bruises, and only rarely did he touch her face. People might have sensed the strain between them, they might have felt what Heather Laurent might have described as an aura of unease (or outright unhappiness), but I’m sure they would have attributed the tension to the fact that George was juggling a variety of retail businesses in an uncertain economy.

The fact is, he had been abusive and controlling for years, blaming Alice for whatever small speed bumps he encountered on what he believed was his right to cruise unencumbered through life. From the moment they wed, he had begun to wean her away from her family in New Hampshire and, later, from her co-workers at the bank. He would savage her cooking and cleaning whenever he could, or her inability to stretch the budget he gave her as far as he liked. He would tell her what kinds of clothes she could wear and what kinds she couldn’t: Stirrup pants and jeans that clung to her curves were out, as were Lycra bicycle shorts (even at her spin class at the gym), skimpy cotton dresses, and those camisole shirts with lingerie-like clasps that were popular that summer. Even though one of his stores sold inappropriately revealing tanks and tees and denim microskirts to teen girls, she was to dress like a schoolmarm.

When, once, she cataloged for me the clothes she was not allowed to wear, I sighed with a mixture of pastoral concern and libidinous longing: I would have been happy to have seen her in any of those things. Instead Alice was likely to be attired in dresses and skirts that were dowdy and sad. Still, when I saw her undressed for the first time, I was not surprised by what a prize she was. She was one year my junior; she had legs that were lithe and long, and a stomach as firm as a dancer’s.

The Haywards had lived (and died) in a handsome Cape Cod they’d built on two acres of meadow that once had been a part of one of the village’s larger dairy farms. The property was being sold just about the time that they were thinking of leaving their Bennington apartment, four rooms that had been fine even when Katie was a baby but was feeling cramped now that their daughter was six. Most of the property, including the largest parcels, went to the sons and daughters of the dairy farmer, but a substantial section was commandeered by a lawyer and his wife from Westchester-the Brookners-while a two-acre block with impressive views and a small ravine that tended to get a little swampy in April and May went to the Haywards. Theirs was a crisp and modern three-bedroom home, and George had done a fair amount of the work on it himself.

They would live there for not quite nine years.

ALICE WAS IN her nightgown when George wrapped his hands around her neck and crushed her windpipe and the strap muscles in the larynx, but she hadn’t yet gotten into bed. The medical examiner estimated it was sometime between eight and nine P.M. when George pressed her against the wall beside a living-room window, in all likelihood lifting her off the floor and slamming the back of her head so hard against the wall as he worked that he dented the Sheetrock. And he killed her while she was slashing away at his own flesh with a ferocity that I suspected might have been there but had certainly never seen manifest myself.

Although no one other than Alice spent any time with George on the day that he died, we all assumed that the clothes in which he was found were the ones he had been wearing most of the day: Blue jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with a small chest pocket. He was barefoot when he was discovered on the couch, slumped back onto the cushions, one arm spread atop a throw pillow and the other hanging over the side of the armrest. George had been right-handed, and the bullet had entered his head just above his right ear, roughly three inches above where his jaw met his neck, and taken off a sizable chunk of his skull. Dangling from his fingers was a Smith & Wesson.357-caliber handgun with a square butt and a stainless-steel finish. The bullet had exited the head just left of the summit of the cranium and was embedded high in the wall near the window.

Nobody heard a gunshot, but the nearest house belonged to that lawyer’s family from Westchester, and they hadn’t been in Haverill that weekend. Likewise, no one heard the two of them fight, and so no one had any idea what precisely had set George off this last time. Ginny O’Brien conjectured the next morning that he’d probably hit Alice, and she’d either told him in some new fashion that he’d better not do that again, or-even more likely-said that she was kicking him out once more. This time for good. Perhaps she had straightened her spine and told him to pack a bag and be gone. But this also may have been merely an unachieved aspiration Ginny had had for her friend.

Nevertheless, in one of the days immediately after Alice was killed, a female minister I’ve known since seminary-a woman who counsels a great many victims (and perpetrators) of domestic abuse-tried to convince me that this was indeed what had occurred. George had probably hit Alice, and she had told him that was it, they were finished. She’d had it. George, in turn, had warned her that she’d better not even try to get dressed. And when she’d said that he couldn’t stop her, he’d killed her. It was the classic pattern, my friend said.

Her point? Alice Hayward had wanted to live. She hadn’t expected to die, and I hadn’t missed some staggeringly obvious signal at the baptism. This wasn’t my fault. Of course, my minister friend hadn’t been at the pond that afternoon. Nor did she know Alice’s and my-and I use this word with both guilelessness and guilt-history. Perhaps if Alice had left behind a suitcase, I might think otherwise. In my mind it is resting on her side of their bed, half filled and hastily packed. But there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even a small pile of clothes anywhere in the bedroom: No shirt, no jeans, no panties, no socks. I would not have needed a suitcase at the scene to have my faith resurrected, but I did need a sign that she had at least planned to leave the house that night.

AND THERE WAS this: Her mother would tell me when we met in my church on folding metal chairs that Monday night that her daughter had been planning to schedule appointments with a lawyer in Bennington and an advocate at the women’s shelter. Alice, her mother insisted, wanted to understand what she needed to do to protect her daughter from George in the event that something like-and here her mother waved her arm once as if swatting at a fly and then collapsed in upon herself in sobs-this ever happened to her. Alice had even taught her parents a new expression: the termination or extinguishment of parental rights. She wanted, her mother insisted, to be sure that George wouldn’t have control of Katie if somehow her husband got away with murder.

“I told her to get out of the house, but… but she wouldn’t listen,” she stammered through her tears, as her husband awkwardly rubbed her shoulders and the back of her neck from his own folding chair.

And if I needed any more proof of my suspicions, it resided in a red felt jewelry box that Katie had told us about that afternoon: Two days before she would die, that Friday, Alice had taken the ruby-and-diamond earrings and the pearl necklace that had belonged to her own grandmother-Katie’s great-grandmother-and given them to her daughter, telling Katie to keep them close to her chest.

THE CHURCH WOMEN’S Circle included about fifteen members of the congregation. They met Monday mornings at seven to accommodate the half dozen members who had jobs outside the home, convening each time in a different woman’s living room or terrace or kitchen. Rarely were all fifteen present; usually there were no more than eleven or twelve women there. The meetings usually lasted until nine-thirty or ten, with the members whose schedules demanded they leave sooner departing whenever they needed. During the school year, for instance, Ginny stayed most Mondays only until seven forty-five because she was due at the village school a little before eight. Alice’s schedule at the bank was Tuesday through Saturday, however, and so she never left early. She was known for remaining till the very end, with the elderly women who were retired and whose children were grown and who had nowhere else they needed to be. When I had suggested the Women’s Circle to Alice, offering the idea one evening when we were alone at the parsonage, I thought it would be weeks or even months before she might find the courage to contact one of the informal group leaders. I could see how thoroughly George had eroded her confidence and severed her ties with so many of her friends-with so much of the world. I contemplated having one of the members reach out to her. But I was mistaken. Within days Alice had contacted the woman nearest her age, Ginny O’Brien, and had asked if she could come to the next meeting. The fact that the group met on the very day Alice had off seemed like a good omen.

And I have no doubts that the women provided a necessary respite for Alice-and yes, a better shoulder than mine. Still, only Ginny knew the extent of George’s violence, and Alice forbade her from ever bringing it up at the Women’s Circle.

In the days after Alice’s death, many adult members of the church took great comfort in Alice’s involvement with the group. I was told often by parishioners in the four days before I left that if Alice had not been a part of the Circle, the Haywards’ bodies would probably have been found by their daughter the next morning or afternoon, when she returned from Tina Cousino’s house. Instead it was Ginny O’Brien who would alert the world that the couple was dead. That day Joanie Gaylord was hosting the group, and when Alice had failed to arrive by seven-thirty, Ginny called her friend. There was, of course, no answer at the Haywards’. And so when the meeting adjourned around nine-thirty, she decided to drop by her friend’s house. She would tell me that afternoon that she’d had a bad feeling as she drove up the driveway to the usually immaculate yellow Cape and seen Lula the dog asleep on the porch. She had, in fact, known what had occurred before she even opened the unlocked front door.

She knew, she said, because the living room was right beside the entry hall, and so from the front steps of the house she had seen the flesh and bone and brain that had once been a part of George Hayward on the inside mesh of the screen window.

CHAPTER FOUR

There is no explanation for my decision to enter the clergy that is both quick and honest. They tend to be one or the other. The quick answer-and it is a response I’ve given most often to especially avid or fundamental believers (of which there is no dearth, even among Baptists in northern New England)-is this, an anecdote I was told by one of my more erudite professors at seminary. When he was a young graduate being considered for a poor, rural parish in West Virginia, he gave a sermon at the church there one Sunday morning. It was, even in his own opinion, more intellectual than inspired, more long-winded than wise. It wasn’t very good. After the service an old deacon-a coal miner who had somehow made it into his seventies without succumbing to any of the grotesque lung diseases that usually mark the end of a coal miner’s life-approached him and asked with a voice rich in irony, “Was you sent or did you just went?” My professor understood instantly what the deacon was suggesting: He, the young pastor, seemed to lack passion and conviction. He seemed merely to be going through the motions. And so when people would ask me why I’d become a minister and I could tell from the question that they wanted an answer singed with Pentecostal fires, I’d recount this story, always ending with a self-deprecating shrug and the remark, “All I can tell you is I believe I was sent.”

The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn’t a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?), or even one palpable experience of the living Christ in the here and now. When I was ten and eleven, I had a fairly common boy’s interest in the horrific and the frightening, in whatever it was that caused one’s heart to beat a little faster: chain-saw murderers, serial killers, and those nightmare ghouls who lurk under our beds. Nasty stuff, but pretty typical. And then, of course, there was the predictable array of werewolves, vampires, mummies, aliens, killer robots, psychotic cyborgs, and the assorted undead zombies and freaks that television shows and movies churned out for my entertainment and dreams (or, to be precise, for my disturbing, sheet-gripping nightmares). My friends in Bronxville and I would savor monster movies whenever they arrived for the summer at the theater across the street from the railroad station, and alone or together we would follow their computer-generated mayhem on what are now quaint and primitive video games. My fascination with this sort of carnage and violence was neither unusual nor a sign of a potentially dangerous personality disorder. Given the always precarious state of my parents’ marriage, I wouldn’t describe my childhood as flawless or serene. (Some years later, when I announced my decision to go to divinity school, my sister observed that I was moving from a bickerage to a vicarage.) But neither was my childhood inordinately painful or scarring. I played Little League baseball in the spring and Pop Warner football in the fall. In the winter I played ice hockey and skied. My father was head of personnel for a large investment bank and commuted with a great many of my friends’ parents into lower Manhattan, gathering like pigeons every morning at that train station by the movie theater. My mother was an editor at a travel magazine but left the publication in her early thirties to stay home and raise my sister and me. My father was ten years older than she was. Their marriage was certainly not exempt from the strangeness that marked the 1970s, but its strains had more to do with the idiosyncratic characters of my parents than with the nature of their friends. As far as I know, no one was swapping spouses at pool parties in July and August. And though I occasionally smelled marijuana, the drug of choice in that circle was clearly brown liquor: The adults encouraged one another to drink scotch the way they insisted their children drink milk.

As a teenager I listened to a lot of heavy-metal and punk music, and I papered my bedroom walls with posters of athletes and rock stars. I had girlfriends, but, in a pattern that would continue through college and into my adult life, I withdrew as soon as it became evident that the relationship was reaching what airline pilots call the V1 point, that point of decision: Either we lifted off and became a very serious couple or we aborted the takeoff and went our separate ways. Invariably I chose to slow the engines if my girlfriend showed no sign of decelerating first.

At some point in high school, when my history class was focused on the Roman Empire, my interest in all things Grand Guignol and sensational found a new fixation: the Crucifixion. My father had been raised a Baptist in southern Vermont-one of the reasons, I imagine, that I wound up here-and my mother was a Presbyterian from a nearby suburb in Westchester. I had gone to Sunday school at the local Baptist church along with my older sister until I was seven, but by the time I was in second grade, we stopped attending church with any regularity. My parents had been worn down by their bickering, their constant late nights on Fridays and Saturdays, my father’s job, and the simple demands of raising their two children. We became Easter and Christmas Christians, making it to church roughly twice a year, and my spiritual quest as a Christian was stalled somewhere between second grade and my adolescent desire to sleep till noon most Sunday mornings.

The Crucifixion changed that. The whole idea that an empire as seemingly civilized as Rome’s-in the movies that formed my conception of the ancient world, the Romans were always extremely mannered and would have passed easily in Bronxville or Pelham-saw crucifixion as a reasonable and relatively common form of justice mesmerized me. I was appalled, but I was also fascinated. We’ll never know exactly how many men were crucified when the revolt of Spartacus the slave was finally suppressed, but one account suggests that six thousand crosses lined the road between Capua and Rome. Of course, it wasn’t the sheer numbers that made crucifixion at once abominable and hypnotic, it was the grotesque particulars of the execution. Nails as thick as Magic Markers and about five inches in length pounded through the bones in the palms of one’s hands or-after the Romans had perfected their technique-through the bones in the wrists. Another, even longer nail, a shade under seven inches in the case of the crucified skeleton excavated at Giv’at ha-Mivtar-was banged through the heels of both feet. Or the ankles. Or the metatarsals traversing the arch. (Wander for even half an hour through the Uffizi in Florence: For nearly a millennium, the great artists in Europe were drawn to those nails.) Bodies would hang on a cross in the Mediterranean heat for hours or-not infrequently-two and three days, the criminal or the prisoner wide awake, in unspeakable agony.

And yet it wasn’t usually those nails that killed the victim. It was asphyxiation. Eventually neither the victim’s arms nor his legs could support his chest a moment longer, and the weight of his own body conspired with gravity to press shut his lungs.

This was torture of a most grisly sort, the kind of violence against the flesh that in my opinion novelists and filmmakers rarely have equaled. Only people (and by that I mean both individuals and groups of individuals working in concert as mobs and, alas, as nations) of a strikingly malevolent disposition are capable of such madness. Such cruelty. Such evil. The idea that someone, Jesus Christ, would subject himself to it willingly haunted me. I remember one Easter weekend I rented all the biblical epics the video store had in stock and watched them for hours on end. That month I pored over the different accounts I had found of the day Christ died. Bishop, Bouquet, and William; Morton and Zeitlin and the writers-four or forty or four hundred in number, we’ll never know for sure-behind the Synoptic Gospels and that especially mystical fourth one, the Gospel According to John.

In college, the sort of small liberal-arts school where many of us from Bronxville would go, it was only natural that I would continue what had been my solitary and ill-defined studies in a more structured manner. I majored in religion. I started going to chapel. Then, when I pondered career choices as a senior, I kept coming back to the reality that what had interested me most for the past eight years had been religion, and why one man-a man who without a doubt in my mind had indeed walked this earth some two thousand years ago, regardless of whether he really was who he said he was-would be willing to die on the cross. I applied to a variety of divinity schools and seminaries and chose one known for its liberal theology and worldliness, just outside Boston. I wasn’t notably zealous when I arrived at the seminary and for a time regretted that I hadn’t simply joined the Peace Corps or become a schoolteacher in (pick one) an inner city or Appalachia or on a Navajo reservation: Either path, Peace Corps or public-school teacher, it seemed to me, would have been a far better way to make a meaningful difference in the world. This was especially true since initially I imagined that my studies in divinity school were most likely to result in my teaching religion someday at precisely the sort of college from which I had graduated. That, in a vague way, was my plan.

But I did believe that Christ had died on the cross and then risen. And with an increasingly warm feeling-not exactly ardor, but certainly absorption-I began to see the possibility of a life of service in the ministry. I envisioned a country parish in New England, a congregation not unlike the Baptist church that my grandparents had attended in Vermont. Toward the end of my third and final year, the expressed needs of the pulpit committee from a little church in Haverill, Vermont, were paired with my expressed desires. There was some concern from the committee that I was unmarried: Like many churches, they wanted their pastor to have a wife, if only because a minister’s spouse actually does a good deal of the heavy lifting when it comes to running a church. But their instinct was that I would not cause them public scandal or betray their trust, and soon enough I would find a wife. The church was a little more than an hour from my grandparents’, and the pastor there assured the deacons and stewards in Haverill that the Drews were good people, essentially vouching for my character though he knew me only in the most distant way: as the grandson of Foster and Amy Drew, both newly departed, and the son of Richard Drew, who had left Vermont some four and a half decades earlier.

Their instinct, of course, was wrong on both counts. But at the time it had looked like a reasonable match, and for fourteen years it had seemed to most of the world to have worked.

“WHERE IS KATIE now?” Heather Laurent asked me that Tuesday afternoon, as we sat on the porch. The sun was finally burning its way through the milky shroud above and was just starting its slow descent to the west. The shadows from the trees began spreading like moss across my backyard.

“She’s with Alice’s best friend, Ginny O’Brien. So are Alice’s parents-Katie’s grandparents. They drove here from Nashua on Monday morning as soon as they heard. They’ve been here ever since.”

“They’ll be in Haverill through the funeral?”

“Oh, most definitely. And probably beyond.”

“And George’s family?”

“They come from somewhere outside of Buffalo. They’re staying in Albany.”

“Keeping their distance.”

“Yes.”

“Have you spoken to the families?”

“I have: both families.”

“You know, Alice’s funeral service is going to be a circus,” she murmured, and she noticed for the first time the swallows that were nesting under a porch eave over my shoulder. The mother bird seemed content to allow me to share the space with her-she had, after all, built her nest right here-but only rarely did the male remain beside her when I wandered out onto the deck. A deacon who loved animals had nicknamed them Lil and Phil.

“It will be large,” I agreed. “But the worst will be the presence of Katie’s friends. All those teenagers and the Youth Group. Though Alice’s friends will be sobbing, it will be the tears of the teenagers that will be hardest for me to see from the pulpit. But I wouldn’t expect it to be a circus.”

“There will be media.”

“True.”

“It’s going to be a hard one for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I’d say it will be rather unpleasant.”

“When is it?”

“Thursday. Day after tomorrow.”

“I presume it will be at your church.”

“Of course.”

She took a breath and sighed. She rubbed her arms as if she were cold, but that wasn’t likely the reason on this particular afternoon. I noticed for the first time that she had a pianist’s fingers: slender and long, with impeccably manicured nails. She had coated them with a clear polish that picked up the sun when she held her hands the right way. “That poor child,” she said softly. “That poor, poor child.”

“Young woman,” I corrected her. “She’s fifteen.”

“Do you know her well?”

“I do. She’s smart. Funny. She’s going places. She’s not really active in the Youth Group anymore. I wish she were. But she’s a good kid, a good student. She’s usually in the school dramas and musicals. Right now her major form of adolescent defiance is a small stud in her right nostril.”

“Her father let her do that?”

“It was a surprise to both parents. Her father did not take it well,” I said, though I knew he had punished only Alice.

“I remember when I first pierced my ears.”

“Rebellion?”

“Emancipation.”

“Katie will do okay. She’ll get through this.”

“Yes, she will. But I still hate to see in my mind the things she’s probably witnessed in that home over the years. Has she been back to the house yet?”

“No. Some of us-her friend Tina’s mom, Ginny, me-packed the clothes that seemed most useful. Shoes. Sneakers. A nightgown. Cosmetics, some jewelry. But I have no idea if we brought the items that really mattered to her. The right hoodie, for instance. The right jeans. The right teddy bear. Think back to your adolescence and what your room was like when you were fifteen-how many outfits you probably tried on before you found what you really wanted to wear. The piles of stuff on the floor were just unbelievable. The mounds of clothes. The piles of DVDs and CDs and books. The cords for iPods and cell phones and her laptop, as well as her laptop itself. I had no idea which music mattered to her and which didn’t-what she had already put on her iPod and what she was planning to download when she had some time to kill. She actually had a bureau drawer filled with nothing but trolls and tins of jewelry and rub-on tattoos. Maybe she hadn’t touched it since she was seven. But maybe it was the most important thing in the room to her. I just had no idea. None of us did. So at some point Katie probably will go back to the house. She won’t ever live there again, because she’s only fifteen. But she will have to go back inside.”

“Oh, I disagree. She may want to go back. But anyone in the world would understand if she didn’t-if she refused to go back in there. I’m sure you or her friends or other parents would be more than willing to pack everything up for her.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Where will she live?” She seemed to ask the question with great care, perhaps because she was afraid I had been offended when she’d corrected me. Actually, I hadn’t been bothered at all. She had made sense.

“There are options,” I answered. “Her grandparents in Nashua are one possibility. But maybe she’ll live here in Haverill with the Cousinos-with her friend’s family. She might want to finish high school in Vermont and be with the kids she’s known since she was six.”

“And this Cousino family is okay with that?”

“So I gather.”

“Have you talked with Katie?”

“Yes.” This time I did find myself slightly affronted. As her pastor I had visited with Katie both yesterday and today, and so my answer may have sounded a little curt. Afterward I hoped I had sounded only surprised.

“How would you say she was doing?”

“She’s devastated, of course. In shock. But she’s doing what she needs to do,” I answered. It was the first thought that came into my mind. “She’s endured the questions the state police had about her parents, as well as the questions of a social worker and a therapist, and she’s volunteered all the information they could possibly want.”

“Is she incredibly angry with her father?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

She nodded. “But I’m sure she also feels some anger toward her mother.”

“For not getting out?”

“For allowing it to happen. For being a victim.”

“I imagine she’s feeling some of that, too.”

“I’d like to talk to her. She’s one of the reasons I’m here. Do you think that would be possible?”

“It’s certainly possible. But I’m not sure it’s appropriate. She already has a small army of grief counselors-amateurs and professionals-at her disposal,” I said.

“Is the house still a-what’s the expression?-a crime scene?”

“No. The state police and the investigators from the crime lab were done by the end of Monday afternoon. It was pretty obvious what had happened. A lot of yesterday is already a blur, but I think most of the official people were gone by four-thirty or five.”

“Ah, the official people.”

“You know what I mean. The medical examiner. The detectives.”

“Can I see the house? Or is that inappropriate, too?”

“The door’s locked. But I think Ginny has the key, if you’d like.”

“I don’t think like is exactly the right word,” she said. “But I do want to see the inside of the house.”

“A visit to the Book Depository while in Dallas?”

“Something like that.”

I shrugged. “I’ll call Ginny. The two of us can go for a visit.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’ve been asking me questions for the last half an hour.”

“Just why do you blame yourself for George and Alice Hayward’s deaths?”

“I don’t blame myself precisely,” I told her, careful to keep my voice even, a monotone of reasonability. “But I do fear that I gave Alice permission.”

“To die.”

“Yes.”

“At the baptism you told me about.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you marry them?”

“No. They were married in Bennington years before I met them.”

“Did you want her to leave him? Just kick him out-or get the heck out of that house herself and never go back?”

Yes, I thought, in hindsight I did want her to get out of that house. Briefly, perhaps, I even wanted her to move into mine. Into this parsonage. But of course I didn’t say that. Because no one knew. Because Alice and I had barely even tiptoed around such a notion, even when we were alone in her home and content in the fog of a postcoital torpor-when, usually, all things seem possible and all lovers are optimists.

“I did,” I answered simply. “I kept hoping she would take Katie and run. Go anywhere. Move in with her parents in Nashua. Move in with Ginny right here. Perhaps get a place of her own in Bennington.”

“It’s not that easy. Not emotionally, not financially.”

“I know. She was married to a reprehensible man. She would have needed someone willing to step up and protect her. Still, I wish… ”

“What do you wish?”

“I never want to see a marriage go belly-up.” It was not what I had planned to say, but I had to say something.

“Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder?”

“Something like that. And sometimes I’m afraid that she tried to preserve the marriage for Katie.”

“That’s completely ridiculous, you know.”

“I do. And sometimes I’m afraid that she clung to the marriage because she was afraid she didn’t know what would become of her if she didn’t.”

“The devil she knew?”

“Precisely.”

“What about her friends? What did they want?”

I understood what she was getting at, and she was correct. “I know Ginny wanted her to divorce him. She loathed George. Thought he was absolutely despicable. She was thrilled when Alice got a temporary relief-from-abuse order and he went to live in their cottage on Lake Bomoseen for a couple of months.”

“When was that?”

“Just before Valentine’s Day. He came back just before Memorial Day.”

“Not all that long ago.”

“No.”

“So she got a restraining order-”

“A temporary restraining order. The police served it while George was at his office one Monday afternoon. There was a hearing scheduled a week later. Neither Alice nor George ever showed up.”

“That’s common.”

“I gather. Tell me, are you married? I presume not, because you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I think I inquired largely because I wanted a respite from her questions. But it’s also possible that on some level I still felt the need to be pastoral-to give her the chance to talk about herself for a moment. I may have been phoning it in by then-I may have been phoning it in for months-but old habits die hard.

“I’m not. But someday I will be, if only because I have a six-year-old girl’s obsession with weddings,” she said, and she shook her head as if she were in the midst of some small, odd moment of rapture. “Of all the rites of passage a culture creates for itself, weddings are perhaps the most beautiful. And, perhaps, the most mysterious.”

“Well, I certainly preferred doing marriages to funerals.”

“Preferred? Why the past tense? Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

“No.”

“You really think you’re finished?” She smiled. “Come on, your faith is that fragile?”

I sighed. Across the street the small river burbled and one of the children there squealed. The swallow adjusted herself on her eggs, using her beak to pick at something invisible to me on her wing. And somewhere not all that far away, a dog barked. Years earlier, I recalled, when I had been a junior in college and a member in good standing of what some students dismissively called the God Squad, I had been asked-challenged, more precisely-by a classmate who viewed himself as an atheist to explain Auschwitz and cancer and typhoons in Bangladesh that drowned tens of thousands of people. As I sat on my porch that first afternoon with Heather Laurent, I wondered what I’d said; my world had shrunk to such a degree that I honestly couldn’t remember how I had responded. I wasn’t sure what I’d felt-other, of course, than any sentient person’s reasonable sadness-at all the funerals over which I had officiated and all the times I had sat beside beds in hospitals and homes and held people’s hands as they died. As my own father had expired in a hospital room and spoke his last words before he sank into unconsciousness: “Go. Just… go.” (I didn’t. My mother, my sister, and I would stay till the end.) I had watched them all depart with what must have seemed to them as confidence and composure, my faith as solid and intact as the heavy pasta pot that hung on a hook above the parsonage stove. But something was different now: It was as if age or rust had worn a great hole in the bottom of that pot and my faith had trickled out like warm water. There were no answered prayers here. And so instead of addressing Heather’s question, I observed, “With everything that must be going on in your life right now, you’ve come here.”

“And that surprises you.”

“It astonishes me.”

“It shouldn’t,” she said.

“No?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. My father used to beat the living hell out of my mother.”

My stomach lurched a little bit at the revelation, but years of pastoral hand-holding kept me from reacting in any visible way, and I mouthed the words I’d probably said hundreds of times every year of my ministerial life: “I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

“Don’t be. You weren’t the one who hit her.”

“Still… I’m sorry.”

“No, no, no. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dropped the bombshell on you like that. I’m used to most people knowing.”

“Knowing?”

“A lot of their story is in Angels and Aurascapes.”

“Are they divorced?”

She gazed out at the maples behind my house and then looked me squarely in the eye. “They’re dead. When I was fourteen, a few months after my sister and I were sent away to boarding school, my father killed my mother-and then killed himself.”

… and then killed himself.

The head of the school, who had been deferring to the school psychiatrist for most of the past half hour, finally spoke. He asked my sister and me what we wanted to do, but neither of us answered him. We couldn’t, because neither of us was capable of giving him the answers he needed. What did I want to do? My God, I was fourteen years old. I wanted to bring my mother back. I wanted to go back in time. I wanted to know where I was going to live-who was going to take care of me. I wanted to learn how to drive. Those were the things that crossed my mind in response to his question, those were the first desires that came to me. And what did my sister want? She was sixteen, she probably wanted pretty much the same things and to have the same sorts of answers. And the headmaster could grant us absolutely none of our desires or answer our most basic questions.

I understood, of course, that traveling back in time and getting my mother back were implausible wishes and never going to happen. But as we sat in the headmaster’s office, I imagined quite concretely what I would do if I could drive-what, to go back to that initial question of his, I wanted.

And I understood I wanted this: I wanted to drive to my grandmother’s house in upstate New York and explain to her that I was all finished with this fine school in New England. And then I wanted to go to one of the huge shopping malls near the old air force base in Plattsburgh, the ones kept in business by the Canadians, and buy all the clothes that my father had forbidden me from wearing and that my mother said I didn’t dare bring into the house. I wanted, in essence, to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps that revealed my shoulders and tight-fitting shorts made from blue jeans that had been faded almost to a robin’s egg blue. I wanted to get my ears pierced at the kiosk in the corridor by the poster-and-frame shop in the mall, and then I wanted to buy earrings. Lipstick. Mascara.

I wanted to drive my friends to my house, and I wanted them all to sit with me on the front porch without fearing that my father would embarrass me with his temper or my mother with her drinking.

That, I realized, was what I wanted to do.

And, fortunately, those images of not-unconventional teenage taste crowded out the reality of what had actually happened to my mother at the hands of my father.

Still, I hadn’t spoken aloud any of this, I hadn’t answered the head of the school’s question. Finally, after the sort of conversational lull that’s polite only after someone has died, he turned to my sister and asked Amanda what she wanted to do.

“I want to go home,” I heard Amanda tell him, her voice appropriately subdued. She was an aspiring painter at the time and even then savored her solitude.

The head of the school nodded and smiled gently. This was the right response, even if home-technically still that cold and massive Victorian, which, despite the resources of both my parents’ families, was in desperate need of a good scraping and painting-was about to become a pretty vague place.

“And you, Heather?” he asked again. “What would you like?”

“A shirt with spaghetti straps,” I answered. “And pierced ears.”

CHAPTER FIVE

That afternoon Heather shared with me an abbreviated but nonetheless harrowing account of her parents’ sordid and, in the end, horrific marriage. In some ways its trajectory was eerily similar to the Haywards’. But, of course, in other ways it had its own idiosyncrasies and detours. Tolstoy was right about families. The most salient feature of her parents’ marriage was money: Both Alex and Courtney Laurent came from what my mother would refer to as “families with means,” though I am not sure that expression does justice to the veritable bank vaults that subsidized the Laurents. Apparently Alex and Courtney had grown accustomed to getting everything, needing nothing, and behaving in a fashion that suggested a complete uninterest in the responsibilities that came with all those advantages. The result, in Heather’s opinion, is that her father was selfish and spoiled, while her mother was entitled and helpless. It was, in her mother’s case, almost a learned helplessness. And so while Courtney Laurent had the fiscal resources at her disposal that most abused women lack, she would have needed someone to remind her of the reality that she had alternatives. Options. But Alex, in the tradition of most batterers, had seen to it by then that she was more or less entombed in the marriage: cut off from her family, out of touch with her closest friends. The Laurents had more money and more connections than the Haywards (though the Haywards were, by any fiscal barometer, extremely comfortable) and thus made a much bigger media splash when Alex Laurent shot his wife in the living room and then killed himself, but otherwise the scaffolding of the tragedy was not dissimilar.

Later Heather and I ventured to Ginny O’Brien’s to retrieve the key to the Hayward house. Unlike me, Ginny knew exactly who Heather Laurent was, and in the woman’s presence her demeanor was transformed from shaken and grieving to a little giddy. She was suddenly a bit like a hyperactive puppy, and I was reminded of the Haywards’ affectionate but needy springer spaniel. Ginny had read Angels and Aurascapes, and when I introduced them, she told the author how much the book had meant to her-and how she had already marked A Sacred While as “to read” on all her online book forums and discussion groups, and suggested to the church book group that they tackle the new one together that autumn. (My sense, now having read both of Heather’s books, is that Ginny most likely was made deeply uncomfortable by Heather’s chapters on the “auras of death” but saw the logic and importance of, once in a while, taking a long walk in the woods with an angel.) We did not see either Katie or her grandparents, but I hadn’t expected we would. I had spent a part of the morning with the three of them in my office at the church, and I knew they had a variety of errands that afternoon that ranged from the merely unpleasant to the downright ghoulish. They were seeing the mortician in Bennington, for instance, to pick out a casket, and deciding whether Alice should be buried in the cemetery in Haverill or with other members of her family in Nashua. I knew that her parents were going to choose Nashua soon enough and were simply trying to spare the feelings of Alice’s friends and her pastor in Vermont. But they were nonetheless taking the time to visit the cemetery, an act of due diligence that couldn’t have been easy.

George’s body-its eternal resting place was of great interest to Alice’s mother and father-was going to be buried back in Buffalo, which mattered because Alice’s family wanted to be sure that she was nowhere near the man who had killed her. Ginny, too. Ginny, however, had recommended cremating George Hayward, “since that vicious bastard’s soul is already roasting in hell, anyway.”

Still, I could tell by Ginny’s puffy eyes that she had cried again that afternoon, suggesting to me that her anger was being subsumed by far healthier grief. She had found the strength to pull a comb through her hair and don a clean, creased polo shirt. Behind the house I could hear the growl of a lawn mower and the almost hypnotic way the noise waxed and waned like a wave.

“How are the boys?” I asked as we stood in the front hallway.

“Dan’s doing a little better than Walter. I sent Walter to the movies with everyone else,” she told me.

“That was a good idea.” Both children were in middle school. Dan was eleven and Walter thirteen. I knew both boys well, and I wasn’t surprised that Walter was taking the Hayward tragedy hard. He was a little closer to Katie’s age and he was, by nature, more sensitive than most teenage males. I wondered how I would have responded at thirteen if my mother’s best friend had been strangled by her husband.

“Yes. Anything to get him out of here for a while,” said Ginny. Then she added, “That’s Dan back there. He said he wanted to do something, so Walter showed him how to cut the grass. It’s his first time.”

After we had the key, Heather signed Ginny’s copy of Angels and Aurascapes. The dust jacket was a carefully blurred photograph of a woman with windblown hair emerging nude from the sea, with what I presumed at first glance was a large beach umbrella behind her. It was only on the second look that I realized the umbrella was actually a seashell the size of a schooner sail and the sylph was a modern-day Venus. As we left, Heather told Ginny she would stop by later so she could chat with Katie and, if they were interested, her grandparents. I suppose I should have felt threatened. Mostly I was bemused.

Then Heather and I went to the house where not two full days earlier George and Alice had died. We had taken my car, an American-made compact with camel-colored seats that felt awfully shabby compared to her Saab, and we drove up into the hills that circle the village of Haverill like an amphitheater. We passed the library and the grange and the volunteer fire department, where a group of boys in knee pads and shorts were riding their in-line skates and skateboards on the sloping asphalt before the company’s three-bay garage. We passed a sugarhouse, dormant since the first week in April, where two attractive but slightly dim yellow Labs that belonged to a family named McKenna were barking at the remnants of a fallen tree, as if the gnarled, rotting trunk were a crocodile. Occasionally, despite my frustration and grief, I found myself stealing a surreptitious glance at Heather’s legs as she sat in the passenger seat beside me. Her skirt had ridden up high on her thigh. Her stockings were nude, the type Alice had worn to the bank in the spring and, I assumed, in the early autumn-though I had never watched Alice dress in the early autumn.

We even passed the Brookners’ pond, where I had baptized Alice, a shallow bowl of brown water no more than forty or fifty yards from the road. Over the years the occasional car had driven by while I’d been in the midst of those infrequent baptisms. The vehicles always made the immersion more moving to me, because they made it such a powerfully public statement: strangers passing by behind glass, perhaps unbelievers, witnesses to the short but unfathomable statement each soul was making that moment in the water-I believe. Now joined with Christ Jesus by baptism, just as Christ was raised from the dead, someday so shall I.

There.

And we passed the cemetery at the top of the hill, with its markers and headstones and underground boxes of ash, the souls, it seemed to me that afternoon, gone not to heaven but merely to seed.

“This really is a pretty corner of New England,” Heather said as I drove, and her voice pulled me from my little reverie of self-pity and gloom. I turned from the cemetery to her. Her earrings, I noticed, were gold studs with a small blue stone in each. “I hope you appreciate the aura of intimacy that envelops it.”

I had absolutely no idea what to say to that and so I simply nodded and turned my eyes back to the road.

“AND YOU WERE here Monday morning?” Heather asked me. There was a slight torpor to her voice, but her eyes were moving like the pendulum on a metronome as she carefully surveyed the living room.

“Oh, I was here through early Monday evening.” The investigators from the state’s crime lab had taken what they needed and left. And while they had scrubbed away a good portion of the tumult in their work, there was still plenty left for those of us who wanted to help. Beside a window next to the couch where George’s body was found, was a small china cabinet with beveled-glass doors. With my hands in thick rubber gloves, I had used a sponge to wipe skull and brain from one long pane of glass. Then I had pulled bone chips and hair from the screen window just above it. The bullet, after perforating the skull and traveling through the cranium, had been extracted from the wall not far from that window by a member of the crime lab.

“And this was the room where it happened?” she went on. The fact she had to ask was a testimony to our work.

“Indeed.”

“You know,” she said, “in books and movies, couples always fight in their bedrooms. Isn’t that something? It’s as if writers and filmmakers want to vilify the domestic center of love. But, in my opinion, that’s one of those great artistic conventions that’s absolutely wrong.”

“Is this wisdom gleaned from your parents’ history or your conversations with readers?”

She picked up a small pile of compact discs that were lying on the floor beside a particleboard entertainment center. I recognized the artists that Alice liked best and presumed that the rest of the discs had been selected by George. I realized I knew which ones she had transferred onto her own iPod. “Both,” Heather said as she flipped through the discs the way, once, I would have looked through a pack of baseball cards.

“If people don’t fight in their bedrooms, where do they battle?”

As if they were delicate antique plates, Heather placed the discs back on the floor where she had found them. “You really have led a sheltered life. You’ve never lived with anyone, have you? Not ever?” She said it with good humor, as if she were making fun of a costume I might have chosen for a Halloween party or a souvenir T-shirt I had brought back from Cape Cod. It was as if she were commenting upon something that was really of little importance to me.

“Not ever,” I said simply. Then, a bit defensively, I added, “As Ire-call, my parents didn’t have a special room to work out their issues. They bickered everywhere they felt like it.”

A line of photo albums sat on a shelf like volumes from that most dispensable of books in the digital age, an encyclopedia. Heather stared at them for a long moment, clearly desirous of reaching for one and opening it.

“So where do most people fight?” I asked again.

“The kitchen. Followed by the rooms that have the television sets. In some homes that’s a living room. In others it’s a den.”

“The TV’s a bad influence?”

“Oh, I don’t think TV is a good influence. But it’s not the reason. It just happens to be in those rooms that people inhabit the most often.” She finally gave in to her desire to see the pictures of George and Alice Hayward that were more revealing than the small head shots of each that had been in the newspapers, on television, and on the Web the past two days. She pulled the album that was most accessible from the shelf and began to flip through the pages. And then, much to my surprise, the smallest of whimpers-barely more than a sigh-escaped her lips, and she sat down in the chair opposite the couch where George’s body had been found. Her knees almost seemed to buckle like the legs of a portable card table. She wiped at her eyes, but it was too late. She was crying, and it was obvious.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know quite how this happened.”

Usually I am fairly competent when it comes to crying women-or, for that matter, with crying men. A minister, even an unmarried one, embraces with impunity. But I wasn’t myself those days; the truth was, even now I’m not wholly sure whom I had become. And so I allowed her to regain a semblance of her usual composure-a demeanor, I had concluded, that was at once so unflappably serene (I would say ethereal, but, given her interest in angels, that would suggest I attributed a layer of autobiography to her books that she never intended) and so completely earnest that I had begun to understand her popularity. Certainly she was beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful women in this world. It was that she was telegenic: an individual whose competence was manifest and whose sincerity was phosphorescent. Her charisma was high-definition. She was the perfect pitchwoman for celestial guardians in the digital world.

Finally I leaned over and glanced at the pictures that had set her off. They were of Katie alone and of Katie and Alice together.

“She’s going to be so pretty,” she sniffled, referring to the now-orphaned fifteen-year-old.

“She already is,” I said, but mostly I was focused on Heather. On how, despite my despair and my culpability and my innumerable failures as a minister and as a man, I could appreciate how lovely this woman was. I thought she might be a bit of a lunatic. But I also felt an undeniable attraction to her that managed to bob safely in the maelstrom of other emotions that would have taken precedence in a person of character-or at least in a person not unmoored-and sent it corkscrewing slowly but ceaselessly to the very bottom of the ocean.

She was studying a group of photos, some of which I had already seen on the Facebook and MySpace pages of teens in the Youth Group. (I should tell you that I only visited those pages with the teenagers themselves, when they wanted to share a digital album with me at Youth Group or, for one reason or another, after school.) There was Katie with some of her friends making faces beneath a Broadway marquee in Manhattan; there she and her mother were-again, making silly faces-in bathing suits somewhere near their cottage on Lake Bomoseen. There she was with her grandparents from Nashua, a whole page of photos taken the previous Christmas. There was a series of Katie on the church van: literally, sitting on top of it with some members of the Youth Group, a Red Sox cap shading much of her face. It was one of the last times I would recall her going anywhere with the Youth Group.

“You told me you’ve never been married,” I said. “I assume you don’t have any children.”

“No, I don’t. But I’d love to someday.”

“Think it’s in the cards?”

“If the right man is, maybe. But I have no interest in being a heroic single mother.”

She flipped some more pages, and there was Katie beside her friend Tina Cousino’s ancient gray Appaloosa. The horse had gone blind and lame and been euthanized a little over a year ago and was buried in a field by the Cousinos’ house. Tina and Katie had choreographed a small service that had left me both moved and impressed. They had asked me to eulogize the animal, and I had. And there were Katie and Alice together approaching the summit of Mount Equinox, a hike they had taken with a woman from Alice’s bank toward the very end of that period when Alice and George had been estranged. Mid-May, I recalled.

“There aren’t very many of Alice and George together, are there?” she murmured.

“Well, not in this album, anyway.”

“I’d wager there aren’t many of George Hayward, period. If the pattern holds, he controlled the camera in the early years of the marriage, and so he took most of the pictures. Then, as their marriage deteriorated, they spent less time together in the sorts of situations that… someone would want to photograph.”

“That’s probably true. Most people rarely saw them together over the last few years. Maybe at a parade. Maybe at the volunteer firefighters’ annual chicken barbecue. Maybe at a business fete of some sort in Manchester.”

“George was a volunteer firefighter?”

“He was for a while. He quit a few years ago, when he opened his third business. But he was still friends with some of the guys.”

The room smelled of cleanser and disinfectant. It was a bad smell to me at that moment, almost a little sickening, and so I opened another window.

“Who gardened?”

“Alice.”

“These pictures of tomatoes should be on seed packets.”

“She was a good gardener, no doubt about it. You should peek at her garden before you leave.”

Heather started to nod and then stopped. She was staring at old Easter photos, and George was in these. He was sitting between Katie and Alice on the very couch on which he would die, and for the briefest of seconds I presumed she had paused simply because here, at last, was a photo of George Hayward. But that wasn’t it, and I understood this almost instantly. It was, of course, the couch. She stared across the room at the wall where two days earlier there had been a couch. Now there was only a side table we had pressed against the Sheetrock to fill the void.

“You removed the couch,” she said, and the idea seemed to horrify her.

“We couldn’t clean it,” I said. “And so Ginny suggested we just haul it in a pickup truck to the dump.”

LATER I SHOWED her Alice and George’s bedroom, a room with which I did have some familiarity, and Katie’s room, with which I had almost none. I knew its location, little else, because Alice respected her daughter’s privacy. The first time I really had been in there had been the day before, when that group of us had rounded up the sorts of things we thought Katie would want or would need.

And then I drove the two of us back to the parsonage, and she climbed into her Saab and returned to Ginny’s house to wait for Katie. Later I would learn that she had stayed for dinner and she and Katie had taken one of those long walks at sunset that Heather claimed in her books were so healing. Ginny would tell me-realizing only when she was done speaking that such tidings might have been hurtful-that Heather’s effect on Katie Hayward had been almost transformative. Apparently Heather had known precisely how to comfort the girl; she had said whatever it was that Katie needed to hear to be reassured that she would get through this, she would survive, she would never be alone. She would be held up by an angel, her sagging soul kept aloft by wings that might be invisible but were nonetheless as strong and tangible as an eagle’s.

“Of course, you’ve helped Katie, too!” Ginny said when she was done, an afterthought that was awkward but still very well intentioned. “Heather has just… you know, lived through this. She can relate to what Katie is experiencing.”

“I’m fine,” I told Ginny, because I was. Ginny was right. Heather could provide Katie much better therapy than I, and not simply because-like Katie-she was an orphan whose father had murdered her mother. Unlike me, Heather still saw poetry in thunderheads and divinity in coincidence. The world, for her, still offered promise. “I’m glad Heather was here for Katie,” I added. “And I’m glad she was here for you, too.”

AFTER LEAVING GINNY’S, Heather returned to the loft in which she lived in Manhattan. It was, she had insisted earlier that afternoon, a pretty modest place, a condo she had chosen that offered little in the way of amenities or style but was rich in memory and aura. I had the sense she was being coy: I knew that part of SoHo. She must have gotten home after midnight.

I resolved that I would remain in Haverill through Alice’s funeral. I would carry out my responsibilities as best I could for the next forty-eight hours, helping the town in the manner that was expected of me. I would talk more with Katie and her grandparents, as well as with George’s mother and father, who as far as I knew would be in Albany and southern Vermont at least one more night. I would greet people at the funeral home during the calling hours on Wednesday evening. I would pray with the people who wanted me to pray with them, and I would visit the sick and the dying and the parishioners who were confused by the carnage that had occurred in our midst. I would offer comfort and counsel.

As soon as Heather’s car had disappeared down the road to Ginny’s, I went to my office at the church and sat down with the church secretary, a remarkable woman named Betsy Storrs who had been working at the church a full decade before I arrived and had the demeanor of a grandmother (which she was) and the efficiency of a presidential secretary. At fifty-eight she learned to design websites, and our church’s site was the envy of the Baptist churches in our corner of New England. Together Betsy and I determined which meetings I should attend in the coming days and which ones I could miss, as well as which parishioners were most needy at the moment-the most distraught at what had occurred, the most shaken-and which ones were merely whiners hoping to leverage a murder-suicide for a little extra TLC.

I should note that although Betsy helped with the triage, she never viewed her fellow parishioners in quite so misanthropic a fashion, especially in those days before I disappeared. I should also note that I was not always such a brooding, unsympathetic soul. Did I always have exactly the wrong constitution for a country pastor? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Though I had slid into my calling, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right path. At least initially. At least for a time. The fact is, it would be a very long while before I would view anyone in my flock as a whiner.

When I was about to leave the church, I peered into the sanctuary and saw Joanie Gaylord kneeling alone in prayer before the chancel rail. We don’t kneel in prayer in my church, but Joanie-seventy-three that summer, an age and a birthday I knew well because Joanie was a prayer warrior and I never once missed one of her birthday parties-was on her knees that evening. I found this interesting and went to kneel beside her. The Women’s Circle had met that week at her home.

“Would you pray with me?” she asked.

“Of course I will,” I said softly, and I took her arthritic hand in mine while she prayed in silence beside me. We stayed like that for easily ten minutes, my mind straying into its more despairing alcoves despite my efforts to focus, before she cleared her throat and I opened my eyes.

“I wish I had known,” she said.

“About George?”

“Yes. I wish she had told us. I wish Ginny had told us. I would have done something.”

“Do you think it might have ended differently?”

She reached for the rail and with what looked like a great effort pushed herself to her feet, and so I stood up as well. “I do. I really do.”

“You were there for her in more ways than you know,” I reassured her. “You meant a lot to her.”

“Do you think?”

“I know,” I said, drawing the verb out with practiced pastoral emphasis. The last thing Joanie Gaylord either needed or deserved was to shoulder the sort of guilt that would be mine for as long as I lived.

TOWARD DINNERTIME, WHEN I thought Ron Dobson and Illa Gove would be back from their jobs in Bennington and Manchester, I phoned each of them. Ron chaired the Church Council and had been one of my closest friends since I’d come to Haverill. He had been my assistant coach those years I’d coached Little League, and his older son-now a shortstop on the high-school team and an active leader in the church Youth Group-had been our lone athletic bright spot. Good hitter, good fielder, good speed. Our team was never especially talented, and we never won more than four or five games a season, but I believe we always had massive amounts of fun. Illa was the leader of the Board of Deacons and Stewards that met at the church on Wednesday nights and a counselor by day at the shelter for teens at risk, in Bennington. I told Ron I’d like to drop by his house after supper, if it wouldn’t be an inconvenience, and then I asked Illa if she’d mind leading her board meeting alone. I explained that I would be greeting guests at the funeral home about that time. She said she would be happy to.

Later, while Ron’s wife was upstairs reading aloud to their young son and daughter, I told him without preamble that I was going to leave Haverill. I told him I was having a breakdown of sorts-not exactly a nervous breakdown, but a spiritual one. And in my profession a spiritual breakdown was every bit as debilitating as a nervous one. Maybe more. And so I was taking an emergency leave, I was going away. It might be for a week, it might be for a month. It might be forever. But I would be gone not long after the last of the mourners had left the sanctuary on Thursday.

At first Ron simply listened and nodded, occasionally rubbing his lantern of a jaw or adjusting the massive inner-tube-size doughnut that stretched tight the thin fabric of his short-sleeved summer shirt. He asked, more as my friend than as a trustee, whether I was planning to check myself into a hospital or a retreat, and then he wanted to know how to reach me when I told him I wasn’t. It was clear that he was struggling with his dual role as friend and church leader, and he began to worry about the concrete logistics that affected the congregation.

“I’ll make sure there’s a substitute pastor in the pulpit on Sunday,” I said. “And I’ll make sure there’s someone here in town on a more permanent basis by early next week.”

“Permanent?”

“Interim, I guess. Someone who can be here for a… while.”

“What about Ken?” he asked, referring to the deacon who was dying of cancer. “What if he dies when you’re gone?”

“If there’s a heaven, I’ll see him there. If there isn’t? Well, then, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I meant the funeral. The family will need you to do it, not some substitute they don’t know.”

He was right, and I found myself wondering if, when that time came, I would have it in me to do what I had to do and not let down that kind and pious family. “We’ll see,” I said simply.

“That’s not very helpful.”

“I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than you know. But that’s my point. I can’t be very helpful right now. I can’t be helpful at all.”

“Look, I just don’t want you to burn any bridges. I just don’t want there to be any hard feelings when you decide to come back.”

“And if I don’t?”

“One return at a time,” he said, shrugging. Dobson was an accountant with a small firm of his own. “One return at a time” was his mantra in March and April, when he and his partner were swamped by wave upon wave of returns. “My guess is we won’t put anybody else in the parsonage while you’re gone.”

“I will understand if you do.”

He shook his head. “This Hayward thing is tough on everyone. For all you know, you’re just tired.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’ll bet if you thought about it, you’d realize you felt a lot like this when some other people had died.”

“You’d lose that bet,” I said, and the moment the words were out there in the air between us-harsh words, needless and abrupt-I knew it was time to leave. I apologized, but it was too late. We stood almost at the same second, embraced awkwardly, and when I walked into the still-balmy night air, the only emotion I felt was relief.

IF, ON THE surface, I was not at my best the rest of that week, I was adequate. I did my job. I found time after the calling hours at the funeral home to meet with a half dozen teens in the Youth Group who wanted to talk, and though the group was somber and troubled, by the time they left my living room near eleven P.M., their faith was on considerably surer footing than mine. I had two breakfasts that Thursday morning, an early one with the deacons to make sure that the transition to the interim pastor would be smooth and then a later one with Katie Hayward, her grandparents, Ginny and Harry O’Brien, and the Cousino family. The purpose of that meal? Comfort and connection and communion of a more secular sort.

Alice’s body was in its casket at the church that Thursday morning, though she was not going to be buried in Haverill. As I suspected, Alice went home to New Hampshire. And though the local mortician, an eccentric elderly gentleman whose funeral parlor was known for the exotic birds he kept, had been able to make her corpse presentable, Alice’s family had decided upon a closed casket. (George’s face, he would confess to me later, could have been reconstructed and made viewable, but he said he was just not inclined to do what he called his “best work” on it, and so that would be a closed casket, too.)

As Heather had predicted, Alice’s funeral was so crowded that one of the stewards had to set up a video feed so the overflow of mourners in the common room below the sanctuary could watch, and we sat people in the choir loft behind me. The sanctuary was packed well beyond the capacity of our two sluggish ceiling fans, and I saw people sweating through their short-sleeved summer shirts (and others, undoubtedly, beneath their blazers), and I watched beads of perspiration run down some of their faces and mingle with tears. I think there must have been forty students from the high school alone in the church, many for the first time, and their faces-so guileless and sweet, despite the girls who were wearing too much eye shadow and lipstick and the boys who were struggling mightily to be too tough for tears-were the hardest for me to watch. Katie, of course, was a source of particular sadness for me. She wore a sleeveless, somewhat slinky black dress that might have been more appropriate at a cocktail party than at her mother’s funeral, but how many black dresses does a teenage girl in rural Vermont own? I was surprised she had even one, and my sense was that in the past she had worn it surreptitiously. George Hayward probably hadn’t even known it existed, though it was the sort of thing he sold without irony to teenage girls and college students at his store in Manchester Center. Her hair was pulled off her face, and she looked pale and a little blank to me. Numb. Her friends cried, but she didn’t, and I realized later it was because Ginny had given her a tranquilizer. She sat impassively as I spoke and Alice’s sister spoke and the choir sang and different people in the sanctuary stood up to offer their memories, mostly of Alice but twice of George. Alice’s father, a sickly-looking old man with skin that struck me as fishlike and was riddled with age spots the size of dimes, flinched when one of the volunteer firefighters reminded us of the countless hours George had devoted to the company and how he hoped that the man’s soul might, at last, find peace. George’s secretary, a svelte and powerfully built young woman who could have moonlit as a fitness trainer, said he had always been a good boss and that no one in his small empire would ever have thought he was capable of such violence. (Instantly I was struck by the salacious and unfounded notion that she and George had been lovers.) No one, in my opinion, tried to grandstand for the media.

And among that great crowd of mourners in the church? Heather Laurent. Yes, she did return. She got home after midnight on Tuesday, yet still drove back to Vermont first thing Thursday morning.

But when I left Haverill on Thursday evening-not like a thief in the night, in all fairness, since the deacons and Ron Dobson and I had made sure that an interim pastor would be there to hold the hands of the congregation after their minister had ostensibly had a nervous breakdown-I did not leave with Heather. Though later there would be gossip to that effect, we most assuredly did not decamp together. I knew how that would look. And I hadn’t known that she was coming back for the funeral. We did not meet up again until Saturday morning, when I showed up in the dark, warehouselike lobby of her building on Greene Street and pressed the ivory-colored call button beside her name. Upstairs she would tell me that she had hoped I would visit, but she hadn’t expected it. She told me she honestly hadn’t realized that I was still so willing to give myself over to my angel.

My father shot my mother on the night of the day that he learned she had taken a lease on another house, one that would be large enough for my sister and me when we were home from school. This was as clear a signal as he needed that this time she really was going to leave him. And so, late that night, he shot her and then killed himself. But he didn’t use the same gun. In fact, he didn’t use a gun, period, when he took his own life. Instead, after murdering my mother, he walked next door to our neighbors’ and left a note on the windshield of the car that the husband drove each morning to work. The note instructed the fellow to call the police immediately and to direct them to the Laurents’ house. He wasn’t to go there himself, and under no circumstances was he to call Heather or Amanda at boarding school. Then, after leaving the note pinned to the glass by the wiper blade, he went home, climbed the stairs to our attic, and hanged himself from an inner beam across the peak of our twelve-by-twelve-pitch roof.

CHAPTER SIX

Some months later that deputy state’s attorney with those lovely blue eyes and the name of a saint would tell me that she had thought I was a pretty cold fish from the moment we’d met that Monday morning after I had baptized Alice Hayward. This might have been posturing to elicit some sort of reaction from me, but it may also have been an honest and legitimate first impression. Certainly I had been anesthetized that day by guilt and despair: guilt that I had not realized why baptism had been so important to Alice the previous morning and despair at her death. Make no mistake: I was grieving as her former lover as well as her minister.

But in all fairness to Catherine Benincasa, I know also that there were parishioners who thought I was distant. Or, perhaps, that I had secrets. Cards that I was loath to reveal. No one verbalized such things prior to my departure, of course. It was only after I left that people’s secret doubts became rumor and gossip and innuendo.

I will be the first to admit that a pastor in a small town has enormous power over the people who come to church and even a fair amount over those who don’t. The directors or coordinators of easily a dozen organizations across the county-the dental clinic for low-income Vermonters, for example, the hospice, the women’s crisis center-would ask me to stand up for them at the town meeting the first Tuesday in March and thereby ensure that Haverill would vote to approve their budget requests.

And we have power in other, more invidious ways as well. There were temptations throughout the congregation, women-some half my age-whose eyes I would meet as I spoke Sunday mornings and whose gaze I would hold a second longer than was probably right. There were single women in the congregation who I know would have been happy to date me and married ones who would have risked the wrath of our small town had I shown any interest at all. Like any minister-not merely the Dimmesdales of fiction-in my little pond, I could have been either a big moral fish or a more complex sort of predator. Many of the parishioners I counseled were female and in a condition that could only be called vulnerable. And, because I am male, that ingrained desire to protect them invariably would kick in. Nevertheless, in most of my dealings, I strove for a moral compass that was sound. There were some women with whom I would flirt more shamelessly than with others, but they were always the parishioners who were happily married and understood that our flirations would never progress beyond vague intimations. In my fourteen years in Haverill, I had dated three women seriously, all of whom, it seemed to me, were unsuited to the life of a country pastor’s wife. None of them were from Haverill: One was from Albany, one was from Manchester, and one lived far to the north in Burlington. The woman from Manchester grew close to my congregation, and I think they were hurt-and saddened for me-when we did not walk down the aisle of my church together.

Yes, I did ask her, despite my misgivings about whether her constitution was right for the role that would be demanded of her if she agreed. She declined, and it was the first time in my life that a woman ended our relationship before I did.

But the only member of the Haverill United Church I ever slept with was Alice Hayward, and that was mostly (though, in truth, not always) in the period when George had moved to the cottage on the lake, where he would reside for a little more than one hundred days: An adult man separated from his wife and his daughter, but living alone in a second house alive with their detritus and scent. I did not, as one newspaper later would put it, pounce upon Alice the moment her husband was gone. But it is an inarguable fact that I took advantage of her precarious emotional health. I massaged the lower back that had been left contused-stripes that changed like the leaves from scarlet to sulfur-with a leather belt. I brought my lips to the stomach that once had carried her husband’s child and then would be beaten by that very man’s fists, at least twice to the point that she was left retching into the toilet.

And yes, the illicit nature of our activities-the way one moment we might be sitting fully clothed, chatting languorously on the rug in her living room, but in the next we would be naked on that floor and my tongue would be buried between her legs with a hunger I had never before experienced-energized my otherwise distressingly placid life.

But it is also a fact that I had never planned to take advantage of Alice Hayward. For a time I had even thought we were in love.

IT IS A Monday afternoon in March, and Alice and I are lying in her bed as the snow blows fiercely against the western window and the howl of the wind is cut only by the occasional rumble of the town plow and sand truck. This storm is arriving a little earlier than any of us expected.

In another hour Katie will be coming home, and so in a moment Alice and I will rouse ourselves, shower together, and get dressed. I plan to be gone long before her daughter’s bus will coast to a stop at the end of the Haywards’ driveway.

“You know,” Alice murmurs, her head resting on my chest, “he has his hurts, too.”

I know who she means, but for a brief second I nonetheless have to spool back in my head the discussion we were having, because on afternoons like this we tend to allow ourselves long, sumptuous pauses in our conversations. Sometimes we will doze and pick up the strand of an exchange a full five or ten minutes later.

“George,” I respond.

“His life was no picnic when he was growing up. All those brothers. My father-in-law can be horrible.”

“Well, he hasn’t made your life a picnic.”

“No. But it wasn’t always so… so troubled. And now… ”

“Go on.”

“I’ve taken away his daughter. He aches for her.”

I want to say that he brought that loss upon himself. But instead I merely listen. I think I have an idea where this is going, but I want to be sure.

“You know I don’t feel good about that,” she continues. “But I didn’t have a choice, did I?”

My arm is asleep, but still I am able to pull her against me. “No,” I reassure her, “you had absolutely no choice.” But as I had suspected-as I had feared-once more she is going to punish herself and recount things she feels she has done wrong in her marriage and the innumerable ways she drove her husband to hurt her. And this litany will end, as it does often, with her flagellating herself for being unfaithful. She will remind herself-and me-that George may have done some terrible things in this world, but he always, as far as she knows, was faithful.

I WENT TO visit my mother in Bronxville the Thursday night after the funeral, though she was sound asleep by the time I arrived. It was after midnight. But she had known I was coming, and so, as if I were nineteen rather than thirty-nine-a student returning home from college-she had stocked the refrigerator with beer and milk and Hostess cupcakes, which as a boy I had always preferred cold. Over breakfast on Friday morning, she asked me all the right questions about my future and whether (and here she was delicate) the deaths of two of my congregants were more of a personal or a pastoral crisis. I answered evasively by explaining that only one was a congregant and that I tended not to use that term in any event. On Friday the sky was a cerulean blue, and I walked alone for hours around the streets on which I had lived as a child and a teenage boy, loitering for a few moments before the slightly imposing Tudor in which I had grown up-a house not far from the swim and tennis club where my older sister would spend long summer days with her friends but that I always found less inviting and tended to avoid. I passed the school, an elegant, lengthy Georgian structure that looked like it belonged on a college campus, then the ball field and the library. That library and ball field and the village itself were far more likely to be my summer haunts than was the swim and tennis club. The town was a collection of hills, the roads laid out chaotically along the cow paths from the nineteenth century, the trees now tall and thick and statuesque, the houses substantial. Most of my neighbors, I would realize in high school, had money and advantages, but as a boy I had been largely oblivious to both. I was more aware of Mike Ferris’s humongous baseball-card collection, for example, and how content and secure I would feel trading cards and arguing baseball with him in his family’s screened porch as a thunderstorm would rumble in from the west.

That Friday as I walked along the sidewalk in the village, I detoured into the bookstore and bought Angels and Aurascapes and A Sacred While.

I had brought my laptop with me, and in the afternoon, as if I were consciously trying to give the investigation that soon would be launched interesting fodder, once again I surfed the Web for information about Alice Hayward (there was nothing I didn’t already know) and about domestic abuse and death by strangulation and gunshot. Some of those sites would come back to haunt me during the investigation, but it was all very innocent. While online I read reviews of Heather’s books and visited her website, and I found myself spending far more time with her blog than I would have anticipated. In the evening, after I took my mother to dinner at a French bistro in town that she had always enjoyed, I read from both of Heather’s books.

And then on Saturday morning, I awoke and pondered my next destination. I had options other than Heather Laurent, including acquaintances who had remained in Westchester County. And there were my friends from seminary-one in Illinois, another in upstate New York, and a third in Pennsylvania. There was my friend in Texas. Instead, however, I found myself drawn toward lower Manhattan: I veered on to the Saw Mill River Parkway, then the Henry Hudson, and then the West Side Highway. I exited at Canal Street and turned on to Greene. I honestly wasn’t sure whether I would ring the bell at Heather Laurent’s building or just glance around her neighborhood for a few moments. There are fine lines between interest and obsession and stalking, but I think I was still well within the bounds of mere intellectual curiosity. And I may also have been experimenting on some level with a flirtatious quid pro quo: She had dropped in unexpectedly on me that Tuesday; now I was returning the favor on Saturday. I hadn’t decided what I would do if she weren’t home. Wait or leave a note or simply depart. For a few moments, they were all equal in my mind.

But I did press the call button, and she was home, and I felt a little rush of pleasure at the sound of her voice over the crackling intercom. She invited me up and said there would be doors to four lofts when the elevator doors parted, and hers would be the one farthest to the left. It turned out to be more information than I needed, because when the elevator reached her floor, she was there with her front door open, the loft behind her illuminated by the sun that was cascading in from the western-facing windows.

“I READ SOME of your books last night,” I told her as I sipped the peppermint iced tea she had in a glass pitcher in her refrigerator. I couldn’t remember the last time I had drunk tea, hot or cold. But just as I didn’t keep tea around my kitchen, she didn’t keep coffee in hers. This seemed very significant to me at the time, a further indication that there was no future between a pastor in the midst of a crisis of faith and a self-help writer with an apparent fixation on angels. “I enjoyed them,” I said.

“But… ” She was smiling.

“But there’s a lot there about cherubs and seraphim. About luminescence and flashes of light.”

“And prayer. And meditation.”

“That, too.”

Her loft, as she had told me, was really not all that extravagant: high tin ceilings, the original fleur-de-lis tile, but not the basketball arena I had seen in my mind. A soft wood floor, wide pine that I suspected had probably been there for generations, covered in sections with plush Oriental rugs. A row of tall windows faced out upon Greene Street, each of them about half as large as the stained-glass windows of the church in Haverill, and there were four chandeliers dangling from the ceiling that initially left me confused and disturbed. I thought the bulbs of coiled glass were supposed to be the snakes that grew from Medusa’s skull. But then I realized I was mistaken: The tentacles, I saw when I looked more closely, were merely the arms and trumpets and small, delicate feet of angels. The glass was white as cooked rice. And on a solid-looking pedestal on one side of a bookcase, positioned against a wall so a visitor couldn’t help but feel he was being watched, was a carved bird the size of a preschooler. It was a bird of prey of some kind, an osprey perhaps, quite accurate, I thought, except that the wings-which were unfolded as if it were about to dive from a high perch-looked like they belonged on an angel. They ran parallel to the bird’s body and were arched at the top like a harp.

“The reality is that I probably view angels in much the same way that you do,” she said. “The fact you’ve come here suggests you don’t believe I’m a complete phony.” We were sitting on an elegant wrought-iron daybed with black bolsters. It was adjacent to the wall with the windows, near a row of hulking stainless-steel kitchen appliances: The refrigerator doors alone looked wide enough to be the entrance to a walk-in closet. There was another corner of the loft with a regular couch, a mirrored coffee table, and a pair of reupholstered easy chairs without arms that looked as if they were from the 1950s. She slept on a bed in an alcove ledge high above the corner in which-based on the desk and computer-she wrote. Along the wall opposite all those windows, broken only by the entryway, was a long line of modern wardrobe doors: the critical renovation she had made, she would tell me later, because the loft was wholly bereft of closets. I counted five wardrobes on each side of the entryway. And scattered along the walls that had neither windows nor wardrobes were framed dust jackets of her books beside specific bestseller lists, as well as a half dozen prints of angels: grown-up angels, I was happy to see, not pudgy child ones with naked ham hocks for thighs. There was a small painting of an angel in a copse of cedar trees that looked a bit like a Botticelli, but she had assured me that it was the work of a minor painter from Siena and it was barely two hundred years old.

“I don’t believe you’re a phony at all,” I said.

“A bit loopy, maybe,” she suggested. “But not phony.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” I insisted. “Just last Sunday a fellow in my church who is five years younger than I am and dying of cancer gave the children’s message, and he talked all about the angels among us. He told the kids angels don’t always have wings.”

“He’s right.”

“He said they were the women who drive him to and from his chemotherapy. Who make him his carrot juice.”

She nodded. “I have readers, of course, who see angels in a pretty literal sense. When I was in Vermont the other day, I had one reader tell me that a particularly amazing angel had caught her husband’s small plane in midair when the engine flamed out and stopped it from crashing.”

“How?”

“You know, with his hands.”

“Just brought it safely to earth?”

“Because the angel had wings,” she said, as if this explained everything. I found myself imagining, no doubt as this reader had, an angel in a white robe flying atop a Cessna, holding the fuselage in his hands while flapping his wings to keep both him and the plane aloft. “As you might imagine, my books do better with some sorts of readers than with others.”

She was wearing black jeans and a white linen top, which was untucked. Her feet were bare, and she had curled them beneath her on the couch. Her toenails were plum.

“What would you be doing if I hadn’t appeared?” I asked.

“Going through the piles of mail my assistant prioritized in my absence. Reading e-mail. Grocery shopping. It was going to be a pretty glamorous Saturday.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Oh, let’s see. Today’s the first day of August. A little less than two years. I call this the Loft That Angels Built,” and I understood she was referring to her first book.

“And you’ve always lived here alone?”

“I have.”

“May I ask you something?”

“You seem to be asking me a great many somethings. Go ahead.”

“Do you pray?” I hadn’t meant it to be an especially challenging or antagonistic inquiry-though I did hear in my head the homonym, prey, and that part of me that I have discovered is capable of unexpected bouts of savagery and anger may have lent an edge to my voice-and she sat back and seemed to be contemplating the question, her eyes growing a little stern, her forehead slightly creased. I imagined her suddenly as a child struggling with a math equation that was beyond her ken. “Everyone prays,” she said finally, “even if they don’t use that verb. Even if they’re not completely sure who or what they’re imploring. Why? Have you stopped praying?”

“So it seems,” I answered, and I told her how hard I had tried that past week to connect with a living God-and how I had even faked it late Tuesday afternoon before the altar with Joanie Gaylord. I had, in truth, spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon at the church. I was either alone in my office in the wing by the Sunday-school classrooms or in the sanctuary itself trying to pray. I let Betsy or the answering machine handle the usual sorts of calls that came in-a request to give the invocation at a special Masonic gathering at the lodge in Bennington, a change in the date of an upcoming Church Council meeting, the increasingly urgent need as September approached to find a Sunday-school teacher for the third-and fourth-graders-as well as the barrage that was linked directly to the Haywards’ deaths and upcoming funeral: The mortician. A deacon. The high-school principal. Ginny.

In theory I knew a very great deal about prayer, so praying shouldn’t have been all that difficult. I had studied it at seminary, I had read all the right books. I’d led prayer groups in my little church, I’d conducted seminars for pastors and lay people in our region. And though I never had expectations of a miracle when someone was actively dying, there had been a period in my life when I had believed fervently in the healing powers of prayer. For over two decades, I had prayed every single day of my life.

Yet when I’d fall on my knees in the days immediately after Alice and George Hayward had died, praying in different measures for forgiveness and healing and understanding, I’d come to realize that I didn’t know a bloody thing about prayer-at least not anything useful. When I needed to find the Lord most desperately, I hadn’t a clue where to begin.

“Can you tell me why?” Heather was asking. “A minister must have a reason to stop praying.”

“I was no longer confident that anyone was listening.”

“In that case you sure put on one hell of a good show on Thursday morning.”

“At the funeral service?”

“Yup.”

“Thank you.”

She shook her head-bemused, incredulous, I couldn’t say for sure-and a lock of her hair fell over one of her eyes. It was, perhaps, the most arousing thing I had seen since the last time I’d been alone with Alice Hayward and I’d allowed myself to savor the sight of the small of her back when she rose from the bed to get dressed. The sense that no one was listening-no one was watching, no one cared-had begun to feel unexpectedly liberating since I had climbed into my car and left Vermont. Originally I had felt only loneliness and despair at the realization that there might be nobody out there. No more.

“Did you always know that your faith was so weak?” she asked.

“No. I actually thought it was rather strong for most of the last two decades. Trust me, it withstood plenty of sickness. Plenty of death. I have prayed with parents who have lost children, I have knelt before the very old in the moments before they would die. I’ve done funerals for teenagers and young mothers. I know the inside of the hospice as well as anyone who works there.”

“But your faith couldn’t withstand the deaths of the Haywards.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Apparently not.”

“What made their deaths so different?”

“Guilt. Anger.”

“I understand the guilt. What is the anger?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“It’s George. It’s the fact that he killed her. It seems that faith-at least my faith-is perfectly comfortable with benign disgust but absolutely no match for rage.”

“Come with me,” she said, and she stood and brought her glass of iced tea to the kitchen island with the black marble countertop. “We’re going out.”

“Okay.”

“You need to do something completely different. You need a change of pace.”

“We’re going dancing?” I asked playfully.

“Oh, I doubt you could dance with me. I used to be a pretty serious dancer.”

“So I read in Angels,” I said. “And you’re right, I couldn’t keep up with you. I would embarrass myself rather badly.”

“Stephen, I was kidding,” she said patiently. “You wouldn’t embarrass yourself at all.”

“I would. Trust me. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

She was already slipping into a pair of black lace ballet flats and motioning for me to leave my iced tea on the table beside the daybed. “I want to show you something,” she said.

“Nearby?”

“In the city.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is, or am I supposed to be surprised?”

She shrugged. “Nothing mysterious. I’m going to show you an angel.”

“I thought you were my angel,” I said. It was the first optimistic remark that had occurred to me in nearly a week, and I found myself smiling.

“I am,” she said. Then she took me by surprise and stood on her toes and kissed me softly on the lips.

LATER THAT DAY a colossal thunderstorm would rumble over Manhattan and raindrops the size of dimes would dance upon the sidewalk. The air was electric and the sky the color of slate. We stood in nothing but T-shirts before the windows of her loft and watched the pedestrians below us race across Greene Street, leaping like long jumpers across the rivers that suddenly lapped at the side of each curb while trying to avoid the spray from the yellow cabs and delivery trucks. Earlier that afternoon, however, the clouds had been far to the west, and we had gone to Central Park, where she had showed me an angel: a tall, confident bronze woman with wings who, Heather told me, had looked out upon the terrace since the nineteenth century. She was striding purposefully atop a fountain, the water cascading from her feet into a bluestone basin below her, the sheets a precursor to the soaking rains that would fall from the heavens in hours.

The bronze statue was Heather’s favorite angel in Manhattan, but I would learn that there were others she liked a good deal in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Though angels were easy to find in cemeteries, she said that she didn’t especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs-she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead-and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she seemed to want to commune.

At the park we ate ice-cream sandwiches on a bench just beyond the shade, and we ate quickly because we were hungry and the ice cream was melting fast in the sun. We were surrounded by softball players and sunbathers and people picnicking on the grass who, I imagined, were falling in love, and I felt at once a part of them all, a select member of a club of people who were happy-unencumbered with doubt and despair-and completely separate from them. I never forgot that Alice was dead and Katie was an orphan and there was a congregation in Vermont that I had deserted. That afternoon, on the bench in the park and then in the bed in the loft above her writing desk, Heather told me more about her parents’ marriage and deaths, and we talked about our siblings-including her sister, Amanda, and the strange ways that the girl had responded to their mother’s death at the hands of their father. Some of this I knew from Heather’s books, but some she had kept from the world as a courtesy to Amanda.

“It’s why I wanted to meet Katie,” she said as we stood in her window frame and watched the rain fall with a Polynesian intensity. “It’s why I worry about that girl.” Amanda was living in a moldy log cabin in the woods in upstate New York with a circumspect-possibly agoraphobic-bird carver, and the two of them went weeks without so much as venturing even to the general store in some dot on the map called Statler. She was an alcoholic who no longer drank, but she no longer attended AA meetings, either. And once she stopped drinking, she shed weight the way a snake sheds its skin. She wasn’t strictly speaking an anorexic in Heather’s opinion, but the woman was five-four and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds when they had seen each other just after Memorial Day. She smoked relentlessly, and her skin looked as fragile as papyrus. And yet, Heather said, her sister was still wise and funny and capable of parlaying her badly socialized lover into an artist of some cachet among curators and collectors. She was, despite her outwardly brittle façade, a formidable business presence. She was appealing and charismatic when she needed to turn it on for a well-heeled dealer at a Spring Street gallery.

And as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, we talked of the lovers we had had in the past, though I did leave one name conspicuously absent from my short but deeply personal inventory, and, like so much else that I did and said that week, this would come back to haunt me.

I found it interesting that just as I had asked one woman to marry me and she had declined, Heather had been asked once to get married and she had said no. She had loved this fellow, she said, but she hadn’t wanted the life that would have come from marrying a bookish religion professor at a small college in Pennsylvania. The fact that this was precisely the path I almost had taken was an irony that was not lost on either of us, since by then she knew this part of my history. I realized as we chatted and dozed and made love that I was not merely a reclamation project for Heather-a notion that had crossed my mind the first time I entered her, though it had not diminished my ardor at all-but was more precisely a much-needed respite. She did, as I had suspected, need to be needed, though it would be a while before I would begin to realize how literally she had meant it when she had agreed that she was my angel. But she also saw in me someone who hadn’t had the slightest idea who she was when we first met and then hadn’t given a damn when she’d told him.

When we awoke Sunday morning, she asked me if I wanted to go to church. It wasn’t quite eight, and if I’d been in Vermont I would have been making last-minute changes to the service or chatting with the choir director about a hymn or checking my props for the children’s moment. I might have been making sure there were candles on the Communion table or, perhaps, simply listening as a few members of the choir rehearsed. There was an energy then that I can liken to the sensations an actor or a stage manager must savor in the half hour before the house opens and the audience starts filing in for the eight-o’clock curtain.

“No,” I answered. “I’d rather not. But I don’t want to stop you from going. I should… ”

“You should what?”

“Well, I was going to say I should be leaving. You do have a life, after all.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I do have options.”

She sat upright in bed on her knees, and her head almost touched the ceiling. “I had fun yesterday. I had fun last night. I hope you know that.”

“I do.”

“Did you?”

“Though I feel guilty saying so, yes. Yes, I did.”

“And you feel guilty because you should be in Vermont? Or because you couldn’t prevent Alice Hayward from dying?”

“Not couldn’t. Didn’t. There’s a difference. And I think I feel guilty for both reasons-though I do feel far worse about the reality that Alice Hayward is dead than I do about the fact that I’m AWOL.”

What I did not feel bad about-then or now-was my attraction to Heather Laurent. People would vilify me further that autumn by suggesting I was some sort of immoral, overly libidinous Casanova. How could I have gotten involved with another woman so soon after Alice’s death? they seemed to ask. My response-had anyone had the decency to inquire to my face-would have been rather straight-forward (assuming I even deigned to proffer a response). I would have pointed out to them that Alice’s and my affair, such as it was, had lasted but six months; that the affair had been over for two and a half months when I allowed myself to fall into bed with Heather Laurent; and that Alice’s and my separation had been amicable. I was devastated by the fact that Alice was dead and her daughter was an orphan. But sleeping with Heather Laurent was neither an act of disloyalty nor a barometer of my callousness as a person. I needed comfort, too. If there is a grimoire for grief, why should it not include romance? The bereft have taken solace in vices far worse.

“Have you ever preached on remorse?” she asked.

She slept in a T-shirt and old dance shorts with a drawstring, and abstractedly she fiddled with the cord. When she asked the question, she had the slightly puzzled look on her face that I was finding more and more appealing. It was the face she made when she was deep in thought, and it was unguarded and childlike, and it made me want to sit up in bed and kiss her. (Imagine the sorts of monstrous names I would have been called had I ever suggested during the investigation that I found something childlike in a woman to be appealing. The aspersions upon my character would have been far worse. And while my mother wouldn’t have believed that such a thing was possible, my attorney and I took dark comfort in the reality that I was a Baptist and not a Catholic, and the crimes of which I was accused, thank heavens, at least did not involve altar boys.)

“Yes, I’ve preached on remorse,” I answered. “I’ve preached on guilt and I’ve preached on shame. I’ve preached easily seven hundred and twenty-five sermons in my life. There isn’t a lot I haven’t preached on.”

“If you could make amends-”

“But I can’t make amends,” I said, cutting her off. Quickly I softened my voice, because I feared in that instant that I had hurt her feelings with my abruptness. “That’s the problem. I can’t bring Alice back. There is simply no way to make this sort of horror right.”

She fell back on the pillow and lay on her side, resting her head on her hand. I was still flat on my back. Her T-shirt was black with a pair of pink ballet shoes on it, and I liked looking up at her. Her hair was still a little wild with sleep. “You told me you never believed in angels in a literal sense,” she said after a moment.

“That’s right. Not ever.”

“‘For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways,’” she said, quoting the ninety-first psalm. “‘They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.’” I recognized that the three verses were from the King James Version.

“Can you do that with every angel reference in the Bible?” I asked.

“No way. But some.”

“Still, I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be. I’m sure you know considerably more passages by heart than I do.”

“You’d be surprised at how little I know-about anything.”

“And you’ve never, ever believed in angels. Really?” I could have given her any number of glib responses, but she deserved better than that. “For a time,” I confessed, “I believed in angelic presence: God’s light in the people around us. People behaving angelically. And sometimes I met people whose demeanor seemed angelic to me. There was a fellow in the congregation when I arrived, an old farmer. A deacon. He was seventy-seven when I got there, and I was a twenty-five-year-old pastoral novice. He was frail, but very kind, very wise. He took me under his wing and taught me all about Haverill, about the history of the church. About the ministers who had come before me. He made sure that the transition was smooth. And-and this is no small and-he taught me how to use most power tools. That deck where we sat the day we met? He and I built it together. But no, I’ve never believed in a genus or species of creature you might call an angel.”

“Nothing with halos?”

“No. Nothing with halos-or wings.”

“‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’” she said.

“Emily Dickinson?”

“That’s right.”

“She was referring to birds.”

“I’ve always found some voices angelic,” Heather said.

I thought about this. “I had one parishioner who told me he heard the voice of God in his daughter’s singing voice,” I admitted. “And there were certainly some Sunday mornings when I hated to have to follow the choir’s anthem with a sermon.”

“I didn’t actually mean singing-though I know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah, you meant a plain speaking voice.”

“I did. Some voices are more angelic than others,” she said, and for a moment I tried to recall that elderly deacon’s voice. He’d been dead seven years by then, and so it took me a moment to recapture the euphonious fusion of words that marked his speech-that marked so many of my most rural neighbors. His voice was gravelly and soft, and he laughed lightly but often. Supposedly a toddler laughs four hundred times every day and an adult barely fourteen. That deacon was an exception. Once I even preached a sermon on that-on laughter as a gift from God.

“I guess I can recall voices that were saintly and beatific,” I agreed.

“I had a feeling you could.”

“Of course, I can also recall voices that, by comparison, were downright evil.”

“You are in a dark place.”

“Apparently.”

“I suppose you’re thinking of George Hayward’s voice?”

“Actually, I was just being ornery.”

“George Hayward’s voice wasn’t demonic?”

“It wasn’t around me. But before he would hurt Alice, she said he would grow condescending. He would start talking like a law-school professor. Old-school. Socratic. He’d start asking her questions, and whatever answer she gave was going to get her in trouble. Do you think it behooves Katie’s mother to dress like a whore? Did you think you were being helpful doing a load of darks without checking with me to see if I had something-a turtleneck, maybe, a pair of jeans-I might want laundered? How did you expect me to respond when you chose to be with Ginny O’Brien instead of your husband? Are you a lesbian? He never raised his voice before he would hit her, and even when he was drunk as a sailor, he spoke like Henry Higgins. Alice always knew she was in trouble when he began doing his My Fair Lady thing.”

When George Hayward died, his entrepreneurial metabolism may have finally begun to slow. He was, according to Alice, spending increasing amounts of time at his desk and in meetings, rather than on his feet in either of his stores or his restaurant, and I wondered what effect those changes had had on his temper. Moreover, the bigger and more diverse his retail kingdom had become, the more difficult it must have been to manage. To rule. To control. He had three very different enterprises. And so, perhaps, over the years he had grown more determined to have absolute sway over Alice. I tried to hear in my head what sort of voice he had used with his employees and how it might have differed in tone from when he was alone with his wife. Publicly he had always seemed rather likable. But in point of fact he was-and even ministers have these sorts of thoughts, though we seldom verbalize them-petty and cruel and thoroughly nasty. I am honestly not sure in whose image he was made.

“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.