Secrets of Eden

CHAPTER SEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, perhaps, a great actor.

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

Shows you what I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what do you think?”

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

“It did look nice and neat.”

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

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

“What do you think the lab will find?”

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

“You’re kidding.”

“Good God, did you count the beer bottles?”

“I did.”

“The guy smelled like a frat basement on a Saturday morning.”

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

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

“Sounds a little far-fetched.”

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

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

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

“Of course, if Hayward was that drunk, it’s also possible that he didn’t kill Alice, either.”

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

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

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

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

“No indications. No semen in the vagina.”

“Well. At least it isn’t a rape.”

“Small consolation when you’ve been strangled.”

“True.”

“And I do think George murdered Alice.”

“You do?”

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

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

“I agree.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No you don’t. You love them, Jim. You are one.”

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

“Me, too.”

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

“At least they’ll be against it.”

“How can you joke like that? You’re a woman!”

“That’s precisely how I can. Because I am a woman.”

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

“I remember.”

“Now they’ll make it sound like it’s the state’s attorney’s job to prevent domestic abuse.”

“Jim-”

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

“Jim?”

“Go ahead.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So he didn’t take anything?”

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

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

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

Or stranger.

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

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

CHAPTER EIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I think about how I spend most of each day, it’s a wonder I ever let my kids out of my sight.

“Well, it’s all pretty interesting,” Emmet said.

“Oh?”

“We brought back a carton of stuff for the crime lab. But the main thing I wanted to tell you is this: Alice Hayward kept a journal. It’s one of those books with blank pages that really isn’t much bigger than an address book. As a matter of fact, that’s what I thought it was when I found it-though I didn’t understand at first why an address book would be way in the back of the woman’s underwear drawer. But as soon as I opened it up, I knew what it was.”

“She talks about her husband?”

“She does, and it’s fascinating. Once in a while, you can almost see what she saw in him. I mean, he was a louse. A complete and total louse. But he wasn’t always bashing her around the house. And after he did, man, was he contrite.”

“That is the pattern. He might have been a nice guy some of the time, but I promise you, it was only after he’d whacked her somewhere.”

“He wrote her poetry. Not my cup of tea, and I have no idea if it’s any good. But it sounds very loving. I can see how he convinced her to take him back. But here’s the really interesting part: George Hayward isn’t the only man in it. You know who else she writes about?”

“Tell me.”

“That minister who lit out of town. Stephen Drew. At least I think it’s Stephen. There was something going on there.”

“You think it’s Stephen?”

“There’s no name, just a code. She draws a little cross where you’d expect to find a name. So the journal is like, ‘cross said this’ or ‘cross and I did that.’”

“And it’s not a t?”

“Definitely not. The first time she used it, she made it pretty ornate.”

“Well, he was her minister. He told us they would talk a lot. It’s why he was so broken up about her death.”

“I think there was more to it than that.”

“How much more?”

“A lot.”

“As in they were sleeping together?”

“I got that vibe. To wit, here’s one of the passages from the diary I scribbled in my notes: ‘Cross’s hair reminds me these days of Christmas. It always has the aroma of evergreen.’”

“But she never comes right out and says they were sleeping together.”

“Not in the pages I skimmed. But she was probably afraid that her husband might find the book, and so there’s nothing definitively incriminating in it.”

“A cross isn’t real subtle. If she had something to hide, she wasn’t real clever.”

“I agree. But listen to this one: ‘Day off, Katie with friends. Cross and I spent hours together today. Very peaceful, very quiet. What to do?’”

For a long second, I thought about that one. “What’s the date?”

“March twenty-ninth.”

“That was long after she had gotten the relief-from-abuse order and George was living on the lake.”

“Take a look at the journal. You’ll see what I mean,” Emmet said. “Here’s another one I wrote down: ‘Cross here. Didn’t leave the house for hours and hours. Heavenly.’”

Paul was in the kitchen, too, but he didn’t know who I was on the phone with. Still, he would tell me later that my eyes went very wide and for a moment the tip of my tongue rested just at the edge of my lips. He has mimicked the look for me before and calls it my “savanna glare.” He says it’s the look I get when I’m seriously into the hunt and the prey has just stumbled big-time in the grass.

IT HAD THE potential to be a fascinating case to construct. On the one hand, it was going to be embarrassingly easy-a slam dunk-to show that Stephen Drew and his hair with the aroma of the church Christmas tree was sleeping with Alice Hayward. Later, when we dusted the whole Hayward house for fingerprints, we found what would turn out to be Drew’s all over the bedroom, including the very top of the headboard. We found them on the nightstand and in the kitchen on wineglasses. We found his DNA in body hair in the shower drain in the master bathroom, and we determined that a piece of pubic hair in the bottom of the hamper belonged to the reverend. We found fibers from his living-room throw rug in the carpet of the Haywards’ bedroom.

On the other hand, it was going to take some serious investigation to prove that he had gone to the Cape on the hill that Sunday night in July and shot George Hayward in the head.

Drew had had his weekly meeting with the church Youth Group that evening, and the gathering had lasted until a few minutes after nine. When he finally reemerged after fleeing, he told us that he had gone home to the parsonage as soon as that meeting was over. He insisted he hadn’t gone anywhere near the Haywards’ house that night-and we had nothing to link him to the murder itself. The only prints on the gun, the load, or the gun cabinet were George’s-though some on the handle and one on the trigger were badly smudged, which was important, because it thus seemed possible that a second person had handled the firearm after George. There was no indication that Drew’s car had been in the gravel driveway that night and no tracks that matched any of his shoes on the lawn-at least none that remained by the time we realized that Drew should be considered a suspect. We could see from Drew’s Internet service provider that he’d been online from nine-fifteen until ten-thirty, answering e-mails and surfing the Web, but we would need a court order-or his laptop, which later we would subpoena-to learn the sites and Web pages he had visited. Then, he insisted, he had gone to bed. I was hoping that Alice might have called him earlier in the evening-battered women often seem to phone someone close to them just before their boyfriend or husband blows for the last time-but there was no evidence that she had.

And yet he had disappeared a few days after what was looking more and more like two homicides, rather than a suicide and a single murder. That was what kept coming back to me. The guy was a friggin’ minister, and he’d jumped ship at the time when the town needed him most. That really got to me-that and the teeny-tiny detail that he was boffing a parishioner who would be murdered.

FOR NEARLY A week, from a Wednesday till the following Monday, none of us had the slightest idea where the good reverend had gone. No one in Haverill knew, and his own mother said that she hadn’t seen him since the previous Saturday morning. We left messages everywhere, including on his cell phone. I’d been thinking all along about the fact that the church secretary had noticed his passport on his desk the morning of the funeral, and so on Friday I sent a fax to the State Department to see if he had left the country. He wasn’t officially a suspect at that point-though unofficially in my mind he sure as hell was-but we certainly wanted to talk to him.

And he hadn’t left the country. Hadn’t even boarded an airplane and flown anywhere domestically.

Which meant, if he was on the move, that he was probably traveling somewhere in his car. (I didn’t completely discount the idea that he might have paid cash for a bus ticket, but somehow the patrician Pastor Drew didn’t strike me as the sort who would mingle with the bus-station crowd.) And while this is a big country, it’s really not that difficult to find someone on wheels. There are the credit-card receipts at gas stations or the cash withdrawals from ATMs or the reality that there are a lot of cops and troopers out there on the road. I had heard back from the State Department on Monday and was wondering if it was time to put out a bulletin on the reverend when, lo and behold, he finally returned one of Emmet’s calls. And as soon as Emmet hung up with Drew, he called me. It was midafternoon, and I was in my office.

“We have contact,” he said, his voice so deep and refined that he always sounded oddly plumy to me for a Vermonter. I attributed that to the reality that Emmet was all business. Some people mistook the crispness that was a part of his demeanor as a state trooper for coldness. Usually that served him well, but not always. The reality is that he was tall and lean, his nose was a wedge, and his close-cropped hair was the dark gray of ash in a woodstove: He could be an intimidating presence when he wanted.

“Really?”

“I just got off the phone with him.”

“And? Did he have an explanation for why he fell off the radar-or why he wouldn’t call back?”

“He said he hoped we didn’t think he was avoiding us.”

“Now, why would we think that? Because no one in the world had the slightest idea where he was-”

“He was in-”

“Because he didn’t return any of the messages you left at his home, his church, or on his cell phone?”

“He was in the Adirondacks. That was his explanation. He said he went with a friend to upstate New York for a couple of days and he was in some rugged corner of the mountains without cell-phone coverage.”

“He was camping? He didn’t strike me as the type.”

“No, he wasn’t camping. But he was in what he described as a relatively primitive log cabin.”

“In the Adirondacks… ”

“Near Statler.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No reason you would have,” he said. “It’s a general store and a billboard, apparently.”

“And there’s no cell coverage there?”

“Nope.”

“He didn’t check his messages at home? He didn’t call in to the church?”

“No, he did not. He said he was calling me back from the interstate, an hour or so from Albany-though he wasn’t coming home. He was heading to New York City. His cell showed he had messages, and so he was returning the calls from the highway.”

I sat back in my chair and took a sip from the water bottle on my desk. I raised my eyebrows to try to relax. “Is he alone? I don’t recall him having any personal Adirondack connections.”

“He says he’s with that friend. He added that she was driving.”

“So you knew he was a responsible driver, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

“What’s her name?”

He paused for a moment, and in my mind I saw him looking down at his notes. “Heather Laurent,” he answered finally.

“You’re kidding.”

“Why? Should I know that name?”

“Well, you shouldn’t. You have a penis. But women love her books. She writes bestsellers about angels. Frankly, I think she’s a complete and total lunatic. Remember when I was so sick last month with bronchitis and I stayed home? I saw her on one of the morning talk shows going on and on about her latest book. And maybe it was because I was oxygen-deprived and half delusional from the medication, but I swear I thought she was talking about angels like they were our freaking neighbors.”

“Well, he’s a minister. I would think angels would give them something to talk about.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking no. My sense is her take on angels isn’t exactly going to mesh with his. She’s somewhere between New Age and wack job. Her angels, I have a feeling, find you parking spaces when you need one. What did he say about her?”

“Really very little.”

“I think she was in Vermont a couple weeks ago. I vaguely remember something in the newspaper.”

“Mostly I asked Drew about his relationship with Alice and George Hayward,” he said, and then he told me in detail what he had learned-and what Drew wouldn’t reveal. Emmet is a pro, and so he didn’t let on that we had reason to believe from Alice’s journal that either she had one hell of a fantasy life or she and Drew were more intimately involved than anyone knew. And Drew stuck to a pretty simple story: Alice was one of his parishioners, George was not, and he’d offered Alice pastoral counseling.

“Would you say you two were friends?” Emmet said he had asked, and Drew had replied, “Absolutely. We were very good friends.” The detective then inquired whether the minister could recall the last time he’d been to the Haywards’ house, and Emmet said there was a pause and he had wondered whether Drew was deciding whether to admit he’d ever been there. In the end he told the detective he’d been there most recently in, Drew believed, May-other, of course, than the Monday after the Haywards had been murdered. At that point he had asked Emmet why we were looking for him.

“Oh, we’re just tying up loose ends,” Emmet had replied. But he did ask the minister whether he was returning to Haverill anytime soon and where he could be reached if he wasn’t. The answer was Heather Laurent’s loft in Manhattan for at least a few more days and then, maybe, with a couple of different friends around the country. But Drew also said he might simply return to Vermont after leaving Manhattan and get some things from his home before taking that longer road trip. Either way, Drew added, he’d most likely be in areas with cell coverage.

“Did he ask you if he needed a lawyer?” I asked Emmet.

“No.”

“He sounds very accommodating.”

“I said I’d call him if I had any other questions.”

“Do we have something that we know has his fingerprints on it-or even his DNA?”

“We don’t.”

“What about when we were at the Haywards’ the day after their murder? Remember what a scrubber Drew was? How helpful he was?” I said, and it seemed possible now that he had been working like mad to make sure that he’d left behind no evidence of his involvement at the scene Sunday night. Perhaps inadvertently he had left us a lead.

“I vaguely recall him Windexing the windows, but he would have been wearing rubber gloves by the time he grabbed the spray bottle.”

“He moved the coffee table.”

“That’s right. But he was probably wearing the gloves by then, too.”

“And I recall him drinking some kind of diet soda from a bottle,” I said, hoping, if he was implicated, he had gotten sloppy.

“If so, it may still be under the sink. They had a recycling tub under there.”

“Good. And if Drew does come back to Vermont, let’s drop in on him or see if he wants to stop by the barracks. Perhaps we can ask him some more questions before he realizes he needs an attorney and winds up in custodial care.”

“Will do,” Emmet agreed. Then: “And you said Heather Laurent was a bestselling writer?”

“Yup.”

“I wonder how she and Drew became friends. Think they went to school together?”

“It’s possible.”

“Let me look into her, too. Maybe she fits in here somewhere.”

“But don’t talk to her until you’ve talked to Drew again-if possible.”

“I understand.”

I couldn’t imagine Drew traveling with the Queen of the Angels, and so as soon as Emmet and I hung up, I Googled her. I saw she was as pretty as she had struck me on television. And I learned that her father had murdered her mother and then killed himself. I decided then that the two were something more than friends, which made me ponder further the motives that drove the Reverend Drew. I began to wonder whether this Heather Laurent had been involved in the Haywards’ murder as well. A love triangle? Possible. I saw online that she had appeared in Vermont on the Monday the bodies were found, which meant that she might have been here on Sunday night. And absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything. I know that. It is, for better or worse, the fallout from my job.

SOMETIMES LATE AT night, I will peer into each of my boys’ bedrooms. Most nights they sleep in their own beds in their own rooms, their doors open, but that summer it wasn’t uncommon for Lionel to grab his pillows and a blanket and curl up either at the foot of Marcus’s bed or in the beanbag chair beside it. He had only been out of a crib for a year and a half. And though he was potty trained, he still slept in pull-ups-just in case. Paul says I will stand there for long minutes in my nightgown, just staring. Intellectually I know there’s a connection between what I see at work most days and the time I spend watching my boys sleep: The weirder my caseload, the more likely I am to act like a sentinel.

They are both very deep sleepers. Their pediatrician once said she believed that little boys sleep more deeply than little girls. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I know that my sister and I never seemed to slumber the way our brother did. My father would wake me up when it was time to start getting ready for school, and I would hear him the moment he started turning the knob on my bedroom door. In the months when we were investigating the murders up in Haverill, I found myself standing with obsessive frequency over my boys’ beds or that beanbag chair and watching the two of them. When Lionel was in Marcus’s bedroom, the air would be filled with the aroma of baby shampoo, and I would just stand there and study how my three-year-old would curl his small body into the beanbag chair as if he were back in the womb, his knees against his chest, while Marcus would sleep flat on his stomach, his legs as straight as an Olympic diver’s as he entered the water. They were often in matching pajamas, though I have actually tried to discourage that. It’s Lionel who insists on being a Mini Marcus and dressing as much like his older brother as his older brother will allow. Marcus, it seems, is much more tolerant in that regard than I would be. That summer the boys were sleeping in pajamas with a montage of comic-book superheroes, men and women who sort of do what I do, but without needing a judge’s permission or a jury’s agreement. And both boys would be sleeping so soundly that I would have to watch very carefully to detect the slightest rise in either Lionel’s slender shoulders or Marcus’s back. It’s as if all that energy they start to expend from the moment they open their eyes-Exhibit A, breakfast-has completely drained their tanks by bedtime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I understand.”

“There’s really nothing more worth sharing.”

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

“Isn’t whatever she told me private? Isn’t it protected by some sort of ministerial confidentiality?”

“We’re not worried that Alice confessed some horrible crime to you in the confessional,” Emmet replied.

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

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

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

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

“Absolutely.”

“Then why do you think he’s so comfortable coming in now?”

“He panicked,” I said. “But now he’s regained his equilibrium. His arrogance.”

“Think he’ll really show up?”

“Versus?”

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

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

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

CHAPTER NINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STEPHEN DREW: Yes.

WALKER: Where did you go?

DREW: I told you, I went home.

WALKER: Alone?

DREW: Absolutely. With whom would I have gone?

WALKER: Did you leave your house again that night?

DREW: No.

WALKER: You were in the house until Monday morning.

DREW: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

WALKER: Okay.

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

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

DREW: You must have checked the phone records by now. You must know that I called nobody and nobody called me.

WALKER: And visitors?

DREW: None, again. It seems I have no alibi, doesn’t it?

WALKER: When was the last time you saw Alice Hayward?

DREW: I presume you mean alive.

WALKER: Yes, sir.

DREW: At the potluck following her baptism on Sunday morning.

WALKER: Did she say anything that suggested she thought she might be in danger?

DREW: Yes, but I didn’t understand at the time that it was a cry for help. Actually, it wasn’t a cry for help. It was…

WALKER: Go on.

DREW: She said “There.” I don’t know. Maybe it was nothing. She said it after she was baptized. After she came up from the water. When I was at the house and I saw that George had killed her, the word came back to me, and it seemed to me that she must have known he was going to do it and that’s why baptism was so important to her.

WALKER: And when was that?

DREW: When was I at the house?

WALKER: Yes.

DREW: It was Monday. Obviously.

WALKER: When she was estranged from her husband this past winter and spring, do you know who she was seeing? Or whether she was involved with anyone other than her husband at the time of her death?

DREW: Well, that’s quite the UFO of a question.

WALKER: Sir?

DREW: Reverend. Please. I asked you to call me Reverend-that is, if you won’t call me Stephen.

WALKER: My apologies. Who was Alice Hayward seeing when she and her husband were separated?

DREW: What makes you think she was seeing anybody at all?

WALKER: She wasn’t?

DREW: Why would I know?

WALKER: You told us you were offering her pastoral counseling. Perhaps she told you something.

DREW: I see.

WALKER: So was she seeing someone other than her husband-perhaps even sleeping with someone other than her husband?

DREW: Why is that relevant?

WALKER: This is a murder investigation.

DREW: I think it’s pretty obvious who killed Alice Hayward. You were there Monday morning. George Hayward killed his wife and then killed himself. Do you honestly doubt that’s what happened?

WALKER: Maybe. Hard to say right now. Did she ever mention another man to you in your… counseling?

DREW: Do I need a lawyer?

WALKER: That would be up to you, Reverend.

DREW: Okay, tell me. What do you want to know?

WALKER: Do you know if Alice Hayward had a relationship at any point this year with a person other than her husband?

DREW: No.

WALKER: No you don’t know, or no she had no relationship?

DREW: As far as I know, she wasn’t seeing anyone.

WALKER: No one.

DREW: No one. She was not having an extramarital affair. She was not sleeping with anyone other than her husband.

WALKER: When was the last time you spoke with George Hayward?

DREW: I can’t remember. It wouldn’t have been in the days before he killed himself.

WALKER: When would it have been?

DREW: I don’t know. Late May or early June, maybe. We may have run into each other at the general store.

WALKER: In Haverill.

DREW: Yes.

WALKER: What did you two discuss?

DREW: It was small talk, if it was anything. I was not likely to have a meaningful conversation with George Hayward. I know ministers aren’t supposed to think like this, but we’re human: He was a malevolent presence, and I never found that praying for him changed him very much.

WALKER: Were you aware that he was abusive toward his wife?

DREW: Of course.

WALKER: How angry did that make you?

DREW: That’s a ridiculous question. Obviously it left me sickened. It left me enraged.

WALKER: How enraged? Mad enough to do something about it?

DREW: What are you implying?

WALKER: Nothing. I am merely conducting an investigation.

DREW: Because if you think I killed George Hayward… well, that’s preposterous.

WALKER: I understand.

DREW: Really, is that what you think?

WALKER: No one is accusing you of anything, Reverend.

DREW: And would you please just call me Stephen? The way you say Reverend… it sounds almost sarcastic.

WALKER: I meant no offense.

DREW: This is all completely ridiculous. Do you want me to take a lie-detector test? I will, you know. Will that put this outrageous notion to rest

He never would take that polygraph test. His attorney would see to that.

But his lie that Alice wasn’t seeing anyone or having an extramarital affair would soon come back to haunt him.

THINGS BEGAN TO move quickly after that. We went back to the Haywards’ house and found that the fingerprints on the diet-soda bottle we had seen in the hands of the preacher man matched those on the headboard in the master bedroom. They matched prints in the bathroom off that bedroom and on a little blue bottle of massage oil in Alice’s nightstand. I now had all I needed for a judge to approve my affidavit to get an official set of Drew’s prints and a swab of DNA from his mouth. I could subpoena his laptop. I might have a while to go before I could connect him to George Hayward’s murder, but it wasn’t going to be hard to prove that he had been intimate with his parishioner.

Emmet put in another call to Drew, but this time the reverend didn’t call back. Instead it was his lawyer who rang, and he didn’t call my detective sergeant, he called me directly. His attorney was a guy named Aaron Lamb. I like Aaron, though he has represented some real scum. And, invariably, real rich scum. Aaron’s the guy who the head of the power company will call when he accidentally runs over a bicyclist on Route 7A while passing in a no-passing zone. Aaron’s the attorney you want if you were just snagged for embezzling a few hundred thousand dollars from the hospital or if you’re a psychiatrist who’s found it easier to sleep with your sexy young patients once you’ve drugged them. And, clearly, he was the lawyer you wanted if you were an aristocrat from Westchester who had chosen to go slumming as a country pastor in Vermont and then went ballistic one night and decided you would take vengeance into your own hands and shoot your now-dead lover’s husband.

“I hear you and Detective Emmet Walker are thinking of joining the Haverill United Church,” Aaron said, his voice its usual silky-smooth icing with just a dollop of boredom tossed in. He was a tall man who had thinning dark hair and rimless eyeglasses with titanium earpieces. He always moved in my mind like a diplomat: His posture was extraordinary, and the world seemed to part before him. He was one of the few men I knew in Vermont who could get away with a ventless Armani suit-no small accomplishment, since a lot of the guys here dress like farmers at a funeral. My sense is that when we beat him-and with the sorts of cases he handled, his clients were convicted as often as they were acquitted-his principal emotion was frustration: He knew that most of his clients were guilty as hell, and he really didn’t care that at least half the time they were going to wind up in prison. Mostly he wanted to win because winning was such a fundamental part of who he was.

And when we lost to him? At least his clients weren’t likely to be repeat offenders.

“Well, I can’t speak for Emmet,” I said, “but Haverill’s too friggin’ long a drive from my house. I try not to spend that much time in the car on a Sunday morning.”

“So then why in the world would you want to talk to Reverend Stephen Drew? This can’t possibly have anything to do with that Hayward fiasco.”

“I know, I know: I just love my dead ends. But I am nothing if not thorough. And Drew was one tough guy to reach for a while there.”

“You know, he helped clean up the Hayward house. That’s the kind of man he is.”

“Yeah, I saw him. I was there, too.”

“Of course you were.”

“I gather you’re going to be his lawyer?”

“Yes indeed. Frankly, you seem to be hanging a lot on a pastor’s crisis of faith and his decision to take a break from the pulpit. The minister-and understand I am using this word sarcastically-fled about three and a half hours from Haverill. He was in the Adirondacks, across the lake from Vermont.”

“He’s not going to be dropping by the barracks again anytime soon, is he?”

“Nope.”

“Nor take that polygraph.”

“I think not.”

“But you know what he is going to do? He’s going to give us a finger print and a mouth swab.”

“Not without a nontestimonial order from a judge.”

“Which shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, because I knew I had Alice Hayward’s journal. I would’ve loved to have told him about it that moment on the phone, but it wouldn’t have made sense to share its existence with the guy’s defense attorney at that point in the investigation. All I needed to do then was share the material with the judge. Still, I’m human, and that was one of those times when I wish I could have dropped that little IED at his feet and seen his face when it exploded. In my mind I could see Aaron actually recoiling in the massive, ergonomically perfect Herman Miller that he called a desk chair but I thought, the one time I visited his office, looked more like something he’d wrestled from the Cathay Pacific first-class cabin. I was pretty confident that the reverend either hadn’t known that Alice Hayward kept a journal or hadn’t yet told his attorney. Either way, it was going to be very bad news for Aaron.

Besides, soon enough he would get to see the journal for himself. But by then Stephen Drew would be what we tell the press, when they ask, is “a person of interest.” Not yet a suspect. But someone we need to spend a little quality time with.

ALMOST OVERNIGHT, IT seemed, everyone was aware that Stephen Drew had been sleeping with Alice Hayward. I spent my life telling reporters from three states that I couldn’t possibly comment on an ongoing investigation. But the more folks we interviewed in Haverill and at the bank where Alice worked, the more our suspicions got out. People would had to have had their heads in the sand or been schoolmates of Marcus or Lionel not to have figured out what we believed had most likely occurred that awful night at the Haywards’. Some parishioners, I imagine, clung to the possibility that there was a killer (or killers) out there who had murdered both Alice and George-preferring, apparently, random horror to the idea that their pastor was capable of sleeping with a part of his flock and then murdering a neighbor. And, I guess, indiscriminate savagery was still a not-inconceivable option-as was some weird love triangle involving Mother Seraphim. But the laws of reasonable inference suggested that George had strangled Alice and then Stephen had shot her husband. Let’s face it: It might be sunny when you wake up in the morning, but if the lawn is sopping wet and there are puddles in the driveway, it’s pretty likely that it rained in the night.

And those parishioners were in the minority: The absolute last thing that most people wanted-especially the fine, upstanding citizens of Haverill, Bennington, and Manchester-was for this to have been some arbitrary slaughter committed by a third party who was still lurking undiscovered in the lengthening shadows of the Green Mountains. The local chambers of commerce and the state representatives grew real antsy at that prospect, and I could see early on that they were going to make my boss Jim’s life hard if it turned out that George Hayward had been murdered by anyone other than the local pastor in Haverill.

I FELT ESPECIALLY bad for Katie Hayward. The amount of crap she was having to shoulder just boggled the mind. She hadn’t been at the house on Monday morning, and so I hadn’t met her, but it was clear this poor girl’s nightmare was only getting worse. She wasn’t merely an orphan now whose father had probably killed her mother; her mother was sleeping with the town pastor, and the newspaper, TV, and Web stories just kept coming. A couple of times, I called the social worker who was assigned to the girl to check in, and it sounded like Katie was doing about as well as could be expected. So far there had been relatively little (and I honestly don’t know what to make of this expression) “acting out.” But there had been a few days of near catatonia. And she’d gotten a tattoo (illegal, but harmless), which didn’t surprise me because her social worker was known for her tattoos. Katie’s was an open rose on her left shoulder that she had gotten in honor of her mother; Alice loved roses and had bushes of salmon-colored wild ones along the wall of the house that faced the vegetable garden. School had finally started, and everyone seemed to think that this was a good thing for Katie. The teenager had gotten over the awkward-now, there is an understatement of a word-moments that had surrounded her like a fog her first days back in the classroom.

Still, Emmet had to go back and talk to her some more, and as a mother I felt like a ghoul asking him to do that. But I had to. I also had him talk to some of Katie’s friends, including Tina Cousino. Katie said she knew that her mom kept a journal, but she had never read it. She wasn’t even sure where her mom kept it. And she said she didn’t believe that her mom was involved with Stephen Drew:

K. HAYWARD: I know some people think there was, like, something going on between my mom and Stephen. But that just seems too weird.

WALKER: By Stephen, you mean Reverend Drew?

K. HAYWARD: Yeah. He likes us to call him Stephen. I think the only time I ever heard him called Reverend was when there was some visiting minister in the church who was all weird and formal. He kept saying Reverend Drew this and Pastor Drew that.

WALKER: What do you mean by “something going on” between your mother and Stephen?

K. HAYWARD: You know. Like having an affair.

WALKER: Was Stephen ever at your house that you know of?

K. HAYWARD: I guess. I know he helped my mom with my dad.

WALKER: Counseling her.

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh.

WALKER: When was he there?

K. HAYWARD: I don’t know.

WALKER: Did you ever come home from school and find him there?

K. HAYWARD: No.

WALKER: Did he ever have dinner at your house?

K. HAYWARD: I think so.

WALKER: You think so?

K. HAYWARD: It was a long time ago.

WALKER: So he did?

K. HAYWARD: I guess.

WALKER: Just the one time?

K. HAYWARD: Yes.

WALKER: When was this?

K. HAYWARD: Winter, maybe? Or, like, spring.

WALKER: Can you be more specific as to a month?

K. HAYWARD: No. I’m pretty sure it was after Valentine’s Day and there was still some snow. But not much.

WALKER: But it was definitely when your father was living out at the lake?

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh.

WALKER: Were there other times he was at the house?

K. HAYWARD: Probably. But I don’t remember any.

WALKER: Then why do you think that?

K. HAYWARD: Maybe because everyone says he was there now. I don’t know.

WALKER: But you do not recall ever seeing him at the house other than that time he was there for dinner.

K. HAYWARD: No.

According to Alice’s journal, it had been a Monday night in early March when Drew had had dinner with her and her daughter. This is what I mean about teenagers being harder to interview than spies. It’s not necessarily that they’re trying to mislead you or withhold a key piece of evidence. It’s just that their hardwiring is so freaking different from a grown-up’s or a child’s.

WALKER: So he never came by for… I don’t know… a quick bite to eat after church? A lunch, maybe?

K. HAYWARD: Definitely not after church. While the kids are in Sunday school, the adults have this thing called Second Hour. They’re supposed to sit around and talk about Stephen’s sermon in the big common room, but whenever I would pass through there to get juice or something when I was in Sunday school, they were, like, talking about muffins and stuff.

WALKER: Muffins?

K. HAYWARD: You know, stuff that isn’t important. They’d be talking about the muffins that some old person had baked for the Second Hour. Grown-ups like snacks, too.

WALKER: What was it like when he had dinner that night with you and your mother?

K. HAYWARD: Awkward. Totally awkward.

WALKER: Why?

K. HAYWARD: Because I sort of don’t go to Youth Group anymore. And I did when I was in middle school and for part of ninth grade.

WALKER: And you felt guilty about no longer going?

K. HAYWARD: Well, yeah!

WALKER: Why else was it awkward?

K. HAYWARD: Look, it wasn’t awkward because my mom and Stephen were together. Okay? That wasn’t it. My mom and Stephen hooking up? Too weird, I don’t want to go there. Besides, my dad…

WALKER: Go on.

K. HAYWARD: I hoped things would get better between them.

WALKER: Between your mother and father.

K. HAYWARD: Yes.

WALKER: Get better in what way?

K. HAYWARD: Not fighting.

WALKER: But we’re discussing a period when your father was away.

K. HAYWARD: I just don’t think my mom and Stephen were… you know.

WALKER: Okay. And when your father returned, they were fighting less?

K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Maybe. Something happened the Friday night before they died.

WALKER: Your parents had a fight?

K. HAYWARD: Yes. But maybe it was Saturday. It’s kind of a blur.

WALKER: Do you know why they fought?

K. HAYWARD: I wasn’t home.

WALKER: Then how do you know they had a fight?

K. HAYWARD: I just do. You can tell. Dad must have hit Mom.

WALKER: There was a bruise? A mark?

K. HAYWARD: Not one I could see. But there almost never was. I think only a couple of times he hit her on the face. He was, like, a businessman. He was careful. But…

WALKER: Go ahead.

K. HAYWARD [starting to cry]: But he felt terrible about it afterward. He always felt horrible. That’s the thing. Until that night… until the night they died… I thought things would get better between them. Between my mom and dad. He came home from the lake, and I didn’t know if things would ever be totally normal. But except for a few bad nights, like that Friday or Saturday, I was sure they were working stuff out. My mom thought so, too! That’s why I don’t think she would have wrecked it by getting involved with Stephen!

WALKER: Not even before your father came home?

K. HAYWARD: No! No, no, no. Things were getting better until that night, and I guess that’s why…

WALKER: What?

K. HAYWARD [crying harder]: I guess that’s why he killed himself after he killed her. Because, like, things had been getting better.

Later Emmet would ask her if she had any familiarity with Heather Laurent before her parents had died-whether her mother or Stephen had ever mentioned her-but it was clear that the girl hadn’t met her until that last Tuesday in July. Before then she’d never heard of the pastor’s new squeeze, and her mother had never spoken the woman’s name. And neither of Laurent’s books were anywhere in the Hayward house. Prior to her parents’ murders, Katie Hayward knew as much about Heather Laurent as she did about the medieval popes.

I PORED OVER a photocopy of Alice Hayward’s journal. Even as a teenage girl, I never kept a diary. It wasn’t that I was afraid someone would read it and something might come back to haunt me. It was, to be totally honest, that I’ve just never been all that introspective. And so the idea that this customer-service representative of a community bank kept a diary fascinated me, and I studied every entry for clues.

Alice had begun keeping the journal almost a year before she would get the relief-from-abuse order, and so altogether the diary lasted close to eighteen months. None of the entries were more than a paragraph or two, and sometimes she would seem to go weeks without cracking the little book’s spine. What intrigued me as much as anything was how her handwriting changed in the course of that year and a half. At first, when she was largely chronicling the latest time that the bastard she called her husband had smacked her hard in the back or called her a cunt, the penmanship was tiny and cramped, almost no space between the letters of each word. Five times, Stephen Drew-as Stephen Drew-appeared in the diary before Alice got the court order that kicked her husband’s sorry ass out of the house. She wrote that she had seen the reverend at his church office on three occasions and at an unspecified locale on two others, and though she wrote that she and Stephen were discussing her husband, she didn’t offer much detail. An entry from late October was pretty typical:

OCTOBER 25: Met with Stephen for over an hour. Told him about George’s threat last night and how much he had drunk. Stephen thinks like Ginny. I should get out. When George gets like he did last night, I think they’re right. I know they’re right. But last Friday he was so different. It was like St. Croix. So I think of St. Croix on the one hand and how much my stomach hurt when he knocked the wind out of me last night on the other.

St. Croix was a reference to a vacation just the two of them had taken the previous winter. And the threat? No idea. Katie Hayward had no recollection of a particular warning toward the end of October or even a memorably violent fight. Nor was she aware that her father had punched her mother so hard in the gut as Halloween neared that she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

It was in November that the cross would first appear. It was less than three months before Alice would request and receive the relief-from-abuse order, which of course led me to wonder: Why was the reverend lobbying for Alice to leave George? Was it because she would be safer or because he wanted to have her to himself? And it was right about this time that her penmanship went from letters that were invariably small and crowded together to more florid curlicues and swoops. A few great sweeping P’s and M’s and O’s. A lot of capital letters. I imagine the penmanship looked a little bit like mine had when I’d been in middle school. If this not-so-mysterious “cross” was indeed Stephen Drew, there were seven entries that the prurient mind-or the prosecutor’s-could interpret as chronicling an intimate afternoon or evening with the pastor. Three were in that period before George Hayward was sent packing, and four were between late February and early May. None, alas, was explicit enough to confirm that Drew and Alice were lovers. But all of them had the feel of a schoolgirl crush:

DECEMBER 14: †’s hair reminds me these days of Christmas. It always has the aroma of evergreen. We were alone, and we talked about my situation. Our situation. I view everything differently when I see it through his eyes. Suddenly the things that I thought were my fault aren’t. All those things that I had viewed as my mistakes? Not my mistakes at all. I always come away a little hopeful, a little confident that there is a plan and things will get better. He is the gentlest person I know. And he opens up to me in a way he doesn’t with other people, in the same way that I can open up to him.

MARCH 11: The whole house was ours tonight. Unimaginable happiness. The day was good, too. Katie and I had breakfast together, which we usually don’t because she is so busy with makeup and figuring out her clothes and trying to find her math homework. And I’m busy getting ready for work. But I made waffles. I woke up before my alarm, and I surprised her with waffles. Such a good time. And then there was †. At one point, when I saw † in the afternoon, he said together we should make some decisions about my future. He’s right. It is time. And then there was the night. Heavenly.

The March 11 entry certainly implied that Alice Hayward and Reverend Drew were romantically involved, but I had spent enough time with Aaron Lamb in the courtroom to know this: Before a jury he was capable of arguing convincingly that on March 11 Alice and her pastor had had a discussion about her estrangement from her husband during the day, and then later Alice had had a cozy evening at home with her daughter-capitalizing upon the mother-daughter bonding she had initiated with waffles at breakfast.

Likewise, the short passage that Alice added on December 14 didn’t exactly have the two of them rolling around the floor together beside a Christmas tree. The fact that she says they were alone wasn’t proof of anything, since Drew obviously was going to be counseling her in private. I knew even as I reviewed the diary that I was going to need a lot more evidence to charge him with murder.

What I found most interesting as the State’s resident cynic was this: Drew had become a cross in the diary long before George Hayward had left. If the pair had been playing Hester and Dimmesdale, it seemed possible that the affair had commenced as long as eight weeks before George Hayward had been ordered to keep his distance. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in their counseling sessions. I could just hear that Waspy, clipped voice of Drew’s as, perhaps, he urged her to leave George-which obviously was exactly the right advice, unless his ulterior motive was inside his own khaki pants. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether the fight between Alice and George that finally led her to get the relief-from-abuse order had been triggered by her involvement with her minister. Either Drew had given her the confidence to get rid of her pathetic excuse for a husband (a very good thing) or he was manipulating his way into her bedroom (a pretty despicable misuse of power). There was no entry until little more than a week after she had kicked George out of the house, which wasn’t illogical, since Alice clearly wasn’t an inveterate diary keeper and she must have been busy reorganizing her life once her husband was gone:

FEBRUARY 17: George still at the lake, Katie and me holding down the fort. She is okay.

I don’t feel like a single mom, but I guess I am. House is quiet since Katie’s out a lot. Funny: Not sure I feel safer not having George around in the night. I know I am. But now it’s just us girls, Katie and me and Lula. I still keep the gun in the tubs with my clothes in the closet. I don’t want it around.

Back is still sore, but arm and elbow less swollen.

The sore back and swollen elbow were the only references to the violence that had led her to finally get that restraining order.

Still, I did learn more about Alice Hayward, and it was evident that she really wasn’t the self-help-magazine poster child for battered wives everywhere. She wasn’t a perfect fit with the profile. Sure, George was the primary breadwinner and clearly subsidized an outwardly very nice lifestyle for them, but she wasn’t totally dependent upon him financially. She had a job and an income. Moreover, she wasn’t the daughter of an abused wife.

I did, however, wonder if her self-esteem wasn’t so low that it had started to burrow underground-and that did fit the sketch. The brute she was married to was quite capable of undermining her faith in herself. He might not have been using her skull as a piñata, but he still knew that he could inflict pain anytime he opened his mouth:

Obviously I wasn’t trying to burn the pork chops. But I did. I ruined them just like he said. I ruined dinner. If he’d just left me alone.

He says it was my fault Katie stayed out too late with Tina and a boy named Martin we’ve never met. He’s probably right. But I tried to reach her on her cell, I did my best. I did!

I can’t make a plumber appear like magic. Maybe other people can.

When did I get so wrinkled? When did I get so fat? He’s right. Sometimes I just hate myself. I even hate my hair.

Called me a cunt, and I asked him what he meant by that. He got red in the face, and I got scared, and he reminded me that I had been flirting with Katie’s English teacher. Was I? I thought I was just trying to be nice because Katie is so talented and he’s shown so much interest in her writing. But maybe I did cross a line. Maybe I did go too far. So embarrassed now. So angry at myself. He didn’t hit me.

Said I looked like a slut. A fat slut. Not even a pretty slut. He said I humiliated us both.

How could I have picked exactly the wrong drapes? I did. I am such a jerk sometimes. Such a jerk.

It didn’t seem to me from her diary that she was staying with George for the sake of their daughter. The girl by then was a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose. If anything, Alice had the common sense to see that getting smacked around and verbally abused by her man wasn’t precisely the sort of role-model behavior a teenage girl ever should see. But she did understand this about her marriage: George was better to her when Katie was around-and she herself was safer.

George is different when Katie’s in the house. Not always. But sometimes. It’s like he’s on his best behavior. I know Katie has seen us fight, and lately she’s gotten in the middle (which somehow I can’t let happen ever again). But I also know George is less likely to hit me when she’s home. So maybe she tells herself all parents fight. He drinks less when she’s here, and that means he’s really more himself. The man I know he can be and the way he used to be all the time. Not perfect. But not mean.

I wish I knew how to talk to her about this. I wish I was smarter. I wish I wasn’t so embarrassed. But her father and I just have so much history. It’s weird. She doesn’t know the best of her dad, and I don’t think she knows the worst. But I’m sure she knows a lot more than she would ever admit.

One more thing about Alice was textbook: She would defend George’s behavior by blaming it on alcohol. The idea that when he was steering clear of beer, things were better seemed to reinforce the connection in her mind that it was barley and hops that were bruising her, not her spouse. I thought it was notable that he didn’t drink on their wedding anniversary:

Flowers, chocolates, a massage with those soft hands of his-the whole deal. It’s been a really excellent week. Made love tonight, and it was good.

There were two separate sheets of heavy, granite-colored résumé-bond paper folded into the diary, and each one held a poem George had written to her in blue ink. They were both fourteen-line sonnets. One included an indictment of his own behavior:

Of all the things I’ve broken,

Of all the things I’ve seen come apart,

The moments I’d wish you’d spoken

Were the moments I’d broken your heart.

The other suggested the remorse he felt after he’d hurt her:

And so, trust me, I know

what I have. What I don’t see is where the anger begins.

But when I come for you with roses and salve,

Know at least I am aware of my sins.

The diary included no mention of Heather Laurent: not as an author whose books Alice was reading and not as a presence in either her life or the life of her pastor. I hadn’t really expected to find the Queen of the Angels in the journal, but so much of the investigation was proving a source of surprise that I wouldn’t have been left breathless if she’d had a small cameo.

I WAS CONVINCED that Alice was kidding herself when she wondered in her diary how much Katie knew. I was confident that the kid knew plenty, and I was sure of that well before she’d even been interviewed again. You can clean up a wife beater and dress him up nice, but he’s still a wife beater, and eventually his true colors will come out.

When I was growing up, people who only knew my family casually would have been quick to award my parents the marriage blue ribbon for best in show. And given the sorry state of a lot of marriages out there, I’ve come to the conclusion that it really was pretty good. But much of their marriage was show, an excellent façade they offered to the world-and, sadly, to each other. In reality their marriage was a far cry from storybook. Sometimes, however, I think it could have had a little magic to it if they’d been the sort who talked more. They almost never fought, which may actually have been a part of the problem. They died married, my dad first from lung cancer and my mom next from Alzheimer’s. There was a six-month period when my brother and my sister and I were practically commuting via airplane from our homes in Bennington, Boston, and Manhattan to Fort Myers, Florida, where our parents had moved after our dad had retired. My dad was in excruciating pain, and my mom was getting lost in the bathroom. Getting old? Not for the faint of heart. You really need a spine when it’s time to check out.

My parents’ big problem was that they weren’t especially compatible, and then they rarely talked about how to bridge their differences. I have no idea what they saw in each other at first, and it may have been as simple as the idea that they both were settling. They thought they were in love, they wanted to be in love, and they worked hard all their lives to fake it. My dad was thirty-five when they married, and my mom was thirty-two. She wanted kids badly, so her biological clock must have sounded in her head like a car alarm. But the thing is, they never quite figured how to say what they really wanted, either to communicate their desires or to be comfortable with what the other was asking. The few times they may have tried, it didn’t seem to have a real happy outcome. Once I remember hearing through the bedroom walls the sort of conversation that creeped me out then and makes me a little sad even now. I was twelve, old enough that I knew more than the basics of procreation and recreation between the sheets, but not old enough to have tried anything at all. It was near midnight, and I had been in bed for at least an hour. I’m not sure why I woke up. But I did. My mom was clearly trying to convince my dad to try something a little out of the ordinary in the sack, and he was clearly resisting. He was forty-eight then, and my mom was forty-five. And I got the sense that sex wasn’t hugely satisfying for her and that she wanted it to be before she was ninety (an age she wouldn’t even approach in the end) and it was too late. She was alternately pleading and wheedling with my dad, and my mind was awash with lurid possibilities, which was making me more than a little queasy since these were my parents. I was just about to pull the pillow over my head when my dad said, raising his voice so that I could hear clearly the panic and the disgust and the fear, “You know I can’t perform that way!”

Perform. It’s a pretty harmless, pretty antiseptic word. I know that the word performance, especially when it’s linked with review, can be a little unnerving. But I don’t think it freaks out most people the way it does me. Whenever one of my associates refers to an opening or closing argument as a performance or suggests that he or she didn’t perform well, I’m catapulted back to my seventh-grade bedroom and the sheets with sunflowers muted by laundry detergent and days drying on a rope line in the sun. I’ve told my husband that he has to strike the very word from his vocabulary around me.

In any case, I’m confident that there are any number of nouns and verbs that Katie Hayward will hear over the course of her life that will instantly bring her back to the Cape on the hill and the horrific things she overheard there.

ALICE’S PARENTS IN Nashua, New Hampshire, had a pretty good idea that George occasionally whacked their daughter around. They knew the details in the relief-from-abuse order, and one time with her mother Alice had brought up the term extinguishment of parental rights, suggesting that she feared someday her husband would do the absolute worst. She told her mother that she had researched George’s rights to Katie if “something” ever happened to her and she was planning to see a lawyer in the autumn-that is, if things grew nasty again. (As far as we could tell, she never had gotten around to contacting an attorney.) George’s parents in upstate New York knew considerably less, and it seemed that the four in-laws never spoke. When I read the reports of the interviews, it didn’t seem implausible that Fred and Gail Malcomb would raise a daughter who might tolerate a certain amount of abuse: an only child who clearly wasn’t spoiled, a father who was distant and believed in corporal punishment (“within reason,” Fred stressed), and a mother who was submissive to the point that she would often look to her husband for approval before she answered a question. Likewise, Don and Patrice Hayward were not improbable candidates to bring up a boy who would grow into a man capable of hitting his wife. Theirs was a family of boys: five of them. No girls. Don didn’t even allow female pets, so every one of the dogs that paraded through George’s life when he was young was male, and there never were any cats. Seemed inevitable that sometimes all that male bonding or all that testosterone left over from ice-hockey practices or games (“ice warriors,” Don called his sons) would result in a little brawling in the house. But, Don insisted, he never hit Patrice, and Patrice didn’t disagree. He also said it was unbelievable to him that his son would ever have hit Alice, “no matter what she did to deserve it,” and that the relief-from-abuse order was based on trumped-up accusations. He said the only reason his son returned to Haverill from the lake house and tried to salvage the marriage was for the sake of his daughter.

I made a note to myself about the reality that when George was grown he had both a daughter and a female dog: Was that a source of frustration for him? Disappointment? Why had he allowed his family to bring a female home from the animal shelter? Ginny would tell us that Alice had lost a baby boy to a miscarriage not long after she and George had arrived in Haverill. Alice believed that if the baby had lived, things might have been different. Ginny doubted that, and I did, too. But it was at least conceivable that George’s longing for a son might occasionally have made him even more of a thug.

The fathers of both victims worked, the mothers stayed at home. Fred Malcomb was employed as a manager at an ice-cream factory. Don Hayward owned a small insurance company. Neither had retired at the time of their children’s deaths.

The most interesting-and, perhaps, the most revealing-remark volunteered by Don Hayward? In the follow-up interview, after the Haywards had been informed that it appeared George had been murdered, Don grew a little combative and asked, “So how do you know she didn’t kill him? Alice? How can you be so sure that little you-know-what didn’t shoot him herself-you know, before someone else came in and strangled her? She never much liked him, you know. That’s the truth. Even after all he did for her and all he gave her, she never much liked him.”

Emmet considered explaining the details of gastric emptying times and how the contents of the stomachs of the deceased suggested that Alice had been dead for hours before someone shot George. But in the end he didn’t bother, since by then Don was rattling on about all the remarkable things George had accomplished in his life as a businessman and Patrice was sobbing.

I’ve always assumed that for most people there is great comfort in being home and-more important than that-a profound, almost visceral sensation of safety. And by home I mean quite literally inside the house. Certainly this is the impression I have gotten from my friends who are married or partnered, as well as from my friends who had childhoods that were more normal than mine. You come home and metaphorically (or actually) you start the fire. You hang up your jacket in the hall closet. You run the baths for your children, you watch your cat groom herself on the bar stool nearest the radiator. You cook. You eat. You hold someone you love. And the whole world with all of its dangers and troubles-its savagery and its pettiness-becomes something other, something beyond your front door. In theory, no one hurts you at home.

For my mother, however, I have always assumed that when she would shut that front door for the night, she felt far from secure. It was like being in the cage with a sleeping tiger, which I presume is at least part of the reason why she drank. She never knew what might awaken the animal. Even at the end of her life, I am not sure whether she knew what specifically might set her husband off, what might cause him to hiss at her or rage at her or destroy something small that she cherished: A plate. A wineglass. A photograph. Once he took one of her favorite black-and-white prints from their wedding album-an image of her with her grandfather-and tore it into long strips of confetti while she cried and begged him not to. I assume she was never completely sure what might lead him to hit her.

And then, of course, there were all those nights when, drunk, she would taunt him. Challenge him with a derision that was self-destructive and could lead only to an escalation in their cycle of violence.

Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen my father’s face at his funeral. My mother’s at hers, too. The desire had a different motivation in each instance: In the case of my father, I wanted to see whether he was peaceful in death. Did all the anger and frustration that caused him to scowl-that left his eyebrows knitted in so many of those frayed snapshots-die with his flesh and body and blood? He had been a handsome man, with cheekbones as pronounced as a ledge: But was it the darkness that actually made him attractive? As for my mother, I wondered what her countenance was like when her eyes weren’t darting nervously like a rabbit’s or shrunken by scotch to mere slits-when she wasn’t anxiously trying to anticipate her husband’s moods. Would she, finally, have a face that allowed the beauty that had been subsumed by all that disappointment and fear shine through?

The last time I had seen either of them alive had been over Christmas. The only angels I had been conscious of back then had been the porcelain ones that decorated the fireplace mantel and the glass ones that my sister and my mother and I hung on the balsam we stood every year in the bay window in the living room. (It would only be later that I would become aware of the angels among us, the sentient and beatific with wings.) At one point when my sister and I were standing in our kitchen after our mother’s funeral, when we were surrounded by all those grown-ups and all the food that neighbors had brought that neither of us had any interest in eating, Amanda turned to me and asked me what I thought the morticians had done to our parents’ bodies between their deaths and their funerals. It was a good question. In hindsight, we both needed more closure than either of us had been offered. Anybody in our situation would.

A few years later, when I was taking a course in college on aberrant psychology, I would come to understand that it was not merely the morticians who had worked upon my parents’ bodies in the period between the murder and the suicide and when their bodies were lowered in mahogany caskets into the earth. It had been the medical examiner who had, in all likelihood, peeled back their faces and weighed their hearts and swabbed the inside of my mother’s vagina.

CHAPTER TEN

It’s not easy to weird out a pathologist, but Heather Laurent succeeded. I already had a meeting with the crime lab on another case, and so I drove up to David Dennison’s office the day after he called so he could tell me precisely what Heather had said and, apparently, done. By then we had checked out the basics of Heather’s history-though we hadn’t interviewed her yet-and pretty much all that she had written in her books about her parents’ deaths was true: Her father had indeed shot her mother and then hanged himself in the family attic, leaving behind two teenage daughters. Nice. What a guy.

David’s office was a first-floor corner just off the mortuary (and he always preferred that we call it a mortuary instead of a morgue, since the word mortuary, he believed, conveyed a greater respect for the dead), and the mortuary was a sprawling series of rooms you entered via the ER at the hospital in Burlington. Convenient, no? If you wound up in the ER and made it, you went upstairs to the hospital; if not, they wheeled you on a gurney through the double doors marked AUTOPSY SERVICES.

The resources were impressive for a state as small as Vermont, because for over a decade we had a governor who’d been a physician. Eventually he was able to secure the funds for a first-rate facility, the sort of place where you really can treat the dead with the honor they deserve. When the legislature was debating the funds for the new space, David testified famously (famously in Montpelier, anyway) that he wanted a kinder and gentler mortuary. We only have a dozen or so homicides a year here, but for one reason or another-usually what we call an untimely death-David and his staff still autopsy about 10 percent of the people who die. And since we usually lose about five thousand people, the pathologists autopsy close to five hundred Vermonters annually. And then there are the corpses with organs and tissue to harvest. David is adamant in his belief that the tissue donation room has the best air in the state.

And the day before, Heather Laurent had showed up out of the blue at Autopsy Services about four o’clock in the afternoon. David had had me paged, but I was in court, and Emmet was in Haverill interviewing Ginny O’Brien and Tina Cousino.

“I have to assume that Heather Laurent is a suspect,” David said when I arrived.

“She may be involved somehow, but I wouldn’t say she’s the lead horse. Not by a long shot. Why would she be at the top of your list?”

“Because she’s insane.”

“You think?”

“Well, not literally. But she is a kook. And I’m not saying she should be the lead candidate, either.”

“She’s loaded, you know.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“She comes from buckets of money and has made a boatload more with her books. Why did she come here? And what did you do when she did?”

We were sitting in his office, and he motioned at the chair in which I was sitting. “Mostly we talked.”

“Here. In your office.”

“I went out to reception when Vivian said Heather Laurent was here to see me. I told the woman it was inappropriate for us to speak.”

“But you did anyway.”

“She wanted a tour.”

“Why?”

“Because she had never seen the inside of a mortuary. She asked to see the bodies.”

“Bodies… generally. Right? She had to know that the Haywards have been in the ground in New York and New Hampshire for a good long time.”

“Yes. Bodies generally. She told me about her parents, which I already knew. But it seems she never got to see their bodies after they had died. The last she saw of them, they were alive. It had been over Christmas. Next thing she knew, they were in caskets. She wanted to know what had probably happened to them in between.”

“Other than being shot in the one case and hanged in the other.”

“Yes. Other than that.”

“I didn’t even know she was in Vermont.”

The shelf on the wall behind his desk was awash in Beanie Babies, small plush animals filled with plastic pellets instead of traditional stuffing. His two daughters, when they had been little girls, insisted on giving him the creatures because they had a vague idea that the office of a man who spent his life taking cadavers apart and putting them back together could use a little cheer. For the first time I noticed that two of them-a zebra and a lavender dachshund-were each wearing a doctor’s white coat. The dachshund even had a stethoscope, which struck me as ironic only because I didn’t imagine that David listened to a lot of beating hearts most days. I wanted to pick one up and throw it at him.

“Don’t worry: The tour I gave her was seriously abridged.”

“I can’t effing believe you gave her any tour at all. You’re the one who’s the lunatic-not her. Are you embarrassed? I sure as shit hope you are.”

His face was a little square and usually rather regal-especially given how early he’d grayed. But now he looked like a scolded child, and his eyes, always a bit drawn, grew small. “I think you’re making too much of this,” he said defensively.

“Emmet hasn’t even interviewed her yet! We didn’t even know she was here!”

“Well, now we know.”

“Where is she?”

He paused. “She went home. To Manhattan.”

“Lovely. Did she say why she was here?”

“I told you, she wanted to learn what had probably happened to her parents’ bodies.”

“I mean in Vermont: Why was she in Vermont?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“We were too busy talking about why she had dropped by my office-though she did say she had just come from seeing Katie Hayward at the high school.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I know-”

“Did she say what she and Katie had talked about?”

“No.”

I was irked and felt a little flushed. I took a deep breath. “So: How extensive was this tour you gave her?”

“Not extensive at all. It’s not like I was going to walk her through the chain of custody for the Haywards-for any of the bodies that arrive here. I showed her my office, an autopsy room, and the tissue donation room. Since it was the reason she’d come here, I told her what I presumed had been done with her parents.”

“And then she left.”

“That’s right.”

“What did she say about the Haywards?”

“She was saddened.”

“Oh, please.”

“And she wanted to know about the nightgown Alice Hayward had been wearing when she’d been killed.”

“Did she say why?”

“She said she was curious and caught me off guard. So I told her.”

“You told her?”

“I did, I’m sorry. I was walking her to the door and it just slipped out. Later it crossed my mind that she wanted an alibi: You know, a moment when someone-i.e., yours truly-could testify that she had asked him what color it was. But I’m being paranoid, right?”

“One can hope.”

“I really am sorry.”

“Her buddy, Pastor Drew? Did she say anything about him?”

“Not her buddy any longer.”

I sat forward in my chair. “Really?”

He shook his head. “No. You didn’t know?”

“We’re not exactly girls in the hood, David. No. I did not know. What did she say?”

“I was talking to her about her own parents and what sorts of things the medical examiner-and, I added, the mortician-had probably done with them. I was being very vague.”

“Sensitive,” I said sarcastically. “That’s you.”

“Thank you. I really was telling her only the basics, but she kept wanting to know things about how her own parents had died. The physiological specifics. It was, in her opinion, the exact reverse of the Haywards. In the Haywards’ case, it was the male who was shot and the female who was strangled; in the case of her own mom and dad, it was the female who was shot and the male who was strangled.”

I nodded, simultaneously interested and a little disappointed in myself that I hadn’t made this association on my own. I wasn’t sure if it mattered, but it was a connection of some sort. “Go on.”

“So I was explaining to her the differences between ligature strangulation-you know, with a scarf or a rope-and manual strangulation. I was babbling on about strap-muscle hemorrhages and the likely calcification of bone in her father’s neck-”

“All things she needed to know.”

He raised an eyebrow but otherwise ignored me and continued, “-and Heather interrupted me. ‘Manual strangulation is much more personal,’ she said. ‘You’re staring into your victim’s eyes. You have to be very angry.’ I thought that was a wee bit of an understatement. Very angry? You have to be a fuel tank that just exploded! But I was polite and agreed. And that’s when she said, ‘I just don’t see how Stephen Drew could have missed the rage that must have been consuming George Hayward.’”

“And you said?”

He shrugged. “I was evasive. I said people are human. They miss things. And that’s when she let on that she and the minister weren’t real tight. Her response? ‘And some people only see what they want to see. Some people’s hearts are harder and more selfish than others’. They resist the more virtuous angels among us.’”

“Wow. Does that mean there are angels that aren’t virtuous?”

“Possibly.”

“Did you press her on what she meant?”

“I asked her if she meant Pastor Drew, and she said she did. Then she looked away. Right out that window. And she looked totally disgusted-which wasn’t a look I had seen on her face until that very second.”

“But she didn’t say anything more. She didn’t elaborate.”

“Nope. Maybe just as well. Most of the things she said were pretty loopy. At one point when I was showing her the autopsy room, one of the lab techs happened to come in with a Tupperware container full of hearts for the medical school. The lid was off. They were old and had bleached out over time, and so they looked more like headless chickens than human hearts. Heather didn’t recognize what they were and asked. I told her. And her response? ‘Why is it we always want the heart of a lion-and not the heart of an angel? An angel’s heart is as strong as a lion’s but has the benefits of acumen and history.’ I didn’t tell her that the only history in most of the hearts I see is too little exercise and too many Quarter Pounders with cheese. Then, a few minutes later, she noticed the bags of bones.” Reflexively he glanced down at his shoes when he said that. No one wants to talk about the bags of bones: They are the human remains-the femurs like clubs and the mandibles that remind one of scoops, the occasional pelvic girdle-that have been unearthed at construction sites or excavations around the state. Most of them, we presume, are Abenaki remains from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we will never attach a name to any one of them. But we have no precedent about how or where to reinter them, and the last thing we want to do is dispose of them with the hazardous waste that is part and parcel of any mortuary (or morgue). And so they sit in massive, Ziploc plastic bags on a couple of shelves in a far corner of one of the autopsy rooms.

“And what did she have to say about the bones?” I asked.

“They’re why humans can’t fly.”

“Because we have bones.”

“Yes. We need bones more like birds’.”

“Or angels’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really?”

“Yup. We need bones like the angels’. She said we’d fear dying so much less if we allowed ourselves to feel the presence of the angels among us.”

“And you said?”

“I said absolutely nothing. It was a straight line with far too many responses. And she was so completely sincere. But you know what expression did cross my mind after she left?”

I waited.

And he said, his voice at once troubled and bemused, “Angel of death. I’m telling you: That woman is as stable as a three-legged chair.”

THE TEST FIRE of George Hayward’s handgun would show that it had been discharged at about two and a half feet from his skull: in all likelihood too far for a self-inflicted head wound. The lab used a bullet with a full metal jacket, as had Hayward, rather than one with a hollow point that is designed to remain inside the body and-not incidentally-expand as it penetrates its target, causing considerably more internal damage. Certainly we were aware of suicides where the victim had held the gun at arm’s length, aimed the barrel back at his head, and used his thumb to pull the trigger. But it was rare. After all, if you’re trying to kill yourself, why risk missing? And given how drunk George Hayward had been that night, it didn’t seem likely to anyone in my office that he would have had the cognitive capabilities to figure out that he could hold the gun so far away and use his thumb to fire the weapon.

WE SEARCHED THE parsonage in Haverill, but we found nothing that was going to link the Reverend Drew to the Haywards’ murders. I’m not sure any of us actually expected to find a flannel shirt with George Hayward’s brains on the pocket, but we had to check. Alice Hayward’s prints were on the kitchen table and on one of the ladderback chairs beside it, but that was the only trace of her we found in the house. Nothing in the bedroom, nothing in the bathroom. And there was nothing on the reverend’s computer that indicated definitively either that he was having an affair with the woman or, later, that he had murdered one or both of the Haywards-though there was plenty that suggested an interest in the crime that he and his lawyer had to know could be made to look incriminating as hell if we ever presented it to a jury. In the days after the bodies were discovered, he was Googling sites with general forensic information about murder by strangulation and murder by a gunshot to the head. He had spent hours clicking through sites on crime-scene investigations and how a suspect might try to eliminate evidence of his presence at a homicide. He was also searching for anything he could unearth about Alice. High-school photos. College-yearbook appearances. There was little there, but he had seemed to have found what there was. What we discovered also corroborated a part of his story: On the Sunday night that the Haywards had been killed, he had frequently visited the website for Major League Baseball and followed the progress of a ball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. And in the following days, he had indeed written e-mails to friends, as he had told us, some of which he had sent but most of which were sitting in the drafts folder in his mail program. All of them suggested he was merely a minister enduring a profound crisis of faith; none of them intimated that he just might have gone postal and shot George Hayward in the head.

Certainly the DNA swab he had given us, as well as his fingerprints, was damning as hell if we were trying to convict him of adultery. His presence was all over the Haywards’ house, especially the master bedroom and bathroom and the kitchen. Unfortunately, this wasn’t seventeenth-century Boston. We needed more than adultery. And, still, nothing that we had linked him to the house that awful night.

GORDON AND MICHELLE Brookner, the neighbors closest in proximity to the Haywards and the owners of the little pond where Alice had been baptized on the day she would die, had seen the pastor’s car visit the Hayward house a number of times the previous winter when they had come north to go skiing. The timing, they thought, had been February and March. They knew that Alice and George had what Michelle referred to as “a troubled marriage,” because of the winter months when George had been exiled to Lake Bomoseen. But they hadn’t known until Alice was dead that George was physically abusive, and they had been surprised. They had rather liked him. Thought he was an impressive young entrepreneur. They had liked both Alice and George. It also hadn’t crossed their minds that Stephen Drew might have been romantically involved with Alice; that, too, was a story they would hear first only after the Haywards were dead. “He was the minister. Why wouldn’t he have come by their house?” Michelle observed.

When Emmet returned to speak once again with Betsy Storrs, the church secretary who I wanted managing my life and, if possible, coordinating the food and decoration for every major family holiday that was my responsibility-especially Thanksgiving-she was uncharacteristically evasive when asked about the minister’s relationship with Alice Hayward. Had she ever seen Alice’s car at the parsonage? Yes, but she had seen lots of people’s cars at the parsonage. How often was Alice in Stephen’s office? Most frequently in the months immediately before “George and Alice decided to take a marital breather,” and then only occasionally in the late winter and spring. The only times she could recall Alice there after George had returned were two instances in July when she and Stephen were discussing the significance and specifics of her desired baptism. Did she think that Stephen and Alice had been more than mere friends? “No friendship is mere, is it?” Well, then, did she believe that it had gone beyond the traditional bounds of a pastor’s relationship with one of his flock? Perhaps, but that was between two consenting adults, and she certainly couldn’t testify under oath that she had ever seen anything inappropriate; besides, “if there was something tawdry there, Stephen and Alice can answer for that when the time comes in heaven. And yes, I do think Alice is in heaven right now, and when Stephen dies-which I hope isn’t for a great many years-he will be, too.”

AND WHAT OF the business associates George had had in his retail ventures over the years? What of the bank loan officers and store managers and waitresses and clerks who had known George? Altogether he had a small empire, with twenty full-or part-time employees in two shops and a restaurant, plus three staffers in his headquarters office on the floor above the toy store. Might one of those workers have had a bone to pick with the man? Likewise, what of Alice’s associates at the retail branch of the bank where she worked? Was it possible that there was a teller or customer-service rep who was a killer? Or might Alice have told them something that would illuminate in some way what had happened to her and her husband that July night?

In the end we interviewed nearly thirty women and men who were acquaintances of the Haywards and might have known something-anything-about why the two of them had come to such a tragic end. When we were finished, we knew that Alice was a customer-service representative for a community bank who was more alone than anyone realized and that George was a businessman who was starting to grow tired of what he did. (Without his supervision, by the end of September the toy store and the rib joint had closed. The original clothing store was still in business, but it was unclear whether it would last even through the December holidays.) No one expressed a particular closeness to George, but no one seemed likely to want to kill him. At the same time, everyone was saddened by Alice’s death, but George had done such a first-rate job of isolating her from possible friends that no one at the bank seemed especially devastated by her murder, either. They were distressed, naturally, perhaps a little troubled by their proximity to murder, but they had moved on. And none of the people we spoke with seemed to have any motive for killing either of the Haywards or any information that was going to bring us nearer to indicting someone who might.

PAUL’S AND MY wedding anniversary fell on a Saturday that autumn, and the two of us had dinner plans that evening. But the day began when all three of the men in my life brought me waffles in bed and cards that each of them had made. Lionel’s was a wobbly amoeba created from pink and red construction paper that in his mind was undoubtedly a heart. Marcus’s was a painting of Cupid that he had downloaded from the Web, printed, and pasted into the background of a photo of Paul and me in the backyard. (It actually looked to me like the little Roman was drawing back his bow to murder one of us, but I reminded myself that only I would see a killer in Cupid.) And Paul’s was a cute card from the drugstore, but the best part was the coupons for “romantic dinner for two” and “afternoon at the spa” that he typed up and folded inside it.

“I made the waffle batter, and Lionel picked out what would go in them,” Marcus informed me with great earnestness and pride, while behind him Paul raised his eyebrows and nodded a little warily. Clearly my breakfast didn’t need a warning from the surgeon general, but these might not be Food Network-quality waffles. I looked at the white, brown, and dark black flecks scattered along the grid.

“Coconut, chocolate, and burned coconut,” Paul offered helpfully. “But not badly burned.”

“And peanuts,” Marcus said.

“Walnuts,” Paul gently corrected him.

I pushed the pillows against the headboard and patted the mattress so my little boys knew to join me on either side of the bed, which they did in an instant. Outside, the sun was up, and there was the reassuring thump I heard many autumn Saturdays, the sound of our neighbor Rudy, an architect, tossing wood into the shed that later that day he would stack with mathematical precision. I poured a little maple syrup-which I discovered Paul had warmed in the microwave-onto the waffles and took a bite. Then I smiled at my boys and at Paul, and I don’t think I thought for a moment the rest of that weekend about all of the disappointing marriages and broken families there are in this world, and the myriad ways love seems to go bad.

WHEN WE INTERVIEWED Ginny O’Brien the second time, journalists and bloggers already were convicting Stephen Drew. Consequently, Ginny was more forthcoming than she had been initially. It seemed less important to protect the confidences that Alice had offered, since they were no longer secrets shared between friends. And, of course, we knew more, and so we knew which questions to ask.

EMMET WALKER: Alice told you that she and the reverend had an intimate relationship?

VIRGINIA “GINNY” O’ BRIEN: Yes.

WALKER: They were sleeping together?

O’ BRIEN: Yes.

WALKER: When did she tell you this?

O’ BRIEN: Last winter.

WALKER: Can you be more precise?

O’ BRIEN: It was before Christmas. I don’t know how long she and Stephen had had a relationship then, but she first told me about it a few weeks before Christmas. She was all giddy, and so I got all giddy. George was just too dangerous. I understand what she had first seen in him-Lord, I know what lots of people had first seen in him-but underneath it all he was just plain despicable. Horrible. I would have been so happy if she had just left him and married Stephen. Stephen’s not perfect, but everyone would have been better off, and she’d still be alive today. Can’t you just see her as a pastor’s wife?

WALKER: I never met her, ma’am.

O’ BRIEN: Of course.

WALKER: Did Alice come right out and say that she and the reverend were having intercourse, or did she simply imply it?

O’ BRIEN: She said it. They were having sex. But I’m sure she only told me.

WALKER: And this started before she got the temporary relief-from-abuse order?

O’ BRIEN: Long before. Like two or three months before. I don’t know this for a fact, but I always assumed it was Stephen who had talked her into getting the restraining order. She wasn’t listening to me, so she must have been listening to him.

WALKER: How long did the affair continue?

O’ BRIEN: Until sometime late in the spring. She got the restraining order, and George left. I was sure that she would start divorce proceedings and soon enough she and Stephen would be living happily ever after.

WALKER: Why didn’t that happen?

O’ BRIEN: Stephen.

WALKER: What do you mean, “Stephen”?

O’ BRIEN: He didn’t want to get married.

WALKER: Did Alice tell you that she and Stephen had actually discussed marriage?

O’ BRIEN: Not exactly. It never went that far. She just had the sense that…

WALKER: That what?

O’ BRIEN: That she wasn’t good enough for him. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that ridiculous and sad?

WALKER: Yes, it is.

O’ BRIEN: Of course, Stephen probably didn’t help matters in that regard: He’s a little… I don’t know… aristocratic. At least he thinks he is. And he never seemed to want to move the relationship along. Maybe he felt guilty. WALKER: Guilty because he was having an affair with a married woman?

O’ BRIEN: And a parishioner. I mean, one of his sermons this spring was really interesting and-given what I knew about Alice and him-pretty darn revealing.

WALKER: What did he say?

O’ BRIEN: He went on and on about how awful he was. He even used that word: awful. He said he was the worst of the sinners. I mean, we all knew he wasn’t. This was pulpit stuff, I figured, to make a point that God loved even him.

WALKER: That was the point in the end?

O’BRIEN: I think so. I just remember that it made some people in the congregation love him even more.

WALKER: But not you.

O’ BRIEN: Oh, I like Stephen. I just thought in that sermon he was a bit of a hypocrite. So what if you’re sleeping with Alice Hayward? She shouldn’t have been with a monster like George. Just announce to the world that you two are in love and be done with it. Marry her! Move on! Instead they broke up soon after that sermon. Well, they stopped sleeping together. It’s not as if they were ever really a public item. It’s not like there was something to “break up.”

WALKER: Who initiated it?

O’ BRIEN: The breakup? I think it just faded. George wanted to come back, and he vowed he had changed. He’d probably done such a job on her head over the years that she really didn’t believe she deserved anyone better than him. And maybe Stephen really did think he was a sinner to be sleeping with Alice and that’s why he didn’t pursue something more. And Alice certainly wasn’t going to press him. She didn’t have that kind of confidence.

WALKER: She didn’t have the confidence to press Stephen for a commitment?

O’ BRIEN: That’s right.

WALKER: Where would they rendezvous?

O’ BRIEN: You mean for sex?

WALKER: Yes.

O’ BRIEN: At her house.

WALKER: Not the parsonage.

O’ BRIEN: I don’t think so. It was too close to the church. It’s in the middle of town. And anyone could drop by.

WALKER: Did Alice ever mention anywhere else?

O’ BRIEN: Once when Katie was with a school trip to Montreal-an overnight for French class-they went to the hotel on the waterfront in Burlington. It was all very clandestine. She checked in, just in case he was recognized by some Burlington pastor or something. Sometimes his photo was in the Baptist newsletter. But he insisted on paying for it. They had a good time. Ordered room service and never left the hotel room.

Sure enough, on the second Thursday in March, Alice Hayward had stayed for a night at the Hilton in downtown Burlington. Her room was on the top floor, and it faced Lake Champlain. Had a lovely sunset over the Adirondacks. And the charges had been paid for with Stephen Drew’s MasterCard.

TINA COUSINO, KATIE Hayward’s best friend, was a very cool customer. Emmet said he had no idea that eyelids could hold the weight of so much shadow and liner or that there were parents in this world who would allow their sixteen-year-old daughters to wear so much mascara. The result was a pair of eyes that belonged, he said, to a clown that either wanted to look very scary or happened to be very sleepy. Her hair had been dyed the color of root beer and fell in a single flat wave halfway down her back. She had dozens of bracelets on each arm between her wrist and her elbow, some made of silver and some made of rubber and some made of tin. She had a sickle moon of metal studs running along the helix of each ear. Most of her answers were monosyllabic, but eventually Emmet was able to get what he needed. According to Tina, Katie knew well that her father had abused her mother and she didn’t have especially fond feelings toward the man. But she also didn’t talk about her parents all that much. From the few times she had, Tina had gotten the impression that Katie viewed her father as far more pathetic than terrifying. Katie was aware of the contrition that followed his bouts of violence and had even seen some of her father’s poetry. One night she had made fun of it with Tina. But she had never given her friend the impression that her mother was capable of sleeping with someone other than George, and the idea that Alice Hayward had been involved with Stephen Drew came as a complete shock to Tina. Among her longer responses? She found it “totally weird, totally disturbing” that her friend’s parents had died while she and Katie had been thirty-nine miles away at a Fray concert in Albany. She knew the mileage, she volunteered, because the next day when she heard what had happened, she’d gone to MapQuest. The distance, she said, seemed to matter.

STEPHEN’S MOTHER AND his sister had no idea that he’d been involved with a parishioner named Alice Hayward. They had never heard of most of the women he’d dated in Vermont. The only name that rang a bell was the name of the woman he had asked to marry him, but no one in Stephen’s family realized that the relationship had progressed so far. No one, it seemed, even suspected that it was more than a friendship.

“I always thought he was gay and just didn’t want to tell me,” his mother said. “I wouldn’t have been upset.”

His sister had disagreed. “Gay? Stephen? No, he’s into women. He’s just not into relationships. He’s really not into people. What he’s doing as a minister is a complete mystery to me.”

I KNOW THE difference between mourning and grief. I have seen enough of death-in my own life and professionally-to know that the differences aren’t subtle at all. My brother-in-law, who in some ways I was as close to as my own brother, died when he was only thirty-one. He was commuting to work on his bicycle. He was at the very end of his training as a cardiologist. According to a witness, he was riding his bicycle on the shoulder of the two-lane road that linked his small house with the four-lane road that led to the hospital and adjacent medical school where he worked, when he was nipped by the wide side mirror of a pickup truck. The truck never stopped, and the witness, another physician in a car behind the pickup who was also commuting to work, was too focused on my brother-in-law’s body as it careened through the air like a crash-test dummy to register the license plate. He was thrown from the bike into the trunk of a thick maple tree and then back onto the pavement. His skull slammed into both, shattering his helmet like a ripe pumpkin rind, and he died from massive head trauma. In hindsight this was clearly for the best, because his neck had also been broken and in all likelihood he would have been paralyzed from the chin down if somehow he had survived. My brother-in-law would not have done well as a quadriplegic.

And my college roommate died of cancer as a relatively young mother, leaving behind two daughters, each of whom is only a year or so older than each of my boys. For months I saved the last message she left on my cell phone when she had tried to reach me in her final days in the hospital: Hi, Catherine, it’s me. They can’t do anything more. I love you. She sounded tired, but in no way relieved. I was in a conference in San Francisco, and she was dying in Maryland. I went right away, but she deteriorated so quickly that she never made it to the hospice. By the time I arrived, she was already so doped up on morphine that she never even had a clue I was in the room.

And, of course, I have seen the children of women who were murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and the parents of women who were slaughtered by strangers, their bodies left unceremoniously in the woods. I have seen the mothers of little girls who were raped and smothered. (Smothering seems to be the method preferred by uncles and stepfathers when they want to kill the elementary-or middle-school girl they have just sodomized. They seem to desire plastic bags.)

Sometimes you just expect the waves and waves of sorrow to wash over you. Swamp you completely. That, in my mind, is real grief. And mourning? That’s when you’ve reached the stage where you can build a stout seawall against those colossal breakers and go about your life. You might be sprayed by the surf, but you are not incapacitated. In the days after my brother-in-law died, my sister and her in-laws were grieving. They were shell-shocked and disconsolate and incapable of doing little more than getting dressed in the morning. My roommate’s husband hadn’t that luxury because of his daughters. He wasn’t allowed to grieve. And so he had to make do with mere slow-motion mourning.

On the other hand, he’d had time to prepare for what was coming. My sister and her in-laws hadn’t.

That’s the thing about the families who lose someone to a homicide or a violent accident: There’s no time to build that seawall. There’s no time even for sandbags.

I thought about this whenever my mind wandered to poor Katie Hayward. I wondered what it must be like suddenly to be so completely and utterly alone. The kid didn’t even have siblings. Sometimes I wish I could do the interviewing myself. I can’t, for the simple reason that it could result in my having to testify in court, which would compromise the prosecution. But Katie was one of those people I would have wanted to speak with as a parent as well as a prosecutor. Do it myself so I could talk to her as a mom. Apparently she was continuing to hold up reasonably well. There had been a few sleepless nights in September and some long days when she ate little and spoke less. Once a teacher found her sobbing in a school bathroom stall. But she was doing her schoolwork, melding well with the Cousino family, and she had auditioned for and been cast in the school musical. She had written an opened for the school newspaper condemning what she called the administration’s cavalier energy policy.

All of this meant that I couldn’t wait to find out what Heather Laurent had said to Katie when she had returned to Vermont in September. I wanted to know what Mother Angel had been doing in Haverill before she had decided to drop in on David. In two days Emmet and another trooper were taking an overnight road trip: first to meet Amanda Laurent in Statler, New York, and then to Manhattan to formally interview Heather herself. But that afternoon Emmet had gone back to the Cousino house in Haverill with Katie’s social worker, Josie, a powerhouse of a woman with dreadlocks and tats, to speak to the teenager about her most recent chat with the Queen of the Seraphim. I didn’t want us to push too hard after what the poor kid had been through-and I doubt that Josie would have let us-but I had to know what Heather had said to the teenager and what the woman had asked.

EMMET WALKER: And so Ms. Laurent came by your school.

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. She came to my lunch table with Mrs. Degraff.

WALKER: Who is that?

K. HAYWARD: My guidance counselor. Heather-it’s, like, okay if I call her Heather, right?

WALKER: Yes.

K. HAYWARD: Because she wants me to.

WALKER: Did Mrs. Degraff know Ms. Laurent?

K. HAYWARD: No. But she had heard of her. Heather writes books. Anyway, you have to get a visitor’s pass to walk around the school, and you get those at the front office. That’s so some crazy doesn’t walk around with a gun and get all Columbine on us.

WALKER: I understand.

K. HAYWARD: And Mrs. Degraff was called in when Heather said she had come to see me. She told Mrs. Degraff she was good friends with Ginny O’Brien-which, if Ginny had heard, would have caused her to, like, totally soak through her pan-

WALKER: Go ahead.

K. HAYWARD: It would have made Ginny crazy happy.

WALKER: And so you and Heather and Mrs. Degraff chatted.

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. But Mrs. Degraff wasn’t there most of the time.

JOSIE MORRISON: I would have been present, but no one called me. And I think Heather Laurent was probably very helpful. I’ve read her books.

WALKER: What did you talk about?

K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Stuff.

WALKER: No specific recollections?

K. HAYWARD: Mostly just how my life totally sucks, I guess. And how it’s okay to feel that way. She’s been through this, you know. She knows better than most people what I’m going through.

WALKER: What did she ask you?

K. HAYWARD: You know. The usual. Like, how was I doing? What was I feeling? She asked what everyone asks. And she gave me her cell-phone number, so I can call her if I’m about to wig out.

MORRISON: And remember, Katie: You have plenty of support right here, too. You can always call me, too. Daytime. Nighttime.

K. HAYWARD: I know.

WALKER: How are you doing?

K. HAYWARD: Okay. I guess.

WALKER: What did you tell her-Ms. Laurent?

K. HAYWARD: Look, do I have to talk about this? It was one thing to talk to Heather. She knows what I’m going through. It’s one thing to talk to Josie. If everyone else would just leave me alone…

WALKER: I’m sorry. Did Heather tell you why she was in Haverill?

K. HAYWARD: Well, at first I thought she had been with Stephen.

WALKER: Your pastor.

K. HAYWARD: Well, the pastor. I don’t know if he’s my pastor. I guess he’s back in Vermont, but he’s not back in church. And it’s not like I’m real involved with the church these days, anyway.

WALKER: Did she say what she was doing with the minister?

K. HAYWARD: The rumor is she was doing the minister.

WALKER: Pardon me, ma’am?

MORRISON: Katie, you really need to save that tone for me. That was a joke, Sergeant.

WALKER: I see.

K. HAYWARD: No, she didn’t say much. And she wasn’t there to see him, anyway. I’d thought she was, but I was wrong.

WALKER: Did she say anything?

K. HAYWARD: She used to like him. That’s what the rumor is. But she doesn’t anymore.

WALKER: How do you know that?

K. HAYWARD: Well, I don’t know it. Not for sure, anyway.

WALKER: But why would you suspect it-that she and Stephen are no longer seeing each other?

K. HAYWARD: Because she is totally into angels and she said he isn’t.

WALKER: She told you that Stephen Drew doesn’t like angels?

K. HAYWARD: Sort of. She said he had built a wall against angels.

WALKER: Do you know what she meant by that?

K. HAYWARD: No idea. But look. Everyone says he was sleeping with my mom. Everyone. Then everyone says he was sleeping with Heather. That’s probably what she meant.

WALKER: You told me the first time we spoke that you didn’t believe that your mother and Reverend Drew were intimate. Have you changed your mind?

K. HAYWARD: Intimate?

MORRISON: Sleeping together, Sweetie.

K. HAYWARD: Oh, I get it. Yeah, I’ve been following what people are saying. You can’t help it, you know? And I guess I was wrong. Way wrong. Maybe they were sleeping together. Everyone in the whole world seems to think so.

WALKER: What else did Heather say?

K. HAYWARD: She told me to keep my heart open to angels. To take care of myself. And to be careful.

WALKER: Be careful?

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. That’s why she came to the school. Don’t you think? To warn me and to, like, let me know I could call her whenever.

WALKER: It felt like a warning?

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh. It definitely felt like a warning.

WALKER: A warning about what? Or whom?

K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Maybe some evil angel-if there is such a thing. Maybe grown men in general. It’s not like she and my mom have had great success with your gender. I’m just saying…

WALKER: Just saying what?

K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Look, this is all totally confusing. But you know what? If my mom did have an affair with Stephen, I’m glad. She needed something nice in her life. At least I think I’m glad.

WALKER: Why the doubt?

K. HAYWARD: Well, we’ll never know if that’s why my dad… um, you know.

WALKER: No, I don’t know.

MORRISON: Killed her mother, Sergeant. We’ll never know if that’s why Katie’s dad killed her mom.

In 2006, Florida lawmakers passed a law that protected the billboard from one of the great environmental threats to its existence: the tree. During the debate a state representative in favor of the bill testified, “Tourism depends on billboards, not on trees.”

This is one of the biggest differences between the Northeast, where I grew up, and Florida. Our tourism depends on trees. Vermont, for example, doesn’t even allow billboards.

Roughly 4 million tourists descend upon the Green Mountains alone each and every autumn to peep at the leaves and savor what poets like to call “the fire in the trees.” There are a great many reasons people celebrate the fall foliage, not the least of which is that it is indeed very pretty. For a few weeks in late September and early October, the New England maple blushes a shade of cherry far more vibrant than a preschooler’s most colorful Magic Marker, the ash glows as purple as the billboards on Broadway, and the birch trees bloom into a neon that’s downright phosphorescent. The woods grow more scenic, more lush, and more visually arresting-especially when the sky above is Wedgwood and the vista is framed by the rising wisps of our own autumnal breath.

But here’s a reality that fascinated me as a young adult: Fall foliage is not the Grand Canyon. Or Yosemite. Or even Niagara Falls. It’s not jaw-dropping, pull-me-away-from-the-edge-of-the-cliff, never-seen-anything-like-it spectacular.

So why the attraction? Why the cars, the crowds, the buses lumbering like moose up and over each mountain gap? At least part of what draws us is this: death. Not all of it, certainly. Some of the pull is romance in a four-poster bed and an inn with a dog and a fireplace. The leaves are a pretext to escape an urban condo with a view of another urban condo.

But we also understand that the phantasmagoric colors we see in the trees are millions (billions?) of leaves slowly dying. We might not know the biology behind the change, but we realize that the leaf is turning from green to red because imminently it will fall to the ground, where it will sink into the forest floor on its way to becoming humus.

The science is actually pretty simple: The tree is aware that the cold is coming and the leaves haven’t a prayer. Consequently it produces a wall of cells at the base of the leaf, precisely where the stem meets the twig, thus preventing fluids from reaching the leaf. At the same time, the leaf stops producing chlorophyll, the chemical behind photosynthesis and the reason leaves are green. Without the chlorophyll, the leaf’s other chemicals become obvious, such as the maple’s red carotenoids. Soon the leaf withers and dies.

But what a handsome death it is. No dementia, no incontinence, no children or loved ones bickering over whether to pull the plug or order one last round of chemo cocktails. Humans should be so lucky as to turn the kaleidoscopic colors of the forest when we pass.

Of course, the whole of autumn is about transience. The entire natural world seems to be shutting down, moldering, growing still. The days are short, the nights are long, and everything looks a little bleak-except for those leaves. Those kaleidoscopically lovely maples and birches and oaks allow us to gaze for a moment at the wonder of nature and to accept the inevitable quiescence of our own aura. Like so much else around us, it’s not the leaves’ beauty that moves us: It’s the fact their beauty won’t last.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There were a couple of reporters who expected an indictment any day now as the last of the leaves fell from the trees, and they were confident that when the time came, we would be arresting Stephen Drew. They called my office often that autumn and were constantly nosing through court papers. They were convinced that what had occurred that night in July was really pretty simple. Somehow Alice Hayward had gotten word to the parsonage that her husband was going ballistic, but by the time her ex-lover arrived, she was dead and her husband was passed out drunk. So Drew killed him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’re not married?”

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

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

“No?”

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

“And Amanda?”

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

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

“How so?”

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

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

“And only kill us after they’d started eating,” Andy added.

“You said most of them were perfect. Which ones weren’t?” I asked.

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

“I didn’t know you knew so much about birds.”

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

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

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

“And this is in honor of Amanda and Heather?”

“So he said.”

“Why are they avengers?”

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

“He didn’t say what they were avenging?”

“Nope.”

“Any ideas?”

“No again. Sorry.”

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

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

“Was her visit a surprise?”

“No. She had called them ahead of time. But she hadn’t told them she was bringing her new boyfriend.”

“So they hadn’t met him before.”

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

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

“They’d seen the story on the news. They still assumed it was a murder-suicide.”

“Your cell phones work there?”

“No, they didn’t. That part of Drew’s story checks out, too.”

“She say anything about her father’s history of abuse or her parents’ deaths?”

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

“And?”

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

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

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

“Well, that must have made it all worthwhile.”

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

“Good for you, Andy.”

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

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

“What did you think of Heather?”

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

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

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

“Why the breakup?”

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

“And this made her mad.”

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

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

“That’s not what she meant.”

“Too bad.”

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

“Satan?”

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

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

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

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

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

“So your money is on Stephen Drew?”

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

“I take that as an affirmative, Detective Sullivan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, I wondered that day in the museum and I speculate sometimes even now what I will do if I ever have before me a capital offense. In Vermont that would demand something like a kidnapping across state lines with a death resulting. Or using the Internet as part of the abduction. At the moment I work for the county, so I won’t face this dilemma unless my career takes me to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Burlington. But someday I might wind up there. And when I thought about the blood and the bodies I had seen in the Haywards’ living room and the kid who was transformed overnight into an orphan, I would find myself angry and appalled and a little unnerved at the pain and the violence that we still inflict on one another daily.

IN ADDITION TO a variety of reporters wanting an indictment, there was my boss, Jim Haas. When I was throwing papers into my attaché and preparing to leave for the day, he knocked gently on my door. It was open, but Jim was feigning deference-which meant, as it did always, that he wanted something. And while I might have assumed it would have something to do with the death of the Haywards, I did have other cases, and so I honestly didn’t know which of the dead victims or breathing criminals-the sex offenders, the embezzlers, the drug dealers-was about to postpone my picking up Marcus and Lionel at their after-school programs. Paul had a soccer game at a high school twenty-five miles distant, and so I was getting the boys that afternoon. Jim looked tired and aggravated, and he had loosened his necktie. He paused in the frame after tapping the door’s hollow metal with his knuckles.

I was already on my feet, and so I murmured a greeting but didn’t stop scanning the papers I was retrieving and the folders I was collecting from different corners of my desk.

“Got a minute?” he asked.

“Barely.”

“I want to talk about the Haywards.”

I grunted something that could have been interpreted as a willingness to listen.

“Are we any closer?” he asked.

“Than when we talked on Monday? Nope.”

“But you still believe it’s the pastor.”

“Yes, but only because I don’t have anyone better.”

“What can I do to help? What would it take to get an indictment?”

“Against Stephen Drew?”

“That’s right.”

I thought about this for a brief moment. “Well, evidence would be good,” I said finally.

“You have none… ”

“None that says he murdered either George or Alice. I have plenty that says he was having an affair with Alice. I have a motive for killing George. But nothing to link him either to the murder of his lover or, more likely, the murder of his lover’s husband. Any special reason for the sudden urgency? It’s not like we’re in an election year.”

“Very funny.”

I smiled, but I honestly hadn’t meant it as a joke.

“Really, it’s not sudden,” he went on. “But I just got off the phone with Sondra Norton, and she says that people are scared. Some are beyond scared. They’re mad. No one likes an unsolved murder-or, in this case, two unsolved murders. It makes folks edgy, especially now that Stephen Drew lives in the neighborhood.”

Sondra ran the shelter for battered women and their children. She was also one of our representatives in the Vermont House. And Stephen Drew, for reasons of his own, had now left the parsonage in Haverill and was living like a three-dimensional wanted poster in an apartment in downtown Bennington.

“We all know there isn’t a killer on the loose who’s preying on people he doesn’t know,” I said. “Whoever killed the Haywards knew them and had a clear motive. Sondra must know that, too. She’s grandstanding. After all, it is an election year for her.”

“Sondra doesn’t grandstand. You know that.”

“She does great work. She’s a great person. But I don’t think she has to worry about the safety of her constituents. Whoever killed the Haywards isn’t about to strike somewhere in downtown Bennington.”

“You’re not worried about the reverend?”

“I think he had a concrete motive.”

“You snap once, it’s much easier to snap a second time.”

“I really don’t believe anyone needs to add extra locks to their doors.”

“That’s not the point. I’ve also heard from both county senators. I’ve heard from our mayor. And I seem to be hearing from the media far more often than I would like.”

“Is that the point, Jim? Is that what this is about? People are frustrated? You’re frustrated? You’re spending more time than you want to holding people’s hands on the telephone?” Immediately I knew I had sounded more exasperated than I should have. He stood a little more erect, and his eyes narrowed.

“Alice Hayward was a battered wife who was murdered. Strangled. Someone wrapped his hands around her throat and crushed her larynx, broke the bones in her neck, compressed the carotid arteries, and caused her to asphyxiate. And that someone was almost certainly her husband. Almost certainly. But it also might not have been her husband, because another person-and it sure as hell wasn’t Alice-took his gun and discharged the weapon into the right side of his skull, splintering bone, causing brain trauma, hemorrhaging, and a serious mess on the family’s living-room windows, walls, and couch. That is the point.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sometime this week or next, when we can clear everyone’s calendars, I’d like us to sit down with the folks at Criminal Investigation and see exactly what we have and what avenues we haven’t pursued.”

“I have a gut feeling you’d like me to be there.”

“Go with your gut,” he said, and then he turned on his heel and left.

PERHAPS A DOZEN times in my life, I’ve run into people while we’re investigating them. Bennington County is like that: It’s a deceptively small corner of Vermont. I’ve run into suspects and perps out on bail while squeezing chickens at the supermarket, while getting gas at the convenience store (with Marcus in his car seat in the back), and at the annual colonial fair over Father’s Day weekend in June (with, thank you very much, my whole family present). Of those dozen or so encounters, all but once the individual knew exactly who I was. And of those times when it was clear that the suspect and I knew precisely where we stood with each other, only twice have I felt the hairs rise up along the back of my neck. One time was when I was having new brake pads put on my car and the wagon tuned up for winter. One of the mechanics, I realized, was an angry young guy charged with aggravated assault and felony unlawful mischief: He had walked into a downtown bar with a steel pipe in his hands and beaten the crap out of some poor dude who’d smiled at his girlfriend. He ended up breaking the guy’s arm. Then, on his way out, he smashed the bar’s plate-glass window for good measure. With his grandparents’ help, he had managed to post 10 percent of the twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail. (It never ceases to amaze me how many people are out on bail and shouldn’t be. Presume this guy was innocent? Yeah, right. I could have filled a dinner party with witnesses. I was also convinced that he was the person who’d been burglarizing vehicles for weeks in a city parking lot and robbed an older couple one night as they unlocked their minivan using-surprise!-a steel pipe as a weapon. And yes, later we would charge him with those crimes, too.) We saw each other at the car dealer just after I’d arrived at the service counter, while I was waiting for them to sign me out a loaner for the day, and our eyes met. He looked seriously pissed at me: His bangs were plastered to his forehead, and he glowered like a petulant schoolboy. Then he motioned with his head out toward my car, which was in the lot just outside the service-garage window.

“That yours?” he asked.

“It is.”

He studied it for a moment as if he were checking out a girl in a bar and then wrinkled his nose dismissively as if it didn’t measure up in some way. Finally he turned back to me and smirked. “We’re gonna get some ice tonight, I hear,” he said. “A lotta ice.” Then he disappeared back into the shop. That night, after I had picked up the car, I was sure my brakes weren’t going to work when I needed them most. For almost a week, I found myself braking long before I normally would have-just in case.

The other suspect who unnerved me when I ran into him outside the safe confines of court was none other than the Reverend Stephen Drew. I knew he was living in Bennington, and I knew he was renting an apartment not far from the courthouse. Nevertheless, it took me a moment to put a name to his face when I came across him on the sidewalk about fifty yards from the courthouse entrance. It was almost six o’clock in the evening, and there was a chill wind blowing in from the west. There were still another two weeks of daylight saving time, but it was overcast, damp, and dusky outside-and there was almost no one on the street. I was racing to the bookstore, which I knew was about to close, because I wanted to pick up a couple of picture books for a pal of Lionel’s who was having a birthday party that coming Saturday. And there the minister was. He was leaning against the brick side of a recessed doorway, and he had the collar turned up on a gray jacket that fell to midthigh. He pushed himself off the wall and blocked my path.

“You’re Catherine Benincasa,” he said. “We met the last Monday in July. I’d recognize you anywhere.” It is always a tad alarming when a suspect in a murder investigation calls you by name on a deserted street at twilight, and his tone was somewhere between menacing and weary. The nearest people were either the security guards back inside the double doors at the metal detectors of the courthouse or the patrons at a bar shut tight against the cold nearly a block away.

“I am,” I said warily. “Hello, Reverend Drew.”

“Stephen. Please. I was just about to give up.”

For a split second, I misconstrued what he’d said, misinterpreting “give up” for “give myself up,” and I thought he wanted to turn himself in. But his demeanor was too chilly, too confrontational for that. I realized then what he had actually meant. “You’ve been waiting for me?”

He nodded. It was just cold enough that I could see his breath. “I waited yesterday, too, but I never saw you leave the building.”

I had to restrain myself from saying something catty about how I’d never before met a pastor who was also a stalker, because I honestly didn’t know yet whether I was in danger. Instead I said simply, “I wasn’t in court yesterday afternoon.”

“Ah.”

“You know I can’t talk to you.”

“Why?”

“And your lawyer would be furious if he knew you were trying to talk to me.”

“My lawyer does not tell me what to do. I think we should chat.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I am not going to speak to you without your lawyer present.”

“But you will if Aaron joins us?”

“Aaron Lamb won’t let you talk to me. I promise.”

His hands were burrowed deep inside his jacket pockets, and when he removed them suddenly, I must have flinched. He shook his head and said, smiling, “You really believe I killed both of them, don’t you?”

“We’re not having this conversation,” I reiterated simply.

And it was then that he started to tell me about crucifixion. The connection, in his mind, was injustice. At least that’s what he said. But he started talking about injustice and execution and the barbarity that always marks the human condition. It was erudite and hypnotic and deeply disturbing. If I lived alone, that night I would have pushed furniture against the front and back doors of my house. I was able to extricate myself only when another lawyer, one of the public defenders who had spent that afternoon at court coping with calendar calls before a judge, came up beside us. It was a friend of mine named Rosemary, and I immediately introduced her to Drew and then allowed myself to be led by her down the block until we had reached the bookstore and the reverend was behind us in the distance. Still, that evening I would insist that she walk with me to my car, and the following night I was careful to leave my office with another lawyer in the state’s attorney’s office.

When Aaron called me the next day, he tried to feign fury that I had spoken with his client, but it was clear Drew had told him that he had initiated the conversation. I could also tell that Aaron wished that his client hadn’t decided to share with me in visceral detail what it must have been like to die on the cross.

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Jim Haas, Emmet Walker, and I spent nearly four hours in Waterbury with BCI-the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. David Dennison joined us from Burlington. We examined all of the evidence we had amassed and we analyzed all of the interviews we had conducted. And when Jim and Emmet and I sped back to Bennington in Emmet’s freakishly clean unmarked detective sedan, we were no closer to indicting Stephen Drew than we had been the day before. At the same time, we were no closer to finding a new direction-a new suspect-worth pursuing.

We were on Route 7 in Wallingford when Emmet abruptly chuckled from behind the wheel. I was sitting in the backseat behind Jim and Emmet, and so I caught Emmet’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“You know, maybe this Stephen Drew did us all a favor,” he said. He was driving with one hand, and he shrugged. “Maybe we should just stop spending the taxpayers’ money.”

“Yeah, it’s crossed my mind, too,” I admitted, and I didn’t have to glance at Jim to know he was glaring at us both from the corner of his eye.

“I mean, think about it. If Drew hadn’t shot George Hayward, we really would have to try the bastard and jail him-and jail him for at least twenty years. Maybe longer. And a trial and two decades of incarceration doesn’t come cheap.”

Jim wasn’t completely sure how serious the state trooper was. “There is a principle here, Emmet,” he said, his tone his professorial best. It was the voice he used when he was making his opening statement or closing remarks to a jury: patient and avuncular and wise.

“Oh, I know, I know. George Hayward may have been the O. J. Simpson of Green Mountain batterers, but that still doesn’t mean someone had the right to shoot him in the head. But think about it: not a bad death, especially given what he did. He passes out drunk and never wakes up. And justice is done. Frankly, I think we should send the reverend a thank-you card and move on.”

We wouldn’t move on, of course. At least not completely. For me it was always going to be a bit like the gnawing frustration we all experience when we misplace something and know it’s somewhere in the house-but where, we haven’t a clue. The cell-phone charger, the car keys, the cap to the felt-tip marker that will dry up if we don’t find it soon. It’s annoying as hell. But I think I knew at that moment in Emmet’s car, as he flipped on the directional and accelerated into the passing lane to get ahead of a lumbering milk tanker, that if we solved either of the homicides in Haverill-found something to link Stephen Drew definitively to the murder of George Hayward-it would be more the result of very good luck than very good work. We had done our best, and, it seemed, we’d been outdone by a country pastor.