Secrets of Eden

CHAPTER FIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed.”

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

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

She picked up a small pile of compact discs that were lying on the floor beside a particleboard entertainment center. I recognized the artists that Alice liked best and presumed that the rest of the discs had been selected by