Secrets of Eden

woman. (Yes, I know a writer is seldom as famous as a movie star: If Angelina Jolie wanders into a library, the fans and the media will swarm; if Margaret Atwood wanders into a cineplex, the lines for the popcorn barely will waver.)

I hadn’t told my mother where I was going, because I honestly hadn’t known myself when I left Bronxville. The same is true in regard to the Pastoral-Relations Committee and the deacons at the church in Haverill. Likewise, Heather hadn’t known at the time that she would go visit her sister in upstate New York, bringing with her in tow a minister who wasn’t sure what he should be doing with his life or what it had meant that he had baptized a woman a half day before she would be strangled. I was quite content in Heather’s bed in her loft. She was, too, I believe, after all the traveling she had done in the preceding months. But whatever need she had to cocoon and replenish her (and I will use one of her words here) aura, it was subsumed by her worry about Amanda and her concern for that basket case of a pastor from Vermont. And so we disappeared into the Adirondacks.

And while it is tempting to express some understanding for the appalling ways that Catherine Benincasa or reporters or bloggers would misinterpret my movements-to begin a sentence with Still or Nevertheless-that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I don’t understand it. And though many people believe I am anything but forthright, in the end I was more candid than I wanted to be or expected to be or was even obliged to be. I know my crimes and I know my mistakes. I live with them.

But I also know that whatever else I may have done (or, worse, failed to do), I positively did not flee. It honestly hadn’t crossed my mind that there might be a need.

Of course, none of us ever knows as much as we think we do. None of us. If there is a lesson to be learned from my fall-notice I did not say my rise and fall, because it’s not as if the ascent to the pulpit of a country church represents an especially glorious accomplishment-it is this: Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume no one really knows anything that matters at all. Because, alas, we don’t. All of our stories are suspect.

Part II. Catherine Benincasa

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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.