“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.
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.
