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 facade 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
