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.
FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. 311) 
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.
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.”
