“Because we have bones.”
“Yes. We need bones more like birds’.”
“Or angels’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Really?”
“Yup. We need bones like the angels’. She said we’d fear dying so much less if we allowed ourselves to feel the presence of the angels among us.”
“And you said?”
“I said absolutely nothing. It was a straight line with far too many responses. And she was so completely sincere. But you know what expression did cross my mind after she left?”
I waited.
And he said, his voice at once troubled and bemused, “Angel of death. I’m telling you: That woman is as stable as a three-legged chair.”
THE TEST FIRE of George Hayward’s handgun would show that it had been discharged at about two and a half feet from his skull: in all likelihood too far for a self-inflicted head wound. The lab used a bullet with a full metal jacket, as had Hayward, rather than one with a hollow point that is designed to remain inside the body and-not incidentally-expand as it penetrates its target, causing considerably more internal damage. Certainly we were aware of suicides where the victim had held the gun at arm’s length, aimed the barrel back at his head, and used his thumb to pull the trigger. But it was rare. After all, if you’re trying to kill yourself, why risk missing? And given how drunk George Hayward had been that night, it didn’t seem likely to anyone in my office that he would have had the cognitive capabilities to figure out that he could hold the gun so far away and use his thumb to fire the weapon.
WE SEARCHED THE parsonage in Haverill, but we found nothing that was going to link the Reverend Drew to the Haywards’ murders. I’m not sure any of us actually expected to find a flannel shirt with George Hayward’s brains on the pocket, but we had to check. Alice Hayward’s prints were on the kitchen table and on one of the ladderback chairs beside it, but that was the only trace of her we found in the house. Nothing in the bedroom, nothing in the bathroom. And there was nothing on the reverend’s computer that indicated definitively either that he was having an affair with the woman or, later, that he had murdered one or both of the Haywards-though there was plenty that suggested an interest in the crime that he and his lawyer had to know could be made to look incriminating as hell if we ever presented it to a jury. In the days after the bodies were discovered, he was Googling sites with general forensic information about murder by strangulation and murder by a gunshot to the head. He had spent hours clicking through sites on crime-scene investigations and how a suspect might try to eliminate evidence of his presence at a homicide. He was also searching for anything he could unearth about Alice. High-school photos. College-yearbook appearances. There was little there, but he had seemed to have found what there was. What we discovered also corroborated a part of his story: On the Sunday night that the Haywards had been killed, he had frequently visited the website for Major League Baseball and followed the progress of a ball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. And in the following days, he had indeed written e-mails to friends, as he had told us, some of which he had sent but most of which were sitting in the drafts folder in his mail program. All of them suggested he was merely a minister enduring a profound crisis of faith; none of them intimated that he just might have gone postal and shot George Hayward in the head.
Certainly the DNA swab he had given us, as well as his fingerprints, was damning as hell if we were trying to convict him of adultery. His presence was all over the Haywards’ house, especially the master bedroom and bathroom and the kitchen. Unfortunately, this wasn’t seventeenth-century Boston. We needed more than adultery. And, still, nothing that we had linked him to the house that awful night.
GORDON AND MICHELLE Brookner, the neighbors closest in proximity to the Haywards and the owners of the little pond where Alice had been baptized on the day she would die, had seen the pastor’s car visit the Hayward house a number of times the previous winter when they had come north to go skiing. The timing, they thought, had been February and March. They knew that Alice and George had what Michelle referred to as “a troubled marriage,” because of the winter months when George had been exiled to Lake Bomoseen. But they hadn’t known until Alice was dead that George was physically abusive, and they had been surprised. They had rather liked him. Thought he was an impressive young entrepreneur. They had liked both Alice and George. It also hadn’t crossed their minds that Stephen Drew might have been romantically involved with Alice; that, too, was a story they would hear first only after the Haywards were dead. “He was the minister. Why wouldn’t he have come by their house?” Michelle observed.
When Emmet returned to speak once again with Betsy Storrs, the church secretary who I wanted managing my life and, if possible, coordinating the food and decoration for every major family holiday that was my responsibility- especially Thanksgiving-she was uncharacteristically evasive when asked about the minister’s relationship with Alice Hayward. Had she ever seen Alice’s car at the parsonage? Yes, but she had seen lots of people’s cars at the parsonage. How often was Alice in Stephen’s office? Most frequently in the months immediately before “George and Alice decided to take a marital breather,” and then only occasionally in the late winter and spring. The only times she could recall Alice there after George had returned were two instances in July when she and Stephen were discussing the significance and specifics of her desired baptism. Did she think that Stephen and Alice had been more than mere friends? “No friendship is mere, is it?” Well, then, did she believe that it had gone beyond the traditional bounds of a pastor’s relationship with one of his flock? Perhaps, but that was between two consenting adults, and she certainly couldn’t testify under oath that she had ever seen anything inappropriate; besides, “if there was something tawdry there, Stephen and Alice can answer for that when the time comes in heaven. And yes, I do think Alice is in heaven right now, and when Stephen dies-which I hope isn’t for a great many years-he will be, too.”
AND WHAT OF the business associates George had had in his retail ventures over the years? What of the bank loan officers and store managers and waitresses and clerks who had known George? Altogether he had a small empire, with twenty full-or part-time employees in two shops and a restaurant, plus three staffers in his headquarters office on the floor above the toy store. Might one of those workers have had a bone to pick with the man? Likewise, what of Alice’s associates at the retail branch of the bank where she worked? Was it possible that there was a teller or customer-service rep who was a killer? Or might Alice have told them something that would illuminate in some way what had happened to her and her husband that July night?
In the end we interviewed nearly thirty women and men who were acquaintances of the Haywards and might have known something-anything-about why the two of them had come to such a tragic end. When we were finished, we knew that Alice was a customer-service representative for a community bank who was more alone than anyone realized and that George was a businessman who was starting to grow tired of what he did. (Without his supervision, by the end of September the toy store and the rib joint had closed. The original clothing store was still in business, but it was unclear whether it would last even through the December holidays.) No one expressed a particular closeness to George, but no one seemed likely to want to kill him. At the same time, everyone was saddened by Alice’s death, but George had done such a first-rate job of isolating her from possible friends that no one at the bank seemed especially devastated by her murder, either. They were distressed, naturally, perhaps a little troubled by their proximity to murder, but they had moved on. And none of the people we spoke with seemed to have any motive for killing either of the Haywards or any information that was going to bring us nearer to indicting someone who might.
PAUL’S AND MY wedding anniversary fell on a Saturday that autumn, and the two of us had dinner plans that evening. But the day began when all three of the men in my life brought me waffles in bed and cards that each of them had made. Lionel’s was a wobbly amoeba created from pink and red construction paper that in his mind was undoubtedly a heart. Marcus’s was a painting of Cupid that he had downloaded from the Web, printed, and pasted into the background of a photo of Paul and me in the backyard. (It actually looked to me like the little Roman was drawing back his bow to murder one of us, but I reminded myself that only I would see a killer in Cupid.) And Paul’s was a cute card from the drugstore, but the best part was the coupons for “romantic dinner for two” and “afternoon at the spa” that he typed up and folded inside it.
“I made the waffle batter, and Lionel picked out what would go in them,” Marcus informed me with great earnestness and pride, while behind him Paul raised his eyebrows and nodded a little warily. Clearly my breakfast didn’t need a warning from the surgeon general, but these might not be Food Network-quality waffles. I looked at
