“Was Lula ever scared of your father?” I asked.
“No way. He treated Lula a lot better than he treated Mom.”
“But she was scared of strangers, I presume.”
“She was scared of men-except for Dad, who won her over. But other men scared the crap out of her. Even Stephen.”
“Why do you say ‘even Stephen’?”
“Well, he’s, like, a minister. Isn’t he supposed to be all about peace?”
“Do you think Stephen was at your house on Sunday night? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“They’re selling the house, you know. It will pay for my college.”
I repeated the question: “Do you think Stephen was at your house on Sunday night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Lula was out.”
“There has to be more to it than that.”
She exhaled so profoundly that I could hear it clearly over the phone. “Remember when you called me the day after you visited the coroner guy?” she said after a moment. “You told me he said Mom had been wearing her red nightgown.”
“Go on.”
“I mean, I don’t know if any of this is what happened. But I keep thinking about it a lot. When my mom sent my dad away last winter, he didn’t take the handgun with him. He made a big deal about this. My mom didn’t even want to touch it, but he insisted she hang on to it, because she was going to be the only parent in the house looking out for me. And our house is sort of isolated. Two women and all. So he left her the gun and the bullets, and then he went to go live at the lake. And Mom put the gun in one of these big plastic tubs she uses to swap out her clothes. She puts her summer clothes in them in the winter and her winter clothes in them in the summer. And as far as I know, the gun was still in one of the tubs in July, even though the summer clothes had been replaced with the winter ones. She’d kept the gun where it was. See?”
“I’m listening,” I said simply.
“Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think Stephen ever saw my mom in her plaid flannel nightgown. Her winter one. I mean, if they were sleeping together, it was during the day when I was at school, because they sure weren’t doing it when I was home at night. And so she wouldn’t have been wearing her nightgown at, like, eleven in the morning or when she came home from the bank to be with him. She would have been wearing clothes. Casual clothes or work clothes. But clothes. Besides, that nightgown is sort of grungy. It’s got weird tears and coffee stains. My mom really liked it. But there is no way she would have let anyone other than my dad or me ever see her in it. Especially… ”
“Especially what?”
“I’m a virgin. Okay? I’m a virgin. But I’m not totally naive. And if you’re having sex with a guy for the first couple of times, you want to look as hot as you can, even if you’re, like, middle-aged. And I know my mom. There is no way she would ever have let Stephen see her in that plaid flannel nightgown.”
“And so you’re suggesting he saw the nightgown for the first time when he got the gun.”
“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” she said, her voice growing more animated, more urgent. “But I just can’t see how else Stephen could have known about the nightgown.”
“Do you know if he knew the gun was in one of those tubs? Did your mom ever tell you that she’d told him she kept the pistol there?”
“You sound like a detective.”
“I’m sorry. But my head is spinning a little bit. Have you told the police any of this?”
“They didn’t ask me any questions about the gun. Or about Lula. And it was only when I had the dream about Lula that the whole nightgown thing even crossed my mind. See, in the dream my mom was wearing that ridiculous plaid nightgown. And that image made the rest really, really clear.”
“I’m going to tell you three things,” I said. “First of all, grown-ups are strange, and sometimes we get comfortable with one another pretty quickly. Your mother and Stephen were intimate in the winter. And so I wouldn’t discount completely the idea that your mother wore that grungy plaid nightgown around him at some point. Then, in the midst of whatever else Stephen is experiencing right now, he confused the nightgowns in his mind when he spoke with you. But here is the second thing: You might be onto something, and you should share your conjectures with the police. I would call them myself-and if you want me to, I will be happy to. But they’re going to want to talk to you anyway after that, so you might as well just pick up the phone and call them yourself. Call that state trooper who interviewed us or call the deputy state’s attorney. I believe her name is Catherine. I’ll get you both numbers-or Josie can. That social worker. Let them decide if there’s anything to it.”
“And the third? You said there were three things.”
“Don’t tell anyone else what you told me.”
“Not even Tina or Ginny?”
“No, not even Tina or Ginny,” I said. And then, because I wanted to leave nothing to chance when it came to Katie Hayward’s safety, I added, “And not Stephen. Under no circumstances tell Stephen what you just told me.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “he would be the last person I’d tell.”
I STARTED READING the Vermont newspapers online that autumn, peeking at them every day to see if there was any news about Stephen or any quotes from his attorney, Aaron Lamb-a name that struck me at some moments as appropriate, others as ironic. I watched to see if Katie’s revelations about the gun and the nightgown would appear in the papers, but they didn’t. A friend of mine who is a lawyer for the City of New York told me that unless the case went to trial, I wouldn’t read about them. She said that didn’t mean that the information wasn’t being used as part of the investigation into Stephen Drew or that detectives weren’t trying to (her words, not mine) turn up the heat on the now officially retired minister. But she said that from everything I had shared with her, unless they could link him to the gun, an indictment wasn’t likely.
“But it’s so clear that he did it,” I told her one evening over a glass of wine at a bar at the South Street Seaport just after Columbus Day weekend. Outside, the shoes of the businesswomen and-men clattered along the cobblestones as, invariably, they chatted on their headsets and PDAs.
“Well, maybe it’s clear to you,” she corrected me. “But it sounds to me that unless he confesses, he’s going to get away with it.”
I considered calling that Vermont state trooper who had interviewed me, and periodically I found myself fiddling with his card, which, for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint, I kept in my purse. I considered making another statement, a second one, but what more really could I say? Stephen refused to own up to his guilt to me and had told me nothing I could add. I could make sure that Katie had shared her ideas with the investigators, but there really wasn’t any doubt in my mind that she had. By now they knew about the gun and the nightgown and the dog.
Stephen did try to reconcile with me that autumn, but only one time with real effort. He called twice and left messages, and he e-mailed me once asking me whether it might be possible to have a conversation. The messages were not insincere, but nor were they impassioned. They were a little chilly and a little tame. Only in one instance did he make an effort in which I glimpsed the iridescence that hovers like a halo amid an aura, and even that was but a passing glance. It was in a handwritten note on a piece of yellow legal paper that he mailed me. Most of the individual letters on each line were so small and controlled that I wondered if he had had a contest with himself to see how many words he could wedge onto the page. He began by reiterating how I should, at the very least, see him once more. Face-to-face. See what it felt like for the two of us to be together, see if there was a hint of the fire we had once felt in each other’s presence. He had moved out of the parsonage by then and was renting an apartment in Bennington while he decided what to do next with his life. He never came right out and said that he was confident he was never going to be tried for murder, but it seemed to me that he was behaving that way. He was almost arrogant. I think he had moved to Bennington, rather than anywhere else, to flaunt his freedom before the very criminal-justice system that wanted to arrest him. Still, it was clear he didn’t plan to settle there. He said the lease was short-term because he was contemplating a move to Manhattan, where he would try to find a new career. He wrote that he thought he was going to become a social worker and, if necessary, he would return to school to get his M.S.W. He claimed that he wanted to work with the homeless. He had visions of himself rolling up
