Secrets of Eden

“Yes. Your… new one.”

“The world’s aura and the way we are degrading it environmentally and ecologically.”

“I suppose aura, in this case, isn’t simply another word for icecap. Or rain forest.”

“No, it’s not. But certainly there’s a connection.”

“And your other books?”

“Other book. Singular. I’ve only written two.”

“And it’s about?”

She smiled as if she knew I couldn’t possibly take seriously what she was about to tell me. “Angels. Auras. The quality of vibrations we emit and how they affect our relationship with the divine.”

“I’m sure those vibrations really matter.”

“You’re not sure at all, but that’s okay.”

“Let me guess. You were at the bookstore in Manchester last night?”

“This morning, actually. Then I gave a talk at that beautiful arts center up on the hill. Yesterday I was at Bennington College and the NPR station in Albany.”

“And now you’re finishing your day with an appearance in scenic little Haverill.”

“You’re having a real hard time with that, aren’t you?”

“Well, do you visit every village that achieves our sort of notoriety?”

“Nope.”

“Just ours.”

She nodded and then turned her gaze toward the open shelves and kitchen counters that were filled with the detritus of a single man’s-a single pastor’s-life. There were the odd, mismatched knickknacks given to me by dotty parishioners over the years: porcelain cookie jars (originally filled, of course, with freshly baked cookies with ridiculous names like snickerdoodles and choc-a-roos), one shaped like a potbellied elf and one like a plump, sitting beagle (that had, alas, lost an ear over the years); an earthenware butter dish I never used that resembled a submarine, a gift from a couple in the congregation after I gave a sermon with references to a 1960s television program I had seen that week on TV Land called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; a tin container for straws, empty, that was crafted from a Coca-Cola can; and a plastic paper-napkin holder that was shaped like a rather flat, two-dimensional log cabin. And then there were the pots and pans that once had belonged to my mother but now dangled-a little tarnished, a little dinged-like old meat from hooks above the stove, as well as the juice and water glasses from her bridal registry, not old enough yet to be interesting but still discolored with age. (When my father died, she had chosen to sell the house and move to a condominium apartment in a brick building in the village, and in her downsizing my sister and I had wound up with a sizable percentage of the contents from the pantry, the hutch, and the kitchen cabinets.) There were coffee mugs, two rows of them, many stained brown and some visibly cracked. And there were the four matching tins for flour and sugar and coffee and rice that were meant to look like miniatures of the sort of antique barrels one might have found once in a country store-or, at any rate, in a country store on a movie set-but each of them now looked only bulbous and bloated and tired. I was always a little embarrassed when a woman saw my kitchen for the first time. It wasn’t often, but invariably I was left with the sensation that I had either remarkably bad taste or an awful lot to explain.

Moreover, I rarely cooked, since so much food came to me from parishioners and friends and since I was expected to attend so many meetings at night. Besides, I lived alone, and relatively few people actually like to cook for themselves. As a result there was an antiseptic odorlessness to the room, an aura of benign disuse. In a typical year, I must have prepared no more than two dozen dinners for myself in that kitchen.

Had she looked through the open door into the den, she would have seen an ironing board strategically placed before my television set and the pile of my shirts and pants that seemed always to be the size of a beanbag chair. I ironed just enough to keep up, but not frequently enough ever to shrink the mound. She would have seen the DVDs more appropriate in the bedroom of a fifth-grade boy than a minister flirting with middle age: an account of a Red Sox World Series championship, two-thirds of the Star Wars saga. She might have noticed the books I was reading, some on the floor and some on the coffee table and some on the television itself. There were books of inspiration and biblical interpretation, as well as the novels set in courtrooms and police stations and law offices-the mysteries that I savor the way some people appreciate science fiction.

It struck me, as it did always when a person saw the inside of my house, as rather pathetic. And while the homes of most single men are rather pathetic-testimonies in some cases to a stunted childhood, sad little museums of loneliness-mine seemed more so. I was, after all, a minister. It seemed to me that I should have transcended the pitiable curiosities of the single life. Usually I took comfort that at least my house wasn’t rife with porn and NASCAR magazines, but that seemed like a small consolation that afternoon.

“How did you learn about us?” I asked. “The newspaper?”

“Initially. And then the television news. And then the Internet.”

“Ah, Haverill’s fifteen minutes of fame. Our chance to bask in the glow of the press. Lovely.”

She picked up the butter dish in the shape of a science-fiction submarine. It looked vaguely like a stingray with a school bus behind it. “You sound so angry about the media,” she murmured, her eyes scanning the vessel. “From the newspaper I would have guessed it was something else.”

“And that was?”

She looked up at me, her mouth open the tiniest bit. “I’m really not that presumptuous,” she answered. “And I hope not that arrogant.”

“No, you can tell me. I’m interested.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I thought you blamed yourself for Alice and George Hayward’s deaths.”

“I do.”

“And I thought you blamed your God.”

“I would if I had one.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Heather Laurent. “I think that’s why I came.”

FROM THE PREFACE TO A SACRED WHILE BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. VI)

The host of a radio show once asked me point-blank, “Do you really believe in magic? Honestly?”

“Honestly,” I said. “Really and truly.”

“Do you think the people who have bought your book do, too?”

I told him I couldn’t speak for the people who had bought my book. But it was clear both to me and to his listeners that this radio personality thought my extended discussions of magic in Angels and Aurascapes were the ramblings of a lunatic. Most people, in his opinion, were smart enough not to believe in magic.

And so I corrected him. “Most individuals on this planet have a religion they approach with some degree of earnestness,” I said. “And what is a religion but a belief in the unseen and a faith in the impossible? Remember what Jesus says in Mark? ‘For all things are possible with God.’ Magic is about the endless ways in this world that the impossible becomes possible-just like religion. Religion, in essence, is ritualized magic.”

I have lived a life with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better…

CHAPTER THREE

I went to Alice and George Hayward’s house when Ginny O’Brien called that Monday morning, I saw the bodies myself. After the state’s mobile crime lab had left, a number of us helped clean the place up-the blood on the wall,