“Yes. Your… new one.”
“The world’s aura and the way we are degrading it environmentally and ecologically.”
“I suppose
“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
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
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.”
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,