Authors: Chris Bohjalian
“Toddler Town is just like a school,” Marcus will tell him patiently, a real little diplomat, but Lionel somehow sees a big difference between his day care and his brother’s elementary school and Paul’s high school. And so either he will take his cereal spoon and smash it into Marcus’s bowl so it catapults the Cocoa Fobs or Pepperoni Clusters (or whatever presweetened nightmare we’re feeding them that day) into the air or he will use his fingers like a shovel and start scooping the stuff out onto the table as if he’s trying to build a sand castle with his bare hands on Cape Cod. And, of course, Paul and I are trying
to get out the door—and get the two boys out the door—and that only adds to the chaos.
The Haywards were murdered at the end of July, and so in the days when the investigation was starting to ramp up, Lionel had his usual Toddler Town, Marcus had a summer day camp called Kid-Friendly Arts or (I swear, I am not making this up) K-FARTS for short. No one officially associated with the organization ever calls it that, and the letterhead and materials never use that acronym, but all of the parents refer to it with that enticing little shorthand. Apparently the organization is in the process of changing its name. In any case, the timing of the murder of the Haywards meant that Paul and I didn’t have to get the boys to school, but most mornings we still had to move things along at breakfast. Usually Paul would drop the boys off at Toddler Town and K-FARTS, since he didn’t have to be anywhere ever in the summer (no, I’m not bitter). One morning in August when Emmet called, I was in the midst of sponging off the kitchen table and making sure there wasn’t visual evidence of the crap I feed my kids on their mouths. He was on his cell, and he wanted to know if I had reviewed the papers and the materials he’d left at my office the day before. I hadn’t, because I’d left work a little early to take a deposition in a case involving a drunken speedboat driver and a water-skier who—as a result of the driver’s recklessly downing margaritas on the dock—was never going to water-ski or walk again.
When I think about how I spend most of each day, it’s a wonder I ever let my kids out of my sight.
“Well, it’s all pretty interesting,” Emmet said.
“Oh?”
“We brought back a carton of stuff for the crime lab. But the main thing I wanted to tell you is this: Alice Hayward kept a journal. It’s one of those books with blank pages that really isn’t much bigger than an address book. As a matter of fact, that’s what I thought it was when
I found it—though I didn’t understand at first why an address book would be way in the back of the woman’s underwear drawer. But as soon as I opened it up, I knew what it was.”
“She talks about her husband?”
“She does, and it’s fascinating. Once in a while, you can almost see what she saw in him. I mean, he was a louse. A complete and total louse. But he wasn’t always bashing her around the house. And after he did, man, was he contrite.”
“That is the pattern. He might have been a nice guy some of the time, but I promise you, it was only after he’d whacked her somewhere.”
“He wrote her poetry. Not my cup of tea, and I have no idea if it’s any good. But it sounds very loving. I can see how he convinced her to take him back. But here’s the really interesting part: George Hayward isn’t the only man in it. You know who else she writes about?”
“Tell me.”
“That minister who lit out of town. Stephen Drew. At least I think it’s Stephen. There was something going on there.”
“You
think
it’s Stephen?”
“There’s no name, just a code. She draws a little cross where you’d expect to find a name. So the journal is like, ‘cross said this’ or ‘cross and I did that.’”
“And it’s not a
t
?”
“Definitely not. The first time she used it, she made it pretty ornate.”
“Well, he was her minister. He told us they would talk a lot. It’s why he was so broken up about her death.”
“I think there was more to it than that.”
“How much more?”
“A lot.”
“As in they were sleeping together?”
“I got that vibe. To wit, here’s one of the passages from the diary I scribbled in my notes: ‘Cross’s hair reminds me these days of Christmas. It always has the aroma of evergreen.’”
“But she never comes right out and says they were sleeping together.”
“Not in the pages I skimmed. But she was probably afraid that her husband might find the book, and so there’s nothing definitively incriminating in it.”
“A cross isn’t real subtle. If she had something to hide, she wasn’t real clever.”
“I agree. But listen to this one: ‘Day off, Katie with friends. Cross and I spent hours together today. Very peaceful, very quiet. What to do?’”
For a long second, I thought about that one. “What’s the date?”
“March twenty-ninth.”
“That was long after she had gotten the relief-from-abuse order and George was living on the lake.”
“Take a look at the journal. You’ll see what I mean,” Emmet said. “Here’s another one I wrote down: ‘Cross here. Didn’t leave the house for hours and hours. Heavenly.’”
Paul was in the kitchen, too, but he didn’t know who I was on the phone with. Still, he would tell me later that my eyes went very wide and for a moment the tip of my tongue rested just at the edge of my lips. He has mimicked the look for me before and calls it my “savanna glare.” He says it’s the look I get when I’m seriously into the hunt and the prey has just stumbled big-time in the grass.
IT HAD THE
potential to be a fascinating case to construct. On the one hand, it was going to be embarrassingly easy—a slam dunk—to show that Stephen Drew and his hair with the aroma of the church
Christmas tree was sleeping with Alice Hayward. Later, when we dusted the whole Hayward house for fingerprints, we found what would turn out to be Drew’s all over the bedroom, including the very top of the headboard. We found them on the nightstand and in the kitchen on wineglasses. We found his DNA in body hair in the shower drain in the master bathroom, and we determined that a piece of pubic hair in the bottom of the hamper belonged to the reverend. We found fibers from his living-room throw rug in the carpet of the Haywards’ bedroom.
On the other hand, it was going to take some serious investigation to prove that he had gone to the Cape on the hill that Sunday night in July and shot George Hayward in the head.
Drew had had his weekly meeting with the church Youth Group that evening, and the gathering had lasted until a few minutes after nine. When he finally reemerged after fleeing, he told us that he had gone home to the parsonage as soon as that meeting was over. He insisted he hadn’t gone anywhere near the Haywards’ house that night—and we had nothing to link him to the murder itself. The only prints on the gun, the load, or the gun cabinet were George’s—though some on the handle and one on the trigger were badly smudged, which was important, because it thus seemed possible that a second person had handled the firearm after George. There was no indication that Drew’s car had been in the gravel driveway that night and no tracks that matched any of his shoes on the lawn—at least none that remained by the time we realized that Drew should be considered a suspect. We could see from Drew’s Internet service provider that he’d been online from nine-fifteen until ten-thirty, answering e-mails and surfing the Web, but we would need a court order—or his laptop, which later we would subpoena—to learn the sites and Web pages he had visited. Then, he insisted, he had gone to bed. I was hoping that Alice might have called him earlier in the evening—battered women often seem to
phone someone close to them just before their boyfriend or husband blows for the last time—but there was no evidence that she had.
And yet he had disappeared a few days after what was looking more and more like two homicides, rather than a suicide and a single murder. That was what kept coming back to me. The guy was a friggin’ minister, and he’d jumped ship at the time when the town needed him most. That really got to me—that and the teeny-tiny detail that he was boffing a parishioner who would be murdered.
FOR NEARLY A
week, from a Wednesday till the following Monday, none of us had the slightest idea where the good reverend had gone. No one in Haverill knew, and his own mother said that she hadn’t seen him since the previous Saturday morning. We left messages everywhere, including on his cell phone. I’d been thinking all along about the fact that the church secretary had noticed his passport on his desk the morning of the funeral, and so on Friday I sent a fax to the State Department to see if he had left the country. He wasn’t officially a suspect at that point—though unofficially in my mind he sure as hell was—but we certainly wanted to talk to him.
And he hadn’t left the country. Hadn’t even boarded an airplane and flown anywhere domestically.
Which meant, if he was on the move, that he was probably traveling somewhere in his car. (I didn’t completely discount the idea that he might have paid cash for a bus ticket, but somehow the patrician Pastor Drew didn’t strike me as the sort who would mingle with the bus-station crowd.) And while this is a big country, it’s really not that difficult to find someone on wheels. There are the credit-card receipts at gas stations or the cash withdrawals from ATMs or the reality that there are a lot of cops and troopers out there on the road. I had heard back from the State Department on Monday and was wondering if it
was time to put out a bulletin on the reverend when, lo and behold, he finally returned one of Emmet’s calls. And as soon as Emmet hung up with Drew, he called me. It was midafternoon, and I was in my office.
“We have contact,” he said, his voice so deep and refined that he always sounded oddly plumy to me for a Vermonter. I attributed that to the reality that Emmet was all business. Some people mistook the crispness that was a part of his demeanor as a state trooper for coldness. Usually that served him well, but not always. The reality is that he was tall and lean, his nose was a wedge, and his close-cropped hair was the dark gray of ash in a woodstove: He could be an intimidating presence when he wanted.
“Really?”
“I just got off the phone with him.”
“And? Did he have an explanation for why he fell off the radar—or why he wouldn’t call back?”
“He said he hoped we didn’t think he was avoiding us.”
“Now, why would we think that? Because no one in the world had the slightest idea where he was—”
“He was in—”
“Because he didn’t return any of the messages you left at his home, his church, or on his cell phone?”
“He was in the Adirondacks. That was his explanation. He said he went with a friend to upstate New York for a couple of days and he was in some rugged corner of the mountains without cell-phone coverage.”
“He was camping? He didn’t strike me as the type.”
“No, he wasn’t camping. But he was in what he described as a relatively primitive log cabin.”
“In the Adirondacks…”
“Near Statler.”
“Never heard of it.”
“No reason you would have,” he said. “It’s a general store and a billboard, apparently.”
“And there’s no cell coverage there?”
“Nope.”
“He didn’t check his messages at home? He didn’t call in to the church?”
“No, he did not. He said he was calling me back from the interstate, an hour or so from Albany—though he wasn’t coming home. He was heading to New York City. His cell showed he had messages, and so he was returning the calls from the highway.”
I sat back in my chair and took a sip from the water bottle on my desk. I raised my eyebrows to try to relax. “Is he alone? I don’t recall him having any personal Adirondack connections.”
“He says he’s with that friend. He added that she was driving.”
“So you knew he was a responsible driver, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
“What’s her name?”
He paused for a moment, and in my mind I saw him looking down at his notes. “Heather Laurent,” he answered finally.
“You’re kidding.”
“Why? Should I know that name?”
“Well,
you
shouldn’t. You have a penis. But women love her books. She writes bestsellers about angels. Frankly, I think she’s a complete and total lunatic. Remember when I was so sick last month with bronchitis and I stayed home? I saw her on one of the morning talk shows going on and on about her latest book. And maybe it was because I was oxygen-deprived and half delusional from the medication, but I swear I thought she was talking about angels like they were our freaking neighbors.”
“Well, he’s a minister. I would think angels would give them something to talk about.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking no. My sense is her take on angels isn’t exactly going to mesh with his. She’s somewhere between New Age and wack job. Her angels, I have a feeling, find you parking spaces when you need one. What did he say about her?”
“Really very little.”
“I think she was in Vermont a couple weeks ago. I vaguely remember something in the newspaper.”
“Mostly I asked Drew about his relationship with Alice and George Hayward,” he said, and then he told me in detail what he had learned—and what Drew wouldn’t reveal. Emmet is a pro, and so he didn’t let on that we had reason to believe from Alice’s journal that either she had one hell of a fantasy life or she and Drew were more intimately involved than anyone knew. And Drew stuck to a pretty simple story: Alice was one of his parishioners, George was not, and he’d offered Alice pastoral counseling.
“Would you say you two were friends?” Emmet said he had asked, and Drew had replied, “Absolutely. We were very good friends.” The detective then inquired whether the minister could recall the last time he’d been to the Haywards’ house, and Emmet said there was a pause and he had wondered whether Drew was deciding whether to admit he’d ever been there. In the end he told the detective he’d been there most recently in, Drew believed, May—other, of course, than the Monday after the Haywards had been murdered. At that point he had asked Emmet why we were looking for him.
“Oh, we’re just tying up loose ends,” Emmet had replied. But he did ask the minister whether he was returning to Haverill anytime soon and where he could be reached if he wasn’t. The answer was Heather Laurent’s loft in Manhattan for at least a few more days and then, maybe, with a couple of different friends around the country. But Drew also said he might simply return to Vermont after leaving Manhattan and get some things from his home before taking that
longer road trip. Either way, Drew added, he’d most likely be in areas with cell coverage.