Authors: Chris Bohjalian
“Did he ask you if he needed a lawyer?” I asked Emmet.
“No.”
“He sounds very accommodating.”
“I said I’d call him if I had any other questions.”
“Do we have something that we know has his fingerprints on it—or even his DNA?”
“We don’t.”
“What about when we were at the Haywards’ the day after their murder? Remember what a scrubber Drew was? How helpful he was?” I said, and it seemed possible now that he had been working like mad to make sure that he’d left behind no evidence of his involvement at the scene Sunday night. Perhaps inadvertently he had left us a lead.
“I vaguely recall him Windexing the windows, but he would have been wearing rubber gloves by the time he grabbed the spray bottle.”
“He moved the coffee table.”
“That’s right. But he was probably wearing the gloves by then, too.”
“And I recall him drinking some kind of diet soda from a bottle,” I said, hoping, if he was implicated, he had gotten sloppy.
“If so, it may still be under the sink. They had a recycling tub under there.”
“Good. And if Drew does come back to Vermont, let’s drop in on him or see if he wants to stop by the barracks. Perhaps we can ask him some more questions before he realizes he needs an attorney and winds up in custodial care.”
“Will do,” Emmet agreed. Then: “And you said Heather Laurent was a bestselling writer?”
“Yup.”
“I wonder how she and Drew became friends. Think they went to school together?”
“It’s possible.”
“Let me look into her, too. Maybe she fits in here somewhere.”
“But don’t talk to her until you’ve talked to Drew again—if possible.”
“I understand.”
I couldn’t imagine Drew traveling with the Queen of the Angels, and so as soon as Emmet and I hung up, I Googled her. I saw she was as pretty as she had struck me on television. And I learned that her father had murdered her mother and then killed himself. I decided then that the two were something more than friends, which made me ponder further the motives that drove the Reverend Drew. I began to wonder whether this Heather Laurent had been involved in the Haywards’ murder as well. A love triangle? Possible. I saw online that she had appeared in Vermont on the Monday the bodies were found, which meant that she might have been here on Sunday night. And absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything. I know that. It is, for better or worse, the fallout from my job.
SOMETIMES LATE AT
night, I will peer into each of my boys’ bedrooms. Most nights they sleep in their own beds in their own rooms, their doors open, but that summer it wasn’t uncommon for Lionel to grab his pillows and a blanket and curl up either at the foot of Marcus’s bed or in the beanbag chair beside it. He had only been out of a crib for a year and a half. And though he was potty trained, he still slept in pull-ups—just in case. Paul says I will stand there for long minutes in my nightgown, just staring. Intellectually I know there’s a connection between what I see at work most days and the time I spend watching
my boys sleep: The weirder my caseload, the more likely I am to act like a sentinel.
They are both very deep sleepers. Their pediatrician once said she believed that little boys sleep more deeply than little girls. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I know that my sister and I never seemed to slumber the way our brother did. My father would wake me up when it was time to start getting ready for school, and I would hear him the moment he started turning the knob on my bedroom door. In the months when we were investigating the murders up in Haverill, I found myself standing with obsessive frequency over my boys’ beds or that beanbag chair and watching the two of them. When Lionel was in Marcus’s bedroom, the air would be filled with the aroma of baby shampoo, and I would just stand there and study how my three-year-old would curl his small body into the beanbag chair as if he were back in the womb, his knees against his chest, while Marcus would sleep flat on his stomach, his legs as straight as an Olympic diver’s as he entered the water. They were often in matching pajamas, though I have actually tried to discourage that. It’s Lionel who insists on being a Mini Marcus and dressing as much like his older brother as his older brother will allow. Marcus, it seems, is much more tolerant in that regard than I would be. That summer the boys were sleeping in pajamas with a montage of comic-book superheroes, men and women who sort of do what I do, but without needing a judge’s permission or a jury’s agreement. And both boys would be sleeping so soundly that I would have to watch very carefully to detect the slightest rise in either Lionel’s slender shoulders or Marcus’s back. It’s as if all that energy they start to expend from the moment they open their eyes—Exhibit A, breakfast—has completely drained their tanks by bedtime.
Occasionally that August and September, I would find myself wondering what sorts of things Katie Hayward had fallen asleep to—or what sorts of noises had woken her up in the small hours of the
morning—and as I learned about Heather Laurent’s history, I would find myself contemplating the fights and screams that had kept her awake in the night, too. What do you do if you’re a girl and your father is beating the crap out of your mother? Or what if he’s simply one of those fiendish monsters who knows how to twist the dagger verbally—knows just what barbs will hurt the most and really get under his wife’s skin? I knew that at some point soon we would be interviewing Katie again, and I didn’t relish the prospect. She was only fifteen, now an orphan, and I had been told that she was doing about as well as one could expect. She was living with her pal Tina Cousino’s family in Haverill so she could remain in the same high school and retain the same friends. But teenagers are always funky to interview. Often they’re not trying to mislead you, but still their answers are all over the place.
We weren’t home Friday night, we were at the movies. No wait, that was, like, Saturday. We got back around ten. No, maybe midnight. I don’t remember. But it was after dinner. At least I think it was. Like, why does it matter, anyway?
Sometimes I would be pulled from my reverie by Paul. I remember one night in late August, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my stomach. I was already in the summer nightshirt in which I slept, a man’s Red Sox jersey that falls almost to my knees, and he whispered, “They never move.” It was true. When one of us would go get them in the morning, there was a reasonable chance that Lionel would still be a crab in the beanbag chair and Marcus would still be about to crack the plane of the water. But what of Katie when she had been the age of either of my boys, when she had been six or three? Or even that lunatic Heather Laurent? How had they slept? Had they pulled pillows over their heads so they wouldn’t hear their parents’ fights or the names that their father would reserve for their mother? At what age do you figure out that your dad is a bastard? That your mom’s life is a train wreck and she’s keeping it together with makeup
and lies? We had a photo from the murder scene of the impression that the back of Alice Hayward’s head had left in the Sheetrock in the living-room wall the night George had killed her. If we went back to the house and ran our fingers behind the framed prints and photos on the walls, would we find other indentations? The idea crossed my mind. Even then we knew a fair amount about how George’s anger would smolder before bursting into one sudden burn and then abruptly flame out. Until the night he killed Alice, he tended not to hit her anywhere that was visible. This wasn’t an absolute rule, of course. There had been bruises before on her face. But usually he would smack her in the ass or on the lower back. The back of her head. Based on the details that Alice had shared with Ginny O’Brien, he may even have deluded himself on occasion that this was creepy but interesting sex play—though it doesn’t appear to have had a damn thing to do with sex. Just because he never broke a bone and only once or twice blackened an eye, just because she only went to the ER one time, didn’t mean that George Hayward wasn’t violent or that the violence hadn’t been escalating. Ginny herself told us that she should have seen this coming. Alice had made it clear to her friend that it had been an extremely rocky July, but somehow she thought she could handle it. It seemed like what sometimes occurred was that George would manufacture an accident: He would drive her backward into the massive hutch in the dining room. He would push her into the triangular point where two lengths of kitchen counter merged. He would knock her into the banister at the foot of the stairs. He was totally capable of calling her a cunt—a useless cunt, a stupid cunt, a pathetic cunt—and later he would write her long letters of apology. Now and then he would write her poems. And he wasn’t without talent. No one did remorse the way George Hayward could, which may have had something to do with why Alice tolerated him for as long as she did.
That, of course, and the fact that once she had loved him. They had loved each other. Still, if George had read the wife-beater’s manual—and somewhere there really must be a how-to book that all these pricks read—it wasn’t long after they were married that he hauled off and hit her that first time.
OFTEN I FOUND
myself wondering this: What precisely was Drew thinking after the crime lab had left, when his hands were in the blue gloves and he was cleaning up the remnants of George Hayward’s brains late Monday afternoon? Had he expected the night before that he would be doing precisely this? Given how much thought he’d put into making Hayward’s death look like a suicide, had his mind wandered to the chance that he would be the one who would quite literally clean up the mess? Was this his way of punishing himself? Or was he simply doing all that he could to make sure that he had left no trace of his crime behind?
The idea that Alice’s choice in men ran to guys like George Hayward and Stephen Drew made me very, very sad. One afternoon at the office, I watched some video of her at Katie’s ninth birthday party. The theme was “fun at the beach,” which interested me because the snowdrifts climbed partway up one of the windows of the Hayward house and there were icicles hanging like stalactites from the hydrangea outside their living room. There must have been eight or nine girls and a couple of boys there, all looking to be third- and fourth-graders, and I saw a few of their moms hovering in the background or herding the kids the way you herd cats: energetically, but not with any sense that you’re really going to accomplish a whole hell of a lot. Everyone was in shorts and sandals, and there were several Hawaiian shirts. A few kids were in bathing suits. There was a
clown in big beach trunks, a muscle T-shirt, and gigantic flippers. As I watched Alice manage the chaos and a kind of Nerf volleyball, I could understand completely what guys saw in her: She was pretty and sweet and efficient. Part banker, but also part cruise director. There was one string bean of a boy who was scared to death of the clown and had wedged himself between the couch and the wall, and the camera caught Alice reassuring the child that the clown was harmless and friendly and was there to make people laugh—and then, when the boy wasn’t convinced, taking him by the hand and leading him up the stairs to Katie’s room, where she said he could play until the clown had gone home. I found the moment a little chilling, because I was pretty sure that it was George who was manning the camera, and at one point, as she was showing the kid which of Katie’s toys were the least girlish—some trolls and board games like Monopoly Junior—she turned and said right into the lens, “He’ll be safe in here. If we close the door, he won’t hear anything at all that might scare him.”
It was times like that when I would think how incredibly lucky I was.
EMMET CALLED DREW
again and asked him if he had decided yet whether he was going to return to Vermont. The reverend took no umbrage at the question and said he thought it was likely. He was, at the time, still playing house in Manhattan with the Queen of the Angels. By then I had read her books. And though I didn’t see how she might be involved with this nightmare, neither could I discount her involvement.
Still, my suspicions remained pretty simple: Drew had gone to the Haywards’ that July night, either by coincidence or because he
feared that George was going to hurt Alice. Although there was no record that she had called him, perhaps she had said something to him that day. Perhaps she had even said something to him at the baptism. Who knows? And so he goes to the house and finds Alice dead and George passed out drunk on the couch. The guy has his handgun out, either because he’s been threatening Alice with it before he strangled her or because he was planning to kill himself. And Drew is furious—no, not furious. Drew isn’t the sort who gets furious. Fury is beneath him. Instead he is disgusted. Appalled. So he takes the gun from the coffee table or a cushion or perhaps even from George’s limp hand and shoots him. Kills him right there on the couch. He believes if he discharges the gun close enough to the guy’s head, it will look like a suicide. Perhaps he had gotten the idea from Heather Laurent’s tragic family history. I thought it was possible that he and Heather had been pals a long while, and so the idea of making it look like George had killed himself after killing his wife was already in his head. I might even get murder one on this theory.
A longer shot, but one I had not yet written off, was the possibility that Drew had done in both of the Haywards. Or, perhaps, Drew and the Angel Advocate together:
The angels will come for her, Stephen. She’s so very unhappy. She’ll be much better off as an angel!
Again, this wasn’t likely given the public persona of Heather Laurent. From her books and the clips of her I had watched on YouTube, she didn’t strike me as the type who looked real favorably on homicide. But I’ve been wrong about people before, and I will be again. You just never know.
In any case, when Emmet spoke with Drew that second time, the minister realized that we had begun to suspect his involvement.
“I’m beginning to think you have some serious questions about me,” he told the detective sergeant, his voice in Emmet’s opinion suggesting only bemusement.