Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“You know,” he said, sitting down behind an Empire desk the size of a mini golf green and motioning me toward the chair beside it rather than opposite it, “already I’m hearing from politicians who see an opportunity in this nightmare. City councilors. State legislators. I hate politicians.”

“No you don’t. You love them, Jim. You are one.”

“Let me rephrase that: I hate it when politicians try to exploit something tragic for their own gain. I hate it when they try to grandstand.”

“Me, too.”

“Already there are people planning to campaign on this. Use violence against women as part of their platform-but with absolutely no specifics, no program, no plan.”

“At least they’ll be against it.”

“How can you joke like that? You’re a woman!”

“That’s precisely how I can. Because I am a woman.”

“It’s like when that patient hanged himself at the state psychiatric hospital. Suddenly every politician wanted a new director. A new hospital. New ways of caring for the mentally ill. There was chaos and noise, and in the end absolutely nothing changed.”

“I remember.”

“Now they’ll make it sound like it’s the state’s attorney’s job to prevent domestic abuse.”

“Jim-”

“They’ll want to set up task forces. They’ll want hearings. Legislation. At least this one is easy for us. Cut and dried-and I promise you, I would not have used that expression just now if George Hayward had used a knife.”

“Jim?”

“Go ahead.”

“David doesn’t think George Hayward killed himself.” He rocked forward in the great palm of his leather chair. “What?”

And so I told him about the head wound and the ME’s conjecture. I shared with him the possibility that if George Hayward had not shot himself, then it was-at least for the moment-conceivable that he had not strangled Alice, either.

“There’s someone else?” he asked, a slight catch of dryness in his throat. That was it.

“Apparently. But at this point all I’m telling you is that George Hayward may not have been a suicide.”

He sighed, and I imagined he was contemplating all of the ways I had just complicated his life, and how so much of his small office’s resources were about to be committed to what had seemed, just a few minutes ago, a relatively simple domestic cataclysm.

MY HUSBAND TEACHES earth science and chemistry at the high school in Bennington, and he is worshipped by his students. Every third graduating class seems to dedicate the yearbook to him, and he is constantly lampooned in their variety shows-but in ways that make it clear he is more beloved than spring break. Once when I was helping him chaperone a dance, half the senior girls viewed me as some haglike interloper. One literally asked me who I was and what I was doing there. She asked me how I knew Mr. Ribner. Well, he’s my husband , I answered politely. How do you know Paul? The boys revere him, too, especially the soccer players. He played soccer through college, and the high-school soccer team now has something of a reputation as a powerhouse in the state. They’ve been state champs four times in the six years that he’s coached the team.

Sometimes after our own boys are in bed (which is always a major production, because one is three and one is six, and they are both relentlessly energetic), we will be comparing notes on our day. He will be talking about some refugee kid-a student with nothing-who’s raised some incredible sum of money in the walkathon for the local homeless shelter and also happens to be a spectacular forward, and I will be telling him about (for example) some minister in Haverill who was fucking some battered woman he was supposed to be counseling and then took justice into his own hands and shot her husband.

I’m no biblical scholar, but even I know who has the final say when it comes to justice and revenge, and it isn’t the local pastor. Weeks later one of the Vermont newspapers would christen Drew the “Vigilante Reverend,” but I always thought that implied there was more fire in the guy’s soul than was actually there. It also, it seemed to me, gave the guy a veneer of likability he didn’t deserve.

Of course, I seem to be an exception among women. Obviously Alice Hayward saw something in him. So did Heather Laurent. And I’m confident there were other women in Haverill, too, and someday they’ll come forward. Even now there are rumors and suspicions and no small amount of whispering. But he’s certainly not my type: He’s almost too pretty. His hair is too perfect. And the camera just loves him. Those first pictures of him in the newspaper that Tuesday morning? We’re talking the dad in a J. Crew catalog.

Still, I honestly didn’t see Drew as a suspect at first, even when David suggested that George Hayward might have been murdered. It was only when one of the original investigators, Emmet Walker, went back to nose around Haverill the week after the funeral and learned that Drew had left town that I began to wonder. Emmet, along with a younger trooper named Andy Sullivan, stopped by the church. The secretary there introduced them to some old fellow named Gavin who said he was filling in as pastor until Drew either returned or decided that he would never be able to. Both Gavin-whose full name was Gavin Muir Maxwell, as solid a name as you can find, in my opinion, for a retired Baptist minister who works now as a sort of substitute teacher for shepherdless flocks-and the church secretary were talkative. They reported that Drew had left Thursday evening, the night of Alice Hayward’s funeral, and that he had said he wasn’t sure where he was going. But the secretary, a lovely woman named Betsy Storrs, who I practically want to make my new godmother (my actual godmother is long dead), told Emmet that she saw the reverend’s passport on his desk before he went into the sanctuary to conduct Alice Hayward’s service, and the day before that she had heard him on the phone trying to find out the limits on his Visa and MasterCard.

“Did you see him remove any papers from his office?” Emmet had asked.

“We have a lot of state secrets here,” Betsy had replied solemnly. “Next to Los Alamos, there are more important documents here than anywhere in the country.”

“So he didn’t take anything?”

“Of course he took things,” she said, shaking her head, and she showed him how the pastor’s personal drawer in the gray metal filing cabinet was now only half full. “The fact he took his passport and so many of his personal papers is why I don’t expect him back anytime soon. I am telling you, he was very, very shaken by this. This hit him in a way that caught all of us completely off guard. I thought I knew Stephen well-at least as well as anyone in this town-but I’m telling you, I never saw this one coming.”

Emmet didn’t think she was angry. But he was confident that she thought the minister held his cards very, very close to his chest.

My sense is that angels come to us: We don’t come to them. We don’t solicit them, we don’t ask for them-though, certainly, we may address prayers in their direction. But we don’t knock, because, after all, we would be knocking on air-on aura. Their presence, however, is undeniable in my mind, and when we need them, they may appear without fanfare at our front doors. They are watching. And it will always be a source of wonder to me how often we miss the obviousness of their arrival, mistaking them for a neighbor or family or friend .

Or stranger .

Too often we presume that the unexpected strangers in our lives bode ill, or we are skeptical of their designs. We think we know more .