Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“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?”