Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

K. HAYWARD: Uh-huh.

WALKER: Were there other times he was at the house?

K. HAYWARD: Probably. But I don’t remember any.

WALKER: Then why do you think that?

K. HAYWARD: Maybe because everyone says he was there now. I don’t know.

WALKER: But you do not recall ever seeing him at the house other than that time he was there for dinner.

K. HAYWARD: No.

According to Alice’s journal, it had been a Monday night in early March when Drew had had dinner with her and her daughter. This is what I mean about teenagers being harder to interview than spies. It’s not necessarily that they’re trying to mislead you or withhold a key piece of evidence. It’s just that their hardwiring is so freaking different from a grown-up’s or a child’s.

WALKER: So he never came by for… I don’t know… a quick bite to eat after church? A lunch, maybe?

K. HAYWARD: Definitely not after church. While the kids are in Sunday school, the adults have this thing called Second Hour. They’re supposed to sit around and talk about Stephen’s sermon in the big common room, but whenever I would pass through there to get juice or something when I was in Sunday school, they were, like, talking about muffins and stuff.

WALKER: Muffins?

K. HAYWARD: You know, stuff that isn’t important. They’d be talking about the muffins that some old person had baked for the Second Hour. Grown-ups like snacks, too.

WALKER: What was it like when he had dinner that night with you and your mother?

K. HAYWARD: Awkward. Totally awkward.

WALKER: Why?

K. HAYWARD: Because I sort of don’t go to Youth Group anymore. And I did when I was in middle school and for part of ninth grade.

WALKER: And you felt guilty about no longer going?

K. HAYWARD: Well, yeah!

WALKER: Why else was it awkward?

K. HAYWARD: Look, it wasn’t awkward because my mom and Stephen were together. Okay? That wasn’t it. My mom and Stephen hooking up? Too weird, I don’t want to go there. Besides, my dad…

WALKER: Go on.

K. HAYWARD: I hoped things would get better between them.

WALKER: Between your mother and father.

K. HAYWARD: Yes.

WALKER: Get better in what way?

K. HAYWARD: Not fighting.

WALKER: But we’re discussing a period when your father was away.

K. HAYWARD: I just don’t think my mom and Stephen were… you know.

WALKER: Okay. And when your father returned, they were fighting less?

K. HAYWARD: I don’t know. Maybe. Something happened the Friday night before they died.

WALKER: Your parents had a fight?

K. HAYWARD: Yes. But maybe it was Saturday. It’s kind of a blur.

WALKER: Do you know why they fought?

K. HAYWARD: I wasn’t home.

WALKER: Then how do you know they had a fight?

K. HAYWARD: I just do. You can tell. Dad must have hit Mom.

WALKER: There was a bruise? A mark?

K. HAYWARD: Not one I could see. But there almost never was. I think only a couple of times he hit her on the face. He was, like, a businessman. He was careful. But…

WALKER: Go ahead.

K. HAYWARD [ starting to cry ]: But he felt terrible about it afterward. He always felt horrible. That’s the thing. Until that night… until the night they died… I thought things would get better between them. Between my mom and dad. He came home from the lake, and I didn’t know if things would ever be totally normal. But except for a few bad nights, like that Friday or Saturday, I was sure they were working stuff out. My mom thought so, too! That’s why I don’t think she would have wrecked it by getting involved with Stephen!

WALKER: Not even before your father came home?

K. HAYWARD: No! No, no, no. Things were getting better until that night, and I guess that’s why…

WALKER: What?

K. HAYWARD [ crying harder ]: I guess that’s why he killed himself after he killed her. Because, like, things had been getting better.

Later Emmet would ask her if she had any familiarity with Heather Laurent before her parents had died-whether her mother or Stephen had ever mentioned her-but it was clear that the girl hadn’t met her until that last Tuesday in July. Before then she’d never heard of the pastor’s new squeeze, and her mother had never spoken the woman’s name. And neither of Laurent’s books were anywhere in the Hayward house. Prior to her parents’ murders, Katie Hayward knew as much about Heather Laurent as she did about the medieval popes.

I PORED OVER a photocopy of Alice Hayward’s journal. Even as a teenage girl, I never kept a diary. It wasn’t that I was afraid someone would read it and something might come back to haunt me. It was, to be totally honest, that I’ve just never been all that introspective. And so the idea that this customer-service representative of a community bank kept a diary fascinated me, and I studied every entry for clues.

Alice had begun keeping the journal almost a year before she would get the relief-from-abuse order, and so altogether the diary lasted close to eighteen months. None of the entries were more than a paragraph or two, and sometimes she would seem to go weeks without cracking the little book’s spine. What intrigued me as much as anything was how her handwriting changed in the course of that year and a half. At first, when she was largely chronicling the latest time that the bastard she called her husband had smacked her hard in the back or called her a cunt, the penmanship was tiny and cramped, almost no space between the letters of each word. Five times, Stephen Drew-as Stephen Drew-appeared in the diary before Alice got the court order that kicked her husband’s sorry ass out of the house. She wrote that she had seen the reverend at his church office on three occasions and at an unspecified locale on two others, and though she wrote that she and Stephen were discussing her husband, she didn’t offer much detail. An entry from late October was pretty typical:

OCTOBER 25: Met with Stephen for over an hour. Told him about George’s threat last night and how much he had drunk. Stephen thinks like Ginny. I should get out. When George gets like he did last night, I think they’re right. I know they’re right . But last Friday he was so different. It was like St. Croix. So I think of St. Croix on the one hand and how much my stomach hurt when he knocked the wind out of me last night on the other .

St. Croix was a reference to a vacation just the two of them had taken the previous winter. And the threat? No idea. Katie Hayward had no recollection of a particular warning toward the end of October or even a memorably violent fight. Nor was she aware that her father had punched her mother so hard in the gut as Halloween neared that she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

It was in November that the cross would first appear. It was less than three months before Alice would request and receive the relief-from-abuse order, which of course led me to wonder: Why was the reverend lobbying for Alice to leave George? Was it because she would be safer or because he wanted to have her to himself? And it was right about this time that her penmanship went from letters that were invariably small and crowded together to more florid curlicues and swoops. A few great sweeping P ’s and M ’s and O ’s. A lot of capital letters. I imagine the penmanship looked a little bit like mine had when I’d been in middle school. If this not-so-mysterious “cross” was indeed Stephen Drew, there were seven entries that the prurient mind-or the prosecutor’s-could interpret as chronicling an intimate afternoon or evening with the pastor. Three were in that period before George Hayward was sent packing, and four were between late February and early May. None, alas, was explicit enough to confirm that Drew and Alice were lovers. But all of them had the feel of a schoolgirl crush: