Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“He didn’t say what they were avenging?”

“Nope.”

“Any ideas?”

“No again. Sorry.”

Outside the window I saw storm clouds the slate gray of autumn. “So what else did you crazy kids talk about?” I asked.

“Well, the key thing is this: The basics of Stephen Drew’s story check out-or at least Amanda corroborated the basics of his story. She says that Drew and Heather Laurent were there for almost a week, and when we got out a calendar, she picked the right six days. She also said she had no idea that her sister had been involved with Stephen Drew until they showed up there.”

“Was her visit a surprise?”

“No. She had called them ahead of time. But she hadn’t told them she was bringing her new boyfriend.”

“So they hadn’t met him before.”

“That’s correct. I got no indication from them that they were aware of any relationship between Stephen Drew and Heather prior to the deaths of the Haywards.”

“Had they heard about the Haywards before Heather and Drew got there?”

“They’d seen the story on the news. They still assumed it was a murder-suicide.”

“Your cell phones work there?”

“No, they didn’t. That part of Drew’s story checks out, too.”

“She say anything about her father’s history of abuse or her parents’ deaths?”

“Finally, but only after I had pushed her a bit.”

“And?”

“We’ll have to go through the transcript carefully once it’s typed up, but nothing that suggested she saw anything except the most obvious parallels to the Haywards’ deaths. She worried about the teenage daughter, mostly. Said the girl is in for a world of pain. But I think we already knew that.”

I’m really not a stress eater, but I found myself reaching for a maple-crème doughnut. I had hoped for something more helpful from the long road trip to Statler. “What about her sister? Heather? Anything interesting emerge from your time in Manhattan?”

“We saw Anne Hathaway-the movie star.” This was Andy.

“Well, that must have made it all worthwhile.”

“She was shopping,” he went on. “Seems to have been visiting some one in the building across the street from Ms. Laurent. I recognized her before Emmet.”

“Good for you, Andy.”

“Well, you asked,” he said, his tone a little hurt.

“Our escort was an NYPD detective named Adrian Christie,” Emmet continued. “He was from Jamaica, and he knew who Heather Laurent was going in. His wife had just read A Sacred While in their book group this month. He made all the introductions. He was really very helpful.”

“What did you think of Heather?”

“She’s pretty. I thought she was actually prettier than her dust jacket. And to go back to your first question: Yes, some interesting things did emerge. First of all, she won’t admit that she and Stephen were lovers, but she is quite clear about this: They are no longer friends. She says that she met him on the Tuesday after the murders-”

“But she was in town that Sunday night. We have records that she had checked in to the Equinox about four-thirty that Sunday afternoon.”

“Doesn’t deny it. Had to be in Albany for a public radio taping Monday morning and an appearance at Bennington College in the evening. It all checks out. She says it was Tuesday when she went to Haverill for the first time, and that was when she met Stephen Drew for the first time. She says their friendship ”-and he emphasized the word with an uncharacteristically facetious pop-“really didn’t last all that long. A little more than a month-though when you piece together Drew’s whereabouts, they were together almost all of that time in either Statler or Manhattan. As far as we can tell, they spent a couple of days in SoHo, about a week in Statler, and then another week in Manhattan. Drew then returned to Vermont, but only briefly. Pretty quickly he rejoined Heather Laurent at her place in the city and stayed for another week or so.”

“Why the breakup?”

“He hadn’t told her that he’d had an affair with Alice Hayward. He only ’fessed up to her after his attorney told him that Alice kept a journal and he was going to have to give us a mouth swab.”

“And this made her mad.”

“Well, it angered her as much as anything can anger her. She’s not a person with what you might call anger-management issues. She’s pretty serene. On the surface she actually comes across as a bit of an airhead-but, in fact, I believe she is very, very smart. She said Drew was more of a son of the morning star than he liked to admit.”

“The ‘Son of the Morning Star’ was George Armstrong Custer,” I said. “He got that nickname because he used to attack at dawn. The Crows gave it to him. I only know that trivia because Paul is a bit of an American-history geek.”

“That’s not what she meant.”

“Too bad.”

“She was referring to Lucifer: Isaiah, chapter fourteen, verse twelve.”

“Satan?”

“A fallen angel. It was Dante and Milton who made him Satan.”

“Emmet, you are a source of unending wonder to me. Have you read Dante and Milton?”

“No. I just did a little research before coming here this morning.”

“So what do you think? Was Heather Laurent involved in some way? You trust her?”

“I think she’s a strange one. But her strangeness moderates against manual strangulation and shooting someone in the head. It moderates against conspiracy.”

“So your money is on Stephen Drew?”

Before he could respond, Andy piped in. “That guy is ice.”

“I take that as an affirmative, Detective Sullivan?”

He nodded. “Emmet and I talked about this on the way home from New York City. Unless George Hayward has a freakishly long arm and was able to hold the gun real far away, we both put our money on the pastor.”

IT IS LARGELY a coincidence that I have the name of a medieval saint from Siena. My Italian mother-whose last name was Brusa-was vaguely aware that there was a St. Catherine, but my great-grandparents had emigrated to Barre, Vermont, in 1901 so my great-grandfather could work in the granite quarries there, and by the time I was born in 1975, my family was deeply Americanized. My great-grandfather was a stone carver, and though he spent the better part of his adult life blasting great blocks of rock from the ground-a job that would, eventually, cause him to die slowly and painfully of silicosis-he nonetheless left behind a poignant legacy in the Hope Cemetery just outside of the town. Three of the most photographed tombstones are his: the little girl nuzzling two sheep that marks the spot where a nine-year-old victim of influenza named Marissa was buried in 1919; the lion with a mane that looks like a halo, his mouth open in a full-throated roar, that sits atop the decomposing body of one of the mayors of Barre; and the graceful young woman on bent knee, her eyes turned up toward the heavens with a look of beatific comfort on her face, who marks the patch of earth where my great-grandmother was buried, far too young, in 1927. Yes, Antonio Benincasa had chiseled the monument for his own wife when she predeceased him. It was, my older relatives insisted when I was a child, one of the world’s truly great, genuinely tragic love affairs.

But by the time I arrived, the granite dust was long gone from the clothes and the lungs of the Benincasas. My father and my grandfather (the one who didn’t edit Vermont Life ) were both lawyers, and I know I made my family happy by taking the LSATs and going to law school. It gave my younger sister clearance to become a wedding planner and my younger brother the freedom to go to New York City to make his fortune-my grandparents and great-uncles actually used expressions like that-as an art director in an ad agency. I certainly have no regrets.