Secrets of Eden (19 page)

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

K. H
AYWARD
: Awkward. Totally awkward.

W
ALKER
: Why?

K. H
AYWARD
: 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.

W
ALKER
: And you felt guilty about no longer going?

K. H
AYWARD
: Well, yeah!

W
ALKER
: Why else was it awkward?

K. H
AYWARD
: 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…

W
ALKER
: Go on.

K. H
AYWARD
: I hoped things would get better between them.

W
ALKER
: Between your mother and father.

K. H
AYWARD
: Yes.

W
ALKER
: Get better in what way?

K. H
AYWARD
: Not fighting.

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

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

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

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

W
ALKER
: Your parents had a fight?

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

W
ALKER
: Do you know why they fought?

K. H
AYWARD
: I wasn’t home.

W
ALKER
: Then how do you know they had a fight?

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

W
ALKER
: There was a bruise? A mark?

K. H
AYWARD
: 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…

W
ALKER
: Go ahead.

K. H
AYWARD
[
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!

W
ALKER
: Not even before your father came home?

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

W
ALKER
: What?

K. H
AYWARD
[
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:

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:

The March 11 entry certainly implied that Alice Hayward and Reverend Drew were romantically involved, but I had spent enough time with Aaron Lamb in the courtroom to know this: Before a jury he was capable of arguing convincingly that on March 11 Alice and her pastor had had a discussion about her estrangement from her husband during the day, and then later Alice had had a cozy evening at home with her daughter—capitalizing upon the mother-daughter bonding she had initiated with waffles at breakfast.

Likewise, the short passage that Alice added on December 14 didn’t exactly have the two of them rolling around the floor together beside a Christmas tree. The fact that she says they were alone wasn’t proof of anything, since Drew obviously was going to be counseling
her in private. I knew even as I reviewed the diary that I was going to need a lot more evidence to charge him with murder.

What I found most interesting as the State’s resident cynic was this: Drew had become a cross in the diary long before George Hayward had left. If the pair had been playing Hester and Dimmesdale, it seemed possible that the affair had commenced as long as eight weeks before George Hayward had been ordered to keep his distance. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in their counseling sessions. I could just hear that Waspy, clipped voice of Drew’s as, perhaps, he urged her to leave George—which obviously was exactly the right advice, unless his ulterior motive was inside his own khaki pants. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether the fight between Alice and George that finally led her to get the relief-from-abuse order had been triggered by her involvement with her minister. Either Drew had given her the confidence to get rid of her pathetic excuse for a husband (a very good thing) or he was manipulating his way into her bedroom (a pretty despicable misuse of power). There was no entry until little more than a week after she had kicked George out of the house, which wasn’t illogical, since Alice clearly wasn’t an inveterate diary keeper and she must have been busy reorganizing her life once her husband was gone:

The sore back and swollen elbow were the only references to the violence that had led her to finally get that restraining order.

Still, I did learn more about Alice Hayward, and it was evident that she really wasn’t the self-help-magazine poster child for battered wives everywhere. She wasn’t a perfect fit with the profile. Sure, George was the primary breadwinner and clearly subsidized an outwardly very nice lifestyle for them, but she wasn’t totally dependent upon him financially. She had a job and an income. Moreover, she wasn’t the daughter of an abused wife.

I did, however, wonder if her self-esteem wasn’t so low that it had started to burrow underground—and that did fit the sketch. The brute she was married to was quite capable of undermining her faith in herself. He might not have been using her skull as a piñata, but he still knew that he could inflict pain anytime he opened his mouth:

It didn’t seem to me from her diary that she was staying with George for the sake of their daughter. The girl by then was a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose. If anything, Alice had the common sense to see that getting smacked around and verbally abused by her man wasn’t precisely the sort of role-model behavior a teenage girl ever should see. But she did understand this about her marriage: George was better to her when Katie was around—and she herself was safer.