Secrets of Eden (31 page)

“Now?”

“Now. It’s fine.”

“They think I killed them. Maybe just him. George.”

I slid down onto the thin wooden board that served as a seat and went completely still. I actually did need to sit down. “Why would they think that?” I asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. And appalling. Obviously I didn’t kill the two of them. I offered to take a lie-detector test. But they’re serious enough about this that I’m going to have to get a lawyer.”

“Where did they get this idea? They certainly didn’t think you’d had anything to do with this tragedy when it first happened.”

“I know.”

“Why, then?”

“I don’t know. I just know I’m furious.”

“It does sound a little absurd.”

“Trust me: It is.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the feet of teen girls and women
younger than me walking beneath the drape, but the world went eerily silent. I was no longer aware of the pulsating music the store had been playing or the conversations between customers just outside the dressing room. I stared down at the black wool of the dress, bunched up a little bit in my lap, and rested my forehead in my hand. My ears were ringing. On the floor of the dressing room was a torn sliver of bathroom tissue, and I couldn’t imagine why it was there.

“Heather?”

“I’m here,” I said. Then: “So you’re getting a lawyer?”

“I am.”

“Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. I know that’s not universally true. But have a little faith in your angel,” I said, and a memory came to me.
I thought you were my angel
. It was what he had said that first Saturday morning when he’d come to my loft and I’d told him that I wanted to show him an angel. He had called me his angel at least three times since then, and I expected him to say those words to me now. But he didn’t.

“I expect I’ll depend mostly on my lawyer,” he said instead. “But thank you very much.”

“You’re still coming to New York?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I just might be a day later than planned. It depends on who is representing me and when he or she can get together with me.”

I was relieved, though not completely. From the other side of the drape, I heard teen girls giggling about the scatological drawing and the sexual double entendre on a T-shirt. They sounded too young to be so knowledgeable, and that only unnerved me further. I was engulfed in an aura of demonstrable unease.

“When you know when you’re coming,” I said, “please call.”

“You sound annoyed.”

“No.
Anxious
would be a better word.”

“I didn’t know you got anxious,” he said, and I wondered if I had heard a ripple of challenge in his tone or whether he had meant this only as a small jest.

“Oh, I get anxious,” I told him. “As you get to know me, you’ll see I have a whole cauldron of emotions.” Still, I don’t believe I expected at the time that he would see hurt and anger and, worst of all, betrayal.

AS SOON AS
Stephen returned to Manhattan, I insisted we stroll into the West Village and stretch our legs along the narrow, oddly angled streets bordered by manicured brownstones. He had arrived near dinnertime because he’d met with a lawyer in Vermont over lunch. Eventually, I thought, we might get as far as the Hudson, where we could watch the late-summer sun descend in the horizon beyond the river, and on the way there I might show him an angel that warmed me near St. Luke’s Church. But mostly I just wanted to talk and savor the first small wisps of autumn in the air.

Initially he was guarded and resistant to my inquiries. It was as if we were back on his porch in Haverill the Tuesday just after the tragedy. The conversation was unsatisfying, and I felt a stab of apprehension that we might not be able to recover what we had had. But that didn’t seem reasonable to me that evening since—then—I believed everything he had told me and thus the inquiries of the police were unfounded. Ludicrous. A strange comet that would streak across the night sky, cause a little disconcerting befuddlement, and be gone. And eventually his resentment and pique did fade and the distance between us narrowed. When we left my loft, we might have been mistaken on the street for a brother and sister who were not especially close: We walked without touching, and our eyes never met. But by the time we reached St. Luke’s, we were holding hands. And when we
returned to Greene Street later that night, I was burrowed against him and his arm was around my shoulders. We would be fine, I decided. We were laughing, and his wit had lost that caustic bite that dogged him when he was irritated.

And for a week we
were
fine. Occasionally after talking to his lawyer—with whom he seemed to speak daily—he would breathe deeply through his nose and sigh and stare for long moments at either my osprey or my angels or the passersby on the street below us. Never would he tell me what he and his lawyer had discussed, and usually the conversations were brief. Still, it was clear he was exasperated, and one time I said to him, “Those little phone consultations with your lawyer can’t be cheap. This is a nonissue—he’ll make it disappear. Let it go.” And after a few minutes he would, and our vacation from real life would resume. We would walk and read and eat and make love. I did a radio interview with a program that broadcast from Manhattan’s City Hall, and he made faces at me through the glass when the host wasn’t looking. I wrote a bit, did a few online q&a’s, and responded to the occasional request from my publisher. But I did little else that week that could possibly have been construed as work. We saw no movies and no shows, because we were content—at least I was—to bask in a world that wasn’t much bigger than the alcove and daybed in my loft.

WE HAD BEEN
together again for a week, and as far as I was concerned, nothing in our world needed to change. I knew it would, of course. But I was very, very happy. Sometimes when I look back at the period when Stephen and I were involved, I find myself doubting that we could ever have been so perfectly mated, so finely attuned to each other’s cravings and desires. It is as if that varied collection of memories
we store—some precisely rendered and accurate, others modified by the caprices and needs of an aura, some gifts from an angel—in my case has a series embedded there that is more fiction than fact. That is, perhaps, all fiction. A string of pearls that turn out to be bath beads when you squeeze them.

And a part of my later sadness would stem from the reality that so many of our long talks together had been total fiction. I discovered I had been lied to for nearly five weeks.

But for those five weeks I had been as content as I have ever been in my life.

It all came apart after one more of his conversations with his attorney. As he did always when he spoke to this Aaron Lamb, he took his cell phone and stood at the corner window, retreating to the section of my loft I lived in least. He spoke softly, and while I might hear an occasional word—
investigation, allegations, evidence, office
—I never knew precisely what they were talking about. I heard no specifics. And that last phone call was really no different, though I did hear two words that struck me in a way that none had in any of their previous conversations:
diary
. And
DNA
. I honestly think I knew before Stephen had ended the call that something different and new had transpired, and it boded ill for our affair.

After he slipped his phone into his pants pocket, he folded one arm around his chest and rubbed at his chin with the other. He hadn’t shaved yet—that week he tended to shave just before lunch—and he seemed to be toying with the stubble along his jawline. It was obvious that this call had agitated him more than most.

I pushed my chair away from my desk and turned to him. “Anything interesting?” I asked softly, though it was evident to me that there was.

He cleared his throat before speaking. “I’m not sure
interesting
is
the right word,” he said carefully. “It may be interesting for uninvolved parties. The prurient who have followed one family’s nightmare in the media. But for me? I’m not sure I would use the word
interesting
.”

“What word would you use?”

He had remained on his feet, and his fingers were still at his face. “Let’s see.
Disturbing
, perhaps.
Disquieting. Problematic
.”

“Sit down. Tell me: What did he have to say this time?”

He didn’t sit, and so I stood and went to him. I pulled his arms from his body to mine and rested them on my hips. For the briefest of seconds, he seemed to resist. I noticed the room wasn’t as bright this time of the morning as it had been only days earlier, and I realized we had reached a stage in the season when the sun no longer rose quite as high over the surrounding buildings.

“Tell me,” I said again.

“Well, where to begin…” He was frowning.

“Aaron told you something. Begin there.”

“He did.”

I was growing restless at the protracted way he was sharing his news. I wanted to know what he had learned so I could offer comfort and counsel. And though I no longer presumed it would be essentially nothing and he would need from me only reassurance, still I hoped. As we stood together in silence, I sent a short, brief petition to my angel that my misgivings were unwarranted. That nothing had changed. “Are you going to tell me?” I asked finally, careful to keep my voice light.

He took a breath and looked out the window over my shoulder. “Alice kept a journal,” he said, his voice a little clipped.

Instantly my anxiety was transformed into dread, and I felt as if I were sliding underwater. For the rest of that conversation, his voice would sound slightly muffled to me, as if my ears were beneath the smooth plane of a very still lake. I understood from the moment he had
said there was a journal that we were moving inexorably toward separation. If I didn’t know precisely what he was about to tell me, I had a feeling. The gifts of prophecy and fear? Trifles compared to the insight an angel will give a receptive mind. I didn’t yet remove his hands from my body, but only because I clung to the tiniest strip of kindling that I was mistaken.

“Go on,” I said.

“In all likelihood I am in that journal.”

“As her pastor?”

“As her…”

“For God’s sake, Stephen, just tell me.”

He sighed. “There is an element to the story—a little background, if you will—that I didn’t share with you. Arguably, I should have. But I made the calculated decision that it would only distress you if I did. I think, in some way, I thought I was shielding you.”

“From what? The idea you’re a killer? I think you have grave demons, Stephen, but I promise you: I don’t see you as a killer.”

“I’m glad. Thank you,” he said, and I am convinced he added that only because it gave him an extra second to stall. To frame his thoughts. Then he continued, “For a time Alice and I were lovers.” He looked into my eyes, but I looked away, and after a brief second I pushed myself off him. I may have seen something like this coming, but the sensation of betrayal was nonetheless palpable, and I could hear my heart thrumming in the back of my head.

“We were lovers, and—”

“I heard you the first time.”

“And I should have told you.”

“When were you two together?” I asked. It seemed the first of a great many pieces of very basic information I needed to gather.

“Late last year. Early this year.”

“How early? It’s currently September. Was this two nights? Two
weeks? Two months?” Outside my window I watched a double-decker tour bus lurch to a stop at the traffic light.

“Two seasons.”

“Winter and spring.”

“Yes. Through the second week in May.”

“And in all of our conversations about the murder and the suicide and your guilt, you never told me this…why?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was protecting you. And it didn’t seem relevant.”

“I think the fact you fucked her is as relevant as the fact you baptized her,” I said, though I was able to restrain myself from raising my voice.

“I deserved that.”

I tried to remind myself that hostility invariably boomerangs back. In the end we wound ourselves, too, when we lash out.

“I imagine I was concerned that you would get the wrong idea about Alice’s and my relationship,” he went on when I remained silent. “Or, perhaps, that you might presume I was at her house that evening.”

“The evening they were killed?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” I asked him.

“About Alice?”

“About anything.”

“No. But things are changing. I am going to have to return to Vermont and give them what they call a DNA swab. I am going to have to give them some fingerprints and turn over my laptop.”

“Are you being arrested?”

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

I took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “Are you scared?”

“Of?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I would think being a suspect in a murder investigation just might unnerve a person.”

“I can’t tell: Are you being sarcastic?”

“Yes, Stephen. I am being sarcastic.”

“That doesn’t seem like you.”

“I just asked you if you were frightened, and you asked me what of. The moment seemed to call for sarcasm.”

“You have every right to be angry with me. I should have told you about Alice.”

“Were you two in love?”

He went quiet, and I couldn’t decide whether it was because they had been and for some reason he didn’t want to admit this or whether he honestly couldn’t decide. Finally: “I’m not completely sure what that means.”

“It’s not a hard question. I didn’t ask you to list for me the contents of the periodic table. Were you two in love?”

“I think she might have loved me. For a time.”

“And you?”

“I enjoyed her company.”

“And you enjoyed sleeping with her.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Her husband wanted to come home. He insisted he’d changed; he said things would be different. It seemed to me that if I told her not to take him back, I would have an obligation to marry her myself.”