Secrets of Eden Read Free Page B

Vermont business community. There were people who were firmly convinced that Alice, though pretty, was lucky to have him. Almost no one knew that she had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order against him that last winter of her life, and many people suspected that he had left her in those months they were separated.
    Oh, but it was
she
who had risen up and kicked
him
out of the house, sending him to that cottage on the lake to see how life felt without her. He had attacked her once too often, and now she was going to try to make a go of it on her own.
    She had been one of his salesclerks at the original clothing store while getting a degree in business administration, and it was there that they had met and fallen in love. They married soon after he had promoted her to manager at the restaurant. By the time he was embarking on the toy store, however, she was securely ensconced as a customer-service representative at a bank branch in Bennington. Given the reality that they had a young daughter, even the fanatically controlling George Hayward saw the advantages to another small but steady income stream when you were juggling local retail ventures in a world of mass merchandisers and chain stores with very deep pockets.
    When she took him back as Memorial Day approached, believing him when he assured her that he was going to embark upon counseling and this time things would be different, some of our neighborsgreeted his return to Haverill with relief: A family was reconciled, and a marriage had been preserved.
    Imagine, then, their surprise when they heard that one disastrously drunken Sunday night he had strangled his wife and taken his handgun—not a thirty-gauge deer rifle, as the earliest rumors suggested—and shot himself.
    Heather Laurent had arrived in Manchester for a day and a half of appearances that Sunday evening: the very night the Haywards would die and about twelve hours before their bodies would be discovered in our little village. Haverill is a small hill town roughly halfway between Bennington and Manchester; the general store is almost exactly eight miles east of the border with New York State. It was therefore Tuesday morning when Heather was able to read about the grim discovery in the newspaper while she ate breakfast in her hotel room at the Equinox and the line of admirers outside the bookstore in Manchester grew long as they waited for the store to open its doors for the day. She was going to be there that morning from ten to eleven, and then she was going to speak at lunchtime at a fund-raiser for the Southern Vermont Arts Center. The day before, Monday, she had visited the NPR affiliate in Albany and given a speech at Bennington College. As she read the story in the newspaper, the final touches were added to the displays of her books: a waterfall of pink satin ribbon cascading over the neat piles of her paperback,
Angels and Aurascapes
, and vases of blue irises and yellow daylilies surrounding her hardcover,
A Sacred While
, which had been published the month before.
    There were two articles about the carnage in the newspaper, and it was in that second story that I appeared. The previous afternoon I had rambled on to the reporter—a woman I pegged at about twenty-five, a decade and a half younger than I and perhaps ten years the junior of Heather Laurent—about what C. S. Lewis had termed the problemof pain. From nearly fifteen minutes of the Reverend Stephen Drew’s babbling, she had pulled two quotes.“Sometimes it seems as if there’s nothing guiding this world. Or if there is something out there, it’s powerless or uninterested in us—or downright mean. Even evil,” I’d said, paraphrasing what Lewis considered the pessimist’s view of the cosmos. I may have gotten to Lewis’s summary of the Christian’s more optimistic perspective—I’d certainly planned to as a courtesy to my parishioners, even if it was a view I no longer shared—but it’s very possible that I didn’t.