On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet.

Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense.

At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer.

Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more.

As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.

Internal Combustion - The Introduction

In early December of 2004, Good Morning America aired a short, four minute segment on the case of a woman named Nancy Seaman, accused of murdering her husband with a hatchet, but claiming self defense. Married for thirty two years, Nancy Seaman was a mother of two grown sons and a fourth grade teacher who had been honored-only two years earlier-with an award for excellence, presented to her by the Governor of the state of Michigan.

At the time of the murder, the couple had been living in a Tudor-style home in a gated community in suburban Detroit, purchased with the proceeds of Bob Seaman's successful career as an executive and engineer in the automotive industry from which he had retired some years earlier. For the eight years preceding his death, he had been-somewhat improbably-managing a batting cage operation housed in an old Ford plant and coaching a girls' fastpitch softball team and -as he had since boyhood-pursuing his lifelong passion of restoring classic Ford Mustangs. If his wife was to be believed, he had also been engaging in an affair with the mother of his star player.

So there you had it: cars, baseball, the suburbs, money and midlife marriage trouble. It was hard to imagine a more American story. There was even a Big Box store in the picture. The murder weapon-whose purchase, on Mother's Day of that year, had been recorded on store surveillance cameras -came from Home Depot.

I was sipping coffee and eating a grapefruit at my kitchen counter at the time I heard the news report. There was plenty of interest in all of this, but what caught my attention more than anything else was the reference to the sons of Nancy Seaman, two brothers who had taken opposing sides in a murder in which one of their parents had been the victim, the other the accused. I know why this item struck me hard: I am a mother of two sons close to the ages of Greg and Jeff Seaman.

Mine were children of a troubled marriage, themselves-trouble taking many forms, as it does-but unlike Nancy and Bob Seaman, who had stayed so long entangled, with neither one willing to let go of the rope, my children's father and I had parted when they were small. For them-unlike the Seaman brothers-- there had been no source of comfort or strength more sustaining than each other's presence. The idea of two brothers, two years apart like my sons, but divided so deeply and with so much bitterness that they might never find their way back to each other, struck me as a particularly poignant and terrible situation, all the more so because the very situation that divided them (their father's murder, their mother's incarceration and trial) should have been one in which they found solace with each other.

So here was this woman almost exactly my age (51), on trial for murder in the state of Michigan (just a few miles, I noted, from the equally privileged suburb where my children's father had grown up, though I told myself this was not a factor in my interest.). To look at us-Nancy Seaman, and me--you would not have identified any particular source of common ground or kinship, but there was this: Her marriage, like mine, had broken down irretrievably, leaving two sons (also a daughter, in my case) to witness the sad spectacle.

The part about the breakdown of a marriage I knew, and sixteen years after the divorce, I continued to carry it around with me--a wound that still gave me trouble, like an injury from a car wreck that causes the once-broken bone to ache on rainy days, or a piece of music you hear on the radio for the first time in a decade, that brings tears to your eyes.

Irreconcilable differences. The phrase trips lightly enough off the tongue, but living through them nearly killed me, and it had killed Nancy Seaman's husband. I wanted to know how, and why.

I also wanted to know how it was that this couple's sons had taken sides as they did. Long ago, when they were still small, my children had figured out a way of continuing to love two parents who didn't love each other any more, and now-in their twenties-it was a fact of their lives and ours that this would be so forever.

The Seaman brothers had apparently felt the need to identify allegiance squarely and unwaveringly with one side or another-with any sign of affection for the other parent viewed as a betrayal of the one whose side they'd taken, or so it seemed. It was an excruciating place for a child of any age to find himself.

I learned from the television report that day how Nancy Seaman struck her husband Bob with a hatchet eighteen times, then took out a knife and started stabbing him. The violence in my family took the more familiar and bloodless course: our story featured custody issues, guardian ad litem assessments, property disputes, and many years of slowly cooling bitterness and anger , all of which had brought my children's father and me to the closest we may ever know to a state of armistice. By the time the whole thing was over (and years passed before that day arrived), we had become like two continents, once part of single land mass, each now surrounded by a vast and chilly body of water, virtually impassable except by the three brave figures who paddled their little boats between the shores of the two territories we'd staked out, where virtually nothing (not the language spoken, or the weather, native dress or the terrain) bore any similiarty to the place they'd left to get there.

Greg and Jeff Seaman, on the other hand, lived as exiles, from the sound of it: each unable to cross what were perceived as enemy lines, to enter the land of the forbidden parent. Even the death of their father had not ended the war. Far from it.

I looked up from my breakfast that morning to study the television screen because I saw a shred of connection between my life and that of the woman now on trial for her husband's murder , as well as a crucial and reassuring difference between us. I, too, had inhabited the dark territory of a relationship in ruins and lived, too many years, in a state of anger and bitterness towards a man I once loved.

As much similarity as I located, between myself and the woman whose face I saw on my TV screen now, on trial for murder, I was also reassured by the fundamental difference between us. She chose murder. I chose divorce. Her children didn't speak to each other. Mine, I sometimes thought, would die for each other. In some deep way, she had taken a disastrous turn, when I had taken the right one.

I was thirty five years old in 1989, when my marriage ended-the same year that my mother died. (This, too, strangely mirrored the experience of Nancy Seaman, whose mother had died unexpectedly only a few months before the murder.)

My children were five, seven and eleven when their father and I parted, but my sons, like Nancy Seaman's, were in their early twenties now, just starting out on their own in lives-as was their sister. I didn't know this Michigan schoolteacher, but I imagined what her heartbreak must be, to see her children suffering as they surely would be now.

From the moment I heard about this particular crime, I said (with a certain air of self-congratulation, probably), "I can't imagine my sons ever turning against each other. I can't imagine murdering anyone, but even if I could, I can't imagine using a hatchet to do it."

Still, I was open minded. I believed that if I knew enough about what this family had experienced, what this marriage had been like, I would come to understand, and I wanted to. I believed that perhaps if I knew Nancy Seaman's story, I might find it comprehensible and, therefore, forgivable.

I thought, when I looked up at the television screen that morning, that I was hearing the story of a battered woman and the man who abused her. I thought that what fascinated me about the story was the prospect of two people unwilling to disentangle-however much damage they did to one another, together. As a woman who had carried for close to two decades a large measure of guilt over having inflicted on her own children the pain of a particularly hard divorce, I could tell myself now what a good thing it had been that their father and I had been smart enough, at least, to put some distance between each other, when they were still young. We'd stayed out of hatchet-range, you might say.

As angry as I'd felt towards my former husband, at a few hundred different moments over the years (more, no doubt), I had never, for an instant even, wanted to see him dead, let alone imagined myself taking a hatchet to his skull. I was unacquainted with that brand of violence. But I was not unacquainted with rage.

I entered into an exploration of the Seamans' story out of a belief that the seemingly unimaginable and inexplicable behavior which had decimated that family could be explained, if I only looked deep enough into the lives of the people who had lived or died through it . I embarked on a journey, that morning, into the origins of an act of violence so bizarre I could only imagine that it had grown out of equally violent acts, inflicted against its perpetrator.

For Nancy Seaman to do what she did to her husband, I believed, he must have done something unimaginably terrible to her, first. For Greg Seaman to disown his father as he had, his father must have done something monstrous. For Jeff Seaman to turn away from his mother, he must have been so fearful of knowing the truth that he constructed a whole other story to substitute for it.

We make up the stories we can stand to live with. I wanted to find out what the real one was. So I got on a plane to Michigan. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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