The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(100)

I left the Westons’ house, not bothering with any social niceties and leaving Judy gawping behind me. I drove home and called the police while I was still buzzing from the adrenaline rush.

After that, things moved quickly. Late Saturday night, Aaron Weston was announced as a suspect in the case of his daughter’s murder. The police served a warrant on his house and took possession of his computers and his car. According to the Sunday morning news, they were looking for proof that he had driven to Wendover and that he had killed his daughter in his own car. I was not happy with the ending of this sad story, but at least it was an ending. I had done something for Carrie Helm at last, even if it wasn’t nearly what I’d wanted to do. And Kelly Helm would be as safe as I could make her, though I might not see her often.

“It seems the best ending I can hope for,” I told Kurt when he got home from church meetings after ten.

“But who will his daughters be sealed to, then?” asked Kurt. “I know I should simply trust in God, and I do. But I wonder even so.”

It was one thing to think of a woman with children sealed to someone besides their father in the eternities, but it was another again to try to imagine a way out of this mess. Would the daughters all be sealed to different families? Then what about their connection to each other? I could not imagine that God would bind them forever to a mother like Judy Weston. They say He forgives all and that we will all be changed beyond recognition, once the work of redemption is complete. But could those daughters ever have happy marriages and relationships with their own families after this? All I could see was generation to generation, daughters and mothers set adrift from sealings. More questions that had no answers.


MONDAY I HAD the television on to watch the news, as I usually did during lunch. I didn’t expect to hear anything about the Westons, but around noon, their house appeared on the screen, surrounded by SWAT vans. People in uniforms were converging on the house with guns.

“Breaking news. Aaron Weston, father and suspected murderer of young Draper mother Carrie Helm, has locked himself and his wife in their house and threatened to kill her and then himself rather than surrender to police, as he was supposed to earlier this morning. Police say that Aaron Weston has a weapon and that he has spoken to them on the phone. He claims that he is innocent and that his daughters, who have made statements against their father to the police, have been subject to brainwashing worked on them by his wife.”

He had turned on her, and I couldn’t feel sorry for her. But I felt no satisfaction. I might think Judy deserved to lose her daughters in the hereafter, but I didn’t think she deserved to die. Not at her husband’s hands.

I turned the television off immediately and got in the car. I called Kurt and told him about the news as I drove south.

“What are you doing? Why? No. Linda, this is none of your business. They’re not in our ward. They’re not your responsibility.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. “You know they are. This is what I have to do. I started all of this and now I have to finish it.”

“Is this about Georgia?” said Kurt.

It was the first time he had said her name in years. It jolted me a little, and I had to work harder to focus on the road. “Not really,” I said. “Not in any direct way.”

“Then why are you doing this? Why put yourself in danger?”

I could see the Draper temple in my rearview mirror, the Oquirrh temple to my left behind the South Jordan temple. The Salt Lake temple was less visible ahead of me. So many temples, where only good thoughts and godliness were supposed to be, and so much horror in the real world around them.

“Kurt, you knew who I was when you married me. I need to be doing something. I need to make a difference.”

“You are making a difference already. At home. In the ward.”

Where he was in control of my influence. “Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. But I should have done more. I should have seen things more clearly. If I’d been doing what I was meant to do from the beginning, this might have turned out differently. I’ve been running away from myself. And now, for the first time, I feel like I’m running forward, not hiding myself.” I should have been scared to death, but I wasn’t. I felt like I was flying. I felt like I had lost fifty pounds and twenty years. “Firm as the mountains around us.” The powerful line from one my favorite old hymns, and that was how it felt. The mountains were firm around me, so I could fly.

“Linda, there’s a SWAT team there. You don’t want to get caught in the cross fire.”

“I’ll be as careful as I can,” I promised him, and hung up. I needed to talk to Aaron and Judy Weston. I could convince him to turn himself in. I could save Judy’s pitiful life. And I was the only one who could do it. I was the bridge from faith to truth here, and I wasn’t going to step aside while other people told me that they could do it better. Even if those people were Kurt or the police, people who had more supposed authority than I did. Authority was given by God, and He was surely telling me to do this now.

After twenty minutes of driving I was pulling into the cul-de-sac of the wealthy neighborhood in Sandy. No one was watching for me. I parked a block away and then tucked myself into my coat. I had always had the gift of being invisible. It would serve me well again.

I was parked by the garage, near the bushes that divided this property from the next. I could see the SWAT team near the van at the front of the house was on the phone with someone inside, most likely Aaron. I wanted to see Judy. And there she was, her face peeking out of the curtain of the sliding back doors.