The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(102)

“Are you so sure of that?” said Aaron. “He could have made it holy if he had. A holy man makes everything holy that he touches.”

I had seen him as a prophet for a moment at the funeral. Did he see himself that way? How often had that excused him in his own mind?

“No one wants to see the underside of the church anymore, the bloody truth behind glory. If the Mormon church has lost its way, and I think it has, then it is because the leaders don’t understand that there is a danger and a madness to true holiness.” He waved the knife, shiny blade glinting, to punctuate his speech.

I thought of the afternoon I had spent hours chopping those vegetables in my kitchen, until I’d ruined one knife and had to reach for another. I didn’t even remember doing that. I shuddered at the thought that I was like Aaron Weston in some way.

“This new group of apostles, old men who are used to comfortable lives—they want to stay on the side of the law. They want to be accepted by society in general. They don’t want to be seen as a cult. And they have abandoned everything about Mormonism that made it difficult to live. They will make us all men who choose what is easiest, not what is right.”

This was a doctrine I had heard before, in different forms. If the “world” believed something, then you had to believe its opposite to be righteous. It made people rage against everything from a global economy to public schooling and immunizations, but mostly I thought it was just an excuse not to have to do the work that seeing shades of grey requires.

“So you believe that when you die, you will go to the celestial kingdom because you are doing terrible, illegal things? That’s why you’re so eager for death?” I asked, staring the man straight in the face.

I felt like I was right on the edge of a fragile rock bridge in Zion National Park. We had been there with all the boys once, and I had never felt anything like the sensation of standing there, on such a thin piece of rock, with the wind blowing all around. That was the valley of the shadow of death. And here I was again.

The knife turned again in his hand, and I wondered how many times he had handled it like this before, as a weapon rather than a tool.

I glanced at Judy Weston. She was still shaking, but there was no expression on her face. She was blank, as much a puppet as Aaron Weston had always seemed to think that she was.

“I believe—there may be a time of waiting,” he said, the knife moving so casually from hand to hand. “But yes, ultimately, I believe God will agree with what I have done. He will see that in the moral dilemma in which he placed us, this was the only choice. Like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.”

I tried not to look at the knife. I didn’t want him to think that it was what mattered here. This had to be a conversation between two equals or it would never work. I tried to lower my voice, and I widened my stance, like a man might. “A period of waiting?” I asked him, seizing on this one hint of doubt. “You mean spirit prison, don’t you? And who do you think will be there with you, waiting?”

He didn’t answer me. He looked out the front window, visible through the kitchen, at the SWAT teams surrounding the house, the knife turning and turning. The phone rang again. He looked at the number, but he didn’t answer it.

He was on the precipice too, I thought. But he was completely alone, staring into the abyss.

“I won’t be there long, so I hardly think it matters. But if I have to endure the company of the wicked there, it will be no different from what I endure here.” He gestured at the front door of the house with the knife, and then at his wife.

She stared at the knife and seemed unable to look away.

“And what about Carrie, your daughter? Do you think she will be waiting for you in spirit prison?”

“Carrie—well, maybe she will be there.”

“Then what do you think she will say to you when you see her in spirit? Before you die, you should consider that, don’t you think?” I could see him rubbing his thumb across the edge of the knife now, making friends with it. “If you give yourself up, you will have to face a trial. But you think that anyone who hears your story will believe you, right?” I asked.

Judy Weston was silent, as she had been all her life. I was glad this once; it meant she didn’t get in my way.

“Think about this choice. If you killed yourself now, or goaded others into killing you, wouldn’t that be a crime in itself? To give up on what you could teach here? Do you think God would approve of you giving up so easily, when there are so many things you need to change in the church itself?”

He looked at me. “What do you know about the priesthood? About the heavens and the place of gods there? You are a woman,” he said.

Damn. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t think in that direction. “My husband sent me here,” I said. It was pure inspiration. “He thought I would get in more easily. But he gave me the words to say.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Your husband is a good man.”

“Good” and “man” being synonymous, it seemed. Just as it was with Alex Helm. Carrie must have thought the Helms were different at first, but the more she lived with Jared, the more she realized she had simply traded one kind of misogynist for another.

I held up my hands, playing on the woman card now that it was out there. “Aaron, I just want to get Judy out of here. She and I will leave and you can stay and do whatever you want.” I really did not care if he lived or died, except for the trouble and danger it would cause the SWAT team outside. I was quite confident that God would deal with him justly, once he was gone. The punishment he would get there would surely be worse than anything he could suffer here. And I wanted him to suffer badly. I wanted Carrie Helm to know that he was suffering.