The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(31)

Clearly, Kelly wouldn’t know, so the questioning was over.

I stopped stirring the brownie batter and reached for a teaspoon. I offered it to Kelly, feeling like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, luring children in with a treat that wasn’t good for them. “Kelly, are you ever afraid of your daddy?” I asked quietly.

“He shouts sometimes,” Kelly said, looking down at her hands. “Then I run and hide in my room. I don’t like it when he gets mad at me.”

Too vague, too vague. If this were a detective novel, I’d be the prosecutor asking leading questions. Of a child. “But does he ever hurt you?”

“Once he spanked my hand,” said Kelly. “Because I almost touched the stove with it and he said it would have gotten burnt.”

“And what about your mom? Did you ever see him hurt her?”

Kelly stared up at me. “He took her pills once,” she said. “And put them down the toilet. She hit him, and then he held her hands. Then she cried. But Mommy told me never to tell anyone. She said she was sorry and he was sorry. She said she was wrong and not to hit.”

Pills? Birth control or her depression medication? It didn’t matter. I had to go back to the question of whether or not Carrie had been alive in that car ride. “Did you see your mom in the car? Or after she was dropped off? Did you see her waving at you?”

“It was dark,” said Kelly again. “I couldn’t see her.”

“And there were no lights? Why do you think she wanted to go to a place where there were no lights?”

“I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Sometimes Mommy said she needed to rest her eyes and her head and she would go into her room and close the door and turn out the lights. She told me to be very quiet then.”

Did I really think I could get all the information I needed out of a five-year-old girl in an hour? I should leave the detective work to the real detectives. Still, I was itching to go through the house, to see how Carrie had left it. Jared would have moved things by now, maybe enough things that I would never be able to piece the full story together. And the police were going through it right now. But there might be things neither he nor they understood the meaning of.

We poured the brownies into a greased pan and put them in the oven. Then I showed Kelly into the front room, and she looked through my children’s books with a cry of delight. “This is Mommy’s book,” she said. “She used to read this to me every day.” It was Harry the Dirty Dog. “I wish she didn’t take it with her.”

“She took this book with her when she left?” It seemed an odd thing for her to take, considering she had taken nothing else.

“I asked Daddy to read it the next day, after she was gone. Daddy said she took it with her. He said she didn’t want me to have it anymore.”

I patted her head, doing my best to suppress my fury at Jared Helm, then gently settled her into my lap and read her the book. She fell asleep in my arms. While her breath softened to a steady, slow pace, my mind was spinning wildly. I didn’t know if anything Kelly had told me would be useful, but the car ride seemed important, especially since Jared had so carefully concealed that information even from me and Kurt, who he must consider to be mostly on his side.

I hoped my worst fears—that Carrie’s presence in the car had been as a corpse—were wrong. I tried to think of more innocent explanations of Jared’s behavior. If he had dropped Carrie off somewhere, then he had been complicit in her escape, not surprised by it as he had pretended to be. But why would he drop her off somewhere completely dark, with no wallet or keys? The missing children’s picture book might mean nothing at all, but it was interesting at least. If Carrie had taken it, why that one thing? And if she hadn’t, why had Jared taken away a book that reminded his daughter of her mother? Was it pure pettiness?

My arms ached, then went numb, and still I sat there on the couch in the front room, the warm weight of Kelly in my arms. It had been a long time since Samuel was this age. My own daughter had never been this age. Maybe she never would be, even in the afterlife in the celestial kingdom that I hoped for. She might belong to another family entirely. Or she might be taken from me, if I had been the ultimate cause of her death. How could Kurt be so sure about seeing her again when we had never seen her really to begin with?

The doorbell rang, and I started. Kelly rubbed at her eyes and her face had a little red mark on it where she had collapsed over her arm.

I shifted her to the side onto the couch and got up to find Jared Helm at the door.

“They’re finished,” he said. “She can come home now.”

I didn’t ask him anything, but I walked back over to the Helms’ house with Kelly and Jared. The last police car was still waiting. Jared had a form to sign, a document stating that nothing had been taken from the house except certain items on a list he had to check off.

Then the police car drove away, and Jared lifted Kelly into his arms. He stepped inside the house reluctantly.

“I could come in and help you clean up, if you’d like,” I offered. What was I doing? Going into a house alone with a man who might have killed his wife to try to find evidence against him? But I had been drawn into this and I was going to use all the skills I had to resolve it.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I need some time to myself. Just me and Kelly.”