The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(32)

I tensed. I had to go in there. The police were looking for signs of Carrie’s death, but I wanted more information about everything leading up to her disappearance. I wanted to know who she had been, since I hadn’t found it out while she was here.

I took a breath to steady myself. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the moment. I needed to let Jared trust me.

But I wasn’t giving up.

“Of course,” I said, and let the door close.


THE POLICE MADE no official report of what they had—or had not—found in the Helm house. Saturday evening, they released a statement saying that Jared was not a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, but that he was a “person of interest.” Which meant the news vans were still camped outside his house, causing Jared and Kelly to live a strange life inside their bubble of home.

On Sunday, they stayed home from church again, and Kurt made sure to contact the Elders Quorum Presidency to ask that they visit Jared, and the Primary Presidency to do the same with Kelly. Kurt got the Young Women to offer to babysit Kelly if Jared wanted to attend the ward temple night this week, or if he needed to leave for a police interview or to go shopping.

Instead of having strange babysitters in his home, Jared made a list of things he needed from the store, and Cheri Tate went out shopping for him. Every purchase she made, it seemed, was then listed on the news that Sunday night.

Kurt shook his head over that. “It shouldn’t happen like that. Did she talk to the reporters? I thought I made it clear she wasn’t to do that.”

“About what she bought at the grocery store? Don’t give her a hard time about that, Kurt. She’s doing her best in a difficult situation.” I imagined the reporters following her through the store, asking clerks what she’d bought, or chasing down mislaid receipts.

There was only so much you could expect anyone to do to preserve another person’s privacy. But I wondered if perhaps Cheri Tate had begun to suspect Jared Helm of criminal behavior toward his wife. A part of me liked that idea very much.





CHAPTER 11




Sunday evening, we had our monthly family dinner, and I tried to be happy with all the boys around, and the two daughters-in-law. After so many years of me alone in a household of men, it was wonderful to have other women around, even if sometimes I felt as if I had learned so well to relate to men that I didn’t readily understand women. I admired my daughters-in-law so much.

Marie is studying nursing and is going to be a power to reckon with. And Joseph’s wife, Willow, teaches ballet in Bountiful, after two years in New York as a professional. She hopes to open her own studio someday, and when she does, her students are going to be very lucky.

I watched them carefully, thinking about Carrie Helm. Suddenly, I found myself asking terrible questions about abuse. I knew I was being alarmist, seeing the worst everywhere I looked. Yet I wondered if it was possible my daughters-in-law were being abused by my own sons? Boys I had raised? Was I missing the clues I should have seen? If I had missed them with Carrie Helm, why not with other women? Kurt had thought so well of Jared Helm until recently, and even now he was torn between his priesthood connection to Jared and the darkness that was beginning to rise around him.

Marie seemed so strong and gave her opinion so openly. She had always impressed me as someone who would change the world because she wasn’t afraid of anything. But could it be a mask she was putting on? Carrie Helm had seemed strong and articulate, as well, except when Jared squelched her opinion.

And Willow was so beautiful and looked so fragile in some ways. She laughed easily and often, sometimes at things I didn’t think were funny at all. Was she pretending to be happier than she was, as Carrie surely must have done?

It was hard for me to imagine my daughter as a full-grown woman, since I had never seen her that way. I had only seen the still, smudged grey skin of her imperfect infant body. There were photographs somewhere. A woman from Share, a charity founded to help parents who lost pregnancies and infants, had come in to help us and she had insisted that we would want photographs someday, to remember our daughter. But I had never looked at the photographs after they had come in. They had seemed so terrible to me, a picture of death, of nothing good. Who keeps photographs of a body in a coffin? That’s what my daughter was by the time I saw her.

I would have been a useless mother to a girl who wanted to be a dancer. I was all left feet and had lousy rhythm sense. I could play the piano, but rhythm had always been my bugaboo. Would I have helped her do her hair? Choose dresses? I felt so inadequate helping in girlish things, but was that habit or some inborn trait? I didn’t know the difference anymore.

I went and played the piano when everyone was gone, head down, thoughts draining away.

Samuel sat on the couch in the front room and listened until I was finished.

“I like it when they are here,” he said. “But I like when they’re gone, too. I like the quiet.”

“I like the quiet, too,” I said.


LATER THAT NIGHT, when we were settling into bed I asked Kurt what to do about the information I’d learned from Kelly Helm. It was the first time we’d had a chance to talk since Friday. Kurt had had to go back to the church after dinner, but it was “Family Sabbath,” which meant he had canceled most of his meetings and other obligations. He was all mine for now.

“She’s five years old. Are you really sure she remembers what happened that night? She could have it confused with another night. It could be a dream she had.” Kurt turned down the covers.