The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(33)

I stiffened at this. “She seems pretty clear to me.”

“But you’re not her mother,” said Kurt. That stung, and he must have seen it on my face because he added, “I mean, you don’t know her that well. I would think that Jared would be a better judge of whether Kelly knows anything here.”

“Jared is the last person anyone can rely on to interpret Kelly’s words. He might have every reason to distort her meaning.” I sat in the bed, my arms crossed.

“I think that you’re too involved in this,” said Kurt, getting into the bed beside me. “This is a police investigation. It’s not something for you to poke around in.”

“That’s ironic,” I said, turning out the light.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kurt.

“It means that you’re the one who is always asking me to poke my nose into other people’s business. Putting names on the refrigerator. And now you tell me I’m stepping outside of my role.”

“When you start investigating a murder, I think that’s a little different than helping out people in our ward,” said Kurt.

The emotional temperature in the room was somewhere near absolute zero at this point.

“Maybe it isn’t that different,” I said. And maybe Kurt just didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t going to let him be in charge of the information I’d found out, nor tell me what my next step should be.

“Linda, you’re the one who said he was dangerous to begin with. I’m just paying attention to you. Why would you get mad at me about that?” he asked.

“Because you’re telling me what to do.”

“God,” Kurt muttered under his breath. He very rarely swore, and it made me flinch. “You always were the most stubborn woman I ever met.”

“Hey!” I said, wounded. “The most stubborn person, man or woman, you mean.”

There was a long silence between us. I took a deep breath and tried to let go of the hurt. I knew Kurt loved me. I knew he trusted me. I had always depended on that trust. What was bothering me didn’t really have to do with him, if I could only admit it to both of us.

“I need to find out what happened to Carrie Helm,” I said, finally. “She is just the age—”

He let out a sigh. “I know,” he said. “You throw yourself into things. It’s one of the things I love about you. You don’t think twice. You commit yourself and that’s it. But in this case—”

“In this case, it really matters.”

“Because you’re still trying to make up for all the mistakes you think you made with our daughter?” asked Kurt. He had moved closer to me on the bed and his hand was searching for mine in the dark. I let him find it.

I couldn’t remember the last time that he had mentioned her. “I want to do the right thing. I want to make sure I have no regrets.” I felt tears prick at my eyes.


As SOON AS I woke up Monday morning, I started thinking about Tobias Torstensen and his first wife. It was early enough that Samuel wasn’t up for school yet, and Kurt was still asleep. I put on a robe against the cold, then I went out to the garage.

There was the pink dress, just where I’d left it on the wooden utility table where Kurt sanded and painted things, sometimes cut them with an electric saw blade. The table was dusty and spattered with colors. I picked up the dress and played with it, feeling the worn cotton against my hands, and the crusted, dried blood that interrupted the softness. It was fragile material. I shouldn’t touch it too much.

The blood could mean nothing at all. Tobias might have bled on it by accident, felt bad about it and hidden it away and when his first wife died, he didn’t know what to do with it, so he left it where it was. But for some reason, my mind had latched on to the proposition that Tobias, like Jared Helm, had killed his wife and disappeared her body. That would explain why there were competing stories about her death by car accident, heart attack, and cancer. Tobias had told different stories at different times and couldn’t keep them straight.

Had he killed her because they fought? Because she threatened to take his sons away from him? It was hard to imagine Tobias Torstensen, such a gentle and intelligent man, hurting anyone, let alone his own wife. Much easier for me to believe Jared Helm guilty, since I disagreed with him on so many topics. But if one man could do it and believe he had the right within the Mormon church, could another?

I shook my head. It seemed too much to believe that there were two murders in my tiny little part of Draper, one ancient and one modern, and that I was placed just where I was to find out about both. Unless I believed that God had put me here to do precisely that, because He wanted me to use my insatiable curiosity for some good.

I wished I felt a burning within the bosom, as the scriptures say that we are supposed to get with the Spirit’s direction. I just felt—cold.

I stared at the pink dress and then put it down. I told myself that I didn’t know if anyone had been murdered in our ward or not, either Carrie Helm or Tobias’s first wife. And it seemed rather ridiculously arrogant to think that I should have some special place in finding out the horrible truth about others.

I was a fifty-four-year-old woman, a stay-at-home mother of five boys, and a bishop’s wife. I was not a detective. I was not a prophet. I didn’t know what I was doing here. And it was time for me to give up the idea that I had some special connection to Carrie Helm, or to any other woman in the ward. This had nothing to do with my daughter. This wasn’t something God had called me to do. There wasn’t even a connection here between these two women, except the connection I was imagining in my own mind.