The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(45)

“I wish I felt something from the Spirit about this. I’ll go pray about it,” he said. And he did. I left his office, but he didn’t. He was in there all through dinner. Samuel and I ate alone.

Late that night, he went to visit Tobias Torstensen again, but whatever he found out, he didn’t tell me. And the call came early Tuesday morning that Tobias Torstensen had passed away in the night.





CHAPTER 16




Tuesday night, I couldn’t sleep. I had this fantasy playing in my head of going out to Tobias’s garden while Anna and her sons were at the funeral. The whole ward would be at the church; no one would know what I was doing. The service would take several hours, including the eulogies and the luncheon afterward. Plenty of time for me to dig in the backyard and find if there was a body under there.

If there wasn’t, well, then, I would have missed a funeral and would make my excuses. I’d come home, take a shower, and tell myself never to jump to conclusions with insufficient evidence. What did I really know about anything here? I was acting as if I were some kind of Sherlock Holmes, but I had no experience at this sort of thing. I’d watched people’s expressions before, listened to them talking, decided that I could read people pretty well. But sniffing out a murder? That was for the police.

“The funeral is supposed to be on Friday, right?” I asked Kurt in the morning. The funeral home had known to expect Tobias’s body, so a lot of the decisions had already been made and the process could be expedited. Tobias’s body had been taken by the mortician within hours of his death.

Anna and Tobias had picked a reasonably priced coffin together, and Tobias had even talked a little about what he would like at his funeral. But he knew as well as anyone that it isn’t the place of the dead to choose a funeral service. Ultimately, Kurt, the bishop, is the one who decides what is appropriate and what isn’t. After any speakers he chose, Kurt would speak himself, the final word on Tobias’s life and what his death would mean. I knew Kurt took the job of speaking at a funeral seriously, even more than he did all of his other jobs as a bishop. And he had genuinely liked Tobias, which would make it more difficult in some ways. He was dealing with his own grief and at the same time trying to ease the grief of others.

Anna had asked me to help her dress her husband in his temple clothes on the morning of the funeral. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had helped my mother do the same for my father when he died of cancer the year that I was pregnant with Zachary, but it had been a long time since I had performed this service.

“You’ve gotten very close to Anna in the last several weeks, haven’t you?” said Kurt on Thursday evening, after he got back from church meetings and we were lying in bed.

“Yes, I have.”

“I always thought you were the kind of woman who had a very small intimate circle with her family, that you didn’t need close female friends.”

“Well, there were always women in the callings I worked in, in the church.”

“But I have the sense it’s different with Anna. This isn’t just about you bonding with her over a joint purpose. Or is it?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I suppose I had spent all of the time since Kurt and I were married focusing on my own children, and my only relationships had grown out of that primary one. I looked back on my life before I had married, though, and I hadn’t had many female friends then, either. I had grown up with three brothers, and had learned to talk as bluntly as they did. That didn’t seem to endear me to other women. But it was also true that my personality was prickly, and that I tended to offend people easily. “Anna is different. She’s—like who I might have been,” I said. “If I hadn’t—if I’d gone through her life instead of mine.” I didn’t know if that was the right way to put it, but it was as close as I could come. I didn’t have any sisters, but I imagined the way I felt about Anna was how I might have felt for a sister.

“I’m glad,” said Kurt.

“Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it makes you stronger somehow. Like you’re linked to someone else strong.”

“Oh. Well, yes,” I said, plumping a pillow behind me so that I could sit up better. Kurt had a wide field of friends to call on, both from work and from the church. He might not go shopping with them or call them on the phone just to chat, but they were always there for him when he needed them for anything.

“You’ve lived in a household of all men for a long time. I thought that was what made you different from other women. You don’t do a lot of the feminine stuff. And I guess there was a part of me that wondered if it was my fault—mine and the boys’—that you were like that. I thought maybe you were missing something.”

I was missing something. I had been for over twenty years. What if I’d had a daughter who wanted frills and pink and lacy dresses? Who pouted and manipulated the way that girls are often taught to, to get their own way? Would that have changed the kind of woman I was? Maybe it would have.

But what if I’d had a daughter who was like a younger version of Anna, who could have been a friend and a confidante? What if that was what I had been missing all this time?

“She doesn’t make me feel like I have to hide who I am,” I said.

I thought about hiding, about secrets. What was going to happen to my relationship with Anna if I pressed her to have the garden dug up so that Tobias’s secret came out?