The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(79)

“Thirty years,” whispered Anna. “Why did he do it?”

“Kill her, you mean? Maybe there was some terrible argument, and then he panicked and buried her? I suspect he must have thought about her every day since then, and felt guilty about it.”

“But that doesn’t mean I have to forgive him, does it? He killed his wife and then hid it. He escaped all the consequences.”

I felt more sympathy for him than she could in that moment, perhaps. Tobias had been so young at the time, and he had two sons to care for. He must have wondered what would happen to them if their mother was killed and their father was in prison for life.

“Everything was a lie. Every word that he ever said to me,” said Anna, her whole body slumped as I had never seen it before, even when Tobias was on his deathbed. This wasn’t just physical exhaustion. It was emotional dissolution.

“Surely not. He loved you, Anna. He truly did.”

“He loved her, too,” said Anna. “And look what he did to her.”

I thought again of the brand new hammer Tobias had kept by the bedside, a twin to the ruined one in the garden, and quailed.

“What’s in that?” asked Anna, nodding to the bag I was carrying.

It held the old hammer and the dress I had found in the shed. I had delayed taking it into the police several times during the last two weeks, not wanting to deal with questions about why I hadn’t called them in the first place, back in February, when Tobias had still been alive. But now I wished I had made a separate visit so that Anna didn’t have to deal with so much all at once.

I showed Anna the dress again, reminding her that I had found it in the shed. This time she saw the bloodstains immediately.

“How did I miss this? I was so blind,” she said. Then her head jerked up. “You think that it was the dress she was wearing when she died?”

“It might be.”

“And the hammer?”

I told her I’d found it in the garden.

“A hammer,” she whispered. “Like the one on his side of the bed, always within reach.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “It might be a coincidence.”

She stared at me. “You don’t believe that.”

“I believe that people can change,” I said truthfully. And Tobias might be one of them. Wasn’t that what religion was all about?

But it was also true that if people changed, part of the evidence of the change was the willingness to face consequences for their past sins. And Tobias had not shown that. He had done everything he could to obscure the truth about his wife’s death, until he himself had been too far gone to tell any more.

A police car drove up and a detective got out. He introduced himself to us as “Detective Eric Dun,” then motioned to us to follow him into the house, so we did. He was younger than I would have imagined, and he had startlingly blue eyes. He smelled faintly of motor oil, though I could only guess at why.

As we stepped through the front door, I felt surprise rinse through me like cold water. The house seemed completely changed. It wasn’t just the plastic on the carpet and the stale smell. The furniture had all changed. I had seen it when the Gearys moved in, but it was strange to be here now with Anna at my side. It made the change feel more permanent. The house had died, too, not just Tobias.

“Can you think of anything that your husband might have told you about his first wife that would tell us why he killed her?” asked the detective, when we were all sitting in the front room.

“He never spoke of her to my recollection,” said Anna.

“Never? Did that strike you as odd?” asked Detective Dun. He was sitting across from us on an upholstered chair the Gearys must have brought in.

Anna looked at me, and I smiled at her reassuringly.

“It was a painful topic and it didn’t seem to have immediate relevance to our lives. She was dead and he was married to me,” said Anna.

“Well, what about your life with him? Was there anything about it that made you suspicious about the kind of man you had married?” He took notes on a small pad of paper spread over his lap.

Anna told him about an argument over checking accounts, when she had wanted to have hers separate from Tobias’s. She claimed it was the only time she had ever heard Tobias raise his voice to her. “It was right here. In this room,” she added, pointing at the space between us, and I could see that she was imagining it in her mind.

“And what about his sons? Was he ever angry or violent with them?”

Anna shook her head. “He sometimes shouted at them to get their attention, but I never worried he would hurt them. He was a very good father and loved his sons devotedly.”

“Hmm. So if his wife had threatened to take the boys away with her?” Detective Dun asked.

This wasn’t what I had expected. I hadn’t realized the police took this case so seriously. I thought this was only a formality.

“I don’t know,” said Anna. She looked at me again.

If someone had threatened to take my boys away when they were that age, I might have been capable of murder. But then again, I might have been capable of murder on any day of the week. I didn’t have grand notions about some people being born killers and others not.

“This is hard for her to take in, of course. We all thought of Tobias as a wonderful man,” I said as tears started to drip down Anna’s face. I handed over the dress and the hammer and explained where I had found them.