The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(86)

I was taken aback at this. “There’s nothing wrong with being quiet,” I said. I knew Anna to be more thoughtful than quiet. And not at all the kind of woman who could be easily deceived or manipulated.

She shook herself. “Maybe not.”

“Are they certain it was Tobias who killed her, then?” I asked.

“Who else could it have been?” she said, then shrugged. “Since he’s dead and there’s no one to charge, they’re not working particularly swiftly. I haven’t heard the specifics about cause of death.”

“What about how she was killed or why? Is there any hint in the papers she left?”

“A little,” said Anna. “The police say that she came into some money shortly before she disappeared. An uncle had died and left it to her. Her father took his sweet time telling the lawyers where she was living, and she was surprised about it, coming so late like that. There’s also an entry in her diary where she talks about what she wants to do with the money. She wanted to see the world on a cruise ship.” Anna gave me a pained, ironic smile.

“Ah,” I said.

“It made me wonder, when I read the entry, if Tobias had planted the idea of a cruise in my head. I don’t remember him ever talking about it, but I couldn’t help but feel—”

“Violated?” I said.

She nodded and looked down. She took a sandwich from the plate. “It might have been only a coincidence,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be the woman she should have been, just because Tobias wanted that. As expiation of some kind.”

She had been the woman Helena Torstensen might have been, as a mother for Tomas and Liam. I hoped Anna wasn’t going to pull away from them, as well. But how could she not? She would need time to recover and find her own way back to them, if she could. I hoped they would give her that time.

And then I thought of Kelly Helm, who was being molded by her grandfather into the woman he thought she should become. If she had no other women in her life but the ones who agreed with him, how would she avoid the destiny he saw for her? Someone was going to have to try to talk to Alex Helm about her, and I wasn’t sure sending in the Primary Presidency would work.

Anna looked up at me. “I feel so strange, as if I’m reinventing myself suddenly. I thought I was done with that sort of self-searching.”

I wasn’t finished with it myself. Maybe it was something that mothers had to do later in life, because we spent so much time not being ourselves, taking care of others. Or maybe it was because we were women and had worried too much about fitting the expectations of others.

“So what are Tomas and Liam saying now? Surely they can’t still believe their father is completely innocent.”

“They won’t talk about it at all,” said Anna with a small, tight smile.

“I’m sorry. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for all of you.”

“They want him to be the gentle father they loved and nothing else. Not that I blame them. I don’t know how to deal with the double image in my mind, either. It gives me a constant headache,” said Anna, touching a spot right between her eyes. “He was a good man in many ways. A part of me wants to think that he changed, rather than just believing that he fooled me for so long. But maybe that part of me just doesn’t want to deal with the truth because it’s so painful.”

“Did Helena ever write in her journal about him hurting her? Arguments? Abuse?”

Anna shook her head. “By her account, he was a marvelous husband. Attentive, kind, the same Tobias I knew. The only thing that bothered her was that he hated her family and would spend hours raving about how they would all burn in hell. He thought the Catholic church was the ‘great and abominable church’ from the Book of Mormon.”

Anna started cleaning up the tea, and I stood up to help her, though she tried to wave me back down. “According to her diary,” she went on as she worked, “Helena used to beg Tobias to pray for her family. She still loved them, even after they kicked her out of the house and refused to speak to her. She went to the temple often and prayed for them. She did work for all her ancestors she could and she wrote about feeling like a vulture, waiting for her mother and father to die so that she could seal them in the temple together, and herself and her brothers to them.”

Anna stopped for a moment, and I thought she might become tearful about the reality that she and Tobias wouldn’t be able to be sealed like this. But she must have thought better of it, because she only shook herself and went back to the dishes.

“The police gave me a copy of the diary because they thought I might be able to see things in it that they didn’t. I’ve been through it several times now.”

Only because she was looking for proof that Tobias had killed Helena? “It sounds almost as if you’ve come to like her.” Her rival, or precursor, or whatever it was that Helena was to Anna.

Anna let out a breath, nodding. “She was a good woman. I like to imagine we would have been friends. Does that sound very odd?”

“I’ve heard of stranger things,” I said. A woman in the ward was best friends with her husband’s ex, and they had met after the second marriage. “Friendships should be taken wherever they work, I think. They are rare enough things, real friendships.” It made me think about Anna and how much I wanted her to stay near.