The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(88)

When Kurt kissed me awake in the morning, I’d managed a total of twenty minutes of sleep. “You’re thinking about Alex Helm, aren’t you?” he said.

I nodded. He wasn’t the only one, but he was top of the list.

“You just need to see how to find the man behind the monster. You’re usually so good at that,” asked Kurt.

Kurt left for work, which was still crazy with people who had filed extensions now needing to figure out their taxes. Soon after, Samuel came downstairs to get ready for school. He still hadn’t talked to Kurt about the question of when he would go on his mission and if he should apply for a deferral from his first year of college. In fact, Samuel was avoiding his father as much as Kenneth had done for a couple of years now, and that wasn’t a good thing. Kurt hadn’t noticed yet. He was too busy. He would, though. I trusted that.

With Kenneth, Kurt had simply let it go, thinking that eventually Kenneth would work out his post-mission problems. Plenty of missionaries had difficulty returning to normal life. It should have been a relief to return to life without the pressure to convert others, but for some, it was a letdown and they began to question everything that had gone before. I’d thought at the time that was what Kenneth had been struggling with. Now I was sure it wasn’t.

When Samuel was out of the house, either on a mission or at college, what was my life going to be like? What about when Kurt was released as bishop? I had fantasized about going to see church history sites in Nauvoo, Kirtland, and Palmyra, which we’d never had a chance to go to with all the boys. Or even Europe—Paris and the Eiffel Tower or the remains of the Berlin Wall in Germany. We had the money to do almost anything we wanted. But would that be enough for me? Would I feel happy in a life that wasn’t about filling someone else’s needs?

But for now, there was plenty of work to do for others. For instance, the laundry pile had become enormous, and I worked through that as I turned on the television news to discover that the police had found the man Carrie Helm had “met” an hour before her death at a hotel on the Nevada side of the border. He had told the police that she had been alive when he left her, though she had said something about being afraid of what would happen next in her life.

It seemed no one would ever find out what had happened to Carrie Helm. Each lead the police followed led them to a dead end. Unless the police had only let this man go temporarily, and were waiting for him to prove his guilt by fleeing? I knew it wasn’t likely, but I had to cling to anything at this point.

The doorbell rang late that morning. I opened it and found Gwen Ferris waiting, staring at the ground.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Come in.” I pulled her inside to the front room, but she was jumpy. The sound of the dryer beeping upstairs to alert me it was finished made her jump two feet.

“Is anyone else here?” she asked. She was wearing elaborate makeup, but with it yoga pants and a worn T-shirt.

“Kurt’s at work and Samuel is at school,” I said.

Gwen relaxed a little and nodded. Clearly she did not want to talk to Kurt. It was one of the tricky things in the church: men were always in positions of authority with the priesthood, but there were certain times when women needed to confide in other women.

Once I’d gotten her settled on the couch, Gwen said, “I have something I need to tell you. It’s been on my mind for a long time, but I didn’t know what to do. I should have said something earlier. I should have been braver.” She finally looked into my eyes.

“You can tell me anything, you know,” I said.

She took a long, shuddering breath. And then another one.

“Is this what you’ve been talking to Kurt about?” I asked,

She shook her head. “Or at least, I’ve only told him part of it. That I can’t get pregnant. Brad and I have been trying for years, and the doctors say there’s really no chance of it now.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” I was tempted to offer suggestions of alternatives or hope for the future, but stopped myself. My place was to listen for now.

“We’ve been talking about adoption, and that’s what Brad wants. That’s why we’ve been to talk to the bishop.”

I thought she and Brad had been going in for counseling with Kurt. But it was this instead, though it might not have been entirely separate from counseling.

“We’d like his recommendation on our application to several local adoption agencies now that the church isn’t doing adoptions anymore through LDS Family Services. But I can’t go through it just yet. It feels like announcing to everyone what the problem is.”

Did she mean infertility? Or did she mean whatever it was she hadn’t told Kurt? “What is the problem?” I asked as gently as I could.

“I’ve only ever talked to one person apart from Brad. But after what happened—” She paused, and said nothing. Her eyes were all over the room, darting from the bookshelves to the piano to the window and then back to the books.

“What happened?” I asked.

She shook her head. “You have to understand,” she said, then fell silent again.

I waited, trying to imagine what she was about to say. I remembered our conversation in the women’s bathroom and her distress at the glorification of motherhood—could it be that she didn’t want children at all and didn’t want to go through with the adoption process? Or was it possible her husband abusing her after all?