The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(91)

Gwen sighed and waved one of those delicate hands. “Oh, I think she knew that Jared was a little crazy. Too gung ho, too rigid about the church and about all the extra doctrines he and his father believe in. But he never hurt her physically. He might have made her feel like she wasn’t good enough, but I think she wanted him to do that. I think she was punishing herself the way her father punished her.” She drew a line across her wrist, and I could see faint lines on the skin of her arm. So she understood Carrie perfectly there, too. “As if she had become so used to the pain that she had to have it. A craving, like an addiction.” She looked me in the eye again and I could see suddenly a little-girl version of her not so very hidden inside, a little girl who was also used to pain.

So much hurt. So much pain. It was easy to brush it off as something that happened everywhere, say that the church dealt with such crimes harshly and that God could never look on sin with the least degree of allowance. But the disguise had worked within our church. And the vulnerability was made possible by the hierarchy as it stood now. Could that possibly be God’s purpose?

Gwen’s hands kept curling and uncurling. Her frenetic movements seemed to echo my own whirling thoughts. “It’s taken me all this time to work up the courage. Not just to tell you about Carrie, but to tell you about myself, and why it matters so much to me. I’m so worried about Carrie’s parents. She warned me that if anything ever happened to her, they would try to take Kelly. I can’t bear to see that happen. I came today to hope that you will make sure that they are stopped. It was the one thing that Carrie was proud of, that Kelly was going to grow up with a better life than she had.”

“Why did Carrie leave her, though?” I asked. “If she loved Kelly so much, how could she go off to Las Vegas like that?” To take the chance that Kelly would be unprotected—surely that was the greatest crime of all?

Gwen stopped moving and looked out the window, speaking to the world itself, as if she could trust it more than me. “You don’t know what it’s like. The demons that talk in your head. I think maybe Carrie decided it was better for Kelly for her to be gone. Or maybe she just had to punish herself more. I don’t know.”

“And the letter her parents have, about Jared’s abuse? Was it real at all?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head and turned back to me. She seemed out of energy now, and I felt the same. All the time I’d spent awake thinking last night, and it had been so useless. I had never come to this, the final, most important truth.

“Carrie told me sometimes about weird things Jared or his father did. But she also loved him. Maybe she wrote to her parents just to scare them away.”

It had all been so complicated. Why had I ever thought it would be simple? There were monsters here, but they weren’t the ones I had seen first and foremost. No wonder Carrie had fled her life here. None of us was willing to see the truth, and if we couldn’t do that, how could we help her?





CHAPTER 31




As soon as Gwen Ferris left, I walked over to the Helms’ and rang the doorbell. Alex Helm met me at the door. He looked me up and down. “Can I help you, Sister Wallheim?”

It felt as if I was literally swallowing my pride, which was a hot and heavy stone. It kept rising back up, and I would have to swallow it down again. “I wanted to ask if you needed any babysitting help,” I got out at last.

He sneered. “Help from you?”

“I know that we did not part on the best of terms and you must think that I—that I am not on your side. But I came to apologize for that. I realize now that I was wrong.”

“Wrong about what, Sister Wallheim?” he asked.

“About Carrie,” I said softly. “And her parents.” I would have to deal with them soon, but somehow I felt like I needed to make this right first.

“Someone has told you something,” he said, leaning in enough to stare me in the eye.

I had to work hard not to lean away from him. I wasn’t going to give him any names. I might have been wrong about him, but that didn’t give me the right to expose Gwen Ferris’s secrets.

“So,” he said when I didn’t reply. “You’ve realized that my son married a troubled young woman and spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the truth.”

“I know that she loved him,” I said. At least, she must have for a few years, until she left. I was trying to make it easy for him to open the door wider and invite me in.

“Do you know that she called him, before she left Las Vegas?” he asked. “Told him that she loved him and that she missed him? At three in the morning, when Kelly was asleep? The morning of the day she died?”

My mouth was dry, and I wished I had a drink of water. I was struggling not to lick my lips in front of this man. “I didn’t know that,” I said. Could I believe him? So far, I could not think of anything that Alex Helm had directly lied about. He might be an odious man, but he was a truthful odious man. “Did she say she was coming home?”

“Not directly, but that was the gist of it,” said Alex Helm. “She said she was sorry for the havoc she’d caused and that she knew she’d been searching for something that only Jared could give her.”

I felt a chill run through me at that. Did she mean love? Had only Jared been able to give it to her? Surely people who are sick can hope for better healing than that even in this broken, mortal world. “Has he told the police about this phone call?”