The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(93)

Alex Helm nodded. “He was a good husband. If he ever hurt her, it was for her own good. She knew that, too. It was why she loved him so much.”

For her own good? No, I thought. I could go a certain distance to see another person’s point of view, but not that far. I stood up and brushed off my pants. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said, though I hadn’t even begun to ask him about Kelly and Primary. Perhaps the Presidency would have to do that on their own. I couldn’t do everything.

“Do you know,” Alex Helm said suddenly, “when she called him, she begged him for forgiveness. She said that she had always been looking for a place where she belonged. As if a whore like that could ever belong anywhere.”

I tamped down my emotional response to his word choice. “And what did Jared tell her?”

“He told her the truth, that he couldn’t take her back into the house with Kelly. He couldn’t let her contaminate their daughter anymore.” He spat out the pebble into his hand and examined it.

I had tried. I really had.

My heart felt as if it were beating outside of my chest, I could hear it so clearly. I couldn’t fix this.

There was a sound behind Alex Helm, and I caught a quick glimpse of messy blonde curls before the door flew open.

“Sister Wallheim!” Kelly shouted, and ran barefoot toward me.

Alex Helm caught her and moved swiftly back to the door without a word to me. As if I didn’t deserve even a farewell. He closed the door in my face, and the last I saw of Kelly were her feet kicking over her grandfather’s shoulder.


I FINISHED THE laundry at home, then started on dinner. I had to do something about what I’d found out about Carrie Helm and her father, but what? Drive down to his house and smash into it? Take a chainsaw with me and see if I could get close enough to take off some body parts? I felt wrung out after my conversation with Alex Helm, as if nothing I did was ever going to matter, and what was the point? Why was I pretending that I could change the world?

I had originally planned to make some chicken stew for dinner, which required two stalks of celery, an onion and a carrot. I had taken out a whole five-pound bag of carrots, a triple bag of celery stalks, and a whole ten-pound Costco bag of onions. And then I had peeled and chopped my way through all of them, telling myself that I would freeze them, that it wasn’t a waste. It was a useful therapeutic exercise.

But then I got out the potatoes. The fifty-pound bag we’d gotten in November when, in a parking lot on the way home from work, Kurt had seen a truck advertising fresh potatoes, straight from the ground in neighboring Idaho. We had barely made a dent in it, in part because the potatoes were so dirty it took more effort to peel them.

I rinsed, scrubbed, and peeled every potato. I diced them, cubed them, and shredded them. I packed them into the gallon-size Ziploc bags (also from Costco) and then put them in the freezer. And when I was done with that, I got out chicken. I boiled it, froze the stock, and then shredded the chicken. My hands had tiny cuts all over them by then, and there were probably flecks of blood all over the food. My wrists ached and my feet were on fire from standing for so long. But it all felt good. Anything felt good. It reminded me I was alive.

“Um, Mom?” asked Samuel when he got home from school. “Is there something wrong?”

“I’m just doing some prep work,” I said, as if it was no big deal.

“For the next millennium?” he asked.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.

“Mom—do you know something I don’t know? Did Dad tell you about a letter he got?” asked Samuel.

I took a moment to look at him. My beautiful son, scared because I was too caught up in my attempts to mother people I couldn’t mother. Why couldn’t it be enough for me to mother him?

Because he didn’t need me anymore. Not really.

“You think the apocalypse will be announced by the First Presidency in a letter?” I said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of the Second Coming,” said Samuel, smiling faintly.

Yes, let’s make this into a joke. A very, very funny joke. “There has to be all that other stuff first. Gog and Magog. The prophets lying in the streets. Blood on the moon.”

“The blood on the moon thing already happened. Didn’t you hear? Neil Armstrong got into a fight with some Russian astronauts.”

I raised my eyebrows. “And we never heard about it?”

“The Russians didn’t want to admit they’d lost the fight, so there’s been a cover-up for years.”

“But you found out about it—?” I asked.

“On the Internet,” said Samuel. “Of course.”

“Yeah. Of course,” I said. He had gotten me out of myself enough that I could see what the kitchen looked like. The sink was filled to the top with potato peelings. The kitchen garbage was overflowing onto the floor. There was pink from blood mingled with vegetable juice all over the countertops, and the handle of one the knives had come off. I’d stuck the knife into the wooden cutting board before ignoring it and moving on.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” I said.

“It looks like someone got you really mad,” said Samuel.

“Then it is what it looks like,” I said. I started to clean up then. Samuel helped me. And then I got some actual stew cooking, though it was a bit after Kurt got home that it was ready to eat.