The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(97)

“You think your grandfather killed your mother?” I asked cautiously. I could see Anna struggling to process Liam’s story. “But if that is what really happened, then why would Tobias bury her body? Why didn’t he report her father to the police?”

“I don’t know,” said Liam. He seemed himself again, weak and pale, but his adult voice had returned.

I stared at him and tried to calculate whether Liam had been old enough when his mother died to remember a scene like this. The fact that he had never spoken about it in the intervening thirty years said something about the trauma of the memory. Was it real? He could have invented it to fit the facts. On the other hand, it was clear that he believed it. And the way he spoke, in that child’s voice, was eerie.

“Why didn’t you say anything about this? All this time, Liam,” said Anna. “When your father was asking about Helena’s gravesite? When we were asking you if she died of a heart problem or in a car accident? Why did you never confide in me, all those years?”

“It felt like a nightmare. I didn’t know if it was real, and then as I grew older, I remembered it less and less because it wasn’t a part of my life. You were my life then. You were my mother.”

For a moment, Anna’s head bowed with this heartfelt return of all her love. I stared at her and swallowed hard. Then she lifted her head.

“You didn’t see him bury her, then?” she asked.

“No,” said Liam. “I didn’t know she was in the backyard. Maybe if I’d thought about it more, I would have seen the connection, but I didn’t.” He sagged back to the couch, and after a moment, Anna put a hand to his back and patted him.

“So what do we do now?” asked Anna. She had turned to me.

She thought I knew the answers here? “We could call the police and have Liam give them a statement.” But I had no idea if they would believe him. And what did it matter? Helena’s father was dead now. They couldn’t prosecute him any more than they could Tobias.

“Why wouldn’t Tobias have reported it?” I asked. “I don’t understand. He should have had the man convicted for murder. And then his wife could have been buried properly, in a cemetery,” I said. Why would he cover up for a man who wasn’t even his own father? A man he had, it seemed, hated?

Anna sighed. “Tobias was always a quiet man. The kind of notoriety that would have come with a murder trial would have destroyed him. And the boys, too.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. He buried her himself so there wouldn’t be a trial? Does an innocent man do that?” I asked.

“Maybe it was more than the trial. Maybe he wanted to keep her to himself,” said Anna. She looked at peace again at last, an expression of relaxation that I hadn’t seen for a long time spreading across her face. “Keep her here, with him, in the garden.”

“She was already dead,” said Liam. “It wasn’t as if a trial would have brought her back. And she loved her father, too. Maybe that was the real reason he said nothing, because he knew he would be ruining her father’s life if he reported her death, and he thought Helena wouldn’t have wanted that.”

I still thought it was very odd, all of it. I didn’t know if I believed Liam’s story, but it made a sense of all the strangeness in our ward these past months in a way nothing else had.

“And the hammer by our bedside all those years?” said Anna. “Do you think he might have worried it would happen again, and if it did, he wanted to be the one with the weapon?”

“I’ll talk to the police if you want me to,” said Liam. “If you think that will clear Dad’s name in some way.”

“Write me a statement,” said Anna after a long moment. “Then I can decide if I want to talk to them and show it to them if I need to.”

“Thank you,” said Liam with great relief. He stared around the house as if realizing for the first time where he was. “I should go. I need to get back home, to work.”

“Not right now. You need to sleep first,” said Anna. “I’ll call your wife and tell her where you are.”

Liam nodded and followed Anna to his old bedroom.

Anna came back down and got a towel from the kitchen to wipe at the tea stain. When that didn’t suffice, she worked on the color with a spray bottle and a hard brush.

When she was finished, she looked at me and held my gaze. She spoke with determination: “Liam was never a child to lie. Tomas, yes. He could lie with the best of them, but not Liam.”

If she believed it, then I supposed I had to, unless the police wanted to investigate the case more thoroughly. It was Anna’s husband’s reputation we were talking about here. She had every reason to want to think he wasn’t a killer. “It feels unfinished somehow,” I said. “There are still so many questions I wish we could have answered.”

“And you hate having it end so abruptly, don’t you?” said Anna, smiling like a mother watching a child make a familiar mistake.

She knew me too well.





CHAPTER 33




I knew as much of the truth about Tobias and Helena Torstensen as I was ever likely to get. I knew the truth about Carrie Helm, too, and I knew that God would mete out justice far better than the Mormon church ever could. But it wasn’t enough for me. I had to do more. I had to do it for Carrie. And for my own daughter.