The Bishop's Wife

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “She got out of the car?” I echoed.

  “Daddy thought I was asleep. He told me to go back to sleep in the car, but when it stopped, I woked up,” said Kelly.

  “And what happened then?” I said, stirring the brownie batter far past what it needed. This was not what Jared Helm had told me and Kurt that morning weeks ago, but I couldn’t react angrily. I didn’t want to lose the sense of ease that Kelly felt in this familiar rhythm.

  “Mommy got out of the car. I heard her thump on the ground.”

  I went cold at the childish description. “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then Daddy said goodbye to her, too, and he got back in the car,” she said simply.

  I felt terrible pumping information from a five-year-old child, especially this very vulnerable one. If the police had done it, someone would have cried foul. But I wasn’t hurting her, was I? And I needed to know what she had heard exactly. “Where were you? Do you remember anything about the place where she got out of the car?”

  “It was dark,” said Kelly helpfully. “And cold.”

  “But were there any lights outside?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Kelly.

  “And your mother didn’t kiss you goodbye in the car?” I asked.

  Kelly shook her head. “I was trying to be asleep. Daddy said to sleep.”

  “Did you hear her say anything to your dad?”

  “She was mad at him. She didn’t talk to him when she was mad.”

  Yes, that would be a useful survival strategy for a woman who had been abused by her husband.

  Or maybe Carrie didn’t say anything to Kelly because she couldn’t. I wondered if Carrie Helm had been alive during this car ride Jared hadn’t mentioned to the police.

  Clearly, Kelly wouldn’t know, so the questioning was over.

  I stopped stirring the brownie batter and reached for a teaspoon. I offered it to Kelly, feeling like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, luring children in with a treat that wasn’t good for them. “Kelly, are you ever afraid of your daddy?” I asked quietly.

  “He shouts sometimes,” Kelly said, looking down at her hands. “Then I run and hide in my room. I don’t like it when he gets mad at me.”

  Too vague, too vague. If this were a detective novel, I’d be the prosecutor asking leading questions. Of a child. “But does he ever hurt you?”

  “Once he spanked my hand,” said Kelly. “Because I almost touched the stove with it and he said it would have gotten burnt.”

  “And what about your mom? Did you ever see him hurt her?”

  Kelly stared up at me. “He took her pills once,” she said. “And put them down the toilet. She hit him, and then he held her hands. Then she cried. But Mommy told me never to tell anyone. She said she was sorry and he was sorry. She said she was wrong and not to hit.”

  Pills? Birth control or her depression medication? It didn’t matter. I had to go back to the question of whether or not Carrie had been alive in that car ride. “Did you see your mom in the car? Or after she was dropped off? Did you see her waving at you?”

  “It was dark,” said Kelly again. “I couldn’t see her.”

  “And there were no lights? Why do you think she wanted to go to a place where there were no lights?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Sometimes Mommy said she needed to rest her eyes and her head and she would go into her room and close the door and turn out the lights. She told me to be very quiet then.”

  Did I really think I could get all the information I needed out of a five-year-old girl in an hour? I should leave the detective work to the real detectives. Still, I was itching to go through the house, to see how Carrie had left it. Jared would have moved things by now, maybe enough things that I would never be able to piece the full story together. And the police were going through it right now. But there might be things neither he nor they understood the meaning of.

  We poured the brownies into a greased pan and put them in the oven. Then I showed Kelly into the front room, and she looked through my children’s books with a cry of delight. “This is Mommy’s book,” she said. “She used to read this to me every day.” It was Harry the Dirty Dog. “I wish she didn’t take it with her.”

  “She took this book with her when she left?” It seemed an odd thing for her to take, considering she had taken nothing else.

  “I asked Daddy to read it the next day, after she was gone. Daddy said she took it with her. He said she didn’t want me to have it anymore.”

  I patted her head, doing my best to suppress my fury at Jared Helm, then gently settled her into my lap and read her the book. She fell asleep in my arms. While her breath softened to a steady, slow pace, my mind was spinning wildly. I didn’t know if anything Kelly had told me would be useful, but the car ride seemed important, especially since Jared had so carefully concealed that information even from me and Kurt, who he must consider to be mostly on his side.

  I hoped my worst fears—that Carrie’s presence in the car had been as a corpse—were wrong. I tried to think of more innocent explanations of Jared’s behavior. If he had dropped Carrie off somewhere, then he had been complicit in her escape, not surprised by it as he had pretended to be. But why would he drop her off somewhere completely dark, with no wallet or keys? The missing children’s picture book might mean nothing at all, but it was interesting at least. If Carrie had taken it, why that one thing? And if she hadn’t, why had Jared taken away a book that reminded his daughter of her mother? Was it pure pettiness?

  My arms ached, then went numb, and still I sat there on the couch in the front room, the warm weight of Kelly in my arms. It had been a long time since Samuel was this age. My own daughter had never been this age. Maybe she never would be, even in the afterlife in the celestial kingdom that I hoped for. She might belong to another family entirely. Or she might be taken from me, if I had been the ultimate cause of her death. How could Kurt be so sure about seeing her again when we had never seen her really to begin with?

  The doorbell rang, and I started. Kelly rubbed at her eyes and her face had a little red mark on it where she had collapsed over her arm.

  I shifted her to the side onto the couch and got up to find Jared Helm at the door.

  “They’re finished,” he said. “She can come home now.”

  I didn’t ask him anything, but I walked back over to the Helms’ house with Kelly and Jared. The last police car was still waiting. Jared had a form to sign, a document stating that nothing had been taken from the house except certain items on a list he had to check off.

  Then the police car drove away, and Jared lifted Kelly into his arms. He stepped inside the house reluctantly.

  “I could come in and help you clean up, if you’d like,” I offered. What was I doing? Going into a house alone with a man who might have killed his wife to try to find evidence against him? But I had been drawn into this and I was going to use all the skills I had to resolve it.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I need some time to myself. Just me and Kelly.”

  I tensed. I had to go in there. The police were looking for signs of Carrie’s death, but I wanted more information about everything leading up to her disappearance. I wanted to know who she had been, since I hadn’t found it out while she was here.

  I took a breath to steady myself. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the moment. I needed to let Jared trust me.

  But I wasn’t giving up.

  “Of course,” I said, and let the door close.

  THE POLICE MADE no official report of what they had—or had not—found in the Helm house. Saturday evening, they released a statement saying that Jared was not a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, but that he was a “person of interest.” Which meant the news vans were still camped outside his house, causing Jared and Kelly to live a strange life inside their bubble of home.

  On Sunday, they stayed home from church again, and Kurt made sure to contact the Elders Quorum Presidency to ask that they visit Jared,
and the Primary Presidency to do the same with Kelly. Kurt got the Young Women to offer to babysit Kelly if Jared wanted to attend the ward temple night this week, or if he needed to leave for a police interview or to go shopping.

  Instead of having strange babysitters in his home, Jared made a list of things he needed from the store, and Cheri Tate went out shopping for him. Every purchase she made, it seemed, was then listed on the news that Sunday night.

  Kurt shook his head over that. “It shouldn’t happen like that. Did she talk to the reporters? I thought I made it clear she wasn’t to do that.”

  “About what she bought at the grocery store? Don’t give her a hard time about that, Kurt. She’s doing her best in a difficult situation.” I imagined the reporters following her through the store, asking clerks what she’d bought, or chasing down mislaid receipts.

  There was only so much you could expect anyone to do to preserve another person’s privacy. But I wondered if perhaps Cheri Tate had begun to suspect Jared Helm of criminal behavior toward his wife. A part of me liked that idea very much.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sunday evening, we had our monthly family dinner, and I tried to be happy with all the boys around, and the two daughters-in-law. After so many years of me alone in a household of men, it was wonderful to have other women around, even if sometimes I felt as if I had learned so well to relate to men that I didn’t readily understand women. I admired my daughters-in-law so much.

  Marie is studying nursing and is going to be a power to reckon with. And Joseph’s wife, Willow, teaches ballet in Bountiful, after two years in New York as a professional. She hopes to open her own studio someday, and when she does, her students are going to be very lucky.

  I watched them carefully, thinking about Carrie Helm. Suddenly, I found myself asking terrible questions about abuse. I knew I was being alarmist, seeing the worst everywhere I looked. Yet I wondered if it was possible my daughters-in-law were being abused by my own sons? Boys I had raised? Was I missing the clues I should have seen? If I had missed them with Carrie Helm, why not with other women? Kurt had thought so well of Jared Helm until recently, and even now he was torn between his priesthood connection to Jared and the darkness that was beginning to rise around him.

  Marie seemed so strong and gave her opinion so openly. She had always impressed me as someone who would change the world because she wasn’t afraid of anything. But could it be a mask she was putting on? Carrie Helm had seemed strong and articulate, as well, except when Jared squelched her opinion.

  And Willow was so beautiful and looked so fragile in some ways. She laughed easily and often, sometimes at things I didn’t think were funny at all. Was she pretending to be happier than she was, as Carrie surely must have done?

  It was hard for me to imagine my daughter as a full-grown woman, since I had never seen her that way. I had only seen the still, smudged grey skin of her imperfect infant body. There were photographs somewhere. A woman from Share, a charity founded to help parents who lost pregnancies and infants, had come in to help us and she had insisted that we would want photographs someday, to remember our daughter. But I had never looked at the photographs after they had come in. They had seemed so terrible to me, a picture of death, of nothing good. Who keeps photographs of a body in a coffin? That’s what my daughter was by the time I saw her.

  I would have been a useless mother to a girl who wanted to be a dancer. I was all left feet and had lousy rhythm sense. I could play the piano, but rhythm had always been my bugaboo. Would I have helped her do her hair? Choose dresses? I felt so inadequate helping in girlish things, but was that habit or some inborn trait? I didn’t know the difference anymore.

  I went and played the piano when everyone was gone, head down, thoughts draining away.

  Samuel sat on the couch in the front room and listened until I was finished.

  “I like it when they are here,” he said. “But I like when they’re gone, too. I like the quiet.”

  “I like the quiet, too,” I said.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, when we were settling into bed I asked Kurt what to do about the information I’d learned from Kelly Helm. It was the first time we’d had a chance to talk since Friday. Kurt had had to go back to the church after dinner, but it was “Family Sabbath,” which meant he had canceled most of his meetings and other obligations. He was all mine for now.

  “She’s five years old. Are you really sure she remembers what happened that night? She could have it confused with another night. It could be a dream she had.” Kurt turned down the covers.

  I stiffened at this. “She seems pretty clear to me.”

  “But you’re not her mother,” said Kurt. That stung, and he must have seen it on my face because he added, “I mean, you don’t know her that well. I would think that Jared would be a better judge of whether Kelly knows anything here.”

  “Jared is the last person anyone can rely on to interpret Kelly’s words. He might have every reason to distort her meaning.” I sat in the bed, my arms crossed.

  “I think that you’re too involved in this,” said Kurt, getting into the bed beside me. “This is a police investigation. It’s not something for you to poke around in.”

  “That’s ironic,” I said, turning out the light.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kurt.

  “It means that you’re the one who is always asking me to poke my nose into other people’s business. Putting names on the refrigerator. And now you tell me I’m stepping outside of my role.”

  “When you start investigating a murder, I think that’s a little different than helping out people in our ward,” said Kurt.

  The emotional temperature in the room was somewhere near absolute zero at this point.

  “Maybe it isn’t that different,” I said. And maybe Kurt just didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t going to let him be in charge of the information I’d found out, nor tell me what my next step should be.

  “Linda, you’re the one who said he was dangerous to begin with. I’m just paying attention to you. Why would you get mad at me about that?” he asked.

  “Because you’re telling me what to do.”

  “God,” Kurt muttered under his breath. He very rarely swore, and it made me flinch. “You always were the most stubborn woman I ever met.”

  “Hey!” I said, wounded. “The most stubborn person, man or woman, you mean.”

  There was a long silence between us. I took a deep breath and tried to let go of the hurt. I knew Kurt loved me. I knew he trusted me. I had always depended on that trust. What was bothering me didn’t really have to do with him, if I could only admit it to both of us.

  “I need to find out what happened to Carrie Helm,” I said, finally. “She is just the age—”

  He let out a sigh. “I know,” he said. “You throw yourself into things. It’s one of the things I love about you. You don’t think twice. You commit yourself and that’s it. But in this case—”

  “In this case, it really matters.”

  “Because you’re still trying to make up for all the mistakes you think you made with our daughter?” asked Kurt. He had moved closer to me on the bed and his hand was searching for mine in the dark. I let him find it.

  I couldn’t remember the last time that he had mentioned her. “I want to do the right thing. I want to make sure I have no regrets.” I felt tears prick at my eyes.

  As SOON AS I woke up Monday morning, I started thinking about Tobias Torstensen and his first wife. It was early enough that Samuel wasn’t up for school yet, and Kurt was still asleep. I put on a robe against the cold, then I went out to the garage.

  There was the pink dress, just where I’d left it on the wooden utility table where Kurt sanded and painted things, sometimes cut them with an electric saw blade. The table was dusty and spattered with colors. I picked up the dress and played with it, feeling the worn cotton against my hands, and the crusted, dried blood that interrupted the softness. It was fragile material.
I shouldn’t touch it too much.

  The blood could mean nothing at all. Tobias might have bled on it by accident, felt bad about it and hidden it away and when his first wife died, he didn’t know what to do with it, so he left it where it was. But for some reason, my mind had latched on to the proposition that Tobias, like Jared Helm, had killed his wife and disappeared her body. That would explain why there were competing stories about her death by car accident, heart attack, and cancer. Tobias had told different stories at different times and couldn’t keep them straight.

  Had he killed her because they fought? Because she threatened to take his sons away from him? It was hard to imagine Tobias Torstensen, such a gentle and intelligent man, hurting anyone, let alone his own wife. Much easier for me to believe Jared Helm guilty, since I disagreed with him on so many topics. But if one man could do it and believe he had the right within the Mormon church, could another?

  I shook my head. It seemed too much to believe that there were two murders in my tiny little part of Draper, one ancient and one modern, and that I was placed just where I was to find out about both. Unless I believed that God had put me here to do precisely that, because He wanted me to use my insatiable curiosity for some good.

  I wished I felt a burning within the bosom, as the scriptures say that we are supposed to get with the Spirit’s direction. I just felt—cold.

  I stared at the pink dress and then put it down. I told myself that I didn’t know if anyone had been murdered in our ward or not, either Carrie Helm or Tobias’s first wife. And it seemed rather ridiculously arrogant to think that I should have some special place in finding out the horrible truth about others.

  I was a fifty-four-year-old woman, a stay-at-home mother of five boys, and a bishop’s wife. I was not a detective. I was not a prophet. I didn’t know what I was doing here. And it was time for me to give up the idea that I had some special connection to Carrie Helm, or to any other woman in the ward. This had nothing to do with my daughter. This wasn’t something God had called me to do. There wasn’t even a connection here between these two women, except the connection I was imagining in my own mind.