The Bishop's Wife

by Mette Ivie Harrison

I dropped the hammer and heard it thunk against the garden detritus.

  My heart was pounding and I felt like all the saliva in my mouth had suddenly disappeared.

  The dress I had found in the shed, dotted with blood along the back of the neck. The stone that looked like it had been made to mark a grave. And now this.

  A hammer with hair on it that suggested violence. A woman whose cause of death was rumored to be any of several different things, even among her immediate family. A woman who had died young, leaving her sons with her husband. A woman whose gravesite was unknown. I walked out of the shed and back inside the house. I pretended that everything was fine with Tomas and Liam, though Anna was still alone upstairs with Tobias. A man who might very well have murdered his first wife. Should I stay to tell her what I suspected? No. Not until I knew for certain. I could not add to her burdens, which were already considerable.

  So I said I felt ill and needed to go home, and asked the boys to give their mother my regards.

  For an hour or more, I waited on our front room couch for the bishop to come home. Then I asked if I could speak to him in his office.

  His eyes flickered with surprise. “If you want.”

  I nodded. I felt like this should be official. Kurt had said he didn’t want me to play detective, and I hadn’t meant to. But now I had to tell someone. I had to know what to do, and I wanted Kurt, as the bishop, to tell me. I wanted this taken out of my hands.

  He sat at his desk. I sat on the couch opposite. And I listed the facts I’d uncovered. The stone in the dirt in the garden that looked like a headstone. The hammer under the dirt by the headstone. The blood and hair on the hammer, and the pink, faded dress with its stain.

  “How can you be sure it’s blood this many years later? It could just be dirt that looks like dried blood,” he began.

  I glared at him.

  He sighed. “And even if it is blood, it could be from an animal. Or …” He seemed unable to think up another explanation.

  “Why would Tobias put the hammer near that headstone? Why doesn’t anyone know what his wife really died of? Why doesn’t anyone know where she is buried? Why is Tobias so desperate on his deathbed to see his wife’s grave?”

  “Maybe the hammer has nothing to do with the headstone,” said Kurt. He waved a hand, dismissive enough to make my fear simmer into anger. “Maybe it’s not a headstone, anyway. It could be a decorative stone.”

  “Kurt, his garden is carefully groomed. Everything has a place. The decorative stones all match. This headstone doesn’t.”

  “It could still have another, perfectly innocuous explanation,” he said. But he didn’t suggest one.

  “Kurt, if there is a human being buried in his garden, don’t you think we should find out who it is?”

  “You think it’s his dead first wife there,” said Kurt.

  I shrugged. Who else was it likely to be? And with all the different versions of what happened to her, it almost made sense. But now that I was away from the garden, away from the sight of Tobias kissing the winter dirt, I was starting to reconsider my own conclusions. Tobias Torstensen, a killer? He was the nicest man. Could he do something like that to his wife? And no one had guessed for all these years?

  “You seem to have a sudden tendency to think men guilty of killing their wives,” said Kurt. “Even if there’s no real evidence of foul play. Is there something wrong? Something you want to tell me about how you feel for me?” He smiled, trying to make it into a joke. He’d used that trick on the boys more than once, and they were all in stitches moments after being in the midst of a fight.

  It wasn’t going to work on me. “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said, and stood up. “Don’t patronize me. I’m not making things up here. I’m not leaping to conclusions. I didn’t call the police to trample through Tobias’s garden while he is on his deathbed. I’m talking to you.” I didn’t move to the door, but I wasn’t going to let him treat me like a child. I hadn’t made up what I’d seen in the garden. Or the hammer. Or the headstone. It was all there, and it had to mean something.

  “He’s an old man, Linda. What do you possibly think we could get out of him at this late date? From a man who is dying?” asked Kurt. He had his hands templed on his desk. I knew that move, too. It was the “calm down” motion that he used when couples were arguing with each other in front of him. “Even if he is a murderer—which I don’t for one minute believe—what is the point of trying to punish him when God has already taken care of it?”

  What about Anna? Didn’t she deserve to know the truth about her husband?

  “I think you may want to consider that this is really about something else,” said Kurt.

  “And what’s that?” I asked him.

  “I think you’re letting your guilt over not noticing Carrie Helm’s unhappiness make you see abusive men everywhere. You’re angry. At God, at my entire sex, and at yourself, for not stopping what happened to her.”

  Maybe I was angry, but if that was true, I had a right to be. And if Carrie Helm was fine, Tobias Torstensen’s first wife wasn’t.

  But I put the anger aside, and sat back on the couch and tried to speak to Kurt the way he could hear me. Without emotion. “Look, I don’t think Tobias’s mental state is that much in question. And if he did this, he’ll want to confess to you before he dies. Asking about his wife’s grave, and the whole show yesterday in the garden—it means some part of him wants to let his sons know before he’s gone. It might be his last chance. So you could hint to him that you know. You could make it easier for him to tell you the truth, when you’re in private. That’s all I’m saying. Give him a chance. Don’t accuse him, but listen if it comes up. Will you do that for me?”

  “I wish I felt something from the Spirit about this. I’ll go pray about it,” he said. And he did. I left his office, but he didn’t. He was in there all through dinner. Samuel and I ate alone.

  Late that night, he went to visit Tobias Torstensen again, but whatever he found out, he didn’t tell me. And the call came early Tuesday morning that Tobias Torstensen had passed away in the night.

  CHAPTER 16

  Tuesday night, I couldn’t sleep. I had this fantasy playing in my head of going out to Tobias’s garden while Anna and her sons were at the funeral. The whole ward would be at the church; no one would know what I was doing. The service would take several hours, including the eulogies and the luncheon afterward. Plenty of time for me to dig in the backyard and find if there was a body under there.

  If there wasn’t, well, then, I would have missed a funeral and would make my excuses. I’d come home, take a shower, and tell myself never to jump to conclusions with insufficient evidence. What did I really know about anything here? I was acting as if I were some kind of Sherlock Holmes, but I had no experience at this sort of thing. I’d watched people’s expressions before, listened to them talking, decided that I could read people pretty well. But sniffing out a murder? That was for the police.

  “The funeral is supposed to be on Friday, right?” I asked Kurt in the morning. The funeral home had known to expect Tobias’s body, so a lot of the decisions had already been made and the process could be expedited. Tobias’s body had been taken by the mortician within hours of his death.

  Anna and Tobias had picked a reasonably priced coffin together, and Tobias had even talked a little about what he would like at his funeral. But he knew as well as anyone that it isn’t the place of the dead to choose a funeral service. Ultimately, Kurt, the bishop, is the one who decides what is appropriate and what isn’t. After any speakers he chose, Kurt would speak himself, the final word on Tobias’s life and what his death would mean. I knew Kurt took the job of speaking at a funeral seriously, even more than he did all of his other jobs as a bishop. And he had genuinely liked Tobias, which would make it more difficult in some ways. He was dealing with his own grief and at the same time trying to ease the grief of others.

  Anna had asked me to help her dress her husband in h
is temple clothes on the morning of the funeral. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had helped my mother do the same for my father when he died of cancer the year that I was pregnant with Zachary, but it had been a long time since I had performed this service.

  “You’ve gotten very close to Anna in the last several weeks, haven’t you?” said Kurt on Thursday evening, after he got back from church meetings and we were lying in bed.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I always thought you were the kind of woman who had a very small intimate circle with her family, that you didn’t need close female friends.”

  “Well, there were always women in the callings I worked in, in the church.”

  “But I have the sense it’s different with Anna. This isn’t just about you bonding with her over a joint purpose. Or is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I suppose I had spent all of the time since Kurt and I were married focusing on my own children, and my only relationships had grown out of that primary one. I looked back on my life before I had married, though, and I hadn’t had many female friends then, either. I had grown up with three brothers, and had learned to talk as bluntly as they did. That didn’t seem to endear me to other women. But it was also true that my personality was prickly, and that I tended to offend people easily. “Anna is different. She’s—like who I might have been,” I said. “If I hadn’t—if I’d gone through her life instead of mine.” I didn’t know if that was the right way to put it, but it was as close as I could come. I didn’t have any sisters, but I imagined the way I felt about Anna was how I might have felt for a sister.

  “I’m glad,” said Kurt.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it makes you stronger somehow. Like you’re linked to someone else strong.”

  “Oh. Well, yes,” I said, plumping a pillow behind me so that I could sit up better. Kurt had a wide field of friends to call on, both from work and from the church. He might not go shopping with them or call them on the phone just to chat, but they were always there for him when he needed them for anything.

  “You’ve lived in a household of all men for a long time. I thought that was what made you different from other women. You don’t do a lot of the feminine stuff. And I guess there was a part of me that wondered if it was my fault—mine and the boys’—that you were like that. I thought maybe you were missing something.”

  I was missing something. I had been for over twenty years. What if I’d had a daughter who wanted frills and pink and lacy dresses? Who pouted and manipulated the way that girls are often taught to, to get their own way? Would that have changed the kind of woman I was? Maybe it would have.

  But what if I’d had a daughter who was like a younger version of Anna, who could have been a friend and a confidante? What if that was what I had been missing all this time?

  “She doesn’t make me feel like I have to hide who I am,” I said.

  I thought about hiding, about secrets. What was going to happen to my relationship with Anna if I pressed her to have the garden dug up so that Tobias’s secret came out?

  I needed to talk to Anna about that, but it would have to wait. If there was a body there, the timing of its discovery wouldn’t make a difference, after all. Here was my chance to prove I’d learned patience.

  Kurt knew me too well, because he said, “You know, I’m going to have to talk to Tomas and Liam about their father’s life history for the funeral.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “Maybe something will come out then,” said Kurt. “And you won’t have any more questions about Tobias and his first wife.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  I thought about the two of them. By my calculations, Tomas had been only two years old when his mother had died, but Liam had been six or seven. Liam might remember, if he were asked the right questions. Maybe being back in the family house would trigger memories.

  “I don’t suppose—do you think it’s possible the first wife ran off somewhere?” I said, the idea suddenly occurring to me. It had been Carrie Helm’s disappearance that had first made me wonder about Tobias’s dead wife, but what if the two stories were even more similar than I imagined?

  Kurt chewed on his lower lip, then said, “I suppose it’s possible. Tobias might have lied to his boys, thinking that telling them the truth would hurt them more.”

  Unlike Jared Helm. I thought again, cringing, of how he’d told Kelly that Carrie had taken her daughter’s favorite book because she hadn’t wanted Kelly to have it anymore.

  “And then after so many years of lying, he couldn’t tell his sons the truth,” Kurt was saying. “Maybe that was what he really wanted when he said he needed to see his wife’s grave. He wanted to tell them the truth, but his mind had gotten too confused to know how to do it.”

  But that still didn’t explain the hammer with the hair and dried blood on it, did it? Or the strange stone in the garden.

  Maybe there was no explanation for those things. There are mysteries that they say we will just have to ask God to answer when we are on the other side. I always wondered if we would just stop caring about them then.

  THURSDAY MORNING, WHEN Kurt and Samuel were gone, I sat down on the computer to do some investigating on my own. I’d had to do genealogy work for the church, and I knew how to find out birth dates, death dates, and other important information. After looking on FamilySearch.com, Ancestry.com, and Genealogy.com, I found several death certificates for Torstensens who had died in Utah in the five-year period I estimated was right, but none of them were listed for Draper. All the death certificates from that period were supposed to be available online, but I wondered if I should send in an official form just to be sure. But I didn’t even know the woman’s first name. Tobias had never mentioned it, nor had Anna.

  As I worked on the computer, there was another knock on the front door. It was Brad Ferris, Gwen’s husband.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, but Kurt’s at work. Do you want me to call his cell phone? Is there an emergency?”

  “I—she isn’t—I came alone this time—because—” Brad was nervous. He took a deep breath. “I was hoping to talk to you, Sister Wallheim,” he got out. “About something private.”

  “Me?” I said, surprised. I had thought nothing could surprise me anymore.

  “If you don’t mind,” Brad said. “It’s about Gwen, but it’s woman stuff. I thought you might be able to help me understand it better than the bishop.”

  I looked around the front room, but decided we were too likely to be interrupted there, either by Samuel, who would be home from school soon, or by someone else coming to see me. So, feeling a little odd, I led Brad Ferris into Kurt’s office and hoped that Kurt wouldn’t feel I’d invaded his private space.

  I sat behind Kurt’s desk and Brad sat in the couch, as before. I didn’t close the door all the way, which was ridiculous, since no one else was in the house. But Kurt was so cautious about being alone with other women, even when he was counseling them, that some of the same nervousness had rubbed off on me. Kurt’s chair made me feel strangely small, but I tried to suppress that thought and sit up as tall as I could.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked Brad Ferris.

  “I feel like I’ve made too big a deal of this,” he said. His voice was shaky and I realized that was because his whole body was shaking. Small-boned and hardly five foot six, he couldn’t be more than twenty-six years old, Adam’s age. His hands looked like they had been rubbed raw with wringing. Was he getting ready to confess something to me?

  “I was hoping that you could give me some advice,” he said finally. “About Gwen.”

  “What kind of advice?” I hoped suddenly that this wasn’t a question about female sex organs. For all I wished that Mormons talked more openly about sex, I didn’t want to give Brad advice about pleasing his wife in bed. I could direct him to a few books, however, if that was what he needed. I scanned the room for Kurt’s
laptop. Good, he’d left it to the side of the desk, and I was pretty sure I knew the password. I could print out a list of suggestions and then Brad Ferris would be on his way.

  “I want to know how to make her feel as special as she really is.”

  Relief. This was not about sex, then. “Special in what way?” I asked, feeling a sudden sympathy for Kurt.

  His hands flew all over the place. “She has had such a hard life and I want to make her feel how happy I am that she got through all of it, that she made it to me. I want to make her feel wonderful. I want her to wake up in the morning and stop thinking about all the mistakes she made, and think instead of all the possibilities.” He captured his hands, and then his head started bobbing. “I—I want her to think about how much better a place the world is because she’s in it. I want her to see how happy she makes me and to believe that matters.”

  I stared at him, shrinking back in Kurt’s chair. I could feel tears rising in my eyes. All he wanted was to do what I thought all men should want to do for their wives, and which few managed to do, even once in a while. He wanted to counteract the message so many women heard “the world” telling them, that they were worthless, and that they should just be content to be no more than vessels to please men.

  “What’s the thing that is causing Gwen the most pain right now?” I asked.

  His hands were free again, and made wide, sweeping ovals. “I think sometimes that it feels to her like her whole life is weighing on her, like everything that has happened to her, and everything she has done wrong … like it’s all happening right now.”

  “That sounds like depression. Or possibly anxiety,” I said. “Is she seeing a therapist?”

  “She was seeing a therapist before, but not now. And yes, she is still on medication. But sometimes the medication isn’t enough. Sometimes—she feels like this is all her own fault, and she doesn’t even deserve to have medication. Or me. Or happiness. So she pushes it away.”

  “I see,” I said, not sure I saw at all. Was this a clinical matter, about Gwen’s mental health? Or was he asking me for tools to manage his own relationship? I wasn’t an expert on medications for depression and I was sure Kurt wouldn’t appreciate me dispensing medical advice in any case. He sent members of the ward to doctors if he sensed they needed that kind of care. So I decided I would deal with relationship issues. That was what I was good at. “Have you tried writing her notes telling her how much you love her? Sometimes writing something down makes it feel more real, more permanent than just saying it. And then she would have it to look at even when you’re not there.”