The Bishop's Wife

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I was relieved that we were changing the topic, even though the Helms weren’t easy to talk about, either. “I think we might be less judgmental if we understand what Carrie Helm’s life was like, how difficult it was for her. She left her daughter, yes.” I still struggled with this myself. “But we don’t know all the reasons for that. We don’t know what she thought she was doing, in her heart. Maybe she thought she was saving her daughter somehow.”

  “Have you ever thought about leaving us?” asked Samuel.

  He was on a roll with the hard questions today. “A long time ago,” I said honestly. “When you were all little and I was still inexperienced with the mothering thing.” I watched Samuel to see what his reaction would be, but he seemed only thoughtful.

  “So you don’t think about it now?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Being a mother is the most important thing in my life,” I said. I was good at what I did as a mother. It was what I had spent my whole life doing. I suppose that was the real reason that I hadn’t gone back to school or found a job yet. It felt like it would be saying that being a mother wasn’t enough.

  “That’s why you’re so bothered about the Carrie Helm disappearance, right? You’re worried about her little girl,” said Samuel.

  “It’s definitely part of it.”

  “She’s cute. I’ve seen her at church,” said Samuel. Then, after a moment, he added, “It seems like it’s hard being a mom. Harder than being a dad. You have to be perfect all the time. You’re always supposed to be looking out for your kids. You never get a break.”

  “Ha!” There was truth in it, especially in Mormon culture. On Mother’s Day, the entire sacrament meeting in most wards is devoted to talking about how perfect someone’s mother is. It was almost always sickly sweet, with tears but rarely laughter. I had once been in a ward where the bishop bought orchid corsages for the oldest mother, newest mother, and mother with the most children (the winning mother had fourteen children). I wondered sometimes if we would expand the categories to the longest delivery, the worst episiotomy, or the ugliest baby, just for fun.

  “Even moms have their own lives. We have to try to juggle things. We just do the best we can. We’re not perfect. We’re not angels,” I said softly. “No matter what some people say.”

  A WEEK LATER, I was outside, bringing groceries in from the car when I heard a scream from down the street. I let go of the bag I was carrying and turned instinctively. I was running before I thought about where I was going, and then I saw Kelly Helm trying to pull away from Alex Helm, who was dragging her off of the front lawn of their house and back inside. I could have stopped right then and gone back to my groceries. I could have reminded myself of Kurt’s advice about people needing space to figure things out on their own. But this was a little girl who was being manhandled by someone who ought to have been protecting her.

  And it was Kelly. My Kelly.

  I caught up to Alex Helm just as he reached the door. “Who do you think you are?” I demanded, breathless. I really was going to have to do more exercise if I got this angry this often.

  “I’m sorry to have disturbed your day,” Alex Helm said, his eyes glinting, “but I am simply disciplining a disobedient child. I am sure you have done the same in your day, Sister Wallheim.”

  God, I wished that I wasn’t just “Sister Wallheim.” I wished that being the bishop’s wife granted me some title of authority.

  “Disobedient child? What in the world was she doing that was so terrible?”

  “I told her not to go outside. It was a simple rule, designed to keep her safe,” he said. He was holding her, and she was struggling.

  How I wanted to yank her away from him and call the police. But I knew very well that it would only end with her being sent back home. What I had seen did not constitute child abuse. It probably wouldn’t even warrant a follow-up call with DCFS.

  “There aren’t any news vans out here. What is the danger you are trying to protect her from, then?” I asked.

  “That is none of your concern. I told her to follow a rule, and she refused to do it. She needs to learn that she can’t do that.”

  Was this just about power? “It’s a nice day. The sun is out. It’s not even that cold,” I said. It was April at last. “The snow is gone. She must be itching for a chance to feel the grass under her feet.” As I looked over at her, I could see that Kelly had bare feet. The ground was still wet, and there were brown splotches from mud that had gotten between her toes, but it made me feel even more sorry for her. What was wrong with a little girl getting mud between her toes?

  “Thank you for your opinion, but Kelly is my granddaughter and I am the one who will face the bar of God for her one day for how she is raised,” said Alex Helm.

  “Yes, you definitely will,” I muttered. The heat I had felt when I came running over was gone now. I just wanted to hold Kelly’s hand in mine, and tell her that everything was going to be all right, but that would be a lie, wouldn’t it?

  “Now, please get off my porch, Sister Wallheim, and let me get back to teaching my granddaughter the way that a proper young woman acts.” He swept past me and slammed the door.

  I was left with the realization that I had gained nothing, and might possibly have lost all the good will I had so carefully built up. False good will, but even so. And now? Alex Helm wasn’t going to be asking me to come over and babysit Kelly for him, that was for sure.

  CHAPTER 27

  The police took two weeks to determine that the body in the Torstensens’ backyard, killed by blunt-force trauma to the head, was “likely Helena Torstensen.” The problem with an actual identification was that there were no dental records that anyone could find for Helena Torstensen, and they had no DNA from her. They could do a mitochondrial test with her two sons, but that would take months to finish and it would be expensive.

  There was no evidence that she had had cancer, which was what Liam Torstensen now insisted. The stories Tobias had told about a heart condition and a car accident were both clearly out. But Liam seemed to believe that his father might have worked some kind of “mercy killing” on his young wife, and suffered for it for the rest of his life, concealing the guilt he felt, but still being enough in love with her that he did crazy things like trying to find women who looked like her to pretend with him for a while that she was still alive.

  The only thing that made me consider Liam’s version was that it helped explain how Tobias Torstensen could have remarried a woman like Anna and then lived happily with for thirty more years without a hint of a criminal personality. If a man was a wife murderer, how had he changed so completely? How could a man who killed be such a kind and loving father?

  The police had called Anna back from her cruise, and it had taken her ten days to find a port and book a flight home. She’d only been back since the weekend, and she, too, had not been allowed in the house.

  Anna had called to ask me to go with her to meet the police. I met her at the walk leading up to her house and was delighted to see her. I hugged her briefly, then stepped back to look at her. She looked tanned and tense.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “As well as can be expected,” she said.

  She already knew the news about Joseph and Willow’s baby coming, which I’d shared in a short email, excited that she and I were going to be grandmothers within a span of months. I suppose we could have emailed more, but I’ve never learned how to do real sharing via a computer screen.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” Anna said.

  “I’m glad you called to ask me.” I desperately wanted to find an answer here. The case with Carrie Helm seemed to have ground to a halt, and the police were not following any new leads. It seemed that her murder would go unsolved, and I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, unsettled by the thought.

  “I feel like I’m reeling, like I haven’t been able to sit down since I heard about the body,” said Anna. “At first I thought it
was the cruise, but even when I was on solid ground, I felt the same disorientation. The whole world keeps moving around me, and I have to keep looking at my feet or I will fall.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “It isn’t just that he killed someone. It’s that I never guessed. I always saw him as such a gentle man, incapable of violence for any reason.” At least she wasn’t spouting a theory like Tomas’s about Tobias’s innocence. “We all believed him,” I said. I didn’t like to think that I was gullible, but they say Utah is the con capital of the world. People who are strong adherents to a miracle-based religion are more likely to believe in other miracles. And we tend to believe the best of others, never guessing that a scam might be perpetrated on us by someone claiming to be a member of our own church.

  “Thirty years,” whispered Anna. “Why did he do it?”

  “Kill her, you mean? Maybe there was some terrible argument, and then he panicked and buried her? I suspect he must have thought about her every day since then, and felt guilty about it.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I have to forgive him, does it? He killed his wife and then hid it. He escaped all the consequences.”

  I felt more sympathy for him than she could in that moment, perhaps. Tobias had been so young at the time, and he had two sons to care for. He must have wondered what would happen to them if their mother was killed and their father was in prison for life.

  “Everything was a lie. Every word that he ever said to me,” said Anna, her whole body slumped as I had never seen it before, even when Tobias was on his deathbed. This wasn’t just physical exhaustion. It was emotional dissolution.

  “Surely not. He loved you, Anna. He truly did.”

  “He loved her, too,” said Anna. “And look what he did to her.”

  I thought again of the brand new hammer Tobias had kept by the bedside, a twin to the ruined one in the garden, and quailed.

  “What’s in that?” asked Anna, nodding to the bag I was carrying.

  It held the old hammer and the dress I had found in the shed. I had delayed taking it into the police several times during the last two weeks, not wanting to deal with questions about why I hadn’t called them in the first place, back in February, when Tobias had still been alive. But now I wished I had made a separate visit so that Anna didn’t have to deal with so much all at once.

  I showed Anna the dress again, reminding her that I had found it in the shed. This time she saw the bloodstains immediately.

  “How did I miss this? I was so blind,” she said. Then her head jerked up. “You think that it was the dress she was wearing when she died?”

  “It might be.”

  “And the hammer?”

  I told her I’d found it in the garden.

  “A hammer,” she whispered. “Like the one on his side of the bed, always within reach.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “It might be a coincidence.”

  She stared at me. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I believe that people can change,” I said truthfully. And Tobias might be one of them. Wasn’t that what religion was all about?

  But it was also true that if people changed, part of the evidence of the change was the willingness to face consequences for their past sins. And Tobias had not shown that. He had done everything he could to obscure the truth about his wife’s death, until he himself had been too far gone to tell any more.

  A police car drove up and a detective got out. He introduced himself to us as “Detective Eric Dun,” then motioned to us to follow him into the house, so we did. He was younger than I would have imagined, and he had startlingly blue eyes. He smelled faintly of motor oil, though I could only guess at why.

  As we stepped through the front door, I felt surprise rinse through me like cold water. The house seemed completely changed. It wasn’t just the plastic on the carpet and the stale smell. The furniture had all changed. I had seen it when the Gearys moved in, but it was strange to be here now with Anna at my side. It made the change feel more permanent. The house had died, too, not just Tobias.

  “Can you think of anything that your husband might have told you about his first wife that would tell us why he killed her?” asked the detective, when we were all sitting in the front room.

  “He never spoke of her to my recollection,” said Anna.

  “Never? Did that strike you as odd?” asked Detective Dun. He was sitting across from us on an upholstered chair the Gearys must have brought in.

  Anna looked at me, and I smiled at her reassuringly.

  “It was a painful topic and it didn’t seem to have immediate relevance to our lives. She was dead and he was married to me,” said Anna.

  “Well, what about your life with him? Was there anything about it that made you suspicious about the kind of man you had married?” He took notes on a small pad of paper spread over his lap.

  Anna told him about an argument over checking accounts, when she had wanted to have hers separate from Tobias’s. She claimed it was the only time she had ever heard Tobias raise his voice to her. “It was right here. In this room,” she added, pointing at the space between us, and I could see that she was imagining it in her mind.

  “And what about his sons? Was he ever angry or violent with them?”

  Anna shook her head. “He sometimes shouted at them to get their attention, but I never worried he would hurt them. He was a very good father and loved his sons devotedly.”

  “Hmm. So if his wife had threatened to take the boys away with her?” Detective Dun asked.

  This wasn’t what I had expected. I hadn’t realized the police took this case so seriously. I thought this was only a formality.

  “I don’t know,” said Anna. She looked at me again.

  If someone had threatened to take my boys away when they were that age, I might have been capable of murder. But then again, I might have been capable of murder on any day of the week. I didn’t have grand notions about some people being born killers and others not.

  “This is hard for her to take in, of course. We all thought of Tobias as a wonderful man,” I said as tears started to drip down Anna’s face. I handed over the dress and the hammer and explained where I had found them.

  “Damn,” said the detective as he opened the bag and held up each piece in the light streaming in from the front window.

  “Can you still test the blood on the dress?” I asked. “Or whatever is on the hammer? Could it be the murder weapon?”

  “It could be. The problem is the chain of custody. You took the hammer from the garden and to your garage, where it has been for months now. And as for the dress, we don’t know anything about how the blood got to be on it. If you’d called us immediately, we might have been able to question Tobias about it while he was still alive.” Detective Dun was staring at me accusingly.

  “But there was no body at the time,” I said. “You would have thought I was crazy, thinking a dying old man had killed his first wife some thirty-odd years ago.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  He let out a breath and seemed to sink into himself a bit. “I’ll tell you a story about why I would have listened to you, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said. I looked at Anna and she nodded.

  “My sister was killed by her husband. Three years ago. She called me the day it happened, asking me for help. I thought I could wait to get to her. I thought she was exaggerating.”

  I bristled at that.

  “That evening, when I finally got to her house, she was dead. So I take women more seriously now. I listen, and try to step in when I can still save a life.”

  He was breathing heavily, and it looked like he felt a little ill. I knew what that was like, giving away too much of yourself when you hadn’t expected to and then waiting to see how it was received.

  “I find myself telling that story more and more often now. I wish it wasn’t applicable in so many of the cases I investigate, b
ut it is.”

  “Even here in Utah?” said Anna.

  “Maybe especially here in Utah,” said Detective Dun.

  It humanized the detective for me, seeing why he felt called to his profession. I’d never faced a tragedy like that in my own life—before this. “But it’s not as if Tobias could be prosecuted now,” I said. “I don’t see what the point is in making a fuss over all of this.”

  Detective Dun straightened his shoulders, back in his authority role, his head rising above the line of the chair. “The point is that people like you think they have seen enough detective shows on TV to do things on their own. But they shouldn’t. If there were a possibility of a real case here, you would have jeopardized it to the point of making the D.A. wonder if he should even try to go to trial. Any defense lawyer would have a field day with the possibilities of what might have happened to the dress and hammer in the time it was in your garage.”

  He was right, of course. After the fact, I could see that I had taken too much on myself. It stung to hear him treat me like a child who had stepped into the street without looking both ways.

  “Promise me you won’t ever do something like this again. Call the police if you find something. Immediately,” said Detective Dun. There was just a hint of pleading in his voice now, underneath the demand. He stood up, putting everything back in the bag. “I will tell you what I am most afraid of, Mrs. Torstensen,” he said, towering above her now, since she was still on the couch.

  “What’s that?” asked Anna, her hands shaking until she put them flat on her knees.

  “If your husband was able to fool you and all your neighbors, and keep this body buried right under your noses, it makes us concerned that we may yet find other bodies,” said the detective. “It could be years before we figure out the extent of what he did.”

  This struck me as both far-fetched and insensitive to Anna’s emotional state. Surely the police didn’t assume that there were serial killers behind every body found buried in a garden. Although, I suppose a body having gone undiscovered for so long was a sign of careful planning. Sociopathic serial killers are good at covering up their crimes, because their strategy is never compromised by remorse.