His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “Sometimes I wish that you could be the one I confess to,” said Anna. “Instead of Kurt. Women maybe need another woman who understands.”

  I thought of Sheri Tate, who’d done that very thing. But that wasn’t my place as the bishop’s wife. I had no official role and no priesthood power. Did that mean that I couldn’t be inspired, as well?

  “I wish you could put your hands on my head and give me a blessing right now,” Anna said.

  “Me?” I asked, confused. I’d always known Anna was a bit of an iconoclast, but this went beyond skipping Relief Society meetings during the week and talking about Ordain Women leader Kate Kelly with sympathy.

  “In the temple, women put hands on women and bless them. I don’t see why it’s not the same outside the temple.” She looked at me directly.

  I was the one who flinched away. Because it wasn’t the same. We both knew it wasn’t. She was talking heresy now, the very thing likely to get someone excommunicated from the church—all temple sealings canceled, no longer allowed to speak to or serve the ward family.

  “You’re always talking about how women need to take more power within Mormonism,” said Anna, her head tilted to the side so that it caught the light from the rising sun just so—it almost made me think of Eve in the temple film that was essentially the story of the Garden of Eden.

  “I do talk about women taking power,” I said. But I didn’t mean giving priesthood blessings—did I?

  Anna started walking again. Her tone was more confident now. “Women are the reason I have stayed in the Mormon church all this time. My connection with other women, and the way I feel that we are the same when we worship together. Isn’t that true for you, too?”

  I thought about it, and realized that I didn’t know. I had come back to the Mormon church years ago because I wanted—something. And then I’d found Kurt. I guess that for me, my religion had been about family. But it wouldn’t be the same for everyone.

  Anna squeezed my arm. “You’re always thinking about how to follow the rules, or how to twist them to fit a situation. But someone else’s rules are never going to make you perfect.”

  We walked back to her house and I was left with a lot to think about.

  Chapter 29

  I called Detective Gore that Tuesday afternoon and told her about the letters that Emma had given me. After everything that had happened, and with my new doubts about Emma, I couldn’t hold the letters back anymore.

  Detective Gore came to pick up the letters herself, though I offered to bring them in to the precinct.

  “Emma Ashby gave these to you?” she asked as she looked through them. We were sitting on the couch in the front room. She showed no sign of discomfort or embarrassment reading them, as I had. I suppose if you were a police officer and then a detective, you got used to much worse things than sitting on strangers’ couches and looking through someone else’s explicit correspondences.

  “She asked me to burn them,” I said.

  “You don’t think she gave them to you wanting you to give them to the police?” said Detective Gore.

  I took a breath. That had been a possibility I had never considered. “I don’t know,” I said. Was Emma Ashby that calculating? Before the email campaign against Sheri Tate, I would have said no. Could she have written them all herself? And planted them after the police had searched her house, looking for evidence against her? I suppose she might have done it to point the finger at someone else. And I had gone right along with it.

  “Do you know Carl Ashby’s handwriting?”

  I shrugged. “A little bit. But I’m not an expert.”

  “Did she tell you where she had found these?” Her scrutiny made me squirm.

  “In his drawers,” I said.

  Detective Gore shook her head. “We would have found them in the search. Tell me, what is your impression of her relationship with her husband? Do you think that she had any reason to doubt his fidelity before he was murdered?” She seemed so matter-of-fact.

  “There was something wrong between them,” I admitted. “I overheard a conversation when I was on the phone with Emma. At the time, I almost wondered if Carl was abusive. He was saying something about his rights and her duties to him.” Was that right? I wasn’t sure anymore.

  “What if I were to tell you that Emma Ashby had moved a large sum of money out of their joint account and into her personal account a week before her husband was murdered?” she asked, watching me carefully.

  I tried not to show my surprise at this. “How much?”

  “More than two million dollars,” said Detective Gore.

  “What?” I was shocked.

  “There was ten million dollars in various accounts, mostly under his name. I believe the money was from an invention he patented some twenty years ago. A medical device used by doctors during difficult childbirths.”

  I was surprised to hear the nature of Carl’s invention. I wondered if it had been inspired by his own experience. Of course he’d never told anyone the details.

  The detective went on, her dark eyes boring into mine. “Carl Ashby’s will was written some years ago, and it divides the money between his wife and his children. But his lawyer claims that Carl recently called about changing the will, about six weeks ago. Do you know anything about that?”

  I shook my head. Carl wouldn’t have cut Emma and the children out of his will himself on legal grounds, would he? That would have outed him as legally female himself.

  “He apparently never got around to changing the will before he died. But the fact that he wanted to means something. I don’t know what to think of these letters . . .” She held them up. “You Mormons hold things awfully close to the chest. You’re the most forthcoming Mormon I’ve interviewed, and you’re no open book.”

  I could hardly blame her for her disdainful tone, considering.

  “And then there’s the community interference. Everyone sticking their nose in, telling me how to do my job. I don’t much like it.” Detective Gore spoke slowly, choosing her words deliberately, watching me in a way that made me wonder if she was telling me this for my benefit or for her own. “The chief tells me I can’t go after my prime suspect because she’s an innocent housewife. He knows because a friend of his who is a fellow Mormon told him.”

  Was she trying to make me feel ashamed of my own religion? Well, it was working.

  She went on. “Can’t let out certain pieces of information to the press. Too inflammatory. And now I’m pushed into cleaning things up because there’s a big mess. And it’s all my fault, somehow, because I didn’t do my job after I was told I couldn’t do my job.”

  This was about President Frost. He was nervous about the fallout in our ward and the surrounding stake if the details of the case came to light. I hated to believe that Gore was right about Emma, but my doubts about her had been mounting for a while. Clearly, Gore was trying to get me to break rank and spill my community’s secrets, to feel like I was doing the right thing by helping her when no one else would.

  I guess I was another stonewalling Mormon, though, because I didn’t say anything to her about Sheri Tate, or Grant Rhodes, or William Ashby. I felt like I should protect them all somehow. Why? Because they were members of the ward, and I was the bishop’s wife.

  “Well, thank you for these, in any case,” she said. “If there’s nothing else you want to tell me?” She waited for a long moment.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I will talk to you again, I’m sure, Mrs. Wallheim,” she said, and left.

  Chapter 30

  I didn’t say anything to Kurt about what Detective Gore had implied about President Frost and the chief of police, but I did tell him about Emma’s transferring money out of the accounts she shared with Carl.

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason for that,” said Kurt, but he didn’t
suggest what one might be. I wondered if Detective Gore’s problems with Mormon interference were from more than President Frost, and I stopped talking because I didn’t want her to have to deal with more pressure about the subject of Emma Ashby.

  On Wednesday, Samuel offered to come over and have lunch with me at home. It should have been lovely, but I expended all my energy trying not to cry over him. He seemed to be adjusting to his new apartment life just fine. He had been open with his roommates about being gay, and they were all welcoming, at least for now. He was going through mission papers with his new bishop instead of with Kurt, which I thought was a good idea, too. That way, he didn’t have to talk about anything uncomfortable with his father—not that I thought he had anything he needed to confess. But just in case.

  When he left again, I let myself cry noisily in my room. Afterward, I felt hollowed out and pitiful, sure this was the end of my life. Which was why I went back to poking around in the Carl Ashby murder.

  That afternoon, Alice Ashby came to see me. It was as if God had been listening to me complain about Samuel being gone. I felt needed as soon as I opened the door. Alice looked too thin. Hungry. And that was one thing I knew how to fix. I asked her into the kitchen and offered her a fresh batch of my patented whole-wheat gingersnaps, made completely out of food storage supplies: molasses, whole wheat flour, oil, and a giant container of spices. In an apocalypse, not only would we not starve, we’d live well.

  They were Samuel’s favorites. If he were here, he would have eaten a whole dozen by himself. Maybe I could replace his hungry mouth with a few others, and keep going on as I had before. But Alice ate a few cookies, then put a hand to her stomach.

  “What can I do for you, besides give you a stomachache?” I asked, though I could have guessed the answer.

  “I just wanted someone to talk to. Someone who isn’t—”

  Her mom, I thought.

  “—who isn’t pushing me about a long list of things I should be doing when all I can think about is my dad being dead and my whole life making no sense at all.” She looked at me with real confusion in her eyes.

  Poor girl. “Well, maybe it’s a good thing you have the summer off right now. So you can spend some time healing before school starts again.”

  “And then I’m supposed to care about school and grades and stupid assignments and tests again?” said Alice. “What about right now? All my friends want to talk about is clothes and sleeping in and watching stupid YouTube videos. Or kissing boys. I can’t stand to hear about them. It just makes me want to float away in some hot-air balloon where I can look down and see all the people like tiny ants below me.” She raised a hand to the air.

  That kind of detachment didn’t sound good. “You can focus on one thing at a time,” I suggested. That’s the way I’d survived Georgia’s death, with lists of concrete things I could do to get through each day. But she didn’t have people depending on her in quite the same way I had. “Maybe you could study for the ACT and SAT for a little while each day.”

  “Why? To get into college? What’s the point?” she said. “As soon as I’m twenty-one, I’ll get all the money Dad left for us. It’s not like I’m ever going to have to work. I can do whatever I want and Mom can’t stop me. What kind of a job is going to earn me more than the interest I’ll get from Dad’s money?”

  “So, do you want to live off your dad’s money, or do you want to make your own life?” I asked bluntly. It was one thing to be in mourning. It was something else to ruin her future while she was doing that.

  “My own life? Yeah, right. There are seven billion people on the planet. How can one more or less matter?” said Alice dully. She pushed the plate away and started tapping absently at the tabletop.

  “One life can matter, if it’s lived deliberately. If you live with an aim of making a difference in the world,” I said.

  “No one makes a real difference in the world,” Alice said softly.

  I looked at her, this sad girl with so much of her life in disarray, whose own mother had nothing to offer her right now, no guidance or support. I tried not to think of Georgia, who never got to be Alice’s age, but I said to Alice what I would have said to one of my own children. “Why don’t you stop telling me about how most people don’t matter and start thinking about your own choices? What are your dreams?”

  Alice let out a long breath and shrugged elaborately. “Dad wanted me to become a doctor.”

  “I didn’t ask what your dad wanted.” Was she so used to being told how to think that she couldn’t even tell me what she wanted? No wonder she thought her life insignificant.

  “Mom thinks medical school is too hard, and besides, working a doctor’s hours would mean I couldn’t be a mother. She says maybe a nurse. But that’s almost as hard to do, and the hours aren’t great, either.”

  I had known several Mormon women who were doctors in my life, and they seemed to manage motherhood and a demanding job, as long as they had husbands and other family members who were understanding. Nursing was just as difficult as being a doctor, as far as I knew, but it paid less and got less cred.

  “Do you like science?” I asked. “Do you like computers? Do you like working with people?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I really like anything.”

  That distance again. I decided to try from another angle. “What subjects are you good at in school?” I asked.

  “I get straight As in everything,” said Alice.

  “But what do you like? What do you get excited about doing?”

  Instead of a shrug, she said, “I hate homework. All of it. But I do it, and then it’s done.”

  “And what do you do after it’s done?” I asked. There had to be something underneath all her lack of caring. Somewhere.

  “I go shopping with Mom sometimes. Or call up friends. Or do my nails.”

  I didn’t want to give her the impression that it wasn’t enough to do those things. But I had the feeling there was more, suppressed inside her for some reason.

  “What about William?” I tried. “What do you think he’s going to do with his life?”

  “Oh, he complains about everything. He hates school as much as I do.”

  “But what does he like?” I asked. “What do you think he would be really good at? I mean, if you could design a future life for him, what would you have him do?” Give someone the chance to pick out a present for someone else, and you learn a lot about them. I used to do this with Samuel, the only son of mine who refused to make a list of things he wanted for Christmas or birthdays. But he was happy to pick things out for his brothers. Somewhere in what he wanted for them, I could see what he wanted for himself.

  “Well, if William listened to me at all, he would think about joining the Air Force. He has always wanted to fly airplanes. When he was little, you could see him just light up when he saw a jet overhead. When Dad went on a trip and we picked him up at the airport, it was like William forgot about everything else but the jets.”

  “So why doesn’t he sign up for an ROTC program for the Air Force?” Hill Air Force Base was in Layton, and that was only about forty minutes north of here.

  I got a full eye roll from Alice at that. “Mom wouldn’t have it. It’s too dangerous. She doesn’t want to worry about him every moment for the rest of her life. She doesn’t even like it when I go out driving. And now she says that William has forfeited his right to get a driver’s license at sixteen. He has to wait until he’s eighteen and he has to have his A1c below seven point five, which is even harder than the eight the doctors say.”

  I assumed this must have something to do with his diabetes, and the insulin levels a patient needed to maintain to drive safely without risking diabetic shock. “And you don’t think that sounds sensible after what already happened?” I asked, not mentioning Grant Rhodes directly.

 
Alice waved her hands in the air, using up her own nervous energy. “William needs something exciting. He needs to push himself. Dad would try to play football with him to get out some of the energy, but now that he’s gone, I can see William just blowing up at random things. He needs an outlet. But Mom thinks that every time he does something wrong, she should just punish him more.”

  Was William in danger? Maybe, but at the moment I really needed to get Alice to open up to me. I couldn’t help her if I didn’t know more.

  “And what would William say that you wanted?” I asked.

  “William? He doesn’t know what I want. He doesn’t pay attention to me. I’m just a girl,” she said, as if this were a perfectly reasonable attitude for him to have.

  Hadn’t her father or mother ever taken William to task about it? I guessed not, after what I’d heard from Carl at the bishopric dinner. “Then what would your friends say you wanted?”

  A shrug. “Clothes and makeup and maybe plastic surgery,” she said.

  Again, only things that related to her appearance. Because clothes and makeup were what she loved? Or because that was what she thought a woman had to be? Interesting, considering that her father had been the one to worry most about appearances. “Are you unhappy with how you look?” I asked.

  A snort. “No one is happy with how they look. Not really.”

  Truer than I wished it was. “Maybe you should think about a career in fashion design. Or being a makeup artist,” I said.

  Alice made a face. “Helping people do things they shouldn’t care about? Making life even more expensive for them?” She shook her head. “My mom would hate that.”

  “Oh? What else would your mom hate you doing?” I had the feeling I had almost hit the geyser here. It had taken long enough.