His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “You are who you are,” Anna said with a faint smile.

  “What does that mean?” It sounded like something Kurt would say to me, and I hadn’t gone to Kurt with this conversation for some very specific reasons. I didn’t want vague, Kurt-like answers intended to spare my feelings.

  “It means that other people aren’t who they really are—they aren’t true to themselves. So it can be intimidating to see someone who is. But it can also be inspiring, Linda. I hope you don’t think you should change.”

  “But I don’t want people to think that I believe I’m above them somehow. I don’t want them to feel like they can’t talk to me.”

  Anna didn’t say anything for a while as we walked up the steep hill. Once again, I wished I had brought water with me. I was already dripping with sweat.

  I wished the air were cleaner as I pulled it into my lungs with heaving gasps. We reached the top of the hill and stopped to catch our breath. “Linda,” Anna said finally, “the reason people don’t want to talk to you is because you are honest. Brutally, unflinchingly honest. You force people to face their own failures and weaknesses, and that can be painful.”

  Directly below us was the temple. I wished I could believe all my answers were in that building, but I didn’t. “I face my own failures and weaknesses. I can make long lists of them. Do you think it would help if I brought that up more?”

  Anna laughed and we started back down the hill again. “No, I don’t think so.”

  So I was stuck with who I was and how people reacted to me, it seemed. I had Anna as a friend, though. Maybe that wasn’t so bad.

  Chapter 22

  That afternoon, I was elbow deep in sweet roll dough when the phone rang. This time, it was Grant Rhodes. He sounded stiff and angry.

  “Sister Wallheim, I am wondering if you would be willing to come and pick me up at the police station. They’ve finished questioning me and are letting me go, but they aren’t driving me home.” His voice was a little slurred with exhaustion.

  If they were letting him go, they must not have been planning to arrest him. At least not immediately. “If you’re sure you want me to get you,” I said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “You’re the only person who has treated me like a human being in the last two weeks,” said Grant. “I just want to relax and feel safe again.”

  “All right,” I said. I was dying to ask him what was going on. I hung up and put the roll dough in the refrigerator. It would keep until I got back.

  But before I left for the station, I called Kurt to tell him where I was going.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said. “Isn’t he a murder suspect?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. I’d talked to the man dozens of times before. “I brought him banana bread.”

  “And that’s like a shield of virtue to protect you against any evil intention?” said Kurt. “Linda, I could ask someone else to go pick him up. One of the retired high priests in the ward. Or I could find someone who can take time off work.”

  I considered it for one brief moment. Should I be warier here? But I shook off any fear. “Kurt, I’d much prefer he think of me as a friend than an enemy. That’s surely the best thing for the whole ward in the long run, if we’re ever going to heal.”

  “We do need to heal,” Kurt agreed.

  “And the police are releasing him. That means they don’t think he’s guilty, right?” Then again, it also meant that the murderer was still out there, somewhere in our ward. Possibly at church every Sunday.

  Kurt was silent for a moment. “You’re itching to ask him about why the police called him in, aren’t you?”

  I was a little embarrassed about that, but it was true. Kurt knew me too well. “I’ll talk to you tonight?” I said.

  “Yes. Take notes. I want to hear it all.” His tone was more amused than worried.

  I drove down to the police station and waited for a few minutes. Grant Rhodes was filling out some final paperwork at the front desk, and he waved to me when he heard the door open.

  Hunched over the papers, he looked different than I’d ever seen him. Diminished, somehow. The skin of his face seemed paper thin, and his jowls hung down limply. His protruding skull appeared small and fragile. Here was Grant Rhodes as he would look when he was dead, I thought.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” I replied, and led him out to my car.

  He got into the passenger side, but I had to remind him to put his seat belt on before I pulled out.

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I’d imagined asking him questions, but considering his state, that seemed utterly inappropriate, so I waited for him to speak.

  He started to weep when I was only a block away from the station. Not quiet sobs, but great, loud waves of pain.

  I pulled over and put a hand on the top of his shoulder to comfort him. He threw himself toward me, his arms outstretched, and I felt trapped for a moment. But he rocked back and forth and once I got into the rhythm of his grief, I felt less constrained. I patted his back and said, “Grant, Grant, it’s okay, I’m here,” over and over again.

  Several times, I thought he was finished, but then he’d break down uncontrollably again.

  About a half hour later, Kurt texted to see why I hadn’t told him I was home. I texted back quickly—later—just so he wouldn’t call in the cavalry.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, when Grant was winding down a fourth time and I finally thought it might be for real.

  He took in a shuddering breath. “They wanted to know where I was on Friday night. When he was killed. Carl.”

  “Where were you?” I asked. “Home?” That would make it difficult for him in terms of an alibi.

  He shook his head. “I was out. On a date.”

  That was a surprise to me. “With a woman?” I said before I could stop myself.

  But he didn’t seem to notice the implication of my surprise. “Her name is Jenny. Jenny Rue. She’s a car enthusiast,” he said. “I met her at a vintage show a few months ago.”

  “Oh. How lovely,” I said.

  “They wanted her name, her cell phone number, everything about her. How often we had dated, who had introduced us, what we had done that night. Every detail.”

  Well, at least it was clear the police were looking beyond Emma.

  “I feel so humiliated,” Grant went on. “They said they would call her and ask her to come in and verify everything. They said that if she disagreed with me in any substantive way, they would have to ask me to come in again and account for myself.”

  “I’m sure everything will be fine,” I said, hoping I was right.

  “I haven’t talked to her since that night,” said Grant. “I’m afraid she’ll be angry at me and that she might—well—not tell the truth.” He pulled back so he could look me in the eye. “Do you think she might hate me enough to lie to the police?”

  “Did something happen on the date that would make you think that? Did it end badly in some way?”

  He shook his head. “But what do I know? It’s been so long since I last went on a date that I’m not sure I could tell.”

  How hard could it be to tell if a woman had been unhappy on a date? To someone like Grant, maybe very hard. “What did she say to you at the end? Did she ask you to call her? Did she get out of your car quickly without saying goodnight?”

  “She was polite,” he said. “She didn’t ask me to call her again, though. She said, ‘Thank you.’”

  “Ah,” I said. Well, it didn’t sound like she’d been angry at him. Just not interested.

  “I don’t understand women. They make no sense to me at all.” His mouth twitched. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying that to you.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. He was just being
honest. Though I have always been confused by the way some men seem to think that women are alien creatures who need to be explored scientifically. We are much more like men than we are different from them.

  “Do you think I could drive you home now?” I asked.

  For the first time, Grant seemed to notice that I had pulled over to the side of the road. “Oh, of course. You must be wanting to get back to your own life. I am sorry to have taken up so much of your time.”

  But what life was there for me back home except for roll dough? Samuel wasn’t home; he had found an apartment and was signing the lease for it today. He would graduate at the end of the week, but he’d skipped classes all of last month, not caring if he got bad grades. In his mind, he was off to college.

  Kurt and I were already empty nesters in every way that counted, and I guess this case had come up conveniently as an excuse for me to deal with something other than the emotional implications of everything going on at home.

  “I only meant that you might be more comfortable at home,” I said, feeling like I had somehow eased into the role of Grant Rhodes’s mother figure. The banana bread had worked almost too well.

  “Yes,” he said. He sighed and nodded.

  I started driving again. He tried to pull himself together, wiping at his eyes and taking deep breaths. It took a good ten minutes.

  “Carl Ashby’s death affected me more than I thought it would,” he confessed when we were almost at his house.

  “Oh?” I said nonchalantly, hoping that would keep him talking.

  “It made me think of how easily we all could die. Just one moment alive and the next gone,” he said. “And then there was the fact that he and I argued so much. I wondered if somehow that had caused his death.” He held up his hands. “Not that I did it. I wasn’t anywhere near there, and I could never—do that. But is it possible that my anger was transferred to someone else? Or that I made him react to someone else?” He shook his head.

  “I don’t think so, Grant,” I said.

  “I hated him in the end. So much. I’m not sure I’ve ever hated someone like that before,” Grant went on.

  “In the end?” I had pulled into his driveway.

  He put a hand on the door, but didn’t open it. “You can come in,” he said. His eyes were rimmed with red, but in other ways he seemed better, as if the weeping had restored him. Why didn’t it ever work like that for me?

  We sat in his living room while he fixed me some Postum. It had been a long time since I’d had Postum. It was something I’d grown up on, a hot, dark-colored drink made from very finely ground roasted barley. It looked like coffee in the cup but didn’t taste much like it, unless you thought of coffee as burned and nasty, which I guess most Mormons did. But once you put a lot of cream and sugar in it, I suppose you could pretend it was almost anything.

  Grant’s living room was decorated with black leather arm chairs, the walls a deep teal. White lace curtains hung in the windows. Stenciling ran along the border of the ceiling, a nice floral. I puzzled over the different impulses at work and wondered if there had been a steady girlfriend in the past I didn’t know about.

  “Are you feeling guilty about your relationship with Carl?” I asked him when he rejoined me. “If you want to talk to Kurt, I’m sure he would be glad to help you sort through your emotions. Tell you what process you need to go through to be good with God.”

  Mormons don’t have anything so simple as a Catholic confession, where you say what you have done and are given a set penance for it. Usually you only go to confess to a Mormon bishop if you have committed a serious sin, like breaking your marriage vows or abusing your children. You could go to a bishop for counseling about smaller sins, but he wouldn’t necessarily be able to absolve you of sin or even tell you what you needed to do for forgiveness. He could give advice or offer discipline if necessary.

  “I don’t think I’m ready to do that,” said Grant. “And besides, Kurt isn’t technically my bishop. My records are still in this ward.” He waved to the houses around him.

  “I know that. But this isn’t an issue of church policy. It’s an issue of conscience.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Grant sipped at the Postum.

  “It isn’t your fault he’s dead, you know. Being angry with him didn’t cause him to get killed. It doesn’t work that way.”

  Grant didn’t say anything.

  I wanted him to keep talking to me, about anything. So I tried our last topic. “This girl, Jenny. You didn’t feel any connection with her?”

  “None,” said Grant.

  “But you are interested in dating? I’m just wondering if I should ask around and see if there’s someone else I could set you up with. Any ideas about what kind of woman you would be interested in?” Not that I had any desire to meddle in love lives. There were plenty of online Mormon dating services already.

  “I think one date this year is plenty for me.” He didn’t elaborate.

  I raised my mug of Postum, inhaled deeply, and realized something. I stood up and headed toward the kitchen. “Just need a glass of water. Hope you don’t mind!” I called out. I poked around in the kitchen, as if looking for a glass. When I opened the cupboard next to the stove and took out the Postum jar, I sniffed it deeply, and realized it was coffee. There was no sign of a freeze-dried coffee can anywhere here, but the Postum jar was pretty old and the wrapper around it was yellowing. He must constantly transfer the powder from one container to the other, and then go on lying to himself about what he was doing.

  No wonder he’d had so many problems with the bishop of his assigned ward. I’d always thought they were philosophical. I dumped out my cup into the sink, and refilled it with water after swishing out any remaining coffee.

  I could have finished the whole cup and told Kurt that I hadn’t known what it was, that Grant had lied to me. It would have been a good excuse to drink coffee, which I seriously missed from my atheist period. But I would have known I was lying, and what point was there in that? I could have coffee any time I wanted. No one was stopping me except for me.

  I had made a commitment to Mormonism before Kurt and I married. It wasn’t the only church I thought had truth in it. I wasn’t even sure it had the most truth. But it was my truth. It was the religion I had been brought up in, the religion whose rituals were most comforting to me. When I went back to God, Mormonism was the religion I went back to. And I was going to follow its rules, not because they made me more worthy or more wise, but because they were part and parcel of the rest of it. If I wasn’t willing to do the small things, then there was no point in being in the religion at all.

  On the other hand, I felt no need to chastise Grant about his choices. I knew there were plenty of Mormons who would have felt betrayed or even defiled by breaking the Word of Wisdom inadvertently, but I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t think it was purity from the substances themselves that mattered. It was your relationship to God, and that was completely individual.

  “Carl Ashby and I were friends in college,” Grant announced when I went back into the living room to sit down. “Did you know that?”

  “No. I had no idea,” I said. This was what I had come to hear about. This had to be why the police had questioned Grant, not because of his religious arguments with Carl.

  “We were in the same department and hung out in the same common areas.”

  I felt like the world had turned upside down and I was trying to figure out how to rearrange it again into a coherent scene. Grant and Carl had been about the same age, though I hadn’t thought of that before now. Late forties to early fifties. Carl had been thinner and in better shape, but they were both getting older.

  “He was still Carla Thompson then?” I asked.

  Grant stared into his coffee, swirling it around as if his whole past were in there, if only he squinted hard enough. He spoke as if he were in so
me kind of trance: “When we graduated, we lost touch for a long time. He got married and I—didn’t.” There was sorrow and longing in his voice, and I wondered if it was possible that Grant Rhodes had been in love with the Carla he’d known in college. It made a complicated wrinkle in the division between gay, bisexual, and heterosexual.

  “But I saw him in the store one day a few years ago. I recognized him despite all the changes,” said Grant

  I could not imagine Carl as a woman. Had he walked differently? Interacted differently with others? Or had he always been masculine as a woman? How had Grant recognized him so easily, in a random location? Had he seen him from a distance? Had they literally bumped into each other? What a huge coincidence. Did Grant think it had been the hand of God at work?

  Grant continued. “He didn’t see me, but maybe he hadn’t thought about me as much as I’d thought about him all those years later. I followed him out to his car and then drove behind him to his house, sure I was going to lose him just when I had found him again. But when he pulled into the driveway, and I realized how close he lived, I knew I could find out more about him. That was when I made excuses to leave my ward and started attending with you.”

  What he was describing was stalking. I was sure Kurt hadn’t known anything about this, or he wouldn’t have been so welcoming and understanding toward Grant in the first place. I should have been more creeped out—I knew stalking was a sign of fixation, one that could possibly lead to murder—but I was dying to know what else Grant would say. I could hardly leave now, even if I’d wanted to.

  Grant set the coffee cup aside, and for a long moment I was afraid that the storytelling was over. Then he said, “Maybe I was crazy, but I really thought we would be friends again. I thought Carl would be glad to see me and we could talk. But he wasn’t. He was busy with his own life and he didn’t have time for me. And I was hurt.”

  “You knew he was a woman,” I blurted. “All this time, and you never hinted at it.” As soon as I spoke, I realized I was doing the same thing that Kurt, and Tom deRyke, and Detective Gore had done to Carl, which was to reduce him to his biology. I was ashamed of myself, but there was nothing I could do to take it back now.