“I want those letters back! I want to put them where everyone can see them!” said Emma. “I think they were from Sheri, but others can judge the truth.”
“The letters are gone,” I said. “You asked me to burn them, don’t you remember?” Which I hadn’t, but I didn’t say that.
“No! How could you do that?” Emma said wildly. She let out a huge, shaking sob and buried her head in her hands.
I remained focused on what I had come for. “Emma, you have to apologize to Sheri for this.” I was close enough to Emma now that I could touch her. She was backed into the corner by the refrigerator.
“She should apologize to me and my children! And then she should go to prison for the rest of her life!” said Emma. Her jaw was tight, the words indistinct, but loud and fierce.
Emma Ashby had made such a mess of our ward. All the bonds that Relief Society was supposed to nourish had been destroyed. And willfully. I found that I was now trembling in anger as I looked at Emma’s defiant face.
I slammed my fist into her mouth. I could feel the skin splitting against my knuckles, and the warm blood oozing out. As soon as that happened, I was ashamed of myself. What had I been thinking?
Emma groaned and fell to the floor.
I might have bent over and tried to help her, but before I had a chance to move, I felt myself pinned from behind.
“Linda, stop!” I heard Kurt’s voice in my ear.
He dragged me out of the house and then locked me in his truck. I saw him go back inside. He was ashamed of me, and I was ashamed of myself, too. But I wasn’t sure I had been entirely wrong.
Several long minutes later, Kurt returned and unlocked the truck and got in.
“I told you not to go to her house alone,” he said, looking straight ahead, his voice stern. Now he was the parent and I was the child.
“She’s dangerous,” I said, knowing it was justification.
“Linda, she could make a statement to the police and send you to jail for assault. You were trespassing on her property and she certainly has evidence of how you hurt her.”
“I know,” I said. “I have no excuse for doing that.” But I hoped it would make her think twice about gossiping about another woman in the ward just the same.
Chapter 27
For the rest of the week, Emma told everyone who asked her that it was Sheri Tate who had accosted her. I meant to correct anyone who talked to me about it directly, but no one did. I admit, I didn’t send out an email to the whole ward admitting my guilt because I thought it would be playing the same game. And also, Kurt asked me not to, at least not like that. Besides, it seemed Emma’s ranting had become so outrageous that people had stopped believing her. Even Verity called and said she thought something had to be done to rein Emma in.
On Sunday, I stayed home from church, depressed about the whole situation. I hadn’t cooked in a whole week, so I was in the kitchen, making myself hot chocolate with whipped cream and some fresh snickerdoodle cookies, when the doorbell rang.
I was afraid that it might be messengers Kurt had sent, ward members who were skipping a meeting to cheer me up. But it was Sheri Tate. And she wasn’t dressed in church clothes any more than I was. I tried to remember a time I had seen her dressed in sweatpants and a torn T-shirt but couldn’t think of one.
I opened the door and let her into the kitchen.
Before I asked her why she was here, I made her a cup of hot chocolate—the real stuff from milk and chocolate chips, not from the powder in a can. Whipped cream on top and a plate of fresh, hot cookies.
She didn’t take more than a sip and a tiny bite, but I thought I could see her shoulders relax just a little. Sugar therapy. I should have tried it on Emma Ashby.
“They’re releasing me today, but I couldn’t go,” said Sheri.
I felt a wave of anger like a hot flash, and had to breathe through it.
“I heard about what you did to Emma. I even saw the photos of her face that she posted online, though she said it was me who did it. I knew the truth. Thank you,” she said.
I wondered who had told her. Kurt? Who else knew? “You’re thanking me? Why are you thanking me? I made things a hundred times worse.”
“They were already so horrible, I’m pretty sure they couldn’t have gotten worse. And you let me feel the satisfaction of revenge without having to feel guilty about doing it myself.” Sheri’s lips twisted into a smirk.
She and I had never been particularly friendly, but I felt a companionable warmth toward her now, a fondness that comes from knowing someone well. “No, you are definitely not guilty for that.” I was glad she’d come.
“Did it feel good?” she asked, her eyes alight.
I thought back. “For a moment, I suppose.” I had felt like God’s avenging angel, but the feeling had faded now.
Sheri spread out her hands on the countertop and stared at them. They were sunspotted, wrinkled—the hands of a woman whose life had not been easy. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I can’t imagine a future where we stay here, but I can’t imagine leaving, either. Everyone and everything we know is here. But it’s all changed now.”
“What does Grayvon say?” I asked. Her children were all grown and out of the house now. Perdita had married last year, and she was the youngest. Sheri’s husband—thin as a rail and nearly seven feet tall—was a quiet, almost painfully shy man. He worked for the city government as a surveyor. When Sheri was around, Grayvon tended to fade into the background. Even when she wasn’t around, actually.
“He says that it’s up to me. But I think he wants to go. I’ve embarrassed him too much.”
Her hair was straggly and in her face, and I realized how much time she must have normally spent on it to make it look full and bouncy.
“I don’t know when I will be able to go back to church,” I said. “But since Kurt is bishop, I suppose I’ll eventually have to.” We were not going to be moving.
“Look at it this way: no one knows what you did,” said Sheri.
“Hmm. Which is worse, people thinking that you did something you didn’t? Or people not knowing you did something you did? Is it better to have dishonor but no guilt or guilt but no dishonor?”
Sheri shook her head. “That’s the problem. You think I’m innocent. That’s why I had to come over to see you today. This is what God insists that I do today—confess to you.”
Confess? I stared at her face, which was gradually suffused with color. She should’ve been with the bishop, not the bishop’s wife, if she truly had something to confess.
“I didn’t have an affair with Carl Ashby, but I flirted with him. What Emma thought she saw between us wasn’t nonexistent.”
“You—and Carl Ashby?” I managed to say, spitting out the sip of hot chocolate I’d been about to swallow. At least I hadn’t choked on it.
Carl had been loyal enough to Emma to share a marriage without sex, but he had let Sheri Tate flirt with him? Was it just an ego boost, or had he intended to follow through with it somehow?
Sheri looked at her hands for a long moment. “I touched his arm on several occasions. I hugged him twice. You know, in a way that might have looked too long to observers. And we had several meetings at the church that weren’t about anything other than us sitting together, talking about our lives and sharing things that we shouldn’t have been.”
And that was what she felt guilty about? She thought that justified her being forced out of her home and humiliated in public?
I didn’t understand any of this. If Carl had wanted something he couldn’t get from Emma, wouldn’t it have been sexual? Would his relationship with Sheri have led to that, eventually? Would she have wanted that? Was there something sexual missing in her marriage as well? Or was this just about them both enjoying the tiniest bit of the forbidden?
“I’m sure you think horribly o
f me now, and it’s just what I deserve. Even the police treated me as a suspect for a while there.” Sheri was gripping the cup so tightly that the handle broke off. Hot chocolate splashed everywhere and she cursed as she tried to mop it up with a towel. I was shocked at the cursing from Sheri Tate, by far the most Molly of all the Mormons I knew.
“Why would the police have treated you as a suspect?” I asked. But as soon as I considered it, I realized that Sheri would have had access to the church that night. She could have lured Carl there on some pretext or another.
She shook her head, the color in her face fading. “Carl and I had set up a time to meet and talk there that night, but I texted him at the last minute and told him I couldn’t make it. But I guess he didn’t get the text in time, because he went there anyway.”
I took the dirty towel from her and bunched it up in a pile on the counter. “So you didn’t go to the church?” I asked.
“No.” Sheri brushed her sweats and put her hands on the counter, folded neatly like we were in Primary and she was demonstrating proper behavior for the youngest kids there, the Sunbeams.
“Where were you, then?” I asked, feeling ridiculous about asking. If I couldn’t believe in Sheri Tate as an adulteress, how could I believe she was a murderer?
“Grayvon and I spent the night watching a movie on television,” she said.
“The letters?” I blurted out, without thinking about how old they were, far too old for her recent flirting with Carl. But she might have been lying about all of that. “Did you write those, too?”
“What letters?” Sheri said, looking up at me, her head tilted.
“You never wrote Carl any love letters?”
“No. Of course not. That would have been stupid. You don’t put down thoughts like that on paper. Someone might find them,” said Sheri.
Someone had found those letters. Emma.
Sheri sighed. “I keep thinking, if I hadn’t encouraged Carl—if I hadn’t set up that meeting with him at the church—he might still be alive now. He was only there that night because of me. Whoever murdered him had the chance because of me. If it was a burglary, he was only killed because he happened to be there at the wrong time, when he should have been home with his family.”
I pressed my hand on top of hers. She was right about that. I couldn’t deny it. It didn’t make her a murderer, but it made her guilty of something.
I could feel a slight shudder pass through Sheri. “After everything she’s done to me, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for Emma, but I feel for those children. I wish I could do something for them, but I’m just running away now. I need to be alone and think about things.” She stood up and I followed her.
At the door, I hugged Sheri tightly. “I’m so sorry for all of this.”
“Are you? Even still?” she asked. There was a hollowness in her voice. Would she ever forgive herself for this?
“Even still. I have always admired you, Sheri. Even when we disagreed. This doesn’t change that.”
She began to sob, her body limp against mine in the embrace. “It does change it. It takes everything away. Any good I’ve ever done is gone.”
“No, Sheri, it isn’t,” I said, as I wondered about my own good deeds and how much I had diminished them with what I had done to Emma.
Chapter 28
Anna called on Monday but I didn’t answer my phone. I let myself lie in bed and eat soup and watch trashy old Cary Grant movies all day. I’d always hated Suspicion, but after watching Emma Ashby in real life, I found I was now fascinated by it and watched certain scenes over and over again, trying to catch the lies and the facial tics that gave everything away.
Samuel looked in on me a couple of times and brought me the raspberry hibiscus herbal tea he knew I loved, but he was busy putting his boxes in our storage room in the basement, just as our other sons had done with everything they’d wanted to keep safe after graduating from high school. It was a graveyard of childhood treasures, things that I knew they were unlikely ever to take with them in the future. But Kurt and I held onto them anyway. Inside those boxes was the physical evidence of all our years of parenting, for good or ill.
By Tuesday morning Samuel had moved nearly everything out, leaving Kurt and me truly alone in our big house. Anna called again and I made myself answer and set up a time for a walk.
“I got those terrible emails about Sheri Tate. I tried to counter them as best I could,” said Anna as we started out on our usual walk around the neighborhood.
“I don’t want to talk about them,” I bit out.
“You always say that when you actually need to talk and don’t know how to begin,” Anna said, proving how well she knew me. Her long, gray hair was out of its normal ponytail so that it was dancing in the wind. She looked utterly carefree, and I was jealous of that.
“Then the truth is, I can’t talk about it. It’s not mine to share.” It was a good excuse for avoiding Anna’s judgment, at least, though I had shared plenty of other things with Anna I probably shouldn’t have. Technically, Sheri Tate’s confession to me had been personal, with no hint of church authority in it. If she had wanted guaranteed discretion, she should have gone to Kurt.
“Well, then,” said Anna.
We walked in silence for a few minutes. I wasn’t sure I was ready for the big hill yet, but here it was anyway.
“I will admit that I have something that’s been weighing on me since before we met, and it’s time that I tell you,” Anna said.
I was surprised enough to stop in my tracks. “Is it a bad thing?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, but motioned for me to keep walking with her. We were in silence for several blocks before Anna began again.
“When I read those emails,” she said finally, “I thought about how devastating it would be to have all the truth come out like that. Even if Sheri Tate was guilty, and I have no reason to believe that she is, to have all her worst deeds thrown in her face. And then to have to look people in the eyes . . .”
I made a noncommittal sound. We had finally crested the hill and were right on the mountain. In the fall, it was colored red and gold, but now it was all shades of green and brown and gray, a combination unique to Utah.
“But I’m not talking about Sheri right now. I’m talking about me.” She stopped walking and looked out over the lake, as if she were confessing to it, and not to me. “I’ve never told anyone this before, but a few years after we were married, I felt like Tobias was ignoring me. I realize now that he had his own worries, but at the time, I was hurt and angry and I told myself I had license to cheat on him. I wanted to hurt him, and I looked around for someone to hurt him with.”
“You cheated on Tobias?” I said in a whisper. Anna? I would never have guessed it. Not in all the eternities.
“It was a short-lived thing, just a couple of weeks. I think we slept together four times all in all. It was just sex. Just his bits and my bits. It was mechanics, like a recipe in a book. You know?”
I felt sick for a moment.
It is terrible to violate marriage vows for anyone in any marriage, but especially in a marriage between Mormons, who believe that the procreative power is as close to godhood as we can ever get—so this news was shocking to me, even if Anna and Tobias had never had their marriage sealed forever in the temple.
Had she ever confessed her sin? Did she still have a temple recommend? Anna might say it was just about “bits,” but this was enough for some people to be excommunicated. I loved Anna, and I feared for her soul.
Facing the wind, Anna spread her arms like wings for just a moment before letting them fall helplessly to her sides. “I can’t make excuses for myself. What I discovered was that trying to hurt Tobias hurt me more than anything he could have done. I didn’t enjoy any of it, not a moment. I was miserable.”
There was a long silence as I tried to take
this in. “Did Tobias know? Did you ever talk to a bishop?” I asked finally.
A car sped by below us, going down the hill loudly. She waited until it passed to speak, shaking her head sadly. “No. I never told a bishop or Tobias. I talked to God about it instead. I know that sounds heretical, but I was worried that a bishop’s intervention would only make things worse.”
I was sure Kurt would be furious about this if he knew. Forgiveness for a serious sin like this could only come through confessing to the proper authority according to Mormon doctrine. But why shouldn’t Anna deal with it in her own way, talking to God herself, and making amends her own way? Was it because she was a woman that she had to have a man mediate her repentance?
“If I’d told Tobias,” she said, “he would have had to work on forgiving me, which would have caused him so much pain. I know he would have eventually done it. He was too big a man with too big a heart not to. But it seemed unfair to place such a burden on him when the sin was mine.”
If I had done the same to Kurt, could I believe he would have forgiven me, too?
He might have forgiven me, but it would have taken a long time. I could understand why Anna had never told Tobias, why she had chosen to carry the pain herself.
“Tobias would have felt I was telling him he was inadequate,” Anna went on. “It would have haunted him. I don’t think he would ever have recovered. And I couldn’t do that to him.” She shrugged. “So I never did. If I was ever angry that our marriage was based on lies for so long, I reminded myself it was all my fault.”
It sounded to me like Anna had suffered plenty in her repentance, and that what she had done had been out of love for Tobias, not out of a desire to make herself look better. I couldn’t give her any absolution, but I found that I loved her more than ever. How was that possible? Did we love people in spite of their flaws or because of them?
We started walking again, very slowly, down the hill. I let my hand brush against Anna’s as our arms swayed back and forth in the same rhythm, then caught and held her fingers up to my cheek. Somehow it seemed to be the only way to show her how much I cared for her. I could feel the heat in her hand, her quickened pulse. She wasn’t crying visibly, but the emotion was there, just the same.
His Right Hand Page 20