“No, my husband is . . .” I trailed off because it was too complicated. I stuck with, “Stephen’s daughter Naomi is engaged to my son Kenneth.”
“Ah, family, then,” said Dr. Benallie, and that seemed the end of her interest in the conversation.
Rebecca came back with the clean knife. “It’s nicked,” she commented, “but I’ll sharpen it with a stone and it will be nearly good as new.”
Dr. Benallie wasted no time in issuing a matter-of-fact list of next steps Rebecca needed to undertake to cover up this crime. It made me wonder if she had done all this before, she was so specific and insistent.
“Roll the body up in the rug to carry it out. Then burn the rug once the body is buried, and clean in here with bleach and replace it with another area rug, so you don’t have any curious carpet delivery people asking questions about why you’re only replacing one room’s carpet. What about the grave?”
“It’s been prepared,” I said, not mentioning Kenneth specifically. “I think it’s deep enough.”
Dr. Benallie tilted her head to the side, considering my admission to participating in the cover-up. “I always wondered how Stephen would end up. I can’t say I’m surprised about this.” She turned to Rebecca. “Though I’m sorry for you, Rebecca, if you’re grieving.”
“I am,” she said. “Of course I am.”
“If you say so,” said Dr. Benallie. She stared at the body again.
The woman was practical to the point of coldness. While she and I agreed generally on our opinion of Stephen, I disliked her manner toward Rebecca. I also wondered why it was that she knew so well exactly what Rebecca should do to cover up the murder. Could she have been involved? It seemed from her appearance at the door that she had a key to the compound gate, unless I was missing something.
“You’ll write up the death certificate, then?” I asked, probing her to see how far she would really go.
“Yes. I’ll simply say he died of heart failure,” Dr. Benallie said. “So long as no one has reason to question it, I’ll keep my license and you can keep your secrets.” She looked at Rebecca and something passed between them that I did not understand.
“Thank you.” Rebecca was tearful again. “You’ll never know how grateful I am for this.”
At that point, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “Why are you doing this? What was Stephen to you besides a colleague?”
Dr. Benallie smiled wistfully. “Stephen and I were engaged to be married eleven or twelve years ago.” She shifted and I caught a glimpse of a large turquoise necklace tucked in her blouse.
“But you never married?” I asked. Surely someone would have mentioned a sixth wife, even if she didn’t live at the compound.
“No. We broke up rather acrimoniously, at least on my side,” she said. “I realized that he would have told me anything to get me to marry him. He had a way of seeing what a woman most needed to hear to keep her coming back for more. He could see weaknesses and he manipulated them.”
I glanced at Rebecca to see if she would contradict this, but she was impassively listening.
“He kept telling me that our marriage would be the fulfillment of the promises in The Book of Mormon to the descendants of the Lamanites. He said that he had had a dream and he saw Samuel the Lamanite speaking to him, telling him I was his granddaughter, and that he had permission to marry me from the prophet himself, if only he promised to treat me like a princess. An Indian princess.” She spat out the last words, her hatred clear.
“So you’re doing this to get back at him?” I asked. She was willing to risk her medical license to get back at a man already dead?
“I owe Rebecca,” said Dr. Benallie.
I glanced at Rebecca.
“It wasn’t much,” she said.
“It was enough,” said Dr. Benallie. She looked at me and admitted, “Stephen nearly separated me from the practice back then. It would have been the end of my career, and at a time in my life that I would have had to declare bankruptcy with all of my medical school debts.”
I was a little surprised at this, but more that Dr. Benallie was grateful enough to Rebecca’s intervention to help her now. After all, remaining with the practice meant that Dr. Benallie had had to continue to deal with Stephen every day of her life since the broken engagement. Had her financial solvency really been worth that?
“You have a key to the gate,” I pointed out, easing into my next question. “You came in without having to wait for someone to open it.”
It took a moment for her to parse what I was saying. Then she gave me a strange rictus grin, all her teeth showing. “You think I killed him?”
It would have been an easy answer, sparing the wives any more fuss. The scorned woman, no threat to anyone anymore, and we could all move on.