Magdalene (2 page)

Hayleigh Sitkaris opened the door fully and
moved out of Sally’s path. She waited until the older woman had
disappeared, then slipped into the office and plopped herself on a
chair. “Bishop—”

He waited, but she looked down at the floor.
Twisted her diamond bracelet around with her finger. Swallowed.
Maybe tonight would be the night she’d confide in him the way a few
of the other kids did, the ones who didn’t trust the charismatic
youth leader—

—Hayleigh’s father.

“I— Uh, I need—”

“You better tell me quick, because your
dad’s going to be here any minute.”

She paled.

“Hayleigh,” he said abruptly, no-nonsense.
Her head snapped up. “Whatever it is, I can help you. You have to
trust me.”

“Nobody believes me,” she whispered, casting
a glance at the cracked clerk’s door. Mitch leaned over and gave it
a gentle push until the latch clicked.

“Except Trevor?” It was a stab in the
dark.

She paused. “He...doesn’t get it.”

Well, Mitch hadn’t understood it himself
until recently, either, and the girl had no faith that he ever
would.

A sharp series of raps on the door made the
girl stiffen. “Just a moment,” he called. “Hayleigh,” he said
softly, leaning over his desk to offer her the ever-present tissue
box. “Mop up.”

She obeyed. Mitch waited and watched as she
struggled to pull herself together. Finally, she took a deep breath
and nodded.

“Come in.”

Enter Hayleigh’s father. He stilled when he
saw the girl, and said smoothly enough, “Hayleigh, dear, your
mother’s looking for you.”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said brightly, popping out
of her chair and acting for all the world that she was happy to see
him. But she never met his eyes, and cast a glance at Mitch.
“Thanks, Bishop.”

“No problem.”

She squeezed past her father, who watched
her, then closed the door and looked at Mitch. “Appropriating
something else of mine, Mitch?” he said low. “Raising two daughters
of your own wasn’t enough that you feel the need to raise mine,
too, or are you into teenage girls?”

“Siddown.”

“I’ll stand, thanks.”

Of course he would. But those tactics didn’t
bother Mitch in the least, and he simply relaxed back into his
chair again. The hostility was ever-present and had been for the
last twenty-five years, but now there were no illusions—or at
least, there weren’t any now that Mitch had something approaching
proof, though not of the right type.

“Whaddaya want, Mitch? The kids are waiting
for me, and you know I don’t like being at your beck and call.”

“I can help you with that,” Mitch drawled,
making a point to look straight into Greg’s soulless gray eyes.
“I’m releasing you from the Young Men’s presidency.”

“You
what
?” Greg asked, shocked. It
was the first time Mitch had seen him show a genuine emotion in
years.

“Young Men’s president. You’re out.”

Greg’s face contorted with the anger of
perpetual frustration. “Why?” he ground out.

“Does the name Rohm mean anything to you?”
Mitch asked.

Greg’s rage didn’t abate nor did he fall to
justifying, explaining, reasoning. “So what if it does?” he
snarled. “You can’t prove anything.”

Mitch shrugged. “Does it matter? I don’t
have to have proof. Maybe I just want somebody else to have a crack
at such a...
prestigious
...calling.”

“Nobody in this ward can do that job better
than I can.”

That, in fact, was true, but Greg had an
ulterior motive: In this neck of the woods, Young Men’s president
was seen as the stepping stone to the bishopric and above all else,
Greg wanted to be a bishop.

“Still waiting to sit in this chair, eh?”
Mitch said, just to twist the knife a little. It wasn’t very
Christlike of him, but he couldn’t resist.

“Dave’s going to hear about this.”

“I’m sure he will, bright and early tomorrow
morning at tee time. Does Shane know you’re a thief?”

Greg barked a humorless laugh. “Ah, your
father-in-law. He’s always been a tool.”

Mitch totally agreed, but there was no
satisfaction in knowing that Shane was as blind to Greg as everyone
else.

Almost
everyone else. There was a
minority of people who either understood or had instincts enough to
steer clear:

A couple of the kids.

The Relief Society president and her
husband.

Mitch’s first counselor and his wife.

His second counselor, who had had a few
run-ins with Greg when they worked together at Jep Industries years
before.

Somehow Mitch had managed to surround
himself with the few people in the ward who understood what Greg
was about—and he had never noticed.

“So tell me something,” Mitch said abruptly.
“How does it feel, knowing you were the flunky at J.I.? What’d they
promise you? A million? Two?”

Greg’s face flushed and he balled his fists.
Mitch knew Greg wouldn’t dare punch him, because Mitch was bigger,
stronger, and he had authority over Greg. Getting arrested for
assault would take the shine off Greg’s façade.

Oh, how Mitch wished he had enough proof to
take to the D.A., but since he didn’t, he had to settle for
punishing Greg ecclesiastically—and even there his options were
limited.

“And leaving the country without you, after
you’d done their dirty work? Nice touch.”

Mitch couldn’t bar Greg from going to the
temple. The stake president—Mitch’s superior—would have to okay the
decision, which would oblige Mitch to explain. Without proof,
explaining to a man that his best friend had been the linchpin in a
large-scale embezzlement scheme would be...awkward. At best. And
explaining it to most of the people in Mitch’s ward—even if he
could—would cause no end of trouble for Mitch.

Better to release Greg quietly and not call
him to anything else. Caught between the most popular man in the
ward and the stake president, it was the only thing Mitch could
do—and he’d get hammered for it from every side.

Ah, well. Perhaps then President Petersen
would release Mitch from the bishopric so he could go on with his
life and do something...different.

“Considering our history, I don’t know what
possessed me to call you in the first place.”

“It’s because you’re such a damned fool,
Mitch.”

“I’m sure Senator Oth would believe me.”

Greg planted his hands on Mitch’s desk and
leaned over it. “Go right ahead and tell him. He’s as stupid as
your father-in-law is.”

“I can’t disagree with that,” Mitch said
blithely. “But Roger has the power to make your life miserable
whether I can prove it or not.”

Greg’s mouth twitched as he slowly
straightened to his full height. “You would never go to Oth,” he
murmured. “You and your wolf pack aren’t exactly his favorite
people, and to him, I’m a nobody. He wouldn’t understand it if you
carved it in his skin.”

That was true, too.

“You have no conscience, do you?”

Greg answered Mitch’s question with a smirk,
his temper evening out into a vague humor. Fake, all fake. Except
the rage. The rage would manifest as “slips” of the tongue and
gentle, slyly penitent tidbits of gossip, little seeds of
contention planted in the minds of three quarters of the people in
the ward and stake.

Why was Mitch only seeing this
now
?

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” Greg said, “but
I
don’t keep company with women who pose for nude portraits.
Or modern-day Gordon Gekkos. Or
murderers
.”

“Jesus did.”

Greg’s rage resurfaced and he reached for
the doorknob. “You’re going to regret this, Mitch,” he snarled.
“You just can’t be happy unless you’ve taken everything that
belongs to me, can you?”

“I never took anything away from you. Mina
didn’t belong to you. Neither does my car, my house, my kids, my
company, my bank account, my friends, my calling. Never did.”

“I’ll find a way to destroy you, Mitch. When
I’m done with you, you won’t be able to walk into a church building
anywhere in the world. You think anybody will believe you over me?
You could have mountains of proof, and nobody would believe I’m
capable of anything less than perfection, and you’d get crucified
for daring to suggest that I am—starting with your father-in-law
and the stake president.”

“Aaannd while you’re trying to figure out
how to do that, I’ll be turning your life inside out and upside
down, finding all your little schemes, starting with Jep
Industries. Let’s see who finishes first.”

“Don’t play chicken with me, Mitch,” he
growled. “You’ll lose, just like the Rohms. Just like Senator
Oth.”

Mitch smirked. “Do your worst.”

Greg turned in a fury, but his demeanor
changed the instant he opened Mitch’s office door and stepped out
in the hall to find a cadre of teenagers awaiting him. “All right,
guys,” he boomed, as jovial as always, “
Now
we can get back
to the fun.”

The excited chatter dimmed with the close of
the door, and Mitch picked up his phone. “Sebastian,” he said
without preamble. “I know you’re up to your eyeballs in problems
right now, but we need to go over those Jep Industries documents
again. ASAP.”

“Uh,” said the man on the other end of the
phone after a long pause. “Why? It’s been six years. We’ve gone
through those a million times.”

“I have something to look for now. Guy in my
ward, one of the HR execs we didn’t rehire. He was in on it. I just
can’t prove it.”

Sebastian put him on speakerphone.
“Name?”

“Greg Sitkaris.”

Keyboard clicks. Mouse clicks. “Okay, I see
him, but nothing pops out at me. What are you thinking?”

“I want to get together. Lay it all out with
the new information, re-map it. And the sooner the better.”

“So what did he do? Why now?”

Mitch hesitated, wondering how much he could
say. Being a bishop held the same responsibility of confidentiality
that every other ecclesiastical position did. But in this
case...

“One of the foundry’s foremen— He’s a bishop
of another ward. Two weeks ago he tells me about a family in his
ward whose financial situation isn’t adding up, and Greg’s name
kept popping up. I took the liberty of having my people check into
this family’s situation, and all roads point to some annuities Greg
sold them—”

“But that’s not illegal,” Sebastian said
with some impatience, and Mitch could tell his attention was
beginning to wander. “And annuities are notoriously bad instruments
to begin with.
Caveat emptor
.”

“Sebastian!” he snapped. “Stay with me. This
is important.”

Pause. “Sorry.”

“Once the new information is added in to
what we already have, it turns into a different picture. I just
don’t have a clear idea of that picture. I want us all there so we
can brainstorm.”

Silence, except for the sound of a fingertip
tapping on wood. Finally, Sebastian said, “Okay. We can do that,
but not in the next couple of weeks. I’m trying to hold Knox
together while the media drags him through the mud over
Vanessa.”

Mitch felt a thud deep in the pit of his
stomach. The stake president would demand to know why Mitch had
released Greg from such a key position in the ward, and Mitch had
hoped to have figured it out before that happened.

“You’re going to Whittaker House for
Thanksgiving, right?”

“Of course.” Mitch only wished Mina had been
well enough long enough for him to have taken her to Whittaker
House Inn, in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks. It was only a
hundred miles southwest of Rolla, the town where he and Mina had
truly, finally fallen in love and spent eight years, where they’d
built their life and family.

Mina would have adored it.

Under normal circumstances, Mitch would have
never gone to one of Vanessa Whittaker’s holiday masquerades, with
Mina or without. Those parties were way too decadent for his
comfort zone, but this time, his attendance was necessary. Vanessa
was mired in media mud and nursing a broken heart, to boot. She
needed all the support she could get, and he owed her for the
sweetly quiet way she’d taken care of him this past year.

“We can do it then,” Sebastian was saying.
“Bring what you have. See if you can gather more. We can spend the
weekend going over it all. That okay?”

No. Possibly too little. Definitely too
late.

Mitch couldn’t even
enjoy
the thought
of finally solving this riddle and putting Greg in jail because of
the dread settling over him. He’d bested Greg for almost
twenty-five years, time after time, and his winning streak had to
end somehow.

Mitch knew this would be it, and it wouldn’t
be pretty.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” he said with a
confidence he didn’t feel.

“Oh, bullshit,” Sebastian drawled after a
split second. “There’s something else going on.”

Not for the first time Mitch wished he could
lie to his best friend as well as he could lie to the rest of the
world. “I just released him from the Young Men’s presidency.”

“And?”

“He wants to be bishop. Always has.
And...compared to him, I have a bit of a credibility problem.”

Sebastian grunted. “Because of us.”

“That and Greg is...charismatic. In the
charlatan televangelist way. Whole ward loves him, especially the
kids. He plays golf with the stake president and softball with
three quarters of the stake high council. My father-in-law’s still
in love with him, and you know how Shane feels about
me
.

“But he’s also got his daughter wrapped up
in knots, his wife is a little too Stepford for my comfort, and the
few people who understand what he is stay far, far away from him.
It’s been explained to me, but I never got it until lately. I
started really watching him, tracking his behavior through the way
other people act and treat each other. He can stir up trouble
without seeming to and make it seem like everybody else’s
fault.”