“She told you about her father?” I said. I was trying to think how this would work, legally. Jared Helm hadn’t been prosecuted because Carrie couldn’t testify against him and the charges were so old. What about her father? Could Gwen testify in Carrie’s place somehow? Please, God, there had to be some way to make Aaron Weston pay for what he had done, to make people see that he wasn’t the man he seemed to be that day he had stood up in front of the cameras on the TV news.
“Carrie showed me some of her scars.” Her hand drifted to her right side, though if that was where Carrie’s scars or her own were, I couldn’t tell. “She was really careful about keeping them hidden. He didn’t just sexually abuse her. He hurt her physically, in every way he could. He tortured her.”
“And Jared?” I asked. “Did she tell you about him abusing her, too?” Or were the wounds she had gone to have documented at the hospital all from her father? Had I been wrong about Jared? Had he been Carrie’s Captain America after all?
Gwen sighed and waved one of those delicate hands. “Oh, I think she knew that Jared was a little crazy. Too gung ho, too rigid about the church and about all the extra doctrines he and his father believe in. But he never hurt her physically. He might have made her feel like she wasn’t good enough, but I think she wanted him to do that. I think she was punishing herself the way her father punished her.” She drew a line across her wrist, and I could see faint lines on the skin of her arm. So she understood Carrie perfectly there, too. “As if she had become so used to the pain that she had to have it. A craving, like an addiction.” She looked me in the eye again and I could see suddenly a little-girl version of her not so very hidden inside, a little girl who was also used to pain.
So much hurt. So much pain. It was easy to brush it off as something that happened everywhere, say that the church dealt with such crimes harshly and that God could never look on sin with the least degree of allowance. But the disguise had worked within our church. And the vulnerability was made possible by the hierarchy as it stood now. Could that possibly be God’s purpose?
Gwen’s hands kept curling and uncurling. Her frenetic movements seemed to echo my own whirling thoughts. “It’s taken me all this time to work up the courage. Not just to tell you about Carrie, but to tell you about myself, and why it matters so much to me. I’m so worried about Carrie’s parents. She warned me that if anything ever happened to her, they would try to take Kelly. I can’t bear to see that happen. I came today to hope that you will make sure that they are stopped. It was the one thing that Carrie was proud of, that Kelly was going to grow up with a better life than she had.”
“Why did Carrie leave her, though?” I asked. “If she loved Kelly so much, how could she go off to Las Vegas like that?” To take the chance that Kelly would be unprotected—surely that was the greatest crime of all?
Gwen stopped moving and looked out the window, speaking to the world itself, as if she could trust it more than me. “You don’t know what it’s like. The demons that talk in your head. I think maybe Carrie decided it was better for Kelly for her to be gone. Or maybe she just had to punish herself more. I don’t know.”
“And the letter her parents have, about Jared’s abuse? Was it real at all?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head and turned back to me. She seemed out of energy now, and I felt the same. All the time I’d spent awake thinking last night, and it had been so useless. I had never come to this, the final, most important truth.
“Carrie told me sometimes about weird things Jared or his father did. But she also loved him. Maybe she wrote to her parents just to scare them away.”
It had all been so complicated. Why had I ever thought it would be simple? There were monsters here, but they weren’t the ones I had seen first and foremost. No wonder Carrie had fled her life here. None of us was willing to see the truth, and if we couldn’t do that, how could we help her?
CHAPTER 31
As soon as Gwen Ferris left, I walked over to the Helms’ and rang the doorbell. Alex Helm met me at the door. He looked me up and down. “Can I help you, Sister Wallheim?”
It felt as if I was literally swallowing my pride, which was a hot and heavy stone. It kept rising back up, and I would have to swallow it down again. “I wanted to ask if you needed any babysitting help,” I got out at last.
He sneered. “Help from you?”
“I know that we did not part on the best of terms and you must think that I—that I am not on your side. But I came to apologize for that. I realize now that I was wrong.”
“Wrong about what, Sister Wallheim?” he asked.
“About Carrie,” I said softly. “And her parents.” I would have to deal with them soon, but somehow I felt like I needed to make this right first.
“Someone has told you something,” he said, leaning in enough to stare me in the eye.
I had to work hard not to lean away from him. I wasn’t going to give him any names. I might have been wrong about him, but that didn’t give me the right to expose Gwen Ferris’s secrets.
“So,” he said when I didn’t reply. “You’ve realized that my son married a troubled young woman and spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the truth.”
“I know that she loved him,” I said. At least, she must have for a few years, until she left. I was trying to make it easy for him to open the door wider and invite me in.
“Do you know that she called him, before she left Las Vegas?” he asked. “Told him that she loved him and that she missed him? At three in the morning, when Kelly was asleep? The morning of the day she died?”
My mouth was dry, and I wished I had a drink of water. I was struggling not to lick my lips in front of this man. “I didn’t know that,” I said. Could I believe him? So far, I could not think of anything that Alex Helm had directly lied about. He might be an odious man, but he was a truthful odious man. “Did she say she was coming home?”
“Not directly, but that was the gist of it,” said Alex Helm. “She said she was sorry for the havoc she’d caused and that she knew she’d been searching for something that only Jared could give her.”
I felt a chill run through me at that. Did she mean love? Had only Jared been able to give it to her? Surely people who are sick can hope for better healing than that even in this broken, mortal world. “Has he told the police about this phone call?”
“The police no longer consider Jared to be a suspect, and they have not asked him about the details of the day Carrie died.”
“And he hasn’t volunteered it? It might be useful for them, in trying to get a timeline of her movements.” But what did I know about detective work? I had stuck my nose into two murder cases in the last five months. I had thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I knew more about the underside of my ward than anyone else, and especially about the women’s world.
“Why should he volunteer anything to the police after the way they’ve treated him?”
“So they will be able to catch her killer,” I said. “Surely Jared wants that as much as anyone.” I couldn’t see Kelly anywhere behind him. Was she sleeping? Or was she too afraid to come near the door? Had her grandfather forbidden that, like so much else?
He glanced behind him, then closed the door and stepped out onto the porch with me. He sat on one of the steps and nodded for me to follow suit. I suppose this was a kind of reconciliation between us. I wasn’t worth the couch, but I could be seated here.
“I think Jared believes that it will only make Carrie look worse for the press,” he said. “After all this, he still cares about her name. After all that she did to him, and the way she left him, he wants to protect her. I don’t understand it, but I think my son loves her still.” He didn’t seem admiring, but neither was he disgusted.
I felt a strange peace at this moment. Love didn’t conquer all, but it endured through many things you’d think would kill it. Real love, which I had to admit I saw in Jared and Carrie’s marriage, despite all their problems.
I tried to remember the expression on Jared’s face when he had first appeared on our doorstep with Kelly in his arms that January morning. He’d been distraught. Whatever his relationship with Carrie had been, however odd and unlike any healthy marriage I had seen, he had loved her. And I couldn’t help but think, now, that she had loved him.
“And then there is Kelly and how it will affect her, all of this,” he added, nodding behind him.
“How is Kelly?” I asked. I wanted to see her so much. Just a glimpse of her messy hair, a hint of her fresh washed little girl smell, a shared smile over a brownie.
“We don’t need you to keep checking on us like some kind of Mormon child services. Jared and I are perfectly capable of taking care of her,” said Alex Helm. “She’s been sick the last couple of weeks. Last cold of the season, I guess, and I’ve kept her indoors for her own safety.” He glared at me, waiting for me to contradict his style of caregiving.
I didn’t. “I know you care about her. But it’s not the same as—well, as a mother.”
“I agree. She does need a mother. A better mother than the confused creature who gave birth to her. That is something Jared agrees on, and he is working on it. He has a new woman in mind to be Kelly’s mother, and his wife.”
I knew he had told Kelly he would find her a new mother, but it seemed crazy to think that Jared would marry so soon after Carrie’s funeral. Hadn’t we just been talking about how much he’d loved her? “So he’s dating again?” I asked, trying to find a way to make it sound more normal.
He let out a brief laugh. “Not dating. He’s courting. She’s met Kelly already and she has fallen in love with her. Now all Jared has to do is convince her that he will be a decent husband and he’s won. Women marry for children. Men marry for—” He didn’t finish, but made a crude hand gesture that it took me a moment to recognize meant the sex act. But I refused to blush. I was too old for that. “Well, who is she?” I asked.
Alex Helm shook his head. “So you can call her and tell her all the sordid details you think you know about Carrie and Jared? She’s heard enough on the news. But she met Jared herself and realized how wrong it all was. She is a lovely person and I won’t have you ruin what could be a perfect ending to this tragedy.”
There was no perfect ending to this tragedy. “Well, I hope Jared is happy. I think he deserves some happiness,” I said, the words grating, but not untrue. I was still trying to salvage things. I still needed Alex Helm to let Kelly come back to Primary at church.
He began to pick at the bits of debris on the steps, which were already nearly clean enough to eat off of. A bit of an aspen leaf. A pebble. A wrapper probably carried from the street to here, or possibly tossed by a child on the way home from school.
“Do you know, I told Jared not to marry Carrie?” he said as he collected the bits into his hand. “I knew about her past problems. I thought he could do better. But he insisted. He wanted so much to save her. And then she turned back to it. Whoring again.” He looked me in the eye, and I knew that he knew what Aaron Weston was, and what he had done. I wouldn’t have called it whoring, but I knew what he meant.
Alex Helm did a strange thing then, and put the pebble into his mouth, chewing at it like it was a bit of gum. There was a long, uncomfortable moment of sympathy between us. I hated that he seemed to be the one person who saw this picture the same way that I did. I did not like to think that I had so much in common with someone like him.
“I appreciate what you and Jared did for Carrie, giving her a safe haven,” I said, even if it hadn’t lasted long. I could see him moving the pebble around inside his mouth, which was distracting. “Jared was a good husband,” I admitted.
Alex Helm nodded. “He was a good husband. If he ever hurt her, it was for her own good. She knew that, too. It was why she loved him so much.”
For her own good? No, I thought. I could go a certain distance to see another person’s point of view, but not that far. I stood up and brushed off my pants. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said, though I hadn’t even begun to ask him about Kelly and Primary. Perhaps the Presidency would have to do that on their own. I couldn’t do everything.
“Do you know,” Alex Helm said suddenly, “when she called him, she begged him for forgiveness. She said that she had always been looking for a place where she belonged. As if a whore like that could ever belong anywhere.”
I tamped down my emotional response to his word choice. “And what did Jared tell her?”
“He told her the truth, that he couldn’t take her back into the house with Kelly. He couldn’t let her contaminate their daughter anymore.” He spat out the pebble into his hand and examined it.
I had tried. I really had.
My heart felt as if it were beating outside of my chest, I could hear it so clearly. I couldn’t fix this.
There was a sound behind Alex Helm, and I caught a quick glimpse of messy blonde curls before the door flew open.
“Sister Wallheim!” Kelly shouted, and ran barefoot toward me.
Alex Helm caught her and moved swiftly back to the door without a word to me. As if I didn’t deserve even a farewell. He closed the door in my face, and the last I saw of Kelly were her feet kicking over her grandfather’s shoulder.
I FINISHED THE laundry at home, then started on dinner. I had to do something about what I’d found out about Carrie Helm and her father, but what? Drive down to his house and smash into it? Take a chainsaw with me and see if I could get close enough to take off some body parts? I felt wrung out after my conversation with Alex Helm, as if nothing I did was ever going to matter, and what was the point? Why was I pretending that I could change the world?
I had originally planned to make some chicken stew for dinner, which required two stalks of celery, an onion and a carrot. I had taken out a whole five-pound bag of carrots, a triple bag of celery stalks, and a whole ten-pound Costco bag of onions. And then I had peeled and chopped my way through all of them, telling myself that I would freeze them, that it wasn’t a waste. It was a useful therapeutic exercise.
But then I got out the potatoes. The fifty-pound bag we’d gotten in November when, in a parking lot on the way home from work, Kurt had seen a truck advertising fresh potatoes, straight from the ground in neighboring Idaho. We had barely made a dent in it, in part because the potatoes were so dirty it took more effort to peel them.
I rinsed, scrubbed, and peeled every potato. I diced them, cubed them, and shredded them. I packed them into the gallon-size Ziploc bags (also from Costco) and then put them in the freezer. And when I was done with that, I got out chicken. I boiled it, froze the stock, and then shredded the chicken. My hands had tiny cuts all over them by then, and there were probably flecks of blood all over the food. My wrists ached and my feet were on fire from standing for so long. But it all felt good. Anything felt good. It reminded me I was alive.
“Um, Mom?” asked Samuel when he got home from school. “Is there something wrong?”
“I’m just doing some prep work,” I said, as if it was no big deal.
“For the next millennium?” he asked.
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
“Mom—do you know something I don’t know? Did Dad tell you about a letter he got?” asked Samuel.
I took a moment to look at him. My beautiful son, scared because I was too caught up in my attempts to mother people I couldn’t mother. Why couldn’t it be enough for me to mother him?
Because he didn’t need me anymore. Not really.
“You think the apocalypse will be announced by the First Presidency in a letter?” I said.
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Second Coming,” said Samuel, smiling faintly.
Yes, let’s make this into a joke. A very, very funny joke. “There has to be all that other stuff first. Gog and Magog. The prophets lying in the streets. Blood on the moon.”
“The blood on the moon thing already happened. Didn’t you hear? Neil Armstro
ng got into a fight with some Russian astronauts.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And we never heard about it?”
“The Russians didn’t want to admit they’d lost the fight, so there’s been a cover-up for years.”
“But you found out about it—?” I asked.
“On the Internet,” said Samuel. “Of course.”
“Yeah. Of course,” I said. He had gotten me out of myself enough that I could see what the kitchen looked like. The sink was filled to the top with potato peelings. The kitchen garbage was overflowing onto the floor. There was pink from blood mingled with vegetable juice all over the countertops, and the handle of one the knives had come off. I’d stuck the knife into the wooden cutting board before ignoring it and moving on.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” I said.
“It looks like someone got you really mad,” said Samuel.
“Then it is what it looks like,” I said. I started to clean up then. Samuel helped me. And then I got some actual stew cooking, though it was a bit after Kurt got home that it was ready to eat.
I was a mess. My kitchen was a mess. My house was a mess. My family was a mess. My whole world was a mess.
I had tried to help Kelly Helm, and I had failed and I was never going to make up for the daughter I had let die. She was always going to be dead and there would never be anyone to fill the hole in my heart.
We ate in near silence, though I could see Kurt and Samuel sharing meaningful glances over the table. As soon as Samuel had cleared his place, he skedaddled, leaving Kurt and me at the dinner table. I stood up, swayed with exhaustion, and broke into tears.
He eased me back down, moving his chair close enough to mine that I was half sitting on him. I wished I didn’t feel so squished against him. But the reality was that when you got to be our age, it seemed like things didn’t fit the way they used to.
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