After twenty minutes of driving I was pulling into the cul-de-sac of the wealthy neighborhood in Sandy. No one was watching for me. I parked a block away and then tucked myself into my coat. I had always had the gift of being invisible. It would serve me well again.
I was parked by the garage, near the bushes that divided this property from the next. I could see the SWAT team near the van at the front of the house was on the phone with someone inside, most likely Aaron. I wanted to see Judy. And there she was, her face peeking out of the curtain of the sliding back doors.
I didn’t look back. I simply moved forward. By the time the SWAT team saw me, I was already knocking on the glass door and Judy Weston was opening it.
She didn’t look particularly glad to see me, but she was trembling and I think she was glad to see anyone who wasn’t her husband.
“What are you doing?” said Aaron loudly, as he came into the vast living room. He was carrying a butcher knife casually, and he was holding a phone to his ear. As soon as he saw me, he smiled at me and pointed at me with the butcher knife.
I hadn’t imagined I would get him to turn himself in without facing him like this. But somehow when the moment came, it was more terrifying than I had anticipated.
Aaron Weston spoke into the phone: “I have a second hostage now. Her name is Linda Wallheim.” He hung up the phone, and motioned for Judy to close the sliding doors.
My stomach seemed to drop to my knees.
I hadn’t said a word of prayer, the whole time I’d been on my way here. Not out loud and not in my heart, either. Maybe I should have, but somehow I had thought in this case God was counting on me instead of the reverse.
Why had I wanted to come in here again? What in the world had I thought I could do that a SWAT team couldn’t? I had had no training in this, no matter how much I told myself it was what I was “meant” to do. I felt a sudden cold sweat of fear at the realization that I had just placed myself into the power of a man who had killed his own daughter. I was now in the same situation Carrie Helm had been in for so long. Was I going to be able to effect an escape any better than she had?
“You,” said Aaron. “You whore.”
The fact that he used the same word as Alex Helm had to make me slap him was strange. I didn’t feel the same anger at all. Possibly because Aaron Weston was speaking so calmly, wearing a fine suit like he had the first time I met him.
My failure to react physically seemed to enrage him, because he lunged at me with the knife. Then I shrieked involuntarily and he pulled back.
“This is the fault of people like you,” he spat out. “My daughters would never—”
“You can stop trying to tell me your excuses. How they seduced you or lied to you or anything else. I’m not interested.”
He stared at me. “I’ll kill you, too. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve gone this far. I killed Carrie, and I’m glad that I did. She needed to die. She didn’t know how to be a mother anymore, or a wife. Her husband will thank me, too, in time.”
At last, I had the impression that I was seeing the real Aaron Weston. There is a legend among Mormons that if you meet a spirit, you should ask to shake hands. An evil spirit will agree to shake, and you will feel no substance. A good spirit will refuse to shake your hand. I wished I had had such a simple test for evil men and good men when I had met Aaron.
“What about Carrie’s daughter?” I asked. “Will Kelly thank you for killing her mother?”
Aaron Weston shrugged. “She is a girl. She belongs to her father, not to me.”
This wasn’t Mormonism, I thought. This had nothing to do with my Mormonism. Only with Aaron Weston’s, and his was wrong.
The phone rang again, but Aaron ignored it. He looked up at me smugly. He nodded out the glass doors to the SWAT team in the driveway and on the street. “They think they are building a relationship with me. They think that they are doing something other than delaying the inevitable.”
But he hadn’t killed himself or Judy yet. Or me. That meant something, didn’t it? “You don’t want to die,” I said. That was, I hoped, where his goal and mine coincided.
“Don’t I? My life is over. Everything I’ve built, my reputation, my family,” he said, his expression dark.
Good. If he saw that clearly, then maybe he could see the rest. “And when you die, what do you think will happen? Aaron, what kind of a God do you believe in?” I asked him.
This was the biggest gamble I had taken in my life. I assumed that after all of his years in the Mormon church, he actually believed some part of it, that it wasn’t all part of a pretense to abuse power. I felt my fear fading and a strange calm envelop me. Maybe I had gone beyond fear, or maybe it was the Holy Spirit. I don’t know.
He stared down at the knife as if talking to his face in a mirror. “God will justify me,” he said. “I have done a lot of good. If I have made mistakes, well, so have others.”
“Aaron,” I said, to make him look at me. He wasn’t alone in this house. He wasn’t in some dreamworld of his own making. “It’s not just a mistake to kill your daughter. You planned it.”
He waved a hand. “Look at Joseph Smith. He had affairs with women long before he instituted the so-called doctrine of polygamy. He was a man with certain lusts, and he found a way to make them palatable to others. He declared a new doctrine.”
“You are not Joseph Smith,” I said. I wasn’t here to defend the founder of Mormonism and the polygamy that had long since been repudiated. Joseph Smith had not been a perfect man, but I believed in the church he had built, and in the Book of Mormon he had translated.
“That is how people outside the church see him. As a lecher. A despoiler of young girls,” said Aaron Weston. “But he was a holy man even so.”
So was that his excuse? That another man had done what he had done and still been praised for his life? “Joseph Smith did not abuse his own daughters,” I pointed out.
“Are you so sure of that?” said Aaron. “He could have made it holy if he had. A holy man makes everything holy that he touches.”
I had seen him as a prophet for a moment at the funeral. Did he see himself that way? How often had that excused him in his own mind?
“No one wants to see the underside of the church anymore, the bloody truth behind glory. If the Mormon church has lost its way, and I think it has, then it is because the leaders don’t understand that there is a danger and a madness to true holiness.” He waved the knife, shiny blade glinting, to punctuate his speech.
I thought of the afternoon I had spent hours chopping those vegetables in my kitchen, until I’d ruined one knife and had to reach for another. I didn’t even remember doing that. I shuddered at the thought that I was like Aaron Weston in some way.
“This new group of apostles, old men who are used to comfortable lives—they want to stay on the side of the law. They want to be accepted by society in general. They don’t want to be seen as a cult. And they have abandoned everything about Mormonism that made it difficult to live. They will make us all men who choose what is easiest, not what is right.”
This was a doctrine I had heard before, in different forms. If the “world” believed something, then you had to believe its opposite to be righteous. It made people rage against everything from a global economy to public schooling and immunizations, but mostly I thought it was just an excuse not to have to do the work that seeing shades of grey requires.
“So you believe that when you die, you will go to the celestial kingdom because you are doing terrible, illegal things? That’s why you’re so eager for death?” I asked, staring the man straight in the face.
I felt like I was right on the edge of a fragile rock bridge in Zion National Park. We had been there with all the boys once, and I had never felt anything like the sensation of standing there, on such a thin piece of rock, with the wind blowing all around. That was the valley of the shadow of death. And here I was again.
The knife turned again in his hand, and I wondered
how many times he had handled it like this before, as a weapon rather than a tool.
I glanced at Judy Weston. She was still shaking, but there was no expression on her face. She was blank, as much a puppet as Aaron Weston had always seemed to think that she was.
“I believe—there may be a time of waiting,” he said, the knife moving so casually from hand to hand. “But yes, ultimately, I believe God will agree with what I have done. He will see that in the moral dilemma in which he placed us, this was the only choice. Like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.”
I tried not to look at the knife. I didn’t want him to think that it was what mattered here. This had to be a conversation between two equals or it would never work. I tried to lower my voice, and I widened my stance, like a man might. “A period of waiting?” I asked him, seizing on this one hint of doubt. “You mean spirit prison, don’t you? And who do you think will be there with you, waiting?”
He didn’t answer me. He looked out the front window, visible through the kitchen, at the SWAT teams surrounding the house, the knife turning and turning. The phone rang again. He looked at the number, but he didn’t answer it.
He was on the precipice too, I thought. But he was completely alone, staring into the abyss.
“I won’t be there long, so I hardly think it matters. But if I have to endure the company of the wicked there, it will be no different from what I endure here.” He gestured at the front door of the house with the knife, and then at his wife.
She stared at the knife and seemed unable to look away.
“And what about Carrie, your daughter? Do you think she will be waiting for you in spirit prison?”
“Carrie—well, maybe she will be there.”
“Then what do you think she will say to you when you see her in spirit? Before you die, you should consider that, don’t you think?” I could see him rubbing his thumb across the edge of the knife now, making friends with it. “If you give yourself up, you will have to face a trial. But you think that anyone who hears your story will believe you, right?” I asked.
Judy Weston was silent, as she had been all her life. I was glad this once; it meant she didn’t get in my way.
“Think about this choice. If you killed yourself now, or goaded others into killing you, wouldn’t that be a crime in itself? To give up on what you could teach here? Do you think God would approve of you giving up so easily, when there are so many things you need to change in the church itself?”
He looked at me. “What do you know about the priesthood? About the heavens and the place of gods there? You are a woman,” he said.
Damn. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t think in that direction. “My husband sent me here,” I said. It was pure inspiration. “He thought I would get in more easily. But he gave me the words to say.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Your husband is a good man.”
“Good” and “man” being synonymous, it seemed. Just as it was with Alex Helm. Carrie must have thought the Helms were different at first, but the more she lived with Jared, the more she realized she had simply traded one kind of misogynist for another.
I held up my hands, playing on the woman card now that it was out there. “Aaron, I just want to get Judy out of here. She and I will leave and you can stay and do whatever you want.” I really did not care if he lived or died, except for the trouble and danger it would cause the SWAT team outside. I was quite confident that God would deal with him justly, once he was gone. The punishment he would get there would surely be worse than anything he could suffer here. And I wanted him to suffer badly. I wanted Carrie Helm to know that he was suffering.
“Please, Aaron,” said Judy, her voice breaking as tears streamed down her face. She was good at tears.
“Go, then. Both of you,” he said at last. He turned his back on me, and threw the knife in the air.
I didn’t wait to see where it landed. I grabbed hold of Judy’s wrist, yanked on the sliding glass doors, and threw Judy out of them. Then I jumped on top of her and rolled, taking her with me down the lawn and toward the street.
The SWAT team came in immediately after that. With an open door, and the hostages out, they seized the opportunity.
Long minutes later, I heard gunfire inside the house. Judy flinched with each shot as I prayed my thanks that I was still alive. An EMT came over to us and helped us to our feet, then led us to an ambulance that was waiting nearby.
I was bleeding and hadn’t noticed it. Aaron Weston had cut me with that knife of his, after all. I stared at my bleeding left arm and wondered why he hadn’t dug deeper, or simply killed me.
They say God looks after fools. Maybe this was the proof of it.
We saw Aaron being carried out of the house on a stretcher while we were still waiting for transport to the hospital. I couldn’t see his face because it was covered with an oxygen mask. He looked as if he’d been shot in the chest, but they had a separate ambulance for him.
KURT CAME TO see me at Lone Peak Hospital. They insisted that I go to have the cut on my left arm checked out, even though I thought I was fine.
He didn’t chastise me. He simply sat and held my hand and told me loved me.
When I was finally discharged late that night, he kissed me gently on the cheek.
“We’ll have to talk about this,” Kurt said.
“I know.”
We had a lot to talk about.
CHAPTER 35
Samuel wouldn’t speak to me Monday night when I got home. There was no pretense of Family Home Evening.
“He’s mad you could have gotten hurt. He’ll come around,” said Kurt, as he helped me up the stairs to our bedroom.
I hoped Kurt was right about Samuel. I couldn’t bear for my youngest son, the one most like me, to hold a grudge.
When I woke up the next day, I felt as if my skin had been filled with sand while I slept. There were no muscles inside me, and I felt very heavy.
Kurt brought me breakfast in bed, and I spent the morning on the phone with the older boys, who were apparently still talking to me. Samuel had gone off to school without a word, and he hadn’t answered either of the two text messages I had sent him.
Kurt had taken time off work, despite the clients who insisted they had “emergencies.” I was touched by that. We also had a visit from Cheri Tate, who said she had arranged for meals to come for the next week.
Kurt didn’t hover, but went down to his office and got to some church paperwork he’d been putting off for a while. About noon, I got up and coaxed myself into taking a careful bath. The heat seemed to melt away the sandy feeling. My left arm still hurt where they had put in stitches, but if I put on a long-sleeved shirt, I could almost forget about it. No one else could see it, either, and when I looked at myself critically in the mirror, I did not think any of the events of the day before showed. I looked tired and my eyes were a little red, but there was no more proof that I had nearly been killed than that. But the change was inside me, even so.
I thought of going for a short walk, and I stepped outside without knocking on Kurt’s door.
The first thing I saw was a FOR SALE sign in front of the Helm house. It hit me hard and I could feel my legs falling out from under me. I went down on my knees on the sidewalk and then knelt there for a long minute. My ears rang, but I didn’t appear to have broken anything. I tried to laugh at myself. This was literalizing the metaphor, wasn’t it?
A car drove by, and I saw the kind face of a ward member poking out from a window.
I lifted a hand and waved them on. “I’m fine,” I called out. Just wanted to kneel on the ground for a few minutes. They probably thought I was being super devout and had decided in the middle of my walk to kneel down and pray. Or maybe they just thought I was crazy. That would be closer to the mark.
I pushed off the sidewalk with the palms of my hands and got to my feet. I took a few small, steadying steps before deciding that I was fine, that I could do this walk, so long as I didn’t have t
o face any more bad news about Kelly Helm.
I went back inside and told Kurt I was going to Anna’s. He asked me if I was sure, but he didn’t try to stop me.
“I’ll be here if you need anything. Make sure you have your phone,” he said.
In case I fell again and needed help getting up, yes.
I walked over to Anna’s house and we went around the neighborhood. When we passed the Helm home, Anna’s hand tightened on mine.
“Don’t look,” she said to me.
“I already saw it,” I said, and looked again. It still hurt to see it. I found myself holding my breath, unable to keep walking. The pain in my left arm suddenly flared up and I felt almost as if I were back in the house with Aaron Weston and his knife.
No, I was home. I was free of him. Kelly was free of him, too.
But not of Jared and Alex Helm.
“She will be fine,” said Anna. “She will go to another ward and she’ll be taken care of there. You have to depend on that. There are good ward members all over the world.”
I stood there, staring at the window. Kelly’s window. She was not my daughter, my Georgia. She hadn’t come into my life to be a substitute for me. But she had come for a reason. She had come to bring me to myself.
“Have you seen her at all since the funeral?”
“A couple of times,” I said.
“It’s not your fault, you know. That Jared is taking her away. He would likely have done it anyway. He needs a new start, and maybe Kelly does, too.”
Maybe.
I caught a glimpse of a face out the window, and then there was a small hand waving at me. I smiled and waved back. Then she was gone.
“We should keep going,” said Anna. She rubbed her shoulders as if it were still winter. “It’s cold.”
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