“It’s just freaky how she’s on board with this,” said Kenneth, “almost like they had it planned out in advance. I mean, normal people don’t see a murder and think immediately, oh, let’s bury the body and just move on with our lives.”
I was wondering the same thing. But surely they wouldn’t have done it the weekend Kurt and I were supposed to be here.
“Well, the Carters aren’t exactly normal people,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess I’m getting that loud and clear every second we spend here,” Kenneth said.
I looked at him and could see that he was feeling some doubts. It was actually the most normal part of all of this. Whenever you meet the family of someone you love, you question things. You wonder if this is what they will be like, in the end. You worry about all the flaws that are on display and if you’ve missed something really big.
“Look, Kenneth, now is not the time to walk away. Naomi needs you. She’s dealing with hard stuff here, and I know you love her. You’re going to be stronger than ever as a couple if you get through this.” I was a little surprised at how I was defending the young woman I’d only met twice, but I felt strongly about her already.
Kenneth closed his eyes, nodded, and took a couple of deep breaths. “Right. Okay, I can help Naomi. But it still feels wrong to act as judge and jury and let a murderer go free. What if something else happens and we could have stopped it? We’ll never forgive ourselves.”
He was right about that. I couldn’t just tell myself that Stephen got what he deserved and that it didn’t matter who had done this. Even if Rebecca wasn’t in danger of being taken from the family, I had to make sure she knew who might be a threat. “Let me take care of it,” I said. “I’ll figure it out. You dig the grave.”
Kenneth’s eyebrows rose. “That seems like a slightly unfair division of labor to me.”
“You don’t know how bad I am at digging,” I said.
“Or how good you are at investigating murders, maybe,” said Kenneth, looking at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.
But he was the one who had told Naomi I could help her figure out what was wrong with Talitha. Well, I guess my son was going to see me in action now.
He tucked the shovel under one arm and grabbed a pair of gardening gloves, then we headed outside and past the shed, down the hill. I showed Kenneth where Lucy the cat’s grave was, in case he needed to show it to Talitha sometime when I wasn’t there. I had meant to show her myself, but other things seemed to keep getting in the way.
“You and Dad had a fight, didn’t you?” Kenneth asked as we were walking.
Instead of denying it, I said, “It’s normal for married people to have conflicts.” He was learning that right now.
“If you don’t want to talk about whatever happened with Dad, that’s fine. I just feel bad because it seems like it’s my fault. Mine and Naomi’s.”
“Of course it’s not your fault, Kenneth.” My heart burned that he thought it was. Kurt and I were perfectly capable of having a rousing fight without his help.
“Yeah, well, I thought things were pretty messed up to begin with, but I had no idea they’d turn into this. No matter how distanced Naomi tries to be from her family, she keeps getting sucked back into fucked up family stuff.”
I wouldn’t normally use that word, but in this case it was completely appropriate. “Fucked up family stuff, yes,” I said. And Kenneth turned to me with very wide, surprised eyes. I laughed at that. Moms can say the “f” word, too, even Mormon ones.
“Mom, I spent a long time thinking about resigning my church membership,” Kenneth said, his tall bulk close enough for me to feel comfort in its size and strength. Just like his father’s, I thought.
“I know that,” I said.
“No, listen to me. If it were just about me, I’d have done it a long time ago. Even before the policy change. When I got off my mission, I think. But I knew how much it would hurt Dad. And you.” Kenneth was looking off into the horizon where the Salt Lake lay instead of at me.
“I love you no matter what, Kenneth. Nothing will change that.” I wished Kurt had been there to say the same thing for his part, but the problem was, I wasn’t sure that it was true. Did Kurt love Kenneth the same, now that he had left the church? Did he love Samuel the same? I thought he was trying to, but I wasn’t sure that was enough.
Kenneth started twirling the shovel, the sun catching it again and again in a kind of visual song. “I remember all through my teenage years, hearing people talk about how it broke parents’ hearts when their children chose the wrong path, and how the parents would speak in testimony meeting about praying for their children to come back. I didn’t want to be the one you and Dad talked about like that. I didn’t want everyone to pity you because of me.” Finally, he let the shovel rest on the ground, motionless.
“I won’t talk about you like that, Kenneth.” But again, I couldn’t promise for Kurt.
“The problem with leaving the Mormon church is that it’s almost impossible to do without leaving your family at the same time. You have no idea how many stories I’ve heard from Mormons Anonymous like that. People who just leave both at once, and how disorienting and lonely it is for them for a long time. But it’s not any easier for those who try to hold onto their families and then live with the well-meaning emails and ‘gifts’ for every occasion, all designed to bring the lost sheep home.”
“Are you a lost sheep?” I asked Kenneth, forcing him to look me in the eye now.
“Well, yesterday I would have said definitely not. Today, who knows?” he laughed a little hollowly. “But listen, Mom.” He looked me straight in the eyes.
Who would have thought there would come a day when it was one of my sons who asked me to listen instead of the other way around? “I’m listening,” I said, my heart swollen with feeling for this son of mine.
“I always suspected that if I left, you’d go on loving me without blinking an eye. But I also knew that Dad might not be able to do that, and that the two of you would probably have fights because of me.”
I let out a long sigh. “Kenneth, it may look like it’s because of you, but what happened between your father and me was about deeper problems. Maybe ones we’ve been ignoring for most of our marriage.” Had I only thought I was really happy with him all those years? Had I just been happy with mothering and with my sons? Or was I exaggerating our problems in the present, because I couldn’t see how we’d resolve them in the future?
“Now that I’m out, I feel like I can be my real self. It feels like I can take full breaths for the first time in forever,” Kenneth said, and he sounded emotional about it.
“I can breathe,” I said defensively.
He laughed. “Yes, Mom. But I’m not like you. I couldn’t breathe in there.”
I guess I knew what he meant. “I’m glad you’ve found what you need.”
“You want me to do something? Call Dad and apologize?” Kenneth offered.
“Apologize for what? For being true to yourself? No, Kenneth.”
After another few minutes, we got down the steepest part of the hill, where the sound of the stream was faint, overcome by the buzzing of insects. I stepped into the cleared section and felt the punishing heat of the July sun in the Utah desert. There were no shade trees overhead, and the overgrown grass only seemed to amplify the heat.
It was more of a cemetery than I had anticipated. There were several large gravestones and a stone angel that looked more frightening than comforting. The angel was wingless, as was traditional in Mormon theology, but it was holding a sword and looked rather martial.
I stood and read the dates on the three large stones:
elizabeth carter,
born december 24, 1939, died july 27, 1981.
richard carter,
born august 15, 1938, died july 27, 1981.
edward carter,
born august 15, 1965, died july 27, 1981.
Ah. Stephen Carter’s parents and brother, I assumed. All three dead on the same day, the anniversary of which was coming up soon. They must have all died in the house fire that Stephen Carter had talked about.
There was a fourth gravestone, flat on the ground, and no bigger than a piece of printer paper.
jane carter,
born june 4, 2014, died june 4, 2014.
From the dates, it sounded like she was stillborn. Rebecca had said “babies,” but there was only one stone. Were there others who had been buried without stones for some reason? Maybe if they were preterm?
“I wonder which of the wives was her mother,” I said. I could ask that woman in private about what had happened.
“That’s the problem with the way we name children,” Kenneth said. “Always with the father’s last name, like only his legacy counts.”
I’d never heard him say anything so feminist before. Was this Naomi’s influence? I wanted to cheer. “Are you trying to tell me something?” I asked.
He shrugged and I saw sweat trickling down his face already, before we’d even started digging. “Naomi and I are going to hyphenate our names. It’s the only sensible thing to do.”
“Carter-Wallheim,” I said, trying the sound together.
“Wallheim-Carter,” Kenneth corrected me. “After all, there’s no reason that the man’s name should always go last. That’s just a sexist tradition.”
I wondered how Kurt would feel about this. But we had four other sons who would keep our name.
“Do you mind, Mom?” Kenneth asked.
It took me a moment to understand what he meant. He had his fingers on the top two buttons of his shirt.
“Go ahead,” I said.
After only a few minutes, sweat was running down his back and chest and I thought fleetingly of how much he looked like his father, at least Kurt from twenty years ago.
Couldn’t we just go back to then? It had been so much easier to believe, to love. Kurt had been younger and less saggy. I’d loved to look at his body whenever I had the chance. He’d sometimes tease me by flexing a muscle in his chest just to prove how good his control was over every little part.
It wasn’t that I thought Kurt was less handsome now. We’d both grown older and frankly, I found him just as physically attractive as ever. But it was different. It wasn’t his body alone that turned me on. It was who he was to me, our whole history together, all those little moments when he had been there for me. It was the wisdom that his graying hair and his sagging chest represented. They were scars of time, proof of him letting go of impatience and selfishness and so many traits that the years had smoothed away.
I should call Kurt, I thought sadly. I wanted to talk to him more than anything in the world. I wanted to ask his perspective on the possible motives of each of the wives. But if I called him, he’d lecture me on how we should have called the police. He’d tell me how wrong I had been. He’d play the part of the bishop instead of the husband. He’d use his authority to correct me. I couldn’t bear that again.
“I need to go,” I said aloud. Not home, though. I needed to get to work on figuring this out so that I could go home after that, and prove I’d been right.
“All right. Good luck, Mom. Or good hunting, whatever they say to detectives in books.” He waved at me, and then went back to digging.
Did they say something to detectives in books? Maybe—run away? Save yourselves! If they were smart, they’d say that, anyway.
Chapter 17
It occurred to me once I walked away from Kenneth that it would be useful for me to check on the fence perimeter, to see if it was as difficult to penetrate as it seemed. So I turned south of the graveyard and began to do a quick search by sight. There were a couple of spots where I couldn’t get to the fence, but I could see it was intact.
And then I saw a small house in the distance, which must have been the neighbors, the Perezes. I didn’t immediately see a break in the fence. It wasn’t until I got close enough to touch it that I saw that a section had been cut, then replaced. There were flakes of rust on the cut pieces that showed the edges.
Someone had to have made this gate between the Perezes and this property. Did Stephen know about it? Had he made it? And if so, why? I couldn’t tell how old it was, but it might have been from when he was “dating” Joanna. The fact that he hadn’t had it repaired since then could have meant nothing more than that had forgotten about it.
I trudged back up the hill, continuing to check the fence perimeter, but I found no other places where it had been breached. After that, dripping wet with sweat, I sat down on a boulder for a moment and tried to decide what to do next. Rebecca had called for the wives to meet at the house to tell them about Stephen’s death and I’d wished I’d been part of that, though my presence might have made the kinds of reactions I was looking for impossible. Could I nose around in the other houses in the meantime?
In my head, I made a list of possibilities. Frankly, Jennifer’s house seemed the most likely to hold secrets. If I could find her financial files, and if I could understand them, there might be a lot there.
And then I remembered Joanna’s warning about Stephen in the middle of the night. She was such a strange character. What would I find if I went into her house while she was gone?
I stood up and made my way to the yard by the unfinished house. Before I got there, I saw Joanna herself, herding her children along the stretch of open field toward the main house.
I debated for a moment and decided that talking to her in person, alone, might be more valuable than anything I could find at her house without her. I jogged to catch up to her and touched her arm as they were cresting the hill to the big house’s back door.
She turned, her eyes wide, startled. “What is it? I need to go to the house. Rebecca called me for some emergency,” she said.
After all her talk about dark shadows, she seemed to have no inkling of why the meeting had been called.
The children in their long dresses were already running ahead toward the back door, which had been left open. For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to be a woman and raise children in a group like this. On the one hand, it would be such a relief to know that there was a babysitter always a moment away, to share the unending responsibilities and maybe find some respite of alone time.
And yet, it would also be difficult to know that your children saw other women as their mothers nearly as much as you, that they could go to someone else and be comforted when they cried.
Being a mother is sometimes a lonely job, but it is always satisfying. Seeing your children eat happily, seeing them sleep peacefully, knowing that they need you and love you desperately. Letting go of the difficulties also seemed to me to be letting go of the treasures.
The back door closed, leaving me and Joanna alone in the yard. “Rebecca is calling all the wives to tell them that Stephen is dead,” I said bluntly.
“Oh, my poor Stephen,” she said, shaking her head. “How will we go on without him?” She didn’t seem distraught, merely concerned.
“You tried to warn him about danger,” I said. Standing near her I noticed how small she was—no more than five foot two, and only barely a hundred pounds by my guess.
“Yes.” She let out a long breath and began to chew at her fingernail.
“I saw you last night when you came to the house and tried to warn him again.” I stared at her, trying to gauge every blink of the eyes. I wanted her to be innocent nearly as much as I wanted Rebecca to be. She was just a child.
“Then you know. I came to tell him about my second vision, nearly the same as the first. If only he had listened to me. He did not believe my gift was a true one. He thought that I was a frightened little girl who wanted to make herself more important.” Her hands flutte
red in a gesture that seemed very little-girlish.
“Did you go home directly after Sarah sent you home?” I asked.
“Of course.” She met my eyes and held my gaze. “I would never leave my children alone in the house for long.”
I believed that. Joanna was an odd combination of weakness and strength. She’d left the FLDS and made a new life for herself here. She’d fought to keep Grace, even though it would have been much easier to leave the FLDS if she’d left her daughter behind. She’d married into a difficult situation and she’d had two more children in close succession, and in my book, having children demanded strength of all kinds.
“What about Sarah? Do you think she might have killed Stephen? She seemed very angry with him when I saw her earlier in the day,” I said, though she hadn’t seemed particularly angry last night. Joanna had said something about seeing a darkness around Sarah, too, something about red and black, but I couldn’t remember. What did it mean? That Sarah had blood on her hands?
Joanna considered it for a moment, her face caught in the sunlight and flattened by the lack of shadow in the midday sun. Then she shook her head firmly. “Sarah is always angry. But she has her paintings as an outlet. If Stephen shouts at her or Rebecca nags her, she just disappears into the shed.” Joanna nodded to the shed we’d passed on the way up, which I needed to put on my list of snooping spots.
“Then which of the wives do you think is the most likely to have killed Stephen?” I asked, because there was something about Joanna’s childishness that brought out blunt honesty in me, as if nothing I said could offend her. I wasn’t sure why.
“Jennifer.” She offered a ready answer.
“Why Jennifer?” I said, surprised.
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