CHAPTER 5
I spent all Tuesday reading, but had been bored by it more than usual. It made me wonder what was wrong with me. This was the life every stay-at-home mother eventually worked her way towards. After all those twenty-four-hour days with kids scraping their knees, making messes, vomiting and needing constant baths, to have some hours of peace and quiet should have felt like a blessing. But I was itchy for more occupation. Maybe I should join the PTA, although it was a little late for that with Samuel a senior. I should be content with being bishop’s wife.
The doorbell rang that evening just after I’d served dinner. “I’ll get it,” said Kurt, staring at his plate then taking one last, large bite of his potatoes.
“I’ll put your plate in the fridge,” I said, and stood up with him.
“Poor Dad, always on call like a doctor,” said Samuel, as he watched his father walk to the front door and open it.
I heard both a male and a female voice, but I didn’t recognize either of them. I put the dinner in the fridge to wait for Kurt’s return and felt only slightly guilty continuing to eat without him.
“Linda, do you mind coming into the office?” Kurt called out a few minutes later.
I was startled and stared down at my own plate.
“I’ll put it in the fridge,” said Samuel, with a bit of a grin.
“Thank you,” I said and went into the office to discover an older man and woman I had never met before. “Are you new to the ward?” I asked. There were still a lot of new homes being built in the area, though I couldn’t think of anyone moving out.
“No,” said the man. He had a large, Roman nose and a strong jawline. He also had an amazing head of hair for a man his age, which I guessed was about sixty. It was all black, and it looked natural, unlike Tobias Torstensen’s. He had eyebrows that looked like they should have been combed—or cut back like an overgrown hedge. There was something about him that made me think I should remember him. Was he an old high school friend who had come to look me up? Or someone I’d only seen in pictures in Kurt’s yearbook?
The woman was greying gracefully, her hair long and thick. She wore little makeup, and had one of those pleasantly round figures. She dressed for comfort rather than fashion: a cotton floral patterned skirt that nearly touched the floor, and under it had on a pair of flat tan shoes. When I looked into her face, she met my gaze with piercing blue eyes and I suddenly knew who she was before the words came from her husband’s mouth. She was her daughter’s mother.
I felt an old, familiar flicker of irrational anger at that—this woman had a daughter, had been able to raise that daughter to adulthood—and tamped it down. I wondered how often that interrupted my relationships with other women.
“We are Carrie Helm’s parents, Judy and Aaron Weston,” the older man said, standing up in the now rather crowded room. Kurt’s office was filled with two bookshelves of church books, and Kurt had read most of them. There were two paintings of Christ, one from the story in the Book of Mormon, of him blessing the Lamanite children during the visit to America after his death, and the other of Christ in Gethsemane with Michael the archangel behind him, giving him strength. There was also a drawing of the First Presidency, which I always thought was an odd image. To me, it looked like the three men—the president and his two elected apostle-counselors—had one neck with three heads coming out of it.
“Down from Sandy,” added Aaron Weston.
That was about twenty minutes from Draper. I’d had no idea Carrie Helm’s parents lived so close. I had never heard her talk about them. But then again, why would I?
“Oh. I see,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure that I did. I glanced up at Kurt, who was behind his desk.
“They are here because they have not heard from their daughter since she left her family here, and they are concerned about her,” said Kurt.
“We are more than concerned about her. We are overcome with worry,” her father said. He spoke eloquently, and with deep emotion.
“Please, sit down,” said Kurt, nodding to the couch. He got out a folding chair for me, and we all sat. I felt as if the room became less crowded, which made no sense. It was something about Aaron Weston sitting down. He felt less—overwhelming in size and personality.
“I don’t know what Jared has told you about Carrie, but there is no way she would leave Kelly like that,” said Aaron Weston. He gripped his wife’s shoulder, his knuckles white, and she nodded, a look of desperation on her face. I noticed, though, that her hands were folded neatly in front of her.
“I’m sure that she will get in contact with you soon. Maybe she’ll decide she’s made a mistake and want to come—” Kurt began.
Aaron Weston cut him off abruptly with, “The only mistake my daughter made was in marrying Jared Helm. He is a tyrant and a bully and quite possibly insane. Have you heard him talk about his political views? Or his religious beliefs? He is rigid and self-righteous and he actually thinks that the lost tribes of Israel are frozen under the ice at the North Pole.”
If we kicked people out of the Mormon church for believing crazy things like that, we would lose half the people on the rolls. I’d heard the lost tribes under the North Pole thing at least a half dozen times before, though it was usually a couple of generations removed from Jared Helm’s age group.
Aaron continued, “I have talked to my daughter on numerous occasions about leaving her husband. I wouldn’t care if she did that. But she always made the plans with Kelly included. How could she leave her daughter with such a man?”
There was a long silence. I couldn’t help but think of the way that Carrie had hugged Kelly when she left her in Primary. Aaron Weston was right. Carrie leaving her daughter behind struck me as wrong. How could any mother do that? My throat tightened.
“I’ve never heard anything against Jared Helm, not from your daughter or anyone else,” said Kurt. “Not about him being dangerous, in any case.” Just a bit right-wing; we’d both heard him in church meetings call homosexuality and universal health care “signs of the end times.”
“Did you ever talk to Carrie about him in private?” Aaron Weston said. “She is afraid of him. She would never say anything close to the truth when he was around.” He pounded a fist into his hand when he said the word “never.” I was somewhat taken aback by his size and the strength of his body language. “But if you have not noticed the look of unhappiness in her eyes, the way that she edges away from him if she can, the way she stands between him and Kelly whenever she can, you have seen nothing at all. How can you be a bishop without looking past the most obvious of pretenses?”
Kurt looked at me. I did not know what to say. He was a man who tended to assume that the obvious was true. It was one of the reasons I loved him. He appreciated honesty rather than subtlety. He did not enjoy the games men and women often play with each other. When I said I wanted one thing, he did not think that it must mean I wanted the opposite. But at times this habit did not serve him well.
“I’ve noticed that she seemed unhappy,” I said. “And lonely. She didn’t make many friends in the ward. I wondered why.” Now that I thought about it, I only remembered her sitting next to Gwen Ferris, but Gwen was a bit of an outsider herself. It occurred to me that the scene in the bathroom with Gwen crying might at least in part have been precipitated by Carrie Helm’s absence. She and Gwen had always sat together in Relief Society and must have helped keep each other sane when stupid things were said, from remarks about depression being the work of the devil to God showing His love by making the righteous wealthy.
“Jared was careful not to leave any marks on her,” Aaron Weston told me. “He threatened her. He told her that he would kill her if she ever tried to leave him, and he would make sure that Kelly never heard of her again. He whispered to her at night. Sometimes he woke her up to tell her that God would judge her if she didn’t obey her husband’s every word, or give details on how God would torment the wicked in the afterlife.”
I blanched at this. That was not only directly against the doctrine of the church, but it was monstrous. No wonder Carrie had kept to herself. She must have been terrified every moment of her life. How could I not have seen that in the small rebellions she tried to make in public at church on Sundays? I had let her walk around with no allies to turn to. I wasn’t the bishop and I couldn’t call her husband into repentance, but the bishop’s wife was the unofficial mother of the ward. She—I—was supposed to comfort and help and, well, see things!
“If you knew all this, then why didn’t you do something?” asked Kurt. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“She begged us not to. He told her that if the police ever came to the house, he would make sure that they saw the perfect husband. Also, he had a notebook of mistakes she had made, with all the proof and photographs to show if there was ever an occasion that he needed them.” He paused and sighed.
“What kind of mistakes?” I asked, though I realized as soon as I said it that it was probably too intrusive a question to ask parents.
Aaron Weston gestured to his wife, who finally spoke. “Things like taking money out of her daughter’s college funds so that she could buy food,” said Judy Weston. “Or not taking Kelly to the doctor after she had fallen and cut open her cheek.”
I wasn’t sure either of those constituted the kind of mistake that could make Carrie Helm look bad in court, if it came to that. But what mattered was probably what she believed, not what was really dangerous.
“I think more than anything she was ashamed she had married him in the first place.” Aaron Weston added. “She made a mistake and she felt bound to him forever. She didn’t know what to do, with her daughter eternally sealed to him.” He interlocked his hands in a gesture of sealing that looked more like prison.
The doctrine of temple sealing was supposed to make families feel more secure, and to offer peace to those who had lost children or spouses. But there were times when it shackled a woman to a man who had become a tyrant, simply because of a ceremony performed and because of children created together.
“That is not what an eternal sealing means,” said Kurt, as I’d heard him say on more than one occasion. “If Jared Helm was not living according to the laws of righteousness, the sealing was already broken.”
Did that mean Carrie was free of him now? And what of Kelly, whom she had left behind? Whatever the church liked to say about broken sealings, genetics and the law of the land were not broken so easily.
Before Aaron Weston had the chance to say anything further about Jared Helm’s righteousness, Kurt asked, “When did she tell you about all of this? How recently?” He wasn’t taking notes during the conversation, but he kept glancing at the notepad on his desk. He never put anything on the computer, but he did take notes after an interview was finished. To keep things fresh in his mind when he prayed, he said. Suddenly, I wondered if he was doing it for legal reasons. Would Kurt be called to testify if this came to court?
“We knew something was wrong shortly after they got married,” Aaron Weston said. “We tried to get her alone to talk about it openly, but it was difficult. It took months. Jared would not let her meet anyone privately, not even us, her parents. Even when we thought we had made arrangements to talk to her alone, he would appear halfway through, or we would find out that he was eavesdropping. She was never able to talk candidly about why exactly she was not happy.” At this point, Aaron nodded to prompt his wife again.
“I thought he had certain appetites,” said Judy. She left the rest unsaid. Sexual appetites, obviously. But we Mormons never speak about that.
I hated the feeling of helplessness that seeped into my bones like cold. What I wanted to do most was go to Jared Helm’s house and take Kelly home with me. That little girl, who had sat on my lap and tried to plunk out notes on the piano before her father stopped her, had settled into my heart. The power struggle between Carrie’s father and her husband was of little interest to me, two men strutting about and comparing their size to each other. Judy Weston had barely said a word, and only when prompted by her husband.
“And when did you hear the rest of it?” asked Kurt.
“She wrote a letter to us only the day before she disappeared,” said Aaron Weston. “She said that she was tired of living with Jared’s outbursts and his judgments, and that she was going to run away. With Kelly, of course. She said that she was leaving Jared and that she hoped we would protect her confidence as long as we could. And she warned us that she would not be able to communicate with us for some time. She told us to pray for her and for Kelly to be safe.” He turned to his wife.
She opened her purse and took out a letter. I didn’t know anything about Carrie’s handwriting, but it was a real letter, written by hand, not emailed. Email would be too easy for Jared Helm to read.
Kurt read it, and I stood up and moved so I could look over his shoulder. Aaron Weston had summarized it adequately. My stomach twisted at the strange ideas that Carrie listed that Jared believed in. Polygamy for one, which some Mormons still thought might be reinstituted, in the afterlife. But Jared Helm took it further, according to Carrie. He thought that he could make a list of women who would be his in the afterlife.
He also thought women were born evil, more worldly minded, and that he had a duty to “tame” his wife and his daughter, whatever that meant. He went on tirades about the clothing Carrie wore because it was not modest enough, nor was the clothing she bought their daughter. But I had never seen Carrie Helm wear anything that was remotely immodest. She had always seemed well dressed, but a little formal for a woman her age. Now I suppose I knew why.
“You have gone to the police then?” said Kurt.
I was still standing, feeling too much negative energy to sit back down. I wanted to scream and kick and tear at things. Instead, I clenched my fists.
“We did. But she has not been gone long enough for them to declare her missing. And there is no evidence of any foul play. They say that a letter alone is not enough to pursue Jared criminally. They need more than that. They need some proof that she has been harmed and isn’t just a troubled woman who left her husband and daughter.” This last Aaron Weston got out with difficulty, each word thrust out from behind his teeth.
“And what would you like me to do?” asked Kurt.
I wanted him to look at me so he could see the fury in my eyes. If I could have reached his hand, I would have gripped it so hard he could not possibly have ignored me. Something had to be done. When Jared Helm had brought Kelly here, Kurt had believed his story, had thought of him as the wronged husband. Somehow, as the bishop, Kurt should have known the truth behind Jared Helm’s lies. It made me angry at God somehow that he hadn’t.
“Find her,” said Judy Weston, but to me, not to Kurt. “Please, find her.” She was gasping, but she was not weeping. Her face was clear and insistent.
One mother who was desperate for her daughter’s return to another mother who would never have hers back.
“You think that she has been harmed?” asked Kurt.
“There is no other reason she would leave her daughter. She has to have been hurt. Possibly—” Aaron Weston didn’t finish.
But if Carrie Helm was dead, then I had no more chance to help her. I would have to admit I had failed her. I could not do that.
If she had lived, my daughter would have been in her twenties now, only a few years younger than Carrie Helm. She had been born between Joseph and Kenneth, but we had never brought her home from the hospital. My doctor at the time had said anything might have caused my daughter’s death, maybe my taking cold medicine before I knew I was pregnant, or letting my body temperature get too high in a hot tub when Kurt and I were on vacation for a week when I first found out I was expecting. I had no way of knowing if it was my fault or not, or if I would ever see that daughter again in the afterlife.
She had died before she was born, and that left her in a kind of limbo in terms of Mormon doctrine. Stillborn children are sometimes listed as members of the family and sealed to their parents, but sometimes they are not. Some Mormons firmly believe a stillborn child is only a body, and that if there was once a spirit attached to it, it has gone to another body, to other parents.
Joseph Smith had given a famous funeral speech for a young child, claiming that children who died before the age of eight were automatically taken into the celestial kingdom and that mothers would there be allowed the privilege of raising their children to adulthood if they had missed the chance in this life. Still, I didn’t like the idea that a child was waiting all those years for me to die before she was allowed to grow up.
I hoped fervently that the Westons were blowing the potential danger to Carrie out of proportion, and for the first time I hoped that Jared Helm’s story was true and Carrie had just abandoned her family. Now, having read her letter, I began to understand why the young mother might make that choice. If Jared had made her believe she was a bad mother, she might have become convinced Kelly was better off without her. I could sympathize with Carrie Helm in ways that her parents and even Kurt probably could never understand.
“If you could talk to Jared,” Judy was saying, turning away from her husband and appealing to Kurt now. “Maybe he would tell you where she is. She did not simply disappear. She would not do that. She would not leave Kelly with him.”
“There might be some other explanation for all of this,” said Kurt. He always wanted there to be an explanation.
But sometimes the explanation was that men took advantage of the power they had over their wives, in society and in the church. Even the kindest men in the church had no idea of the many ways in which they made their wives and daughters into lesser persons than their sons and fellow male church members. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my wife,” they say in testimony meetings. But what they are also saying is that their wives have given up their personal ambitions in favor of the ambitions of their husbands. Mormon men protect their daughters, but they encourage and cheer on their sons. And I, who had never had a daughter, and had so few female friends still in the church, had done little more than any of the men had to help the women around me. But that had to change. I had to change first, and make the church and culture change around me. First came speaking the truth.
“You need to get the press involved,” I said, thinking of the news stories I had seen that week on television. The missing persons cases with the best publicity always get solved the fastest. “If the police won’t act, then we need some help. Some people out there, looking for her. People who might have seen Jared the night Carrie disappeared.” This was what I had learned in my years of watching missing persons cases on TV, not anything official, but I believed it.
“Press?” said Kurt in a choked tone.
But Judy Weston nodded. “That is a good idea. I know a writer for the local paper.” She glanced at her husband.
“But he isn’t anyone important,” said Aaron Weston. “I have some friends who work at KSL, members of the church I’ve come in contact with in my leadership positions.”
I disliked the way that he dismissed Judy’s suggestion and had to put his own ideas first, but I wanted this done more than I wanted to argue about who should lead it. “Start with any local connections you have,” I said. “But national coverage would be better. We want to force the police to pay attention. The longer they wait before acting, the less chance there is of …” I couldn’t allow myself to believe that she was dead. Carrie Helm had to be alive.
Aaron Weston was nodding vigorously. He could agree with me, if not with his own wife, it seemed. “Good,” he said, putting a hand to his heart. “The Spirit is speaking to me right now, telling me this is the right path. We’ll go and get started. Thank you so much. We’ll be in touch with you again soon about the results.”
I nodded, feeling alive in a way I hadn’t for years. My fingers were tingling and I could feel the beat of blood in my neck. Other bishop’s wives didn’t get involved in personal crusades, but I couldn’t turn this one aside. I owed it to Carrie Helm, after all the time I’d neglected her.
“I knew this was the right place to come,” said Judy Weston softly. She stood up and came toward me, hugging me gently despite my stiffness. I was going to have to learn sometime, I told myself. This was how women interacted with each other.
Holding her husband’s hand as they walked to the front door, Judy Weston said, “I am sure that God is watching over Carrie even now.”
I watched them leave and then Kurt gestured me back to his office. “If Jared Helm is innocent, you have just put him into an impossible situation,” he said sternly.
“Do you really still think that is likely?” I said, annoyed with him. “You read that letter Carrie Helm wrote. It sounded pretty bad to me.”
“I admit, it was disturbing, but it seems unfair to paint Jared Helm as an abuser. Or a possible murderer. That letter isn’t proof of anything other than the fact that Carrie and Jared had a troubled marriage, and we knew that already.”
“Carrie Helm is gone and no one has heard from her. She might well be dead. I think the possibility of that outweighs Jared Helm’s need for privacy,” I said. But I thought, please, don’t be dead, please don’t be dead. It was the same mantra I had repeated that night so many years ago, when Kurt drove me to the hospital.
Samuel was waiting for me and Kurt at the bottom of the stairs. He told us he had decided to go to the dance with the girl he was comfortable with and seemed relieved at the choice. I was relieved that he was going to the dance at all. I slipped out of bed late at night to go downstairs and watch the news. But there was nothing about Carrie Helm. Yet.