The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(15)

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.