CHAPTER 10
The police served a warrant on the Helms’ home Friday morning, after Kurt had gone to work. I got a panicked call from Jared and rushed over There were a dozen policemen in uniforms already moving through the house. Jared was in the kitchen, holding Kelly in his arms. He was weeping again, and she looked like a scared rabbit.
“You can both come to our house. There’s no reason you have to be here while the police search,” I said. I looked around and found a plainclothes policeman who looked like he might be in charge. “Can he leave? Does he have to watch this?”
“As long as we know where he is, in case there are questions,” was the answer.
I wondered if he meant in case they found evidence enough to arrest Jared on the spot.
“You take her,” said Jared, standing up and pushing Kelly toward me. “I’ll stay here.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“I need to be here,” he said. “This is our home. I’ll stay here to watch over it. But Kelly shouldn’t have to worry. Take good care of her?”
I nodded. “Of course I will. We’ll have fun together, right, Kelly?”
She nodded at me, then tucked her head into my pant leg.
I took her hand and it felt so good, that tiny, warm bit of flesh and fingers, that I thought there was something wrong with me. How could I feel so right with this other girl who wasn’t my daughter? But somehow I felt like she belonged with me, like she was my second chance.
As we walked back across and up the street, I noticed more than one curious neighbor poking a head out, taking in the police vehicles in the Helms’ driveway and along the sidewalk. I felt a pang for Jared Helm. No matter what he had done, he was still a scared young man trying to do what was right for his daughter.
When I turned back at the front door of my own house, I could see several white-gloved policemen in the Helms’ garage lifting the trunk of the family car.
Kelly caught a glimpse of this, too. “What are they doing? Are they going to take our car away?” she asked.
“No,” I assured her. “They’re just looking for your mother.”
“Why are they looking for her there?” said Kelly.
“They don’t know where else to look for her,” I said.
“But she’s not there,” said Kelly insistently. “She’s gone away.”
“Yes, sweetheart. But she didn’t say goodbye to anyone, so they’re worried about her. They want to talk to her and make sure she’s all right.”
“She said goodbye to me,” said Kelly.
My heart nearly stopped at that. I pushed the door open and pulled Kelly inside. “Come on inside to the kitchen,” I said. What did Kelly know about all of this? No one had ever thought to ask her this particular question before, it seemed. Or Kelly hadn’t felt comfortable enough to answer.
“Why don’t you tell me about your mommy?” I said, trying to move to the larger questions cautiously.
“Mommy used to make brownies with me when she was feeling sad,” said Kelly.
“Oh? What else did she do when she was sad?” I asked. I set her on the bar to watch me.
Then I got out all the ingredients to make brownies, hoping it would make Kelly feel more comfortable, and possibly jostle loose some memories. I felt like I was no better than the policemen who were even now poking into her underwear drawer, and her mother’s, as well. Prying out secrets from a child—how low did that make me? But I wanted to know the truth.
“She loved me,” said Kelly.
“Of course she did.” I hugged the little girl hard and set the butter I’d softened in the microwave in front of her, along with the sugar and cocoa, and asked her to stir it. I figured I would have a mess to clean up afterward, but Kelly had been trained well. She dug in with the wooden spoon and stood on the chair I pulled up for her, using the full weight of her body to cream the ingredients.
“Mommy likes chocolate best. It makes her feel happy again. And she likes the kissing movies.”
I smiled at that. “What kissing movies are her favorites?”
“The one with the movie star and the man who lives in the blue door. The one with the floppy hair,” said Kelly.
“Notting Hill?” I asked. It was also one of my favorites. “What else? You said she said goodbye to you before she left?” I was treading on dangerous ground here. I casually cracked eggs into the brownie batter, but felt as if my own house was as fragile as the eggshells. What if Jared realized what Kelly might say and came rushing over to take her back with him?
“She came into my bedroom and kissed me goodnight. She said to be a good girl for Daddy,” said Kelly.
But that could mean anything. “Well, I’m sure you are a good girl,” I said, hoping for more.
Kelly looked down at the brownie batter. “Can I have a taste? Mommy always lets me have a taste,” she said.
“With the eggs in it? That’s not safe,” I said. “Raw eggs can have bad bacteria in them.”
“Is that what made Mommy go away? The bad bacteria? Because she ate brownies before they were cooked?” said Kelly, looking up at me, her messy, curly hair now also dusted in flour and cocoa.
“No, I don’t think so,” I assured her.
“I’m not going to run away like Mommy. Daddy says I have to promise not to run away.”
“Your daddy is right about that, Kelly. You shouldn’t run away. Did you see your mom packing anything before she left? Are you sure she ran away?”
“Daddy said she ran away,” said Kelly. “But I only saw when she got out of the car.”
“She got out of the car?” I echoed.
“Daddy thought I was asleep. He told me to go back to sleep in the car, but when it stopped, I woked up,” said Kelly.
“And what happened then?” I said, stirring the brownie batter far past what it needed. This was not what Jared Helm had told me and Kurt that morning weeks ago, but I couldn’t react angrily. I didn’t want to lose the sense of ease that Kelly felt in this familiar rhythm.
“Mommy got out of the car. I heard her thump on the ground.”
I went cold at the childish description. “Then what?” I asked.
“Then Daddy said goodbye to her, too, and he got back in the car,” she said simply.
I felt terrible pumping information from a five-year-old child, especially this very vulnerable one. If the police had done it, someone would have cried foul. But I wasn’t hurting her, was I? And I needed to know what she had heard exactly. “Where were you? Do you remember anything about the place where she got out of the car?”
“It was dark,” said Kelly helpfully. “And cold.”
“But were there any lights outside?”
“I don’t think so,” said Kelly.
“And your mother didn’t kiss you goodbye in the car?” I asked.
Kelly shook her head. “I was trying to be asleep. Daddy said to sleep.”
“Did you hear her say anything to your dad?”
“She was mad at him. She didn’t talk to him when she was mad.”
Yes, that would be a useful survival strategy for a woman who had been abused by her husband.
Or maybe Carrie didn’t say anything to Kelly because she couldn’t. I wondered if Carrie Helm had been alive during this car ride Jared hadn’t mentioned to the police.
Clearly, Kelly wouldn’t know, so the questioning was over.
I stopped stirring the brownie batter and reached for a teaspoon. I offered it to Kelly, feeling like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, luring children in with a treat that wasn’t good for them. “Kelly, are you ever afraid of your daddy?” I asked quietly.
“He shouts sometimes,” Kelly said, looking down at her hands. “Then I run and hide in my room. I don’t like it when he gets mad at me.”
Too vague, too vague. If this were a detective novel, I’d be the prosecutor asking leading questions. Of a child. “But does he ever hurt you?”
“Once he spanked my hand,” said Kelly. “Because I almost touched the stove with it and he said it would have gotten burnt.”
“And what about your mom? Did you ever see him hurt her?”
Kelly stared up at me. “He took her pills once,” she said. “And put them down the toilet. She hit him, and then he held her hands. Then she cried. But Mommy told me never to tell anyone. She said she was sorry and he was sorry. She said she was wrong and not to hit.”
Pills? Birth control or her depression medication? It didn’t matter. I had to go back to the question of whether or not Carrie had been alive in that car ride. “Did you see your mom in the car? Or after she was dropped off? Did you see her waving at you?”
“It was dark,” said Kelly again. “I couldn’t see her.”
“And there were no lights? Why do you think she wanted to go to a place where there were no lights?”
“I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Sometimes Mommy said she needed to rest her eyes and her head and she would go into her room and close the door and turn out the lights. She told me to be very quiet then.”
Did I really think I could get all the information I needed out of a five-year-old girl in an hour? I should leave the detective work to the real detectives. Still, I was itching to go through the house, to see how Carrie had left it. Jared would have moved things by now, maybe enough things that I would never be able to piece the full story together. And the police were going through it right now. But there might be things neither he nor they understood the meaning of.
We poured the brownies into a greased pan and put them in the oven. Then I showed Kelly into the front room, and she looked through my children’s books with a cry of delight. “This is Mommy’s book,” she said. “She used to read this to me every day.” It was Harry the Dirty Dog. “I wish she didn’t take it with her.”
“She took this book with her when she left?” It seemed an odd thing for her to take, considering she had taken nothing else.
“I asked Daddy to read it the next day, after she was gone. Daddy said she took it with her. He said she didn’t want me to have it anymore.”
I patted her head, doing my best to suppress my fury at Jared Helm, then gently settled her into my lap and read her the book. She fell asleep in my arms. While her breath softened to a steady, slow pace, my mind was spinning wildly. I didn’t know if anything Kelly had told me would be useful, but the car ride seemed important, especially since Jared had so carefully concealed that information even from me and Kurt, who he must consider to be mostly on his side.
I hoped my worst fears—that Carrie’s presence in the car had been as a corpse—were wrong. I tried to think of more innocent explanations of Jared’s behavior. If he had dropped Carrie off somewhere, then he had been complicit in her escape, not surprised by it as he had pretended to be. But why would he drop her off somewhere completely dark, with no wallet or keys? The missing children’s picture book might mean nothing at all, but it was interesting at least. If Carrie had taken it, why that one thing? And if she hadn’t, why had Jared taken away a book that reminded his daughter of her mother? Was it pure pettiness?
My arms ached, then went numb, and still I sat there on the couch in the front room, the warm weight of Kelly in my arms. It had been a long time since Samuel was this age. My own daughter had never been this age. Maybe she never would be, even in the afterlife in the celestial kingdom that I hoped for. She might belong to another family entirely. Or she might be taken from me, if I had been the ultimate cause of her death. How could Kurt be so sure about seeing her again when we had never seen her really to begin with?
The doorbell rang, and I started. Kelly rubbed at her eyes and her face had a little red mark on it where she had collapsed over her arm.
I shifted her to the side onto the couch and got up to find Jared Helm at the door.
“They’re finished,” he said. “She can come home now.”
I didn’t ask him anything, but I walked back over to the Helms’ house with Kelly and Jared. The last police car was still waiting. Jared had a form to sign, a document stating that nothing had been taken from the house except certain items on a list he had to check off.
Then the police car drove away, and Jared lifted Kelly into his arms. He stepped inside the house reluctantly.
“I could come in and help you clean up, if you’d like,” I offered. What was I doing? Going into a house alone with a man who might have killed his wife to try to find evidence against him? But I had been drawn into this and I was going to use all the skills I had to resolve it.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I need some time to myself. Just me and Kelly.”
I tensed. I had to go in there. The police were looking for signs of Carrie’s death, but I wanted more information about everything leading up to her disappearance. I wanted to know who she had been, since I hadn’t found it out while she was here.
I took a breath to steady myself. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the moment. I needed to let Jared trust me.
But I wasn’t giving up.
“Of course,” I said, and let the door close.
THE POLICE MADE no official report of what they had—or had not—found in the Helm house. Saturday evening, they released a statement saying that Jared was not a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, but that he was a “person of interest.” Which meant the news vans were still camped outside his house, causing Jared and Kelly to live a strange life inside their bubble of home.
On Sunday, they stayed home from church again, and Kurt made sure to contact the Elders Quorum Presidency to ask that they visit Jared, and the Primary Presidency to do the same with Kelly. Kurt got the Young Women to offer to babysit Kelly if Jared wanted to attend the ward temple night this week, or if he needed to leave for a police interview or to go shopping.
Instead of having strange babysitters in his home, Jared made a list of things he needed from the store, and Cheri Tate went out shopping for him. Every purchase she made, it seemed, was then listed on the news that Sunday night.
Kurt shook his head over that. “It shouldn’t happen like that. Did she talk to the reporters? I thought I made it clear she wasn’t to do that.”
“About what she bought at the grocery store? Don’t give her a hard time about that, Kurt. She’s doing her best in a difficult situation.” I imagined the reporters following her through the store, asking clerks what she’d bought, or chasing down mislaid receipts.
There was only so much you could expect anyone to do to preserve another person’s privacy. But I wondered if perhaps Cheri Tate had begun to suspect Jared Helm of criminal behavior toward his wife. A part of me liked that idea very much.