CHAPTER 32
“It’s done,” said Kurt when he came home from work that Friday evening. He looked terrible. The last time I had seen him like this was when he went on a high adventure with the Varsity Scouts for a full week in the Uintas, a backpacking trip where he claimed to have gotten no sleep at all and had to cook food over a fire for fifteen boys ages sixteen and seventeen—two of them our oldest sons, Adam and Joseph.
I touched his beard. “You forgot to shave this morning,” I said, rubbing at it. I hadn’t seen him before he left for work. I’d slept in, feeling good. I trusted that Kurt would do something. It might be that I didn’t agree that men should hold all the offices in the church, but I trusted Kurt that if he had power, he would use it well.
Kurt put a hand to his face. “Oh, damn,” he said, which said a lot to me. Kurt didn’t curse easily, and I didn’t think he was cursing about his beard.
“So, what happens now?”
He shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything about it. It’s too personal, and I don’t really know any of the details. I’ve just set something in motion. I don’t know how it will turn out.”
I looked him in the eye. “Don’t tell me there’s a possibility that he will go scot-free.” Church discipline wasn’t exactly a legal system. There was no “evidence” to be offered, no experts to testify. Some witnesses might be called, and then the “jury” of priesthood holders deliberated, allowing the accused to speak for himself if he wished. And they all prayed.
The idea was that God would tell the truth of the matter, and it was supposed to be far better than a regular court system, where you had to rely on things like reason and logic. But those men who would be deliberating were all likely to be men who knew Aaron Weston, who admired him, and served with him. If he denied everything, which I was sure he would, would they be able to see past the shiny sticker of perfection he wore so well?
“If he’s innocent, then he will face no punishment,” said Kurt.
I pressed my lips tightly together. Kurt had to know that wasn’t an outcome I could accept. Would it simply be a matter of Gwen Ferris’s word against Aaron Weston’s? A woman who had mental-health issues, who wasn’t a mother, and who didn’t always come to church, against a Melchizedek priesthood holder and leader in Zion?
“And if he’s not, which I’m confident God will show to all who are deliberating, there will be harsh consequences,” Kurt finished.
“Can you tell me what they might be, say, hypothetically?” I asked. I had an idea, but I didn’t know the particulars. I hadn’t seen a church court in action before, except for returned missionaries who had admitted to breaking the law of chastity. That happened fairly regularly, and they were often disfellowshipped, which meant they had to serve a certain number of months without all of the blessings of the church like going to the temple or taking the Sacrament.
“Well, for a man who has been in the high positions he has been in, to be seen as guilty of sexual abuse in a church court would mean almost certain excommunication, cancelation of sealing to his wife and daughter, and revocation of any temple blessings.”
I let out a long breath. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t a jail sentence. But it was something to show that the Mormon church took a crime like this seriously and didn’t blithely go on as if the most important thing was how a man looked, how well he managed paperwork, and how much the other men around him liked him. And it separated him from Carrie, who could only be helped in the hereafter. At least she wouldn’t be bound to her father forever there.
“And how hard would it be for him to be rebaptized?” I asked. Was that vengeful of me?
Kurt shook his head. “Part of getting repentance for something like this would be confessing the truth and showing remorse. It would be accepting the consequences of a legal admission, which would mean confessing to the police and serving time for his crimes. In addition, he would have to do whatever is possible to make it up to those who were sinned against. In this case, I don’t know how a man could ever gain forgiveness from his dead daughter. Or how he could ever make it up to her. But I won’t say it’s impossible. God forgives even the most heinous sins, so it would behoove us not to deny forgiveness ourselves.”
“I don’t suppose ritual castration is one of the options?” I asked Kurt.
He choked a little at that. “Not that I’ve heard of.”
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, ANNA and I went on a walk. She had given up the condo and moved back into her old home. That made it easier for us to get together often, and we had begun to go on long walks together around the ward. It is surprising how much you can learn about people just by looking at their houses. The car that hasn’t moved for days. The windows with blinds that are never opened. The porch with more and more boxes piled up around it, the sagging fascia or the unpainted garage. The brick that has been painted, yellow or blue, over and over again, year after year, until it doesn’t appear to be brick anymore. I should have been noticing things like this years ago.
We usually had tea at her house after our walks. Sometimes I stayed for lunch, if we talked for a long time. It depended on what we had to say.
This time, Anna was just starting tea when then there was a loud knock on the door.
“Maybe it’s the mailman dropping something off?” she guessed.
But it was Liam.
“Liam, what are you doing here?” asked Anna.
“I had to come,” he said. He glanced up at me, and I thought he would ask me to leave, but he didn’t. “I have to tell you something.”
“All right, but come in and sit down. Did you fly here?”
He shook his head. “Drove.”
“From Tacoma?” said Anna. “Did you stop?”
He shook his head again. “I should have told you this before. At the funeral. Maybe before that. I don’t know. I didn’t want anything to happen to Dad and I was afraid—” He gasped in air and shook his head.
“Sit, sit,” said Anna, gesturing to the front room. It didn’t look the same as it had when Tobias had been alive. There were a few more feminine touches than before, and some of the furniture she had gotten rid of completely. She had also painted one of the walls a deep maroon with texturing. I liked it a lot.
Liam looked around and finally sat on the couch gingerly, as if he wasn’t sure it would hold him. The couch had a floral pattern that matched the wall, one of the new pieces Anna had put in.
“Tea?” asked Anna. She brought some in from the kitchen, but he only seemed to pretend to sip at it. “You know, your father is gone now, but nothing you say about him will change the man he was, the husband and father we both know he was,” said Anna. She seemed relaxed and her tone was calm.
“Yes. He was a good man,” said Liam. Then the words started pouring out of him. “I remember now. What happened all those years ago.”
“When? What do you mean?” asked Anna. Her voice was a little strained now.
Liam set down the tea and waved his hands. “Dad. And Helena. My mother. The day she disappeared.”
“Oh,” said Anna. She sat down abruptly on the couch next to Liam.
Then I could see Liam’s face clearly, and it was alight as if with revelation. “I heard them arguing that night. I was supposed to be asleep in bed, and I knew Dad would get mad at me if I came out of my room. But I heard them shouting and I was scared.” His voice became more high-pitched and less clearly pronounced, like a child’s. “I don’t remember what they were arguing about. I don’t think I understood it then. But she threw something at him. I heard it shatter against the wall.” He shuddered as if it were happening now instead of thirty years ago.
Was Liam trying to argue that Tobias might have had some excuse for what he had done? That it had been self-defense?
“Did you hear Tobias—hurt her?” asked Anna. Her voice sounded stuffy, as if she had a cold, but I didn’t see any tears on her face.
“No. You don’t understand. Dad didn’t kill her.” He sucked in a huge breath.
“I know you don’t want to believe that, Liam. Neither of us does. Tobias was a good man, but we have to accept that something happened between them that changed that. Maybe for only one moment. I don’t know how he could have changed back so quickly, but he did. The evil closed over him and then he broke free of it again. He was a good man, but he also hurt your mother, Liam,” said Anna. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at a point just past my head, on the other side of the room, as if that was the only way she could keep herself calm enough to speak about her husband this way.
“No! I saw—I heard what happened,” said Liam, standing up. His teacup fell to the carpet. None of us moved to pick it up, despite the stain it was spreading on the tan threads. “There was someone else there. I heard the door open, and I heard another voice. It was deeper than Dad’s, and it spoke to her. To Helena, my mother.”
He moved to the door, and gestured as if opening it. “I heard her say Daddy. Like she was calling the other man Daddy. He was angry with her and she was begging him not to hurt them. They’re babies, she said. I think she was talking about me and Tomas. I was mad, then, that she called me a baby. Tomas was a baby, not me. And then he said that they were—we were—little bastards, little demons sent from hell. And then I heard Dad say that he loved his wife and his sons as much as any man ever had.”
Anna was stiff with tension, leaning out of her seat on the couch, her neck stretched as far as it would go.
Liam let out a small gagging sound, but nothing came up with it. “And then,” he said hoarsely, “I heard a scream, and a thump. After that, I didn’t hear anything except the door closing again. I fell asleep.” He looked as innocent as a little boy at that moment, a boy whose life had been devastated and who had heard it happen, and did not understand it in the least, who only knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
Could Helena’s father have been the one who killed her? Had I been as wrong about Tobias as I had been about Jared Helm? And in the same way? Two murders in our ward, but neither of them the kind of murder I had imagined, a husband killing his wife. But fathers had so much power over their daughters, even when they were grown. Sometimes in our world, we forget that. A father is like a god. Thus we call God “Father in Heaven.”
“You think your grandfather killed your mother?” I asked cautiously. I could see Anna struggling to process Liam’s story. “But if that is what really happened, then why would Tobias bury her body? Why didn’t he report her father to the police?”
“I don’t know,” said Liam. He seemed himself again, weak and pale, but his adult voice had returned.
I stared at him and tried to calculate whether Liam had been old enough when his mother died to remember a scene like this. The fact that he had never spoken about it in the intervening thirty years said something about the trauma of the memory. Was it real? He could have invented it to fit the facts. On the other hand, it was clear that he believed it. And the way he spoke, in that child’s voice, was eerie.
“Why didn’t you say anything about this? All this time, Liam,” said Anna. “When your father was asking about Helena’s gravesite? When we were asking you if she died of a heart problem or in a car accident? Why did you never confide in me, all those years?”
“It felt like a nightmare. I didn’t know if it was real, and then as I grew older, I remembered it less and less because it wasn’t a part of my life. You were my life then. You were my mother.”
For a moment, Anna’s head bowed with this heartfelt return of all her love. I stared at her and swallowed hard. Then she lifted her head.
“You didn’t see him bury her, then?” she asked.
“No,” said Liam. “I didn’t know she was in the backyard. Maybe if I’d thought about it more, I would have seen the connection, but I didn’t.” He sagged back to the couch, and after a moment, Anna put a hand to his back and patted him.
“So what do we do now?” asked Anna. She had turned to me.
She thought I knew the answers here? “We could call the police and have Liam give them a statement.” But I had no idea if they would believe him. And what did it matter? Helena’s father was dead now. They couldn’t prosecute him any more than they could Tobias.
“Why wouldn’t Tobias have reported it?” I asked. “I don’t understand. He should have had the man convicted for murder. And then his wife could have been buried properly, in a cemetery,” I said. Why would he cover up for a man who wasn’t even his own father? A man he had, it seemed, hated?
Anna sighed. “Tobias was always a quiet man. The kind of notoriety that would have come with a murder trial would have destroyed him. And the boys, too.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. He buried her himself so there wouldn’t be a trial? Does an innocent man do that?” I asked.
“Maybe it was more than the trial. Maybe he wanted to keep her to himself,” said Anna. She looked at peace again at last, an expression of relaxation that I hadn’t seen for a long time spreading across her face. “Keep her here, with him, in the garden.”
“She was already dead,” said Liam. “It wasn’t as if a trial would have brought her back. And she loved her father, too. Maybe that was the real reason he said nothing, because he knew he would be ruining her father’s life if he reported her death, and he thought Helena wouldn’t have wanted that.”
I still thought it was very odd, all of it. I didn’t know if I believed Liam’s story, but it made a sense of all the strangeness in our ward these past months in a way nothing else had.
“And the hammer by our bedside all those years?” said Anna. “Do you think he might have worried it would happen again, and if it did, he wanted to be the one with the weapon?”
“I’ll talk to the police if you want me to,” said Liam. “If you think that will clear Dad’s name in some way.”
“Write me a statement,” said Anna after a long moment. “Then I can decide if I want to talk to them and show it to them if I need to.”
“Thank you,” said Liam with great relief. He stared around the house as if realizing for the first time where he was. “I should go. I need to get back home, to work.”
“Not right now. You need to sleep first,” said Anna. “I’ll call your wife and tell her where you are.”
Liam nodded and followed Anna to his old bedroom.
Anna came back down and got a towel from the kitchen to wipe at the tea stain. When that didn’t suffice, she worked on the color with a spray bottle and a hard brush.
When she was finished, she looked at me and held my gaze. She spoke with determination: “Liam was never a child to lie. Tomas, yes. He could lie with the best of them, but not Liam.”
If she believed it, then I supposed I had to, unless the police wanted to investigate the case more thoroughly. It was Anna’s husband’s reputation we were talking about here. She had every reason to want to think he wasn’t a killer. “It feels unfinished somehow,” I said. “There are still so many questions I wish we could have answered.”
“And you hate having it end so abruptly, don’t you?” said Anna, smiling like a mother watching a child make a familiar mistake.
She knew me too well.