CHAPTER 34
I left the Westons’ house, not bothering with any social niceties and leaving Judy gawping behind me. I drove home and called the police while I was still buzzing from the adrenaline rush.
After that, things moved quickly. Late Saturday night, Aaron Weston was announced as a suspect in the case of his daughter’s murder. The police served a warrant on his house and took possession of his computers and his car. According to the Sunday morning news, they were looking for proof that he had driven to Wendover and that he had killed his daughter in his own car. I was not happy with the ending of this sad story, but at least it was an ending. I had done something for Carrie Helm at last, even if it wasn’t nearly what I’d wanted to do. And Kelly Helm would be as safe as I could make her, though I might not see her often.
“It seems the best ending I can hope for,” I told Kurt when he got home from church meetings after ten.
“But who will his daughters be sealed to, then?” asked Kurt. “I know I should simply trust in God, and I do. But I wonder even so.”
It was one thing to think of a woman with children sealed to someone besides their father in the eternities, but it was another again to try to imagine a way out of this mess. Would the daughters all be sealed to different families? Then what about their connection to each other? I could not imagine that God would bind them forever to a mother like Judy Weston. They say He forgives all and that we will all be changed beyond recognition, once the work of redemption is complete. But could those daughters ever have happy marriages and relationships with their own families after this? All I could see was generation to generation, daughters and mothers set adrift from sealings. More questions that had no answers.
MONDAY I HAD the television on to watch the news, as I usually did during lunch. I didn’t expect to hear anything about the Westons, but around noon, their house appeared on the screen, surrounded by SWAT vans. People in uniforms were converging on the house with guns.
“Breaking news. Aaron Weston, father and suspected murderer of young Draper mother Carrie Helm, has locked himself and his wife in their house and threatened to kill her and then himself rather than surrender to police, as he was supposed to earlier this morning. Police say that Aaron Weston has a weapon and that he has spoken to them on the phone. He claims that he is innocent and that his daughters, who have made statements against their father to the police, have been subject to brainwashing worked on them by his wife.”
He had turned on her, and I couldn’t feel sorry for her. But I felt no satisfaction. I might think Judy deserved to lose her daughters in the hereafter, but I didn’t think she deserved to die. Not at her husband’s hands.
I turned the television off immediately and got in the car. I called Kurt and told him about the news as I drove south.
“What are you doing? Why? No. Linda, this is none of your business. They’re not in our ward. They’re not your responsibility.”
“Yes, they are,” I said. “You know they are. This is what I have to do. I started all of this and now I have to finish it.”
“Is this about Georgia?” said Kurt.
It was the first time he had said her name in years. It jolted me a little, and I had to work harder to focus on the road. “Not really,” I said. “Not in any direct way.”
“Then why are you doing this? Why put yourself in danger?”
I could see the Draper temple in my rearview mirror, the Oquirrh temple to my left behind the South Jordan temple. The Salt Lake temple was less visible ahead of me. So many temples, where only good thoughts and godliness were supposed to be, and so much horror in the real world around them.
“Kurt, you knew who I was when you married me. I need to be doing something. I need to make a difference.”
“You are making a difference already. At home. In the ward.”
Where he was in control of my influence. “Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. But I should have done more. I should have seen things more clearly. If I’d been doing what I was meant to do from the beginning, this might have turned out differently. I’ve been running away from myself. And now, for the first time, I feel like I’m running forward, not hiding myself.” I should have been scared to death, but I wasn’t. I felt like I was flying. I felt like I had lost fifty pounds and twenty years. “Firm as the mountains around us.” The powerful line from one my favorite old hymns, and that was how it felt. The mountains were firm around me, so I could fly.
“Linda, there’s a SWAT team there. You don’t want to get caught in the cross fire.”
“I’ll be as careful as I can,” I promised him, and hung up. I needed to talk to Aaron and Judy Weston. I could convince him to turn himself in. I could save Judy’s pitiful life. And I was the only one who could do it. I was the bridge from faith to truth here, and I wasn’t going to step aside while other people told me that they could do it better. Even if those people were Kurt or the police, people who had more supposed authority than I did. Authority was given by God, and He was surely telling me to do this now.
After twenty minutes of driving I was pulling into the cul-de-sac of the wealthy neighborhood in Sandy. No one was watching for me. I parked a block away and then tucked myself into my coat. I had always had the gift of being invisible. It would serve me well again.
I was parked by the garage, near the bushes that divided this property from the next. I could see the SWAT team near the van at the front of the house was on the phone with someone inside, most likely Aaron. I wanted to see Judy. And there she was, her face peeking out of the curtain of the sliding back doors.
I didn’t look back. I simply moved forward. By the time the SWAT team saw me, I was already knocking on the glass door and Judy Weston was opening it.
She didn’t look particularly glad to see me, but she was trembling and I think she was glad to see anyone who wasn’t her husband.
“What are you doing?” said Aaron loudly, as he came into the vast living room. He was carrying a butcher knife casually, and he was holding a phone to his ear. As soon as he saw me, he smiled at me and pointed at me with the butcher knife.
I hadn’t imagined I would get him to turn himself in without facing him like this. But somehow when the moment came, it was more terrifying than I had anticipated.
Aaron Weston spoke into the phone: “I have a second hostage now. Her name is Linda Wallheim.” He hung up the phone, and motioned for Judy to close the sliding doors.
My stomach seemed to drop to my knees.
I hadn’t said a word of prayer, the whole time I’d been on my way here. Not out loud and not in my heart, either. Maybe I should have, but somehow I had thought in this case God was counting on me instead of the reverse.
Why had I wanted to come in here again? What in the world had I thought I could do that a SWAT team couldn’t? I had had no training in this, no matter how much I told myself it was what I was “meant” to do. I felt a sudden cold sweat of fear at the realization that I had just placed myself into the power of a man who had killed his own daughter. I was now in the same situation Carrie Helm had been in for so long. Was I going to be able to effect an escape any better than she had?
“You,” said Aaron. “You whore.”
The fact that he used the same word as Alex Helm had to make me slap him was strange. I didn’t feel the same anger at all. Possibly because Aaron Weston was speaking so calmly, wearing a fine suit like he had the first time I met him.
My failure to react physically seemed to enrage him, because he lunged at me with the knife. Then I shrieked involuntarily and he pulled back.
“This is the fault of people like you,” he spat out. “My daughters would never—”
“You can stop trying to tell me your excuses. How they seduced you or lied to you or anything else. I’m not interested.”
He stared at me. “I’ll kill you, too. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve gone this far. I killed Carrie, and I’m glad that I did. She needed to die. She didn’t know how to be a mother anymore, or a wife. Her husband will thank me, too, in time.”
At last, I had the impression that I was seeing the real Aaron Weston. There is a legend among Mormons that if you meet a spirit, you should ask to shake hands. An evil spirit will agree to shake, and you will feel no substance. A good spirit will refuse to shake your hand. I wished I had had such a simple test for evil men and good men when I had met Aaron.
“What about Carrie’s daughter?” I asked. “Will Kelly thank you for killing her mother?”
Aaron Weston shrugged. “She is a girl. She belongs to her father, not to me.”
This wasn’t Mormonism, I thought. This had nothing to do with my Mormonism. Only with Aaron Weston’s, and his was wrong.
The phone rang again, but Aaron ignored it. He looked up at me smugly. He nodded out the glass doors to the SWAT team in the driveway and on the street. “They think they are building a relationship with me. They think that they are doing something other than delaying the inevitable.”
But he hadn’t killed himself or Judy yet. Or me. That meant something, didn’t it? “You don’t want to die,” I said. That was, I hoped, where his goal and mine coincided.
“Don’t I? My life is over. Everything I’ve built, my reputation, my family,” he said, his expression dark.
Good. If he saw that clearly, then maybe he could see the rest. “And when you die, what do you think will happen? Aaron, what kind of a God do you believe in?” I asked him.
This was the biggest gamble I had taken in my life. I assumed that after all of his years in the Mormon church, he actually believed some part of it, that it wasn’t all part of a pretense to abuse power. I felt my fear fading and a strange calm envelop me. Maybe I had gone beyond fear, or maybe it was the Holy Spirit. I don’t know.
He stared down at the knife as if talking to his face in a mirror. “God will justify me,” he said. “I have done a lot of good. If I have made mistakes, well, so have others.”
“Aaron,” I said, to make him look at me. He wasn’t alone in this house. He wasn’t in some dreamworld of his own making. “It’s not just a mistake to kill your daughter. You planned it.”
He waved a hand. “Look at Joseph Smith. He had affairs with women long before he instituted the so-called doctrine of polygamy. He was a man with certain lusts, and he found a way to make them palatable to others. He declared a new doctrine.”
“You are not Joseph Smith,” I said. I wasn’t here to defend the founder of Mormonism and the polygamy that had long since been repudiated. Joseph Smith had not been a perfect man, but I believed in the church he had built, and in the Book of Mormon he had translated.
“That is how people outside the church see him. As a lecher. A despoiler of young girls,” said Aaron Weston. “But he was a holy man even so.”
So was that his excuse? That another man had done what he had done and still been praised for his life? “Joseph Smith did not abuse his own daughters,” I pointed out.
“Are you so sure of that?” said Aaron. “He could have made it holy if he had. A holy man makes everything holy that he touches.”
I had seen him as a prophet for a moment at the funeral. Did he see himself that way? How often had that excused him in his own mind?
“No one wants to see the underside of the church anymore, the bloody truth behind glory. If the Mormon church has lost its way, and I think it has, then it is because the leaders don’t understand that there is a danger and a madness to true holiness.” He waved the knife, shiny blade glinting, to punctuate his speech.
I thought of the afternoon I had spent hours chopping those vegetables in my kitchen, until I’d ruined one knife and had to reach for another. I didn’t even remember doing that. I shuddered at the thought that I was like Aaron Weston in some way.
“This new group of apostles, old men who are used to comfortable lives—they want to stay on the side of the law. They want to be accepted by society in general. They don’t want to be seen as a cult. And they have abandoned everything about Mormonism that made it difficult to live. They will make us all men who choose what is easiest, not what is right.”
This was a doctrine I had heard before, in different forms. If the “world” believed something, then you had to believe its opposite to be righteous. It made people rage against everything from a global economy to public schooling and immunizations, but mostly I thought it was just an excuse not to have to do the work that seeing shades of grey requires.
“So you believe that when you die, you will go to the celestial kingdom because you are doing terrible, illegal things? That’s why you’re so eager for death?” I asked, staring the man straight in the face.
I felt like I was right on the edge of a fragile rock bridge in Zion National Park. We had been there with all the boys once, and I had never felt anything like the sensation of standing there, on such a thin piece of rock, with the wind blowing all around. That was the valley of the shadow of death. And here I was again.
The knife turned again in his hand, and I wondered how many times he had handled it like this before, as a weapon rather than a tool.
I glanced at Judy Weston. She was still shaking, but there was no expression on her face. She was blank, as much a puppet as Aaron Weston had always seemed to think that she was.
“I believe—there may be a time of waiting,” he said, the knife moving so casually from hand to hand. “But yes, ultimately, I believe God will agree with what I have done. He will see that in the moral dilemma in which he placed us, this was the only choice. Like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.”
I tried not to look at the knife. I didn’t want him to think that it was what mattered here. This had to be a conversation between two equals or it would never work. I tried to lower my voice, and I widened my stance, like a man might. “A period of waiting?” I asked him, seizing on this one hint of doubt. “You mean spirit prison, don’t you? And who do you think will be there with you, waiting?”
He didn’t answer me. He looked out the front window, visible through the kitchen, at the SWAT teams surrounding the house, the knife turning and turning. The phone rang again. He looked at the number, but he didn’t answer it.
He was on the precipice too, I thought. But he was completely alone, staring into the abyss.
“I won’t be there long, so I hardly think it matters. But if I have to endure the company of the wicked there, it will be no different from what I endure here.” He gestured at the front door of the house with the knife, and then at his wife.
She stared at the knife and seemed unable to look away.
“And what about Carrie, your daughter? Do you think she will be waiting for you in spirit prison?”
“Carrie—well, maybe she will be there.”
“Then what do you think she will say to you when you see her in spirit? Before you die, you should consider that, don’t you think?” I could see him rubbing his thumb across the edge of the knife now, making friends with it. “If you give yourself up, you will have to face a trial. But you think that anyone who hears your story will believe you, right?” I asked.
Judy Weston was silent, as she had been all her life. I was glad this once; it meant she didn’t get in my way.
“Think about this choice. If you killed yourself now, or goaded others into killing you, wouldn’t that be a crime in itself? To give up on what you could teach here? Do you think God would approve of you giving up so easily, when there are so many things you need to change in the church itself?”
He looked at me. “What do you know about the priesthood? About the heavens and the place of gods there? You are a woman,” he said.
Damn. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t think in that direction. “My husband sent me here,” I said. It was pure inspiration. “He thought I would get in more easily. But he gave me the words to say.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Your husband is a good man.”
“Good” and “man” being synonymous, it seemed. Just as it was with Alex Helm. Carrie must have thought the Helms were different at first, but the more she lived with Jared, the more she realized she had simply traded one kind of misogynist for another.
I held up my hands, playing on the woman card now that it was out there. “Aaron, I just want to get Judy out of here. She and I will leave and you can stay and do whatever you want.” I really did not care if he lived or died, except for the trouble and danger it would cause the SWAT team outside. I was quite confident that God would deal with him justly, once he was gone. The punishment he would get there would surely be worse than anything he could suffer here. And I wanted him to suffer badly. I wanted Carrie Helm to know that he was suffering.
“Please, Aaron,” said Judy, her voice breaking as tears streamed down her face. She was good at tears.
“Go, then. Both of you,” he said at last. He turned his back on me, and threw the knife in the air.
I didn’t wait to see where it landed. I grabbed hold of Judy’s wrist, yanked on the sliding glass doors, and threw Judy out of them. Then I jumped on top of her and rolled, taking her with me down the lawn and toward the street.
The SWAT team came in immediately after that. With an open door, and the hostages out, they seized the opportunity.
Long minutes later, I heard gunfire inside the house. Judy flinched with each shot as I prayed my thanks that I was still alive. An EMT came over to us and helped us to our feet, then led us to an ambulance that was waiting nearby.
I was bleeding and hadn’t noticed it. Aaron Weston had cut me with that knife of his, after all. I stared at my bleeding left arm and wondered why he hadn’t dug deeper, or simply killed me.
They say God looks after fools. Maybe this was the proof of it.
We saw Aaron being carried out of the house on a stretcher while we were still waiting for transport to the hospital. I couldn’t see his face because it was covered with an oxygen mask. He looked as if he’d been shot in the chest, but they had a separate ambulance for him.
KURT CAME TO see me at Lone Peak Hospital. They insisted that I go to have the cut on my left arm checked out, even though I thought I was fine.
He didn’t chastise me. He simply sat and held my hand and told me loved me.
When I was finally discharged late that night, he kissed me gently on the cheek.
“We’ll have to talk about this,” Kurt said.
“I know.”
We had a lot to talk about.