“We’ll see,” said Kurt, who was usually unfailingly polite in social situations, but clearly felt pushed to the limit here.
If we didn’t stay overnight, I wondered if there would be any chance to find out what I needed about Talitha.
I packed bags for both of us Sunday night, while Kurt was still busy at the church. Since it was summer, it was convenient for Kurt to take some time off from his accounting business (Mormon bishop is a lay position, and doesn’t pay the bills.) On Monday morning we headed out.
There was no Googling the address—the Carters lived off the map. At least the frustration Kurt felt at taking wrong turns made the drive less quiet than most of the time we’d been spending together lately. He didn’t curse, but he came close a couple of times, eventually pulling over and asking for the instructions he’d scrawled down during his phone call with Stephen Carter. I handed them over because I couldn’t read his handwriting. After heading north again on I-215, we finally took the correct exit, then a series of turns in the foothills behind the commercial section of town. The roads were narrow and potholed, and Kurt checked the directions twice more before stopping the truck in front of a gated complex.
“Is this it?” I said.
Kurt grunted in response.
There was no name emblazoned on the gate and no mailbox to be seen.
With all the pine trees that hadn’t been cleared here, I could only make out one building on the property, though I assumed there were five houses somewhere in there, one for each wife. The large house looked some thirty years old. I didn’t know when the fence had been erected. The iron gate looked ancient and a little rusty, and there was a padlock on it rather than an electronic keypad.
Kurt got out of the car and yanked on the gate, but it didn’t budge. But while he was getting back in the truck, a boy who looked about eight years old, very blond and dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved blue-and-white checked shirt, appeared at the gate. He used a key on the padlock, opened the gate for us, waited solemnly and silently for us to drive through, then locked it again, and ran down a hill and out of sight.
Looking back at the gate and the thick metal fencing around it, I noticed how difficult it would be to get out if we didn’t have permission, and I wondered how many people had keys. Was this one of the ways Stephen Carter made sure his wives and children remained under his control? I shivered at the thought and wondered why we were here, after all.
Naomi, I reminded myself. And little Talitha, who might be in danger.
The sound of gravel from the unpaved road hitting the underside of Kurt’s truck reminded me of visiting my uncle’s old farm in Idaho with my parents and brothers back when I was a little girl. Though I could see the Salt Lake Temple from here, this place was more wilderness than city, with native scrub oak and pine huddling together near a small stream that ran down the mountainside and leading eventually to either the Jordan River or the Great Salt Lake.
The big boulders that were usually removed from cultivated lawns had been left intact here, and I imagined that these ten or twelve acres looked very much like they had when the pioneers had first come into the valley in the 1840s and ’50s. There were no sprinklers on the lawn, no flower gardens or ornamental bushes, though I thought I could see a large vegetable garden as we wound around the gravel road toward the big house.
It was three stories with white pillars in front, and it looked like it could use a new coat of paint. The western wing had been built more recently and seemed tacked on. On the rest of the property, I made out only two buildings to the north and what looked like a shed a little to the south of the main house, but the terrain hadn’t been leveled, so other buildings might have been discreetly concealed by nature. The fence around the gate had seemed to cover any access points, and I assumed it ran around the property lines, even if I couldn’t track it fully.
We rang the doorbell at the main white house, and a woman in a close-fitting sheath, floral on black, answered the door. I was surprised at how young she looked, though she clearly had the same facial shape and nearly the same hair as Naomi. Surely this couldn’t be her mother, and Naomi was the oldest of the children, which left . . . who?
“Good morning,” she said.
“Kurt Wallheim,” Kurt said, from behind me. “And this is my wife, Linda.”
There was a lot of noise behind her, children’s voices.
“Come inside and I’ll go get Rebecca,” said the woman, waving us in without either smile or warmth.
Ah, I thought, relieved to recognize a familiar name. Naomi had told me that her mother’s name was Rebecca.
Kurt and I stepped into a small foyer with wood flooring.
“I’m her aunt Sarah,” explained the woman.