He swore again. “No,” he said. “She didn’t tell me that either.”
“So you can see that Carrie needs to come back. If she wants a divorce, she needs to get one legally. And she needs to deal with custody issues. Even if she doesn’t want to see her daughter, she should legally give over her rights so that there are no questions.”
He sighed. “Well, good riddance to the bitch.”
The disdain in his voice seemed to echo Alex Helm’s, and I cringed. Had Carrie gone from the frying pan into the fire? “What do you mean by good riddance?” He’d said she was gone, but I’d thought he was prevaricating.
“All her crazy—it’s nothing to do with me anymore. She’s gone. She left last night, while I was asleep. She didn’t tell me she was leaving. She didn’t leave a note or nothing. She just disappeared. So good riddance, like I said.”
She had disappeared again, I thought. This was starting to sound like Carrie Helm’s M.O.
“Did she say anything about why she was leaving?” I asked. Was it because of the television news coverage? “Or where she was going?”
“I didn’t ask her to come here in the first place, you know. She just showed up, and it wasn’t a fun time. But I was trying to be the good guy. And then she just disappeared like that. Proves she never cared about anyone but herself.”
The more he talked, the less he sounded like the kind of person Carrie should have expected to help her. What had she been thinking? Was this proof of desperation or real mental illness?
“Did you call the police?” I asked. “Are you at all concerned that something might have happened to her?” She hadn’t come back home, as far as I knew. Maybe she would appear any moment and the news vans would get the story of the day. Or maybe she had moved on to another man, another cell phone, another city where she could get lost.
“Why would I call the police?” he said. “It isn’t as if we were married. I don’t even know that much about her.”
Clearly. I was getting the sense that sex with a random woman who needed a place to stay was par for the course for this guy.
“Now, I’ve got to go—” he began.
How was I going to keep him talking? I could see Kurt giving me a baleful look, but I wasn’t finished yet. He was just going to have to wait his turn to yell at me.
“You don’t want anyone to think that you had something to do with whatever happens to her next, do you?” I asked.
“I didn’t do anything!” he said, his tone strained.
“Of course you didn’t. But that’s not how it might look to others, especially if she gets into trouble. Do you know if she was involved with drugs? Or if she had financial problems?” I was racking my brain, trying to think of reasons that Carrie was behaving this way, and at the same time trying to make sure Will didn’t hang up.
“I didn’t see any drugs while she was here, but she claimed she didn’t have a credit card and she didn’t bring any money. Like I said, she was all about what she needed from me.”
“Did she tell you anything that might be useful in trying to track her down and make sure she isn’t hurt?”
“She didn’t tell me anything that wasn’t a lie, or so it sounds like from what you’re saying. She wasn’t anything like she seemed online. She was always wanting to stay inside, keeping blinds closed, and refusing to talk.”
“You met her online? How long have you known her?”
“About two years, I guess,” he said.
And how much of that did Jared Helm know about? Did that affect the way he’d reacted when she asked him to drop her off at the bus station? Was that the reason he hadn’t let her take anything with him? Had he forced her to cut herself off from her daughter?
I kept hearing Alex Helm’s voice in my ears, the word “whore” echoing. If she’d had a relationship with another man while she was married, it might not matter to him whether or not it involved actual physical sex.
“Did you meet in person before she came to stay with you?” I asked.
“A few times,” he said.
So. There it was. This was who Carrie had become, or maybe who she had always been. I wouldn’t call her a whore, but I hated the thought that Alex Helm might have seen some truth about her that I had not.
She was alive, I kept telling myself. That was the important thing. But it seemed that Jared was more and more the wronged husband here, just as he had always claimed.
“And she left recently?” I asked.
“Last night. And I really don’t want to talk to the police about this. Or her husband.”
Of course he didn’t.
I thanked him briefly, made no promises, and hung up. The cell phone beeped at me that its battery was low again, and I went upstairs to plug it in.
When I came back down, Kurt was waiting for me in the kitchen with some lemonade. “You know we have to tell the police what you found out. They need to know where she’s been all this time,” he said. “And that she’s not in danger. Her parents need to know.”
“It will only make it look worse for Carrie,” I said.
“You mean like Jared looks right now?” said Kurt.
I thought about it, but in the end, it was the image of Kelly’s face that decided me. It was Kelly who was the most vulnerable. Carrie was an adult, or at least she ought to be one. After what I’d found out, I couldn’t see her as the victim.
“She isn’t there anymore,” I said. “In Las Vegas.”
“But she was there? Since she disappeared?” said Kurt.
I nodded. “It sounded like she went to him as soon as she got off the bus.” Though I hadn’t asked Will that directly.
“Then we have to tell the police. We have to give them the cell phone you found. Where did you find it, by the way?” said Kurt. His eyes narrowed.
“In the basement of the Helm home when I went over there yesterday. All her things have been bagged up,” I said. And somehow the police hadn’t found it. Had they not been looking very hard?
“Hmm,” said Kurt. “That makes it trickier. The police might not be able to use it as evidence if it was stolen.”
Irrationally, I was annoyed with Kurt. Why did he have to take my victory away from me? “I’ll take it back,” I said. “And after that video footage of Carrie getting on the bus, no one thinks she is dead anymore.”
“What about her parents?”
“I’ll call them,” I said. “Just give me a little time.”
“All right, Linda. You know I trust you,” he said, and I was glad he didn’t add the proviso, “most of the time,” which I was sure he must be thinking.
He went to bed, and seemed to expect that I’d do what he said on Thursday. But I didn’t. I kept the phone and I didn’t call the Westons. Not yet. I just felt this niggling sense that things weren’t quite what they seemed to be. Or maybe it was that I wanted Carrie to be better than she was. She’d been a good mother, I thought, and she’d been an interesting thinker. I hated to imagine that I had been so duped, and it was worse somehow to be duped by another woman than by a man.
FRIDAY MORNING, WHILE Kurt was at work, I watched the news. It was a rather lurid report, late-breaking, with innuendos and nasty laughter from the reporters. Jared Helm had been cleared of any wrongdoing in his wife’s disappearance, and Carrie Helm had been with a lover in Las Vegas. After this revelation, which had had nothing to do with me or Carrie’s cell phone, the police were no longer actively searching for her or information about her.
The news vans slowly pulled away from the Helm house and by afternoon, when we came home from church, Jared, Kelly, and Alex were free.
By the time Kurt came home that night, I found that my annoyance toward him had dissipated considerably. I kissed him goodnight and let him hold me for a long time in bed. Then I turned over and thought about what I had to do now. Did I give up and let Carrie live with the consequences of her own bad behavior? I might have been tempted by the thought, except that there was still Kelly. And for
all that Jared Helm might have reason to complain about his wife, I did not think that Alex Helm was a hero here. He had called Carrie a whore and I wondered how much he had pushed her into it with his attitude about women. What I wanted most now was the assurance that Kelly was safe.
CHAPTER 22
Anna Torstensen called me Monday afternoon to ask me if she could come over. A few minutes later, I opened the door and let her into the front room. She seemed full of energy, which I rather envied after the exhausting time I’d had dealing with the Helms. She was carrying a manila file folder and spread it out in front of me on the coffee table.
“I found these papers,” she said, tapping at them vigorously, “after I talked to Tobias’s lawyer. He claimed that Tobias had never revised his will from before we were married. But he has an address listed on some of Tobias’s correspondence that he thinks is Tobias’s first wife.”
“What?” I said.
She nodded, and I realized that I had misinterpreted her energy. She was shaking with anger and fear, not joy. “He says that half of the money could potentially go to her, if she is still alive.” Her voice was moving all over, up and down. “He also said that it’s possible that if she is still alive, Tobias’s marriage to me is illegal and that she could claim that all of his money is hers. That my marriage to him was bigamous because there was never any divorce.”
I was stunned. “She can’t be alive, surely.” The hammer with hair on it. The dress with blood on it. The odd gravestone in the garden. Had I misunderstood all of it?
“The lawyer had photos of her, and several letters. It sounds like she talked about coming back home at some point, when the boys were older and she could explain where she had been.”
“Where had she been?” I asked.
She pushed one of the pages at me, neatly written in nice schoolteacher loops. “She was in California, I guess.”
“But why?” Why any of this? Why would she leave her sons so mysteriously? I scanned the letter, but there was no answer there. It was just kind words about coming home and how much she missed Tobias and the boys, and how sorry she was. Was that what a woman who felt guilty about leaving would write? Was it what Carrie Helm would write if she had to explain herself to Kelly?
“Even if she’s dead now, my marriage to Tobias wouldn’t have been legal at the time. I can’t inherit because there’s no common law wife statute in Utah.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I knew she didn’t care about money or even the house. The boys would let her stay in it anyway. But the humiliation and disrespect she must feel—and she had to deal with it at the same time as her grief. So unfair.
Anna was pacing in a short line, up and down the small space of my front room. “He was even corresponding with her two years after he and I were married. And yet he never said a word to me about her being alive or coming back into his life. He didn’t say anything about needing to get a divorce.” She stopped pacing and threw up her arms. “What kind of man does that?”
I took the moment to draw her down to sit on the couch. “I don’t know. I’m sure you feel very confused.” Though in a way, this made more sense out of the fact that Tobias hadn’t wanted to be sealed to Anna. He must have known that the more scrutiny he brought to himself and his marriages, the more likelihood there was that his deception would be discovered.
In order for a couple to be granted a temple divorce, a lot of paperwork has to be filled out, and often the couple has to wait a year. The First Presidency of the church has to approve it officially, and while I don’t know exactly how much personal supervision that entails, it isn’t a rubber-stamping process. The Mormon church wants to make sure people take marriage seriously, both before and after making their covenants.
“I feel so betrayed.” Anna stared out the window, as if she couldn’t bear to look me in the face.
“Of course you do. You were betrayed.”
“Do you think he was planning to divorce me and remarry her all along?” she asked desperately.
I patted her hands. “No, I’m sure he wouldn’t have done that. He was in love with you. And besides, she had left him once. Why would he give her a chance to do it again?” I paused, thinking. “It must have been for the boys. Were they having a particularly hard time when all this happened? Can you remember?”
I must have said the right thing because Anna turned back to me, her eyes glistening. “Oh, yes,” she said. “How could I have forgotten? The first year Tobias and I were married, Tomas and Liam got along very well with me. But the second year—Liam was so angry with me. He would try to push me out of the room when we were all together. He refused to call me Mom or even Anna. I was ‘her’ or ‘the lady.’ ” She was smiling at this old memory, instead of feeling hurt. That said a lot about her and how she was capable of moving past hurt. I hoped it would serve her well in this.
“He wouldn’t eat any food that I made for him,” Anna went on nostalgically. “If I served him dinner, he would get up and make himself a peanut butter sandwich, or just starve. And then he started to spit in my food, or put dirt in my side of the bed. He poured honey in between the keys of the new piano Tobias bought for my birthday. He was such a terror. Every time I turned my head, he was off doing something naughty.”
“And that’s when Tobias was writing to Helena?” I asked.
She looked down at the letters and held up one of them, underlining the date, November 1985. “Maybe he was just trying to find her for the boys. Poor Liam. I don’t think it would have helped him at all if his mother had returned. He would have hated her just as much as he hated me. Possibly more. But I can see how Tobias might have thought differently.”
I couldn’t help but think of Kelly Helm. If Carrie came back, how would it affect her? Carrie had been gone too long for there to be no changes in their relationship. When a mother abandons you, you can’t simply take her back like that. You can’t forget that she left and go on like you weren’t afraid she would go away again.
But Anna’s expression had darkened again. “What about all those years I spent with Tobias? I was his mistress, not his wife. We were living in sin all that time.”
“You didn’t know,” I said. “I’m sure no one could hold you responsible.” But that didn’t mean their family wouldn’t be torn apart by the truth.
“But what will happen to Tobias?” asked Anna.
“You mean, will he face excommunication posthumously?” That wasn’t something the church bothered with much, though there were occasions when people’s records were reinstated posthumously.
“And how will I tell the boys?” Anna went on.
Anna wasn’t at fault for any of this. But that didn’t mean her sons wouldn’t blame her. How could Tobias leave this for her to deal with after he was gone?
And then a thought occurred to me. “Can I see the photos of this woman the lawyer showed you? I’m curious.”
Anna looked through the piles and handed me some of the photos, all of a woman alone, on the beach or next to a building with blue skies overhead. I compared them to the wedding photo, which Anna had also tucked into the envelope, whether in anger or because she had also compared the faces.
The women were superficially quite similar: dark-haired, petite, with slightly pointed chins. But the eyes did not look at all the same to me. And the nose was certainly not the same. The Helena in the wedding photograph had a tiny, button nose. The other woman’s nose was rather large for her face and it had a bump on it, as if it had been broken at some point.
I let out a long breath and tapped the photo of the other woman. This wasn’t about bigamy.
“What is it?” said Anna.
I held out the two most distinct photographs. “Do you really think that’s the same woman?”
“I already looked at them. I thought it was.” She stared down at them again. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “She would have gotten older. Life might have been hard on her.” She touched the second picture, her fingerti
p landing on the bump. “It looks like her nose was broken.”
“But the nose is too big. Your nose doesn’t get bigger as you age. Not that much bigger, anyway.”
“Hmm,” said Anna. “I see what you mean.” She looked at the photo more closely. “Maybe she had plastic surgery or something.”
“To make her nose larger?” It certainly wasn’t what most women wanted.
“Maybe she was trying to hide her identity. Make sure that Tobias and the boys couldn’t find her.” I could tell even she didn’t believe what she was saying.
“It doesn’t sound in the letter like she was trying to hide.”
“What do you think it all means?” asked Anna.
I was making an enormous leap, but what if sometime soon after his marriage to Anna, Tobias had in a moment of doubt found a woman who looked like his deceased wife and had tried to use her to pretend that Helena was still alive? Then Anna and Tobias had been legally married all along, and the only sin here had been Tobias’s wishful thinking. Cautiously, I laid out this theory for Anna.
“So, she would have to prove she is actually Helena in order to get anything,” I said, nodding at the newer photograph of the woman with the big nose.
“I suppose. The lawyer is going to send a private detective out.”
“But if she isn’t Helena, then Tobias didn’t deceive you, right?”
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “It seems so far-fetched.” She had her hands balled up now.
“More than Tobias lying to you all these years and pretending his wife was dead?” Or my imagined history of him killing his own wife and burying her in the backyard? Surely this was the least difficult version of his life to believe in.
“Do you need anything while the will is in probate? The church might be able to help if you have bills to pay.” She’d said that Tobias had already paid for his own funeral, but I didn’t know about other funds. Did she have anything for groceries? For gas?
Anna took a breath and shook out her hands. She seemed more herself. “Thank you, but I’m sure I’ll be fine. In fact, I’m thinking of going back to work full-time. And there’s enough in our checking account for me to get by for a few months even if the will is contested.”
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