She reached for the door, but didn’t open it. Instead, she stared at me long and hard. “I know you are, Linda. You think you can help everyone, but sometimes the best thing to do is to help yourself.”
“That seems like a selfish way to look at the world,” I said.
“It’s not selfish. It’s survival. You deserve to be able to protect yourself,” Anna insisted. She opened the door, but now I was the one who didn’t go inside.
“What is it precisely you think I’m in danger of?” I asked.
“Another faith crisis. And leaving the church,” Anna said, nudging me in.
“Anna, I already told you I’m not having another crisis. And I’m not leaving the church.” The Mormon church was my world. It was my family. Well, most of my family, since my son Kenneth had left.
“Then why are you spending so much time with someone on her way out?” Anna asked quietly.
I thought about this before answering with the truth, which was that I liked Gwen and so many of her ideas.
And then I realized where these accusations were coming from. I wasn’t the one who was jealous of Gwen—Anna was. I’d been spending more time with Gwen than my dearest friend. Why? Was it because I thought of Gwen as the daughter I’d never had? Or because Gwen took risks and voiced some of my own doubts about Mormonism in words I might not dare to use? Ones Anna certainly never would.
As we walked up the entryway into the kitchen, I said, “Anna, Gwen needs someone. She isn’t close to anyone else in the ward.”
“Maybe she should look at her life and think about why she has so few friends, then,” Anna said so bitterly that she sounded more like Gwen than ever before.
“Gwen is still in her twenties—practically a child, compared to us,” I said, grinning a little at the joke. “But she’s a bit lost, and I’m trying to help her,” I continued, the warmth of the house and the smell of the pumpkin spices making me take off my coat and hat.
Silently, I admitted to myself that maybe there was more to it than that, a confluence of things that drew me to Gwen. Her husband in the bishopric with mine, her closeness in age to my daughter Georgia, who’d died at birth, and something else that was hard to explain. Her willingness to call out injustices, even when she knew she was up against a system that didn’t want to hear them, made me wonder when I’d become so subdued and obedient.
“If you say so,” Anna said. She didn’t mention Gwen again as she got out the tea and the cookies.
“These are incredible,” I said, taking a bite of the delicious crumbly pumpkin cookie. It was true, but also was a way to shift the conversation to something less contentious and personal.
“Do you want the recipe?” Anna asked. An offer of reconciliation—Anna didn’t often share her recipes.
“Thank you,” I said. “That would be lovely.”
She wrote it down for me, and then we drank the hot Caramel Truffle Teavana tea I’d gotten her for her birthday last month. I wondered for a while what it would be like if it were caffeinated and no one cared whether we were following the Word of Wisdom in every sip and bite. What if Anna and I could just be ourselves without wondering if we were obeying God’s word and doing the best we could to get back to the celestial kingdom? Would our relationship be the same? Would we still be friends at all?
Maybe Anna was right about my connection to Gwen exacerbating my problems with Mormonism.
“How about next Wednesday?” she asked as I left.
“Sounds great,” I said. I thought about asking her if she wanted to join MWEG with me, but wasn’t sure she would care about it. The politics of the women in the group were all over the board, but I suspected Anna wasn’t as concerned about the current administration’s policies as were others in the group.
Chapter 12
I got a call later that night. From Gwen, of course. I glanced around to see if Kurt was nearby, then stepped out into the garage to answer it, just in case.
“Hi, Gwen,” I said, closing the door behind me. It was cold in the garage, and I wished I’d thought to bring a jacket, but I was stuck in just the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing in the house. “Anything I can do for you?” I asked.
She hesitated, then said with a sigh, “Linda, I have to confess something to you.”
Kurt was the one who was supposed to hear confessions, not me. But I was pretty sure this was about what she’d taken from the crime scene, so I waited.
“I found Gabriela’s phone. On the grass by the Pro-Stop.”
I wasn’t terribly surprised. Still, stealing evidence was pretty bad. The police would need this, and now that I knew Gwen had it, I had to talk her into giving it to them. “I see,” I said, counting breaths as I tried to be the grown-up.
“I called it until I heard her ringtone. I don’t know what’s wrong with the police—how did they not think to call her number like I did?”
Probably because they assumed the crime scene was secure enough that they didn’t need to worry about it being taken. They’d have been focusing on the body and witness statements to begin with.
“It’s further proof to me that something is wrong with this investigation,” she said.
That again? “I’m sure they’d have found it soon enough. Gore is competent and thorough, not to mention unbiased,” I said. “But you distracted Officer Grant, you know.”
“That’s no excuse,” Gwen said.
I could imagine Detective Gore saying the same thing to him. “You could have offered to call her number for them,” I said.
She grunted. “Like they would have accepted any help from me. They just wanted me out of there.”
“Well, we were civilians with no place in an official police investigation,” I said. And we were both probably too close to the victim.
It might seem hypocritical of me to criticize Gwen for doing things I’d done, but it was the opposite—I was trying to save her from making the same mistakes I had. I’d also assumed the police were incompetent in the past, but I’d learned otherwise, especially when it came to Detective Gore.
I edged closer to the other side of Kurt’s truck. “Gwen, you’ve got to turn that phone in to the police. Holding onto it could impede the investigation,” I said, hoping Kurt wasn’t listening from the other side of the garage door. He wasn’t someone who made excuses for breaking the rules.
“Linda, it barely had any battery left, and the screen was completely cracked. I fully charged it and replaced the screen with a kit I bought online.”
Very industrious of her. Even so, I highly doubted the police would be grateful for her efforts.
“Do you want to come over and see what’s on it?” she asked. “I’m trying to figure out her password.”
It seemed like the only chance I had to get her to listen to me was talking to her in person, so I relented. “All right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Brad’s not home,” Gwen said. “I’ll leave the door unlocked.” She hung up before I could respond.
I went back into the kitchen and stood there, trying to decide what to tell Kurt. He was in his office at the front of the house, so I knocked lightly and opened the door.
“I’m going over to Gwen’s for an hour or so,” I said. I hoped it wouldn’t take longer than that to convince her that the best thing she could do for Gabriela was to turn the phone over to the police. Whatever her obligation to her friend, she could fulfill it best by going through the existing lines of authority, not taking too much on herself when she didn’t have the training or the status. Or did that sound too much like I was talking about the church? Maybe that was why we both tended to flout authority—we were ordered around by it too much on a daily basis.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Kurt asked.
“No,” I said, too honestly.
His eyebrows rose. “You want to tell me what i
t’s about?”
I couldn’t. It would feel like too much of a betrayal. Kurt had so often kept information from me after a confession. Now it was working the other way.
“She just needs to talk,” I said. “She’s angry.”
Kurt stared at me for a long moment like he knew I was lying. He probably did. What kind of marriage did we have if my lying was such a regular occurrence that he had a ready expression for when it was happening?
“Linda, just think for a few minutes about what’s important, all right? That’s all I ask,” he said at last.
“I will,” I said, and blew a kiss at him.
As I drove to Gwen’s, I thought about what we each had to lose here. The risks weren’t really much different from in previous cases, but I was much more aware of them now. I could end up exchanging my comfortable life with my family for a jail cell. Scandal, even if only attached to me, could threaten Kurt’s position as bishop. If we were convicted of anything, Gwen and I could both lose our church membership. She could be forsaking her marriage, as well as her chance to attend the Police Academy. She could probably afford the fines, but she wouldn’t be able to buy her way out of a prison sentence.
I could call Detective Gore right now. She’d give us a stern lecture about how Gwen should never have taken something from an active crime scene, or at least should’ve turned the phone over when she found it. But Gore would let us go with that—I hoped.
Still, I didn’t call. I understood Gwen’s position too well. She was desperate to find the answers herself here. She felt guilty for not doing better by Gabriela before, guilty for being so privileged.
I opened the door and walked in. “Gwen? It’s Linda,” I called.
“I’m back here!” she responded.
I followed her voice to the small kitchen area, where she had Gabriela’s phone on the countertop. I perched on the tiny barstool next to her and watched as she showed me the new screen she’d put on the phone.
“See? Working perfectly now,” she said, and turned it on. “We just have to figure out her password.” She wrinkled her forehead and punched in a few numbers, but the phone buzzed a rejection. “That was her last name in numbers.”
“Are we really going to be able to just guess her password?” I asked. I wondered if someone would be able to guess mine, which was Georgia’s birthday and the first three letters of her name. It was probably a bad one, but I’d used it for years.
Gwen said, “Hackers do it all the time. They say it’s pretty easy, because most people use the most obvious things as passwords. They have to remember them, so they do what’s easy.”
Right. But had Gwen known Gabriela well enough to guess hers? Too many incorrect tries, and the phone might shut itself down. “Gwen, we really should give this back to the police,” I said delicately. “They’ll be able to get into it and find the important information on it.”
Gwen glared at me. “If the police take this, then how do we find the real murderer?”
“I told you. We can trust Detective Gore. I’ve seen her work cases before, and she won’t let anyone sweep anything under the rug. Besides, you don’t want to do anything to sabotage your future career.”
I could imagine Gwen alongside Detective Gore—an older, less impulsive Gwen. I hoped she stayed out of trouble long enough to get there. I just had to make sure she put her emotions to the side and thought her next steps through logically. Right—because I’d always been so great at that.
Gwen tried another password and swore out loud when it didn’t work. She started pacing. “I need to think like Gabriela. Her kids mattered so much to her. I keep thinking the password has to be one of their names or birthdays, but I’ve tried all the combinations I can think of.”
I mulled it over for a moment. “Do you know their full names?” I asked. “First and middle?”
“Middle . . .” Gwen turned to me, her whole face alight. She typed something new into the phone and set it on the table. “That’s it, Linda!” she said. I could see all of Gabriela’s apps now and wondered whose middle name had been the right one.
“Let’s see what’s in here,” Gwen said. She scrolled through Gabriela’s most recent calls first. On Friday, the day Gabriela had died, there had been calls from “Work,” from “Luis,” from “Carlos Santos,” and from “Bishop Hope.”
“Luis? In Mexico? I guess if she has an international calling plan, it might not be too expensive. But who’s Carlos Santos?” Gwen murmured to herself.
“She has Bishop Hope’s number in her cell phone?” I asked, wondering how many of the members of our ward had Kurt’s. Mormons did tend to call their bishop in an emergency, sometimes even before 911. We were trained to think of the church as the backup to every plan.
“In case of emergency, probably,” Gwen said absently.
I pulled up the “Work” number and typed it into my own phone, then hit dial. In a moment, I was talking to a woman who thanked me in a soothing tone for calling “Celestial Security,” then asked me to leave a number so that someone could get back to me during regular business hours.
“Celestial Security,” I said out loud. “What’s that?” The word “celestial” was clearly intended to target Mormons, since we used it to describe the highest kingdom in the afterlife. Did Bishop Hope own a bank or securities investment company? I’d gleaned from Kurt that Gabriela had been on his payroll, and wondered what she’d done for the company.
I’d have to go home and look up Celestial Security on the computer. I could try it on my phone, but reading anything on a phone was getting to be more of a problem for me every day, and I was too vain to carry reading glasses with me everywhere.
“We should go back to the apartment,” Gwen said. “We can look around and see if there’s anything there that will help us figure out which Carlos this is.”
It sounded like she knew several from the ward, but there was no guarantee this one was any of those.
“The police might have gone through and gathered evidence from the apartment already,” I said. Not to mention, it might still be cordoned off—what if we ran into Detective Gore or Officer Grant again?
“Maybe,” Gwen said. “But they could have missed something we might see.”
“Why do you think we’d be better at this than the police, who have the training and resources?” I asked.
“Because we knew Gabriela. And because we actually care about this,” she said.
She wasn’t going to back down on this. I could practically hear the guilt in her tone, involuntarily recalling Gabriela’s phone message.
“Fine, I’ll go to the apartment with you,” I said with a sigh. I debated texting Kurt, but decided against it. It would only strain things further between us, and possibly between Kurt and Brad as well. I noticed Gwen didn’t bother to stop to write a note or text for her husband, Brad. Maybe we’d both be back home in time that no one would ask what we’d been doing.
Chapter 13
As I suspected, Gabriela’s apartment was locked, though there wasn’t yellow tape anywhere, as this wasn’t a crime scene. I listened for noises inside, but heard nothing.
“We have to get in,” Gwen insisted.
“How?” I said, folding my arms and staring at the door.
Gwen jiggled the handle again, then shook her head and went back down the stairs.
I followed her, assuming we would get into the car and head home. Instead, she went around to the other side of the building and started climbing up the fire escape. Surely that wouldn’t work . . . would it?
I watched nervously as Gwen made her way up the outside of the building from floor to floor, surprised at how much more agile she was than I. The effects of age were not on my side when it came to physical feats of prowess like this. Clearly her training for the Police Academy was going well for her.
When she got to right fl
oor, she used her elbow to break the living room window to Gabriela’s apartment. I winced at the sound, hoping no one had heard the break or the subsequent clearing of the shards. I didn’t see or hear much to indicate the neighbors were home, but I hurried back around to the front side of the building and up the stairs again, huffing and puffing and cursing Gwen’s better form as I went.
I knocked on the door, and after a long moment, Gwen let me in, and except for a couple of cuts on her hands, she seemed fine.
“This is breaking and entering,” I said. “What if someone calls the police?”
“Even if they do, you really think the police will bother coming here?” Gwen asked with a marked certainty. “If they send a car around, it’ll just be to make sure there’s no gunfire. They’d never arrest two white Mormon ladies like us, just trying to check on a friend who isn’t answering her door.”
I sighed. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
Unexpectedly, she smiled and put her hand on my arm. “Linda, I know this is the right thing for Gabriela. Please trust me.”
And in that smile, I didn’t see Gwen. I saw Georgia, my little girl. And I knew that I couldn’t stop myself from seeing Gwen as a daughter figure and wanting to be closer to her, even in circumstances with such high stakes for us both.
If I didn’t stop Gwen, that meant I was committing to joining her. And maybe that was what I wanted, anyway. I was also invested in finding out what had happened to Gabriela, and if the police had already been here, what could it hurt?
The apartment was different without the children. It should have felt bigger, but instead seemed painfully small. There was a child-sized couch in the front room, but no television, and the carpet was worn enough that I could see through to the cement foundation in spots. It was spotless, though. I could imagine Gabriela vacuuming and picking up after her children in a constant effort to keep the place clean.
In the kitchen, Gwen started looking through cupboards one by one. I noticed as I passed her that the highest cupboard had cleaning supplies and a childproof lock on it. I’d done the same thing with dangerous chemical products when my boys were younger.
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