I’d noticed the first time how bare the refrigerator was. Now I saw the cupboards were much the same. Pantry items included beans, rice, and corn flour. The white flour and sugar and oil I’d dropped off were there, along with baking powder and a keg of salt. Gabriela had clearly done all of her cooking by hand. There wasn’t a single box of store-bought cookies or crackers. No cold cereal, no microwave popcorn, no potato chips or Pop-Tarts.
But I was wasting time. Who knew how long we could safely poke around here? I went down the short hallway into the single bedroom. Inside, I could see a portable crib set up in the corner, as well as a toddler bed. There weren’t any other beds in the room, just sleeping bags with mattress pads under them, which I assumed were for Gabriela and her oldest child, Lucia.
I had to sit down for a moment to process the sadness that weighed on me at this realization. Gabriela had been a caring, attentive mother. She’d made sure the children had a babysitter whenever she went out. She’d made sure they weren’t hungry, as well as she could. But there was such a difference in our circumstances. She lived only a few miles from my house, and yet, I lived in luxury in comparison. I had a year’s supply of food in my basement. I had extra beds in my house, empty rooms full of furniture I never used.
When I was able to get to my feet again, I explored a little more. I noticed a pile of clothing in the opposite corner of the bedroom. I assumed it needed washing, but when I picked everything up, a pair of scissors dropped and I realized after checking that one of the small pants had a needle with black thread stuck into it. The other pants had already been mended with careful stitches.
It made me feel kinship with her again, and reminded me of how often my boys had split out the knees of their pants as children. I’d heard other parents talk about handing clothes down from child to child, but I’d never managed to get even one pair of pants to last that long with my boys. Knees were split, hems torn to shreds, pockets ripped, and grass stains everywhere.
And then there was the Saturday night problem, when the boys brought me their Sunday shirts and pants for mending. Because of course they hadn’t noticed any problems the Sunday night prior, when they’d taken them off. So I’d spent years of Saturday nights sighing as I mended clothes, wishing my sons didn’t look like such ragamuffins at church.
A part of me wanted to finish this mending for Gabriela while I was here, a favor from one mother to another, but of course that made no sense. I doubted that DCFS would come back to take any of these clothes for the children. The foster parents would probably get them new things instead of keeping these reminders of tougher years with their mother, who was gone.
I stood up and left the clothes on the floor, reminding myself why I was here. I was trying to find any evidence that might have led to Gabriela’s murder. I opened the closet next to the small window and on a shelf above a sparse collection of her dresses and blouses on hangers, I saw a shoebox. I pulled it down—it was far too light to contain shoes—and opened it to discover a stash of letters from Luis. I felt a pang of guilt for invading her privacy, but brushed it aside. I told myself any information about Gabriela’s life might help me understand her better, and thus figure out who had killed her.
The first letter I opened was postmarked from Colonia Industrial in Ozumba, Mexico.
I tried to read the letters, but they were written in Spanish, so I couldn’t tell what they said. I scanned through them anyway, and saw the names of the children mentioned more than once. I hoped that meant that Luis had been a caring, involved father, at least as much as he could be from out of the country. Apparently, he’d communicated with Gabriela often.
I noticed that the newer letters were postmarked from Salt Lake City. That was odd. Maybe he’d given them to a friend who traveled back and forth regularly?
“Linda, come here!” Gwen called from the bathroom, interrupting my thoughts.
I went in and saw the medicine cabinet gaping open. Inside were only children’s aspirin, a bottle of children’s cough medicine, and a tube of bubble-gum flavored children’s toothpaste. No adult over-the-counter medications of any kind, no prescriptions. Four toothbrushes sat in a divided cup on the sink. I assumed that Gabriela must have used the bubble-gum flavored paste herself as well, since there wasn’t any other kind.
But that wasn’t what Gwen had called for me to look at. She was sitting in front of the open cupboard beneath the sink, where there seemed to be the financial documents I’d been looking for.
“I thought she said she didn’t have any receipts,” Gwen said as she handed me a plastic basket with mail inside that was as carefully ordered as the letters from Luis had been. There was a bill from a nearby doctor’s office where Gabriela had taken the children in July, and a matching bill from the local pharmacy. There were her utility bills, her receipts for gas for the last several months, grocery bills, and even a record of her rent payments.
So what was the accusation of embezzling about?
But then things became even more confusing—and intriguing.
“Look at this,” Gwen said with satisfaction, handing me the last three months of bank statements, which showed regular payments of $1,000 a month from Celestial Security and another $1,000 a month from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The former must have been her salary. But why had she been getting regular payments from the church in the same amount?
If these statements were right, Bishop hope had been giving her regular payments, which made the whole embezzlement story stink to high heaven. Whatever Bishop Hope had been doing, it wasn’t proper church protocol, especially since he’d claimed he’d only given her money to pay her bills. If anything, he should have been the one to get in trouble, not Gabriela.
And then it struck me.
“Did you just swear?” Gwen asked.
I guess I had. Had Gabriela been trying to get someone to look into what was going on? Was that why she’d called Gwen for help?
“Does Kurt give out that kind of money every month?” Gwen asked.
I was sure she already knew the answer to this. “No, never,” I said anyway.
Bishops were supposed to give vouchers for free food from the Storehouse or temporarily pay bills for specific things, but never make regular payments without oversight like this. The idea was to help people become self-sufficient, not to make them permanently dependent on church welfare.
I wished Kurt was here so I could see his reaction to these bank statements and ask him to make sense of the accusation that Gabriela had been embezzling church funds. But of course, he would doubtlessly have been roaring at me and Gwen to get out of the apartment, which was getting colder by the minute because of the window she’d broken.
“He couldn’t possibly be getting that much in fast offering every month from our ward. And why would he give this to Gabriela when there were other people in just as much need?” Gwen asked.
“He was getting money from the stake from other wards’ fast offering funds,” I said, thinking back to what Kurt said about his conversation with President Frost.
“What did Gabriela think of Bishop Hope?” I asked, hoping she had a bead on that.
Gwen hesitated, then said, “She said he paid his employees on time every month.”
My eyebrows went up at this. Damning by faint praise? “Anything else?”
Her eyes narrowed as if just realizing this might be important. “She also said his children were well behaved and his wife was very kind.”
Which meant nothing, really.
Gwen continued, “Now that I think about the two of them at the church together, she never spoke to him. I think she might have even gone out of her way to avoid him a few times. And maybe she wasn’t the only one in the ward who did that. I interpreted it as shyness and an attempt to cover up his lack of Spanish language skills, but it could have been something else.”
Yes,
it could well have been. An avoidance was almost as telling as a direct connection.
“Are you ready to go?” Gwen asked, standing up and closing the medicine cabinet. Then she looked at the basket of mail at her feet.
I bent over to push it all back where it had been, but Gwen stopped me, picking out the latest bank statement and tucking it into her coat pocket.
I made a disapproving sound.
Gwen walked toward the door. “It’s not like the police are going to notice it’s missing. If they even bother to come here.”
I glanced back at the broken window as we stood on the threshold.
Gwen paused a moment and turned around. “I guess I’ll leave some money in the kitchen drawer to cover the broken window.” She did this, and then we locked the door of the now-drafty apartment as we walked out, heading back to Gwen’s car.
Chapter 14
Kurt wasn’t awake when I got back, and by the time I was up, he was already at the church for his early Sunday morning meetings with the bishopric and other leaders of the ward. I’d have to talk to him about Gabriela’s bank statements when he got home.
I checked on where Luis had sent his letters to Gabriela from, Colonia Industrial in Ozumba. To my surprise, I discovered that this was a hotspot of the “Third Convention,” a group of native born Mexican Mormons who, in 1936, had demanded that a native born Mexican be appointed as the leader of their area. They were excommunicated and seemed almost extinct, though later were rediscovered, defiantly rejecting the authority of the mainstream church but adhering to other parts of Mormonism, including the Book of Mormon and the moniker of “Lamanites.” I had no idea if Luis had ever been part of them, but it seemed unlikely, given that he and Gabriela had been sealed in the Salt Lake Temple. Just another part of the strange history between Mormonism and Mexico.
I walked to church on my own, as I’d gotten used to by now, and went into the Relief Society room with its nice padded chairs. This week’s lesson was by Yolanda Jones, a biracial woman who defied the white Mormon stereotype. She taught from a talk by Chieko Okazaki, the first Japanese American member of the General Relief Society Presidency, a woman who had been a firecracker through the 1990s.
I could see some of the other women shift uncomfortably in their seats as Yolanda talked about the reality that less than a quarter of Americans lived in a traditional family, with a mother at home with the children and the father working as a provider. Gabriela certainly fit into the non-traditional demographic, though it hadn’t been her or her husband’s choice for her to live as a single mother.
Yolanda went on to say that all families should be protected and valued by the church—families with single women at their heads, families with grandparents, even families that looked different. Yolanda didn’t directly mention same-sex families, but she glanced at me as she trailed off, so I was pretty sure that was what she meant.
There was a long quote by Okazaki in which she used different types of quilts to talk about life and faith:
This style is called a crazy quilt. Some pieces are the same color, but no two pieces are the same size. They’re odd shapes. They come together at odd angles. This is an unpredictable quilt. Sometimes our lives are unpredictable, unpatterned, not neat or well-ordered.
Well, there’s not one right way to be a quilt as long as the pieces are stitched together firmly.
Sometimes it felt like my plan for my life had been a different kind of quilt, but that it had turned at some point and other people had started adding and taking away pieces. I’d just kept on making the quilt, and what was wrong with that? My family was still wonderful, and I refused to accept that Kenneth’s leaving the church or Samuel’s sexuality damaged the quilt in any way. It was just a different texture than I’d thought we were getting, but the quilt still kept us warm. Maybe it was all the more beautiful for being a little surprising.
I walked into Sunday School, but it was being taught by the teacher I didn’t like who made constant comments about the evils of the current world that were not-so-vague references to same-sex marriage. So I ducked out and went into the foyer.
I was the bishop’s wife, and I wasn’t going to my meetings. I was hanging out in the foyer and pretending to listen to another ward’s Sacrament meeting when I was really checking my phone for messages from Gwen, who hadn’t responded. Was she back at the Spanish ward today, or getting into more mischief about Gabriela’s murder case?
I managed to make it through the day’s Sacrament Meeting, which was about genealogy and how we should all be doing more of it so that we could baptize our ancestors and make sure they could move from “spirit prison” in the afterlife to “spirit paradise” as they waited for the resurrection. I had nothing against genealogy or temple work, but at the moment, I was more worried about how Gabriela’s children were doing and the next step to take in finding her murderer.
After church, I hurried home and got a casserole in the oven for whenever Kurt was finished with his bishoping commitments. While the casserole cooked, I spent some more time poking around online, this time to learn about Bishop Hope’s company, Celestial Security, where Gabriela had been working. It was an electronic security business based mostly in Utah—one that seemed to be thriving, based on its sleek website and large social media following. Customers paid a lump sum up front to have the electronic hardware of a pricey selection of systems installed, but it looked to me like most of the money the company made was from the monthly monitoring fees.
It appeared the business had been running for about four years and had plenty of celebrity advocates. The site was plastered with photos of Greg Hope with Senator Orrin Hatch, Senator Mike Lee, Senator Harry Reid, former President George W. Bush . . . not to mention Mormon Church President Thomas S. Monson and his counselor Dieter F. Uchtdorf, as well as former BYU quarterback Steve Young and BYU basketball standout Danny Ainge. There was one with Donny and Marie Osmond, too, but that looked like it had been taken when Greg Hope was barely out of his teenage years.
As I clicked through, I found that there were plenty of ways to join “the Celestial Security team.” The site mentioned a vague fee for a “full training and documentation package” to begin a lucrative career selling security systems to your friends and family members. It sounded to me like a classic pyramid scheme, though of course, the fact that there was a real product involved technically made it legal. What was this called? Multi-level marketing?
I looked at some of the testimonials listed. Each was accompanied by a photograph of a smiling family in a lavish home. The families all struck me as “Mormon” in subtle ways. I couldn’t necessarily spot the lines of their undergarments, but they all wore modest clothing: pants to the ankles, shirts to the elbow, high necklines, and no visible tattoos, body piercings, or double-earrings.
Every family was also nuclear—a father, a mother, and their children lined up in a row. No same-sex married couples, no summer-winter relationships, no single mothers. Unlike the varied quilts Chieko Okazaki had praised, these were clearly meant to be perceived as perfect, intact Mormon families. The wedding rings were visible on all the parents’ hands, and the women and girls wore their hair long and perfectly styled, with makeup to a T for women and girls over the age of twelve.
Was there objectively anything wrong with using a “clean” Mormon image for a business? Plenty of Mormons sold their products to other Mormons. It was a quiet but tightly knit network. I’d heard non-members complain about not being able to sell car insurance to Mormons because they weren’t Mormon themselves, and that loan services handled by Mormons were more likely to be patronized by other Mormons.
And that didn’t even begin to cover the large number of independent “home businesses” that Mormon women ran, selling everything from children’s books to kitchen tools, vacuums, and oils. Mormons assumed that other Mormons wouldn’t cheat them. And even if they did, charges were rarely filed.
Money didn’t matter in the long run, right? It was only useful for getting us to the next life, by being given away to good causes and to the church itself.
Kurt eventually came home, and we shared the cheesy casserole.
After dinner, I left the dishes where they were and put a hand on Kurt’s arm as he headed into his office. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Of course,” he said, sitting back down on his stool.
“Greg Hope’s business, Celestial Security—have you heard of it?”
“He’s not still doing commercials for car washes?” joked Kurt.
“No,” I said, refusing to smile in response. I explained what the business sold and then told him about Bishop Hope’s payments to Gabriela, omitting the part about how I’d obtained the information.
“I see,” he said, looking troubled.
“That’s not normal, is it? For a bishop to give someone direct deposits like that for month after month?”
“I don’t want to second-guess another bishop,” Kurt said. “Maybe there was a good reason for the arrangement. Bishops have to do their best in difficult situations.”
I wasn’t attacking him, but Kurt always took it that way when I criticized another church authority. I had to be careful. “Why do you think he might have given her that much money every month?”
“He might have thought he was paying for regular medical costs. Or I don’t know, legal bills, if she was trying to get DACA status. Could be anything,” Kurt said.
“But she didn’t say anything about having a lawyer at the workshop I helped Gwen with.” And surely she would have mentioned it if she was already getting help. Gwen had started at the beginning and Gabriela had seemed to be paying careful attention.
“She could have misunderstood something,” Kurt said.
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