I cringed.
“If the phone was so important, why didn’t you find it? I picked it up hours after the murder. You’re making excuses so you can blame someone else for not doing your job,” Gwen quipped.
What was she doing? I barely resisted the impulse to shush her.
Detective Gore stood up and took a couple of steps closer to Gwen, looming over her so there was no way to avoid looking at her. “No one tells me I don’t do my job. No one,” she said in a low voice.
Gwen swallowed but tilted her chin upward. “Gabriela deserves justice just as much as anyone else,” she said in a steady, quiet tone.
“The way you get justice is to trust the police. We get justice for victims. It’s our job. That’s the way it works,” Gore said.
“I’ve been a victim, and I can certainly say the police are just as likely to protect the perpetrators as they are to help the victims,” Gwen said.
I realized as she spoke that she was talking about her own past. She’d gone to the police when she was sixteen and told them about her father’s abuse. They hadn’t believed her any more than her own bishop had. It was her word against her father’s, and he’d been a stake president at the time. Everyone chalked it up to her being an angry teenager, out to get revenge on her father for setting too strict a schedule for her.
“Gwen, Detective Gore isn’t—” I tried to say.
But Gore interrupted me. She pointed a finger at Gwen, her volume rising. “You don’t ever tell me that I’m not fighting for victims. Do you understand me? My stepfather murdered my mother when I was eleven years old. I spent ten years making sure he served justice. I will always be seeking justice for victims. It’s why I became a police officer.” I could see a single drop of sweat slide down her forehead as she spoke.
I was cowed into silence by these two women’s histories of violence.
Gwen had also gone quiet. “Please, just look at the evidence on the phone,” she asked softly. “Don’t waste any more time shouting at us.”
Detective Gore looked skeptically down at the phone. “I have no idea if this has been altered. If you’ve added to it or erased from it. I have to get the techs to work on that—I can’t do it myself.”
“We didn’t—” I started to say.
Gore dismissively waved a hand. “What you say doesn’t matter. What matters is what a good defense attorney will be able to imply that you might’ve done.”
There was a long silence. I’d known it had been bad to let Gwen hold onto the phone, but I had to admit, I hadn’t thought through all of the implications. It was one thing for us to be prosecuted for something like this, but if it meant Gabriela’s killer went free, how would either of us live with that?
“I have little reason to do this, but let me assure both of you that we are close to an arrest. As for the phone, we had just this morning tracked it to your house, Mrs. Ferris. We were investigating the possibility that you were involved in the murder, or that your husband was. When we’d cleared him, we were going to move on to you.”
For the first time, Gwen blanched. She shook her head. “Brad didn’t have anything to do with this. And I didn’t kill Gabriela. I was trying to help her.”
Gore’s expression was stony. “Help her? Who appointed you her savior?”
Gwen just grimaced.
Gore pressed the point. “You don’t know how often I see this. Bored, privileged white women with nothing better to do in their lives than poke around in police matters. You think that because you’ve always been well off, that you can see what other people need and give it to them. Well, you’re not the saviors of this planet. You don’t know anything about police work, and you should both stay out of it.”
I was humiliated. I wanted to apologize again, but there was no point. Detective Gore had made it all too clear what she thought of what we’d done.
“I was only trying to help,” Gwen said, looking down at her hands. She was on the verge of tears now. Finally repentant, as Kurt might say.
But Gore was in no mood for sympathy. “Trying to help? Because you know so much more than the professionals? What in the world made you think you should try that? Too many CSI episodes, or too many Miss Marple mysteries? Did you just think that it looked easy, so you didn’t need any training to do it?”
I was pretty sure that this was also directed toward me. Coincidentally, I had watched almost every iteration of CSI and read just about all of Agatha Christie’s novels.
Gwen’s face had gone very pale by now. “I was—I’m planning to start the Police Academy at UVU in January. I feel—called to it.”
I wished I’d warned Gwen not to mention her ambitions. I wasn’t sure Gore could stop her career before it started, but why take the risk?
“You feel ‘called’ to become a police officer?” Gore laughed aloud at this, and not in a friendly way. “You think your Mormon God wants you to be a police officer, so you jumped the gun and started messing around with my murder investigation? No, that doesn’t excuse you.” Gore looked over at me and shook her head. “Real detectives don’t get on their knees and pray to some god for the answer to the question of who committed a murder. They don’t assume people are good or bad based on their temple recommend status.”
Her words made me suspect that her resentment of Mormonism went far beyond this one case. It also made me wonder why she remained here in Utah. A woman with her credentials could surely go anywhere she wanted.
She continued to dig at Gwen. “You wouldn’t make it two months at the Police Academy. Personally, I’d bet on less than two weeks. It’d be too much work for you, work that’s too dirty and beneath you,” she said scathingly. “No inspiration or scripture reading involved.”
Gwen let out a gasp, and I knew Gore had really hurt her.
Satisfied with Gwen’s reaction, Gore crossed her arms and stared at us coldly. “Mrs. Wallheim and Mrs. Ferris, I want you both to leave this station right now, and I want to make sure that neither of you ever poke into an investigation like this again. It’s not safe for you or for anyone else involved.” She walked to the door and held it open for us.
I stood up and walked out with Gwen, trying to suppress my own hurt that Gore hadn’t called me “Linda” or “Sister Wallheim,” as she had when she’d trusted me to help her before. I supposed that I deserved to be just “Mrs. Wallheim” now.
Chapter 17
We walked back to the car together.
“You were right,” Gwen said quietly as we both sat there, waiting for the heater to kick in.
“Well, don’t get used to it. I’m wrong plenty,” I said, trying to make her feel better.
“Do you think I should just give up on the Police Academy, like she said?” Gwen said dolefully as I pulled away from the station.
I felt like this was all my fault. I should have made Gwen turn in the phone earlier and taken the heat from Gore myself. I had been trying to make things better, but had made them worse instead.
In a soothing tone, I said, “No, of course not. Detective Gore was just angry. You should do what you feel called to do, Gwen. Spiritual promptings are important.”
In the silence that followed, I turned up the road to our neighborhood and caught a glimpse of the beautiful Draper temple against the drab colors of the winter mountain beyond, which still had very little snow on it. Mormons had taken this bleak landscape and made something of it. We were supposed to be reminded that this history proved that we mattered, but I didn’t feel it right now. I only felt depressed.
Gwen eventually said, “I didn’t mean called like that. I didn’t mean that I thought it was what God wanted me to do.” She sounded defensive.
“Okay,” I said, holding out for more.
“I just meant that I felt it was right for me. Even nonreligious people talk about that—finding the thing they were always meant to do,
the thing that finally makes sense of everything they’ve been through in their lives.”
I tried to think of the right thing to say to her. “Gwen, if you’re saying you don’t think of yourself as Mormon anymore, you can just come out and say it. I already know you’re a good person; whenever you talk about the Police Academy, it’s about helping the people who need it.”
“I can’t just bottle up all my questions and problems with the church. I can’t be a good soldier this time,” Gwen said after a moment.
I put a hand on her knee. “You don’t have to be. You can leave if you need to, but you can also stay on your own terms. I, for one, think it’s refreshing when we have people talk about their doubts in church.” I wouldn’t get so bored or walk out as much, for one thing. We’d had the same lessons, heard the same canned answers to scripted questions in our correlated manuals. Everyone felt like they weren’t good enough, but was afraid to admit their real issues because they’d become the “problem” soul everyone talked about and pitied.
Gwen looked up at me. “It’s not just questions. I need more than someone telling me to go to God and ask for answers. I need more from the church, period.”
I did, too. For all the rules, sometimes it felt like there was a depth missing in Mormonism, like it had stopped being about saving souls and showing Christ-like love, and had become a church of checklists. Going to meetings, raising your hand, reading scripture automatically, saying the same prayers, fasting on the days you were told to, wearing the right clothes and voting the right way. If only I could have conversations like this at church. But people like Gwen tended to leave for their own protection. And who did that leave behind?
“We need you there. We need someone to push others,” I said. But if that was true, why wasn’t I doing the pushing? Instead, I also walked out of those meetings, sitting in the corridors.
“I don’t think they can bear to know the real anger I’m feeling. They’d all run away screaming.” She laughed, but with pain behind it. “I’ve never been a proper Mormon woman, not from the beginning. And now, with me going to the Police Academy, I’m so far in left field, they don’t know what to do with me.”
“Mormon women aren’t just one thing,” I said. “They never have been and never will be. Just read the old journals of Emma Smith and Eliza R. Snow.” The two women had both been strong and both had been married to Joseph Smith, but it was hard to think of two more different personalities. “And what about Emily Richards and Martha Cannon? And Emmeline Wells and Zina Young? And Sarah Kimball?” I searched my mind for names from the Mormon suffrage movement from the 1890s and beyond. Utah had been one of the first states to grant women the vote.
“That was a long time ago,” Gwen said. “It doesn’t seem like women are seen in the same way now.”
“But you didn’t hear Yolanda Jones’s talk on Sunday about Chieko Okazaki,” I reminded her. “It was so great. She was so inclusive and feisty.”
“And she was released a few years after she was called, while all the men stayed in place,” Gwen reminded me, rubbing at her eyes.
Yes, that was true. Mormon women weren’t paid for their leadership positions, and their main priority was supposed to be their families, so they only served in executive positions temporarily instead of permanently like the men. And they only had authority over women and children. It came back to this again and again. You might not have to be the same Molly Mormon, but if you weren’t, you didn’t go far. And if you were, you only went a little bit farther.
“But things are changing,” I said. “There’s Ordain Women and other groups—”
Gwen shook her head. “All the original leadership of Ordain Women were excommunicated or pushed out. The new leaders have turned down the volume completely, waiting patiently to be heard. And the other movements around women’s power are ridiculous. Women wearing pants to church? Like that’s a way to get power. And women praying in General Conference? That’s what we think will make men see women as equal?”
That was a pretty damning evaluation of people who were doing good work to change things. But Gwen had a good point, that they weren’t changing the organization of the church itself. It was hard to get men to see the problem when they were convinced that the existing patriarchal power structure came from God. If you didn’t even ask the question, how could you get an answer?
“I don’t think this is all the problem of Mormonism. Or God. It’s just the world we live in. Most of us are so used to breathing this air we don’t even think about it.” That was my best attempt at explaining it to her.
“I know,” she said sadly. “But if we’re the one true church and God is speaking daily to the prophet and the Quorum of the Twelve, then why are we facing so many of the same problems?”
I didn’t have an easy answer for that. “Because people move slowly. God works with us as flawed mortals,” I said.
“Maybe I don’t want to work with God anymore. It seems to me that faith takes up so much energy,” Gwen said. She gestured down at the valley below us. “There are a lot of people out there who are suffering—they’ve given up on God, too. Maybe they need someone in a position of authority who will listen to them. If I can’t do that in the church, maybe I can do it on the police force.”
Years ago, I’d felt like believing in God again had given me new energy, but I didn’t want to argue with Gwen. I knew good people who were atheists, including Kenneth. Gwen had to follow her own path.
“Leaving means a ton of paperwork,” I said in a halfhearted attempt to make her laugh. You had to write a letter with very specific legal language, or the church just sent more missionaries or a bishop to talk you out of your decision.
She frowned slightly. “I know paperwork very well from Zions. I think I can handle that part.”
“Of course you can. I don’t doubt you,” I said, too exhausted to explain the joke.
She leaned forward, resting her head in her hands. “Linda, I know I made a mistake with Gabriela’s phone. I shouldn’t have stepped onto that crime scene. Detective Gore was right to yell at me. In fact, I’ll remember that, in case I ever need to do the same thing to someone like me, who means well but isn’t thinking straight.”
I sighed in relief. “I guess that’s some good that’s come out of it, then.”
To my surprise, when I pulled up in front of her house, she didn’t get out. I’d figured she’d be eager to get away from me and any reminder of what had just happened at the police station.
“Brad is really angry with me,” she said instead, looking down at her hands. Her nails were chewed and uneven.
“Because he suspects you don’t believe in God anymore?” I asked, trying to get to the heart of the real problem, not just the symptoms of her odd behavior when it came to this murder case.
Her voice was small and sad. “Among other things. He says I’ve changed, that I’m not the same person he married nine years ago. He says I’ve changed and he hasn’t.”
I snorted at that. “No one who is married for so long survives without changing. In fact, the longer you’re married, the bigger the changes are.” I’d seen plenty of changes in Brad myself. He’d become stronger when he learned what had happened to Gwen in her childhood, and more open-minded. Being in the bishopric had made him more aware of the problems other people had. And that was just the beginning.
“No, I think he’s right,” Gwen said. “I mean, he’s changed, obviously, but not as much as I have, and I’m sorry about that, but I can’t turn back time and go back to being someone who isn’t me anymore. He really did fall in love with a different person, and I’m not sure he’ll be able to fall in love with the person I am now.”
“Well, that’s the challenge of any lasting marriage. We all have to figure out how to keep falling in love with the person our spouse becomes. How to find new things we have in common.”
I thou
ght about how often Kurt and I fell back on the children we had together—something Gwen and Brad might never share. Was anything as powerful as the binding weight of children? Perhaps not, which could be the reason the church had had so much success with the message “Families Are Forever.”
“Or we don’t,” Gwen said simply. There was less sadness than acceptance in her tone.
Was this it, then? Would she and Brad get a divorce? Brad would be removed from the bishopric without a temple sealing, but be free to find a new wife who could have children and who would be more committed to the church. But if he thought he could find someone who wouldn’t change, he was sadly mistaken. I wondered if I could get Kurt to talk to him about the real lessons of a lasting marriage, the compromises that had to be made.
“Brad is a good man,” I said, not ready to give up on their marriage. “Even if you think he hasn’t changed as much as you have, that’s no reason to dump him.”
“Dump him? He’s the one who wants to dump me,” Gwen said, her anguish now clear. “I’m not faithful enough for him, apparently. The only thing I can do for him now is let him find someone else.”
If she was acting in what she saw as his best interest, then there was still hope for them. While I’d seen the way he’d looked at her worriedly at church and how he’d shut down during her fight with Shannon Carpenter at the Trunk or Treat, I didn’t think he wanted to give up. He was just figuring out how to adjust to an increasingly tricky position.
“Gwen, Brad might be struggling with who you’re becoming, but that doesn’t mean you’re being kind to him by letting him go. I think he’s trying to love you better. Try not to fault him for that—he’s just lost his grasp on who you are now and needs help figuring out what you need.”
She let out a long breath, on the edge of a sob. “I think we’re too far apart now to ever come back together. And I don’t know if I want to be with someone like that anymore, anyway.”
Not of This Fold Page 12
