“But there are some kids who only see the short-term rewards of lying, which is that they don’t have to deal with repenting and how difficult that is.” He took two more quick bites. I accepted that as a compliment.
“Or the shame of admitting to doing something wrong in the first place,” I added.
Kurt nodded at this. “Some of them are afraid I’ll tell their parents, and no matter how many times I promise them otherwise, they won’t budge.”
I raised my eyebrows. “But you do tell their parents, don’t you? If you think it’s important for them to know.”
“Well, with minors, I sometimes feel like I have to call other people in to help. It’s my duty,” Kurt said. A Mormon bishop didn’t have the same rules for confidentiality in confession that a Catholic bishop did, although they were still supposed to keep sins secret. I’d heard about the truth being spilled in meetings with other leaders who could “help” with a problem, but I think Kurt had so far tried very hard not to let this happen.
“Anyway,” I said, trying to get him to keep going.
“But adults are different. My responsibility to them and to the church is more straight-forward, so if they lie to me, I can respond directly,” Kurt said more carefully. He was only toying with his second serving of pot pie now, which seemed a disservice to my creation, but I could always make more. This conversation was important.
“You mean you call them out on it?” I said.
He tilted his head to the side. “Yes, I do. And I’m not always nice about it. The consequences for certain sins can be more serious for adults than for teens because of the covenants they’ve made in the temple, so I’m less sympathetic about any lying. I expect adults to have learned to admit wrongs a little more easily and to be willing to accept a little pain to deal with a long-term fix.”
I wondered if that was fair. Were adults really better able to deal with guilt and pain than children and adolescents? “Is it harder to catch adults lying?” I asked.
He thought for a moment, putting down his fork at last. “I think so. Most who would bother lying are very practiced at it. They’ve chosen it as a way of life, and they rarely have the same kinds of tells.”
A reminder that I wasn’t good at lying. “Is that a compliment?” I asked.
He laughed, then went on, “Or they’ve been lying to themselves for so long they don’t know the difference between truth and lies anymore.”
“Then what do you do?”
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s tricky. For one, when I’m in a situation like that, I generally have other incriminating information. From another family member, for instance.”
I imagined the situations Kurt was talking about and began to feel sick. Spousal abuse, child abuse, affairs, embezzling money . . . and if Kurt had seen these sins, it meant people in our ward were guilty of them. Some really were crimes, not just sins. I went cold, wondering if Kurt had ever had to call the hotline the church advertised to help bishops deal with criminal situations in their wards.
He leaned back in his chair, tone distant. “If I’m getting contradicting information, I press them on the details, and there’s usually a tipoff that they’re holding back something I know about from other sources. When I point it out, they try to talk around it, but their story unravels quickly.”
I was silent. I hadn’t realized Kurt regularly confronted this kind of thing—we’d really never talked about it.
“But those are all situations when I’m using something other than the Holy Spirit to find out the truth. There are definitely occasions when the Spirit will tell me what I’m hearing is a lie without me having any other information, because of my mantle of bishop,” Kurt said.
I understood that spiritual mantle. I’d felt the weight of it descend upon him when he’d been set apart as bishop, and I’d seen it on his face every day since then. I also knew when he was acting as a husband or a father instead. Now that I thought about it, that threat of excommunication had been from my husband, not my bishop. There had been no sense of spiritual stewardship there, just anger and frustration. But why had he done it? He’d apologized without explaining that part.
He glanced down at his plate, then pushed it away, only half finished. After a moment, he said, as if trying to make sure he omitted certain details, “I can’t tell you any specifics, but there was a woman who came in. I asked her all the regular temple recommend questions, and at the end, I just knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was, so I told her I needed to ask the questions again. She gave the same pat answers, but I still felt something was wrong.”
“Nothing specific?” I asked. The temple recommend interview was a list of fourteen set questions, from whether we sustained the current prophet and leaders of the church to the Word of Wisdom and general questions about integrity. While anyone could go to a Mormon church, the temple was reserved only for the most worthy, and the ordinances done there included temple marriages sealed forever, baptisms for the dead, and endowments with the highest level of covenants that a Mormon could offer to God.
Kurt shook his head. “I only had this impression of a dark veil over her, and I could see her struggling beneath it. It wasn’t one answer to one question. It was all of them, I think.” He paused a moment. “Finally, I told her I knew she was lying, and that we were both going to sit there until she told me the truth because I couldn’t in good conscience give her a temple recommend.”
I leaned in toward him, quite curious now. “What happened?”
“She got up and hurried out of the interview room without another word,” Kurt said. He stood up, took both of our plates to the dishwasher, and rinsed them off. I let him go, even though I’d been considering a second piece of pot pie for myself. Apparently, his appetite was gone.
I pressed my napkin to my lip and stood up, following him a few steps to make sure the conversation didn’t end. “Really? And you let her go?”
He finished with the plates, then turned around and frowned in thought. “I didn’t know what else I could do at that point. I had other appointments, and even if I hadn’t, I’m not a detective.” He let me see a faint grin. “I can’t legally force people to talk to me. They have to do it of their own free will and choice.”
“You never found out what was wrong?” I asked, that old curiosity of mine itching at me.
“No, I never did.” He stood there, hands searching for his pockets.
“Do you think it was something that had been done to her, or something she’d done to someone else?” I asked.
Kurt shook his head. “I have no idea. She moved away from the ward shortly afterward, maybe in part to avoid talking to me again.”
That was a big step to take just to get away from a bishop’s questions in a temple recommend interview. I tried not to think of who had moved out of our neighborhood since Kurt had become bishop. He’d been trying so hard not to give me any identifying information.
“Anyway,” he said, moving back out of the kitchen and toward the living room where we so often watched television at nights when he wasn’t at the church. “That’s one of those questions I think I’m going to have to wait to find the answer to until I’m in heaven and I meet with Christ to review my life.”
I sat down next to him on the couch, staring at the blank screen before us. I thought about Gabriela and Carlos again and let out a long breath. “What would you do if you weren’t sure someone had lied to you, so you’d let it go, but realized later that a sin had been committed you could have prevented?”
Kurt held my gaze, as if to emphasize that this was important and he wanted to make sure I absorbed every word. “I’m not sure I believe that could happen. Linda, I’ve been called to be the bishop of this ward. That means that unless I close myself off to the Spirit by sin, I’m the designated mouthpiece of the Lord. I believe that He will give me inspiration when
it needs to be given. Sometimes hitting me over the head, if He has to.”
Wow. I wished God would hit me over the head sometimes. It was what I needed with Gabriela’s murder. It felt like Gwen and I were just guessing, wandering around in the dark. Maybe I would be called and set apart one day as official nosy neighbor of the ward so I could get the kind of revelation Kurt seemed to expect.
“You think that works one hundred percent of the time?” I asked.
“Yes, I do,” Kurt said solemnly. “That’s what it means to be bishop. You have to show up for a lot of boring meetings”—he let out a short laugh—“but the reward is knowing that God has your back and will make sure that you never make a mistake so terrible that other people will hurt for it.”
I really wished I believed in God the way Kurt did. But I knew I’d never come back to the same kind of confidence in Him I’d had before my faith crisis in my twenties. I still believed in a beneficent God who loved all of His children and wanted what was best for them. I believed in a God who whispered what was good to us. But I didn’t believe in a God who made things happen the “right” way all the time. Surely the world wouldn’t look like it did if God was like that.
But Kurt didn’t seem to be bothered by that. For him, the world wasn’t full of suffering, at least not in the long term. The gospel promised blessings, and he seemed to see them. Was his view wrong? I guess if you put in that many hours a week doing the work, you’d want some kind of guarantee it was worth it, at least for the people around you.
On the one hand, I was jealous of Kurt’s worldview. On the other, it seemed naïve and self-centered. As long as men had the true priesthood, God would protect them from terrible things? So if there were mass killings and famines and rapes happening in other parts of the world, it was because the gospel hadn’t been preached there yet, so the people had no protections? And that was why it was so important for missions to be opened everywhere, for missionaries to spread the truth of the church and to baptize and ordain men to the priesthood?
I didn’t believe in that. No wonder Kurt and I had fought so much over the new policy excluding same-sex married members and their children. If he believed the leaders of the church got their revelations right one hundred percent of the time, then saying the new policy was wrong was akin to saying that they were deliberately going against God. Or even worse, that there were no promises that came with having the priesthood—only regular everyday protections based on fallible common sense and the limits of human knowledge.
I thought about asking Kurt to explain all the news stories about corrupt bishops—ones who stole tithing money, slept with other men’s wives, abused teens who came in for interviews, used camping trips as an excuse to molest young boys, and so on. What about their mantles? If the priesthood worked so well, why had we ever made mistakes like denying black people temple ordinances?
Because we didn’t understand all things. God would explain it all in the afterlife and we’d see how every part of it was necessary, I guessed Kurt would say.
In a way, I wished I could believe all that. It would be easier to live in Kurt’s world. But since I didn’t have Kurt’s absolute faith, I couldn’t be allowed in. I had to stand on the outside, looking in from the cold.
“Linda, you might as well tell me what’s going on. I know this has to do with Gabriela Suarez, and it probably has to do with you and Gwen Ferris meddling in things you should be leaving to the police, despite my warnings last night that you should stay out of it and look out for your own safety. So are you going to tell me the truth or not?” His arms were folded across his chest. I supposed he was interviewing me now.
Fine. I didn’t like keeping things from Kurt. “Gwen and I went to talk to Luis, Gabriela’s husband, and Carlos, a . . . friend of hers.”
“And?” Kurt said. I could almost see him putting aside what he really wanted to say and focusing on remaining calm.
“Luis says Gabriela was having an affair with Carlos. But Carlos says that Luis is the liar, and that he abused Gabriela, which made her terrified of him.”
“Ah,” Kurt said, and took a long drink of water.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Aren’t you going to help me figure this out?” I was peeved. “You just told me you got answers from the Holy Spirit that were always accurate.”
“But Linda, I wasn’t there to hear either of these men you interviewed without permission from the police.” He implied the criticism rather than stating it out right. “And even if I had been there, the spiritual promise to me as bishop only works for those who are directly in my care. Ward members, that’s it. Gabriela wasn’t in my ward, nor were these men. I could only make a guess, and there’s no reason my guess would be any better than yours.”
And this brought us back to church authority and the priesthood and why men were in charge of everything and women were just supposed to do as they were told.
“I think the church is missing out on half the population who could do wonderful things,” I said. Kurt knew I meant women and the reality that they weren’t allowed to hold the same priesthood office as men.
Kurt patted my hand gently. “Women are perfectly capable of listening to God and doing good in their own spheres,” he said. Classic church line.
I tried not to be insulted by it and said calmly, “But our callings are so limited. And you know as well as I do that even those callings tend to go to women whose lives fit with the photos in church magazines.” Stay-at-home mothers in particular. Gwen Ferris wasn’t among them, which meant we could lose her, and I hated that thought, even with her flaws, her lying, her prejudices and her anger. She had the potential for incredible good, even if she felt forced to take those abilities outside of Mormonism.
“The church doesn’t change to suit individuals who don’t fit the mold,” Kurt said, seeming perfectly content with that answer.
“Well, maybe it should try. It seems like we’re alienating and excommunicating the women who are the strongest and most capable.”
I thought of Kate Kelly and Sonia Johnson before her, and Maxine Hanks and Lavina Fielding Anderson and Margaret Toscano and all the feminist Mormon women who had been excommunicated in the past and would probably continue to be excommunicated in the future because they drew outside the lines of an orthodox Mormon woman.
Kurt lifted the remote and turned on the TV. As it booted up, he said, “You should trust the police to find the culprit in this case, Linda. I’m sure they’re doing a lot more behind the scenes than you think.”
I fumed as Kurt flipped through channels. Of course he would say that. He trusted authority figures all around; he was an authority figure himself. But no matter how good a system was, there were always holes in it, cracks people fell through. And right now, I worried that Gabriela Suarez had fallen through one hole, whether through her husband’s abuse or the immigration system, and that Gwen was falling through another. How could anyone blame me for trying to stop that?
Kurt could—and did, I supposed. Even if he apologized, he still thought that he had authority over me. Not just as my bishop, but as my husband. He could receive revelation about me, but it didn’t work the other way around.
Chapter 26
Saturday night, Kurt and I were watching the news again and saw that a man had been arrested in the death of the local woman whose body had been found behind the Pro-Stop dumpster.
I sat up straight and turned up the volume. “That’s Gabriela’s case,” I said.
There were some photos of the gas station from two weeks ago with police cordoning it off, which we’d already seen. But this was followed by footage of the outside of Gabriela’s apartment building.
“Sources say the suspect’s name is Carlos Santos, and he is believed to have been in a romantic relationship with the victim,” said the red-cheeked, besweatered male reporter. “More details should be forthcoming as the invest
igation continues.”
I was already up and walking toward the front door.
“Linda, there’s nothing you can do about this,” Kurt said.
My phone buzzed as I debated what to say to Kurt. I pulled it from my pocket and saw it was Gwen.
Before I had a chance to say hello, she immediately started with, “We can’t let them do this to him. They’re taking the easy way out. Someone should call the news station and demand that the whole situation be looked into more carefully. This is all so . . . so racist.”
Her tone was near hysterical. But hadn’t she been the one to press Carlos about his relationship with Gabriela? She’d suspected him of the murder, as well as Luis. She should have been celebrating the fact that the police had been working the case in the same direction we had gone all along, but her personal history made her convinced that the police would never do what was right in the end.
“Gwen, calm down,” I said, glancing at Kurt since I’d said her name for his benefit. “Why don’t you come over and we’ll talk about what to do next?”
“I already know what to do. I’m going to talk to Detective Gore.” I heard a car door close and an engine start in the background. She was on the move less than a minute after the news had broken, which seemed like a really bad idea to me.
“Gwen, this is an official police investigation. Please don’t jeopardize your future at the Police Academy.” I had to remind her of the future that mattered so much to her, a future that would help other Gabrielas and other versions of her past self. But it was too late—she had already hung up.
I put down the phone and cursed.
Kurt looked up, concerned, and said, “Should I call Brad?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to make things even worse between them. “Do you mind if I go to the police station and try to talk her out of this? Or at least stay with her while she says her piece?” I assumed that was where she was headed.
“Go,” Kurt said with a sigh. I think he was just glad to know where I was going this time.
Not of This Fold Page 18
