Gwen’s whole body seemed tense. “Then I decided I could throw it all away. Stop thinking about God as male to begin with. She doesn’t need Him. Maybe I don’t, either.”
A sharp pain cut through my heart. Was this the inevitable answer for women asking for more power within the church?
“If I invented a god of my own, I wouldn’t need to keep any of the parts of my father. Or my mother. Why should I hold on to any of the old traditions of godhood if they hurt me? I’ve spent so much time and energy working around them. I’m done, Linda. I’m finally done.” Her breathless tone had verged toward manic, but she sounded pretty lucid otherwise.
“I’m not going to try to get you to reconsider,” I said sadly. “Maybe this is where you need to be, Gwen. I respect that, and I’ll honor it. I know good people who have left Mormonism and taught me a lot about living well in the world without it.” I thought of my son Kenneth. It was somehow harder to let go of Gwen than it had been with him. Because she was a woman? Or because she felt like the daughter I’d already lost?
She drove in silence the rest of the way, as if she’d used up all her energy at last.
“Ready?” she asked, when we got to the parking lot.
I croaked out an affirmative and we walked in.
We had to wait for a few minutes to see Carlos, but apparently Gwen had already set up a visit for both of us in advance, since we were both on the list.
We signed in, then passed through a metal detector. We gave up our phones and purses and were then sat in a small room to wait for Carlos.
“I arranged to put a little money in his commissary account,” Gwen explained. “So he has a reason to show up to the visit.”
Was that the way it worked? It would never have occurred to me, but us buying this meeting made me feel a little sick. What bribe would matter to someone who was imprisoned and facing a murder trial?
I was shocked at the marked change in Carlos’s appearance when he arrived. He seemed shrunken compared to when we’d spoken to him at his own apartment, his head and shoulders slumped, his good looks faded. There was sweat along his forehead and above his lip, and he was breathing heavily as he settled into his chair.
“Carlos, Linda and I came here today because neither of us think you’re guilty of killing Gabriela,” Gwen began.
He shifted, and I felt uncomfortable with the weight of his gaze on me.
“Tell us your story. We believe you,” I said. Maybe I was being fooled, but it didn’t feel like it as I gazed into his eyes.
He teared up and bowed his head for a moment. “Thank you,” he muttered.
Gwen spoke up. “We don’t know why you confessed to killing Gabriela, but if you want to take back the confession, you can do that. You know that, don’t you?”
He gave me a pained look, then turned to Gwen. “I didn’t kill Gabriela,” he said. “I could never have done that to her.”
But if he hadn’t killed her, why had he confessed to it? I didn’t believe Gore would have had anything to do with forcing a statement out of him, even if I couldn’t convince Gwen of that.
Gwen bounced with excitement. “Then you must have been under duress. Did someone threaten you to make you confess?”
Carlos shook his head. “No.”
“Well, do you have a lawyer? We can help get you a good one, not just a public defender. You can tell them the truth, all right?” Gwen glanced at me as if expecting me to give them a name.
There were a couple of lawyers in the ward, but neither of them handled criminal cases, and even if they had, I couldn’t promise they’d represent Carlos. He’d already confessed, and while he’d been better off financially than Gabriela, that didn’t mean he’d have the money for hefty legal fees. I was pretty sure the church wouldn’t pay them in this case.
“I already have a lawyer,” he said. “Bishop Hope got me one.”
I stared at Gwen. If Bishop Hope was paying for his attorney, what was he getting in return? Was that why Carlos had confessed to the murder?
“You don’t have to use his lawyer if you want someone else. Did they encourage you to confess?” Gwen asked.
Carlos was looking at his hands. “I loved her. And her children, too. We were going to be a family.”
“You were at the Pro-Stop with her just before she was killed, right? The police have you on tape, arguing with her. What were you fighting about?” Gwen said.
Carlos shook his head slowly. “I should never have fought with her. I should have taken her home. Kept her safe.”
He sounded guilty, but of what? I tried to read his expression, but he just stared at his hands.
“Are you saying you should have taken her home because you knew she was going to do something dangerous? What did she say to you, Carlos? What was her plan?” Gwen peppered him with questions, but he didn’t seem to hear them. His head was down now, his elbows on his knees.
I put out a hand to Gwen to get her to give me a chance. “Carlos. What did you argue with Gabriela about? The argument that was caught on video at the gas station?” I asked in a soothing tone, the one I used when the boys broke something and didn’t want to admit to it.
“Luis. He wanted to be back in the children’s lives. He said he had changed. He wanted another chance.” Carlos sounded distant from all this information, neither angry nor sad. I thought of Kurt’s story about the woman whom he’d known was lying because she’d given him pat answers, even if he hadn’t known what she was omitting, and I felt the same phenomenon here. Carlos wasn’t telling us the whole story.
“She said she was going back to her husband, is that right?” I asked. Gwen turned in her chair and was about to say something, but I signaled for her to wait and give my strategy a chance.
“Yes, back to Luis,” Carlos said.
“And you were angry? Did you try to talk her out of it?” This didn’t mean it was the only argument they’d had that night. I was just trying to make Carlos feel comfortable enough to tell us more.
“I tried, but she wouldn’t listen,” Carlos said.
“Were you physical at all with her?” Maybe that was what had been caught on tape and led to Gore arresting Carlos.
Carlos shook his head. “No, no,” he said.
“Did she try to get away? Maybe you hurt her then, by accident.” The police had to have a good reason for arresting him, not just his confession. Gore would want plenty of evidence to take to court. I knew her too well to imagine she’d be any sloppier.
“I didn’t hurt her. I could never have hurt her.” Carlos started to sob, his shoulders shuddering with each intake of breath.
I felt terrible that I’d pushed him so far, but I should have been focusing on Gwen instead of Carlos, because my pause allowed her to take charge of the conversation.
“You said you should have kept her safe, Carlos. Who were you keeping her safe from?” Gwen asked.
Carlos kept sobbing.
“Carlos, if you didn’t kill her, who did? You must have some idea. You knew Gabriela as well as anyone. You knew who she was afraid of. Give us a name, anything that can help. We can’t get you out of here otherwise.”
But she’d pushed him too far. We both had. Carlos stood up, still shaking with sobs, and went to the door to call for a guard to take him back.
“Wait, come back! You haven’t finished answering our questions!” Gwen called after him.
But we had no way to make him keep talking to us.
The guards came and ushered us out of the room, so the rest of our conversation was as we left. Gwen wasn’t crying, but she looked distraught, pale and unsteady on her feet.
“He loved her, Linda. How could he have killed her?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. People get confused in their thinking,” I said. I’d seen far too many cases where men had killed or abused the women t
hey thought they loved.
“You know this has to do with Bishop Hope and Celestial Security. Linda, you had the same bad feeling about him when you met him, right? I’ve felt this way for weeks now.”
“A feeling isn’t evidence, Gwen,” I said morosely.
We stepped out of the jail into the pale November sun. “Linda, do you really think Greg Hope hired an attorney for Carlos out of the goodness of his heart?”
She was right on that point. “Maybe he just thought it would make him look good,” I said.
“That’s not enough. He’d want more than that for his investment. Linda, this stinks to high heaven.”
“Let’s just go home,” I said, reaching for the car door. When I got home, I texted Gore again. But I got the same response. Nothing.
Chapter 32
We sang the usual handful of Thanksgiving-themed hymns at church on Sunday. “Now Thank We All Our God,” “Come Ye Thankful People” and my favorite, the more traditional “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.”
The Primary children wandered the halls after church with paper pilgrim hats or bonnets on their heads and paper buckles on their feet. They’d drawn cornucopias to show off and had made fresh butter in baby food jars they’d rolled around during Singing Time.
Shannon Carpenter might be twenty years younger than I was, but she’d recreated the Sundays before Thanksgiving of my childhood nearly perfectly. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, that nothing ever changed in Mormonism.
I saw Brad Ferris in the foyer on my way from Relief Society to Sunday School. He waved and I waved back, but by the look on his face, I could tell he wanted to talk. Frankly, Sunday School wasn’t my favorite part of the three-hour church block, so I figured it was as good a time as any to linger in the hall and chat.
“How are you doing?” I asked, pulling him into a corner away from the front doors. I worried about how that might look, but it wasn’t as if I was in a dark room alone with him.
“Fine, fine. How are you?” he asked.
Typical Mormon insistence on everything being happy. If you had the gospel, you weren’t faithful if you didn’t feel glad all the time.
“How are you really?” I pressed. “You and Gwen?” I’d heard her side of the story, but he must have his own.
He paused for a long moment, then spoke slowly, carefully. “I’m not sure how we are, honestly. We don’t talk much anymore. It feels like the house is a battlefield and we’re both just waiting to take up our weapons at the slightest provocation. So I try to make sure there’s nothing to set either of us off.”
I suspected he wouldn’t have been this honest with anyone else, maybe not even to Kurt. Especially not to Kurt, whose opinion he valued so highly.
I neglected to mention she’d told me she was leaving Mormonism yesterday. I couldn’t bear to tell him. “I know you see things differently when it comes to the church.”
He let out a half-laugh, half-sob. “You could say that. She’s just so angry about everything, it’s hard to tell if there’s anything that can make her happy anymore.”
I knew she hadn’t meant for things to come across that way to Brad, but I thought he was right. She was generally unhappy nowadays. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
The words seemed to strengthen his resolve. I saw his shoulders rise. “She still loves me, I think. I know I love her. I always believed that would be enough, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
“I think this is a lot of delayed processing,” I said. “It may not be fair, but if she’s directing her anger at you, it’s because it’s safer that way.” She knew with certainty that Brad would never raise a hand against her. Not like her father. Or Luis.
“It feels like she hates all men, in the church and out,” he said, shaking his head slowly as if it were weighted down. “I understand that she’s trying to carve out a new space for herself, to figure out who she is after everything her father did to her is scraped away. But I’m not her father. I thought when she married me, it was because she knew that.”
It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’d ever heard a man say. I reached out to give him a hug, then realized it might not be appropriate and pulled back, patting him awkwardly on the shoulder instead.
“Just keep loving her,” I said. “That has to be enough.”
“I’m trying, but if she leaves the church, everything will change. Prayers and scriptures and church together. Christmas and Thanksgiving and every other holiday. I don’t know who we are together without all of that.”
Brad had only spoken to me this way once before, and I knew it was unusual for him to be so vulnerable. I tried to honor the gift with my best advice. “Gwen is changing, but that doesn’t mean things have to be worse between you. You can still find things to do together. New things. New traditions.” I loved the holidays, but they weren’t the heart of my family. “You have to remember not to make her feel like she isn’t enough. You can’t keep praying for her to come back. Or pitying her, either.” That might be worse.
“How can I not want her to be happy again?” he asked, his voice breaking on the penultimate word.
“Happy, yes. But maybe not in the same way,” I thought about Kurt and how he’d thought I would be happy if I just let my questions about the church go, but that wasn’t how life worked. You couldn’t go backwards like that, and happiness wasn’t always what it looked like. Sometimes you could be happy and angry, happy and tired, even happy and sad. “Let her know she can talk to you about anything,” I added.
“She doesn’t want to talk to me. Any time I try to get her to open up, she pushes me away,” he said, rubbing at his eyes to staunch the tears.
“Maybe you have to start with something that’s scary for you to admit. You could tell her about all of this, right now.”
He thought about this for a long moment. “All right. I’ll try,” he said finally.
“Don’t just try, do,” I said, echoing Kurt’s revision of Yoda that I’d heard him repeat so often with our sons. Then I patted his shoulder one more time. “And make sure she knows where you are. Right at her side, every step of the way.”
At home after church, Kurt asked me what I’d talked to Brad about.
“Are you stalking me?” I teased. Wasn’t he too busy to hunt me down during church hours if I wasn’t in my meetings?
“I heard from at least three different sources that you and Brad had a very intimate conversation during Sunday School,” Kurt said.
Oh. I blushed. “It wasn’t that intimate,” I said defensively.
“Then why don’t you tell me what it was about?” he asked.
“It was about Gwen. And how to stay married now that she—if she leaves the church.” I said, rephrasing at the last minute in an attempt to maintain her privacy.
“And what advice did you have about that?” Kurt asked, his look intent.
“I told Brad that he needs to make sure he can love her without judgment,” I said. “And to be honest and vulnerable with her, even if he’s afraid she might hurt him.”
Kurt nodded at that and seemed to let go of the breath he’d been holding. “Good advice,” he said.
And that seemed like the end of it, except that I asked him just before he went into his office, “Was Brad one of the people who told you about our talk?”
“Actually, he was,” Kurt said with a faint smile.
If I’d known, I’d have been less worried about explaining everything. But Kurt had known that very well and used it against me.
We went over our schedules for the week, as we usually did.
“Greg Hope called me this morning,” he said.
I tensed in anticipation of Kurt upbraiding me for going back to Celestial Security with Gwen two days ago.
But to my surprise, Kurt said, “He wants us to come over for dinner with his family Tuesday nigh
t. What do you think?”
It was hard for me to not answer this immediately with, “I think that’s a really bad idea.” I hadn’t liked the man beneath the mask that I’d seen, but the fear I’d felt at Celestial Security had faded enough that I was curious. What kind of a woman had Bishop Hope brought back from Mexico and married? What were his children like? Could someone who seemed so shallow and corrupt still have a decent home life?
“Linda?” Kurt asked again, anxious.
“You already told him yes, didn’t you?” I guessed. Of course he had. Kurt was the man of the house and the priesthood holder. He made the decisions for the family. It was his duty and his prerogative.
“Don’t you want to see him in his own habitat?” Kurt asked. Was he actually encouraging me to snoop around?
“So you’re saying you don’t mind if I disappear in the middle of dinner on the pretext of going to the bathroom and look through his medicine cabinet, plus any papers he’s left out in the open?” I said.
Kurt rubbed his eyes and said, “Linda, please tell me you’re not going to do that while we’re there.”
I sighed. I considered telling him about the terror I’d felt when Greg Hope had talked about Gabriela Suarez and the supposed embezzlement charge, but then I’d have to admit to doing what Kurt had told me not to, and I didn’t want to get into that.
“What is this really about?” I asked instead. It was right before Thanksgiving. What woman wanted to have guests over then? A woman whose husband demanded it, I supposed.
“I just want to get to know him a little better,” Kurt said.
I was pretty sure there was more than that, but Kurt wasn’t offering anything else, and I found I was too tired to press him. Fine, I’d play the good wife, and if there was a chance to find out what I wanted to know, I’d do that, too.
Chapter 33
In the morning, I went back to pie-making. Pecan and pumpkin first, because they kept the best. Apple and mincemeat next. And finally, the cream pies. There were always at least ten pies at a Wallheim Thanksgiving, and I was going to enjoy making every single one.
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