News from the Wasatch Front

When Tal and I heard someone testing the handle of the French doors in the Ashton’s dining room we looked at each other and thought of Molly Little. She’d been missing for over three months. She would have been a freshman and we were juniors, driving our first cars and collecting our first kisses. It was impossible not to think of Molly Little. Her captor entered her family’s home by forcing the French doors in their dining room. The Littles lived two streets away from the Ashtons in a house with a better view and a bigger backyard. Molly’s bedroom had two gabled windows above the garage.

I was at the Ashtons to babysit their twins that night. Tal, my best friend, was there to keep me company while the twins slept and I waited for their parents to return. We were in the kitchen, a few steps from the dining room. We couldn’t see the French doors from where we were sitting. I was supposed to feel prepared for an emergency, but I didn’t. I knew everything useful there was to know about that split-level on the hill above Wasatch Boulevard— I knew where to find crayon boxes and candy stashes, and I knew the Ashtons stowed their best flashlight in the food storage cupboard next to their heavy manual wheat grinder. I stood at the sink, flashing the light out the kitchen window into the sloping backyard below. I didn’t know what we’d do if we spotted someone there, and I hoped we wouldn’t unless it was the person who would lead us to Molly Little safe and sound, though truthfully, I already presumed her dead in spite of the many collective prayers for her continued health and safety. I imagined a masked figure with evil eyes, a devil hiding in the bushes. I had cartoonish ideas of what evil looked like. Still, those images filled me with fear.

When Molly Little went missing, babysitting changed forever. I worried I’d miss something—an unlocked window, one unattended moment— and the Ashton twins would vanish. Or I could end up just like Molly Little and disappear myself, held at knifepoint in the middle of the night. According to the papers, Molly Little wore a blue striped nightgown with a lace yoke and flip flops when she was abducted, probably the same pair she took on her last family boating trip to Lake Powell.

“I’m not hearing it anymore,” Tal whispered. He was an Eagle Scout unimpressed by my kidnapping deterrent technique.

“What if they’re in the backyard?” I asked, considering the Ashton’s dense hedges. I could picture a man jumping out at us with a machete. I thought I heard something scraping the back patio. A rake on concrete? Something, someone, being dragged? Could fingernails alone make such a sound? Scared, I grabbed Tal’s arm. It might have been the first time I touched Talmage Benson, the too-skinny mop-haired boy I relied on for supplementary notes. My best friend, my unrequited crush. “Should we call the police?” I asked.

The sound stopped. I let go of Tal’s arm. He crept into the dining room. Without warning, he swung open the Ashton’s French doors as I reached frantically for the cordless phone. I didn’t know Tal to be especially brave, but maybe those rafting trips he took with his family in Colorado really built character in the way the tour companies claimed they could.

Tal, in the face of fear, laughed. “Come on,” he said.

Three of his friends walked in, all wearing University of Utah sweatshirts—they’d just come from a football game. They could see I was mad. I put the cordless phone back in the receiver.

“Why do you always assume something bad is going to happen?” Aaron said, opening the Ashton’s fridge.

“You knew they were coming?” I asked Tal.

“They mentioned it,” he said.

“You never mentioned it to me,” I said. “I like to give the Ashtons a head’s up about extra guests in their home.”

“Sister Ashton loves me,” Aaron said with total confidence. She hired Aaron to mow her lawn. “You’re my favorite person to scare. I knew you’d freak out if we came through those doors.”

It was as if there was nothing for me to be afraid of, as if a girl hadn’t been taken out of her home just two streets away.

“We brought homework,” Chris said, peeling off his sweatshirt and unzipping his backpack. “Did you make cookies?” I reluctantly arranged a few gingersnaps on a paper plate. They expected me to accommodate them, knowing I wouldn’t refuse. I wouldn’t ask the boys to leave but they had to be quiet. I didn’t want them to wake the twins.

“Bad things have happened in our neighborhood,” I said, not able to let it go. Somehow the boys had stopped seeing all the light blue ribbons tied to our trees, though they’d been the scouts to tie them there.

*

According to the papers, the few leads investigators followed dead-ended by Christmas. The weather turned the tattered ribbons tied to telephone poles limp and dirty with rock salt. A handyman who installed a sprinkler system for the Littles was the primary suspect. He died suddenly of natural causes. Those who assumed him guilty figured we’d never find Molly Little.

One day that winter a group of us argued about her whereabouts while eating lunch in the seminary building across the street from our school. We could go there to get away from the congested hallways and the near-daily food fights (a bagel schmear and a yogurt cup had both pelted me in the recent past). I liked to eat quickly then pull out my sketchbook to draw cartoons of my classmates. That year we took seminary with Brother Leishman after lunch. He taught us about the Book of Mormon. Every day he asked us to promise him that we’d always stay true and faithful.

“Statistics show that it’s likely she ran away.” Hannah ate her reheated lentils from a Tupperware container before moving on to her string cheese.

“But she didn’t take anything with her,” I said. Did no one remember the nightgown and flip flops?

“If I wanted to get away, I could imagine hopping on a bus.”

“A bus to where, exactly?”

“Kids show up in strange places.” Did Hannah think Molly Little struck out on her own to start a new life? Did she think Molly Little looked old enough to lie about her age, to start working a job where no one would be suspicious? She didn’t seem unhappy at home. I didn’t know Molly Little but I’d made projections about her.

“Maybe she got mixed up with a trafficker?” Whitney offered. “He might have promised her lots of money.” Whitney herself had been approached at the mall by a “talent scout” asking her if she wanted to start modeling. Whitney didn’t feel modeling would be a stretch for her at all. After she paid him $1000 to take pictures of her in his studio, she never heard from him again. She waited for weeks for a call from an agency in New York. She’d already started inquiring about apartments. It turned out to be the greatest hoax of her young life.

“She’s most likely dead,” Tal said. “But I have another theory.” He sat in the seat next to mine. “The church kidnapped her as a PR move. You know, to get everyone on their knees.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I said. There was no way the church was involved in the disappearance of Molly Little. I had my doubts about the church’s teachings but that had nothing to do with this. I didn't like where his imagination had gone.

“They kidnapped her, offered her up on an altar in the temple, and they probably even told her parents about it.” Tal’s contrarian streak showed up at odd times. I generally had patience for it, and found myself constantly defending him in ways that compromised my own integrity. My patience was a show of my everlasting loyalty.

“She was not a human sacrifice. I think she’s still alive. Someone will find her. But way to bring in that AP World History. Sit somewhere else if you don’t want to talk about this.”

Class would start soon. I put away my drawings.

“The church doesn’t benefit from Molly Little’s disappearance.” Hannah clearly saw Tal’s conspiracy theory as not only preposterous, but disrespectful. I felt ashamed of Tal.

“That’s not something a future missionary would say, even as a joke,” I said.

“What makes you assume I’ll go on a mission?” Every boy in our neighborhood went. Some lied to meet the standards, some repented. Many paid for the whole suit-and-tie adventure with their lawncare/snow-shoveling/fast food chain money. Even boys who never finished the Book of Mormon served two-year missions. As a girl, I felt grateful I didn’t have to go. But I also understood what was expected of me. I was supposed to prioritize marriage and motherhood above all else. The other girls I knew hoped they’d become brides before they turned twenty-two. Sure, I wanted to be loved, but babysitting gave me a complicated glimpse of maternal ambivalence. I didn’t want to rush into all of that. I wanted to explore my options. I thought I was pretty good at art and my teachers agreed; my parents thought art school was a scam. They said if I wanted a career, they hoped I’d become a lawyer. Being a lawyer sounded safe.

I briefly entertained what Tal might do if he didn’t accept a mission call. He’d stay with me. Or, if he wanted to leave the Wasatch Front, we’d travel. We’d have an exciting life together, uninterrupted by inconvenient church service. I wanted to do everything with Tal, even if he made me furious, even if I couldn’t be sure he’d ever love me like that.

“You’ll go,” I said, even though I didn’t want him to go.

Soon the bell rang. Brother Leishman walked in. Hannah hurried to her post at the piano.

What I said to Tal that day in the seminary building was exactly right. Two weeks after he turned nineteen, he left. For two years, we wrote inconsistent, extremely unsatisfying letters. I don’t know why I bothered reading them. I wanted to open one to find greetings from my dearest friend, but with his new haircut and new obligations, I’d lost him— except for his handwriting, which remained unchanged. Sometimes I sent sketches. He never said whether or not he liked them.

I’m grateful he was wrong about Molly Little.

*

When Molly Little disappeared, my mother told me a story about her childhood that I’d never heard before. Her family lived in Las Vegas in the 50s. My grandfather worked in construction. I thought it was funny that my grandfather built the casinos when Mormons don’t believe in gambling. This was all years before my grandparents packed up the family to move back to the Beehive State.

My mom had two sisters: Judy and Carol. Judy, the eldest, was nine years old when she won a city art contest for children with her oil pastel of the mushroom cloud poking up between the strip’s waving cowboys and neon starburst signs. They printed Judy’s picture in the paper next to her impressive work of art.

One day while the girls were at school my grandmother received a horrifying phone call. A man described Judy (dark curls and dimpled cheeks, just like the newspaper picture), what she was wearing that day (a checked dress, mary janes, a satin ribbon in her hair) and which door of the school he knew she’d exit from. He found sick pleasure in telling my grandmother that he would rape and kill Judy, that she’d never see her daughter again. He didn’t know Carol’s name or my mom’s, but he described them too.

“There’s a blonde in a smocked dress with scabby knees,” he might have said (Carol) “and a real tiny one in a puffy pinafore that sucks her thumb” (Elizabeth, my mom). He said he’d found Judy’s pretty picture in The Las Vegas Sun and he just couldn’t forget her. He said he’d been watching the girls come and go from school for a while. Grandma asked him for a ransom. They didn’t have much money, but maybe the church could help her pay it. She’d pay anything to keep Judy safe. She’d do anything to buy herself some time.

My mom remembers her kindergarten teacher interrupting her nap, gently pulling her up from her mat and holding her drool-covered hand all the way to the principal’s office. Her mother waited with Judy, Carol, the principal, and a policeman. This was the day the predator made his first phone call. Everyone was safe. But for months, the policeman escorted the three girls to school, and they sat on a bench with him outside during recess. The officer sometimes brought them Bit-o-Honeys or atomic fireballs. They folded pulpy wide-ruled paper into cootie catchers, played cat’s cradle, occasionally chanted rhymes or sang rounds during those dull, hot Vegas recesses.

“Judy and Carol knew what was happening, and they were watching for him,” my mom said. “But I just thought the policeman sat with us because we were special.”

The man periodically called the house to reiterate his threats, recounting what the three girls wore to school that day in precise detail: embroidered collars, pleated jumpers, scalloped socks. He wanted Grandma to know he lurked nearby, waiting. I don’t know how anyone in the family ever slept at night.

The predator made his bold appearance not on a normal school day, but on a Saturday, on the very street my mom’s Mormon family lived on. Judy and Carol practiced roller-skating, swaying in giant slaloms, racing, wobbling backward. Elizabeth watched, jumping rope. A man emerged from a shiny Buick and ran towards Carol, grabbing her by her swinging braid. She fell on her knees and screamed. He fell too. She started kicking the man in the face, rubber wheels spinning against his cheek. He held Carol by one ankle. Elizabeth ran towards the door dragging her jump rope, shrieking, crying. Judy first tried to clutch Carol’s hand to pull her from the man, but when it didn’t work, she raced away, yelling.

“He’s here! Help us now!”

My grandpa had been watching his girls from the living room and he ran out to tackle the guy. A neighbor got there first. Others hurried into the street, some waited on their porches. Grandma stood in the doorway with the long phone cord, calling the officer. Someone, my mom remembered, shot a warning bullet into the air, just like the cowboys in Judy’s oil pastel.

They charged the guy, booked him, and found he’d harmed and harassed many Clark County schoolchildren. After they caught him, the girls could walk to school by themselves. They could finally participate in recess—climb the monkey bars, swing on the swings. But they knew there were others out there, and their fear never fully dissolved. When I asked Aunt Carol about the story, she told me she still had scars from the gravel where she fell when he grabbed her braid and she kicked him with the skates. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that in all the family pictures after that year and forevermore, Aunt Carol kept her hair cropped short— nothing to grab onto.

When my mother told me this story, I realized why she gave us one long thorough look before sending us off to school every day: she committed the outfits we wore to memory, so she could describe us accurately if we ever went missing. A tiny protection against the awful possibilities she couldn’t forget. She knew what could happen to us long before we could imagine what had already happened to her. My mom knew what happened to Molly Little could have happened to any of us.

I told Tal the Las Vegas story during lunch one day during the winter Molly Little was missing. I remember we were sitting in front of our shared locker splitting a pack of pretzels.

“It makes sense now,” he said. “I didn’t tell you because I thought it was weird, but one time your mom called my house asking if I knew where you were. You’d just left, and I assured her you’d be home in a few minutes. She thanked me, but then she asked what you were wearing.”

“I’m so embarrassed. She’s out of control.” I felt annoyed that she’d done this, but not surprised. Tal should’ve told me earlier. If his mom called and asked what he was wearing—if Tal’s mom ever called and asked me anything— I’d definitely tell him.

“Yes. And because she asked, I still remember. Daisy sun dress, flimsy sandals, canvas messenger bag.”

I loved that daisy-patterned dress. I wore it during the one and only time we kissed, later that year, one night at Donner Park.

*

I may as well share a few things about the Donner Park kiss, an event that was exciting and confusing and ultimately insignificant. It was summer by then. Tal had mostly recovered, but he still used a cane for stability. When our sloppy first kiss lips tentatively touched, he positioned one hand firmly on my shoulder for balance, and the other on the round marble head of his old man mahogany walking stick, a shaky stake gently denting that grassy hill. It all seemed so deliberate, as if he wasn’t afraid. He kissed me, then offered me a sad expression that seemed to communicate regret. It happened, then we pretended it didn’t happen. After that, I still carried Tal’s books for months. He missed an entire soccer season. Before the cane there were crutches. Before the crutches, a wheelchair. Before the wheelchair, a surgery. By that time, Molly Little had already been found alive, where no one would have expected her.

On the spring day they found Molly Little, I sat at the football stadium, half watching Tal’s soccer game and half drilling flashcards for an upcoming history test. My friends insisted on attending every home game. Fearing I’d miss out on something, I tagged along though I didn’t find soccer particularly riveting. I couldn’t really tell who was a good player versus who was standing around in a school-issued uniform because he could. Tal insisted he played well. He claimed that if it hadn’t happened, he might have played in college.

Against the Bountiful Braves, our boys had little hope. Our defenseman moved too slowly and our goalie was a joke.

I set down my flashcards and entirely forgot about the game when Hannah walked up to us, still wearing her cross-country garb.

“Have you heard?” she asked. “They found her!”

“They found who?” I asked.

“Molly Little,” she said. “She’s alive.” I let some of my flash cards flutter away in the wind without running after them. The dates I wanted to memorize hardly felt significant.

“That’s amazing!” Whitney said. “Her parents never gave up!”

“They brainwashed her,” Hannah said. “They hid her in plain sight.”

We didn’t have many details at first. We knew they found Molly Little only a few miles from home, walking the street with her captors in long robes, her sweet face covered except for her familiar blue eyes. I hoped she’d already been reunited with her parents. I hoped that by that night she’d be able to sleep at home, even if it wasn’t in her gabled bedroom above the garage. I hoped her parents would buy her new everything. New pajamas! New flip flops! New perfect hair ribbons! I hoped they would re-enroll her in the music lessons all the papers said she loved. We didn’t know yet who Molly Little’s captor was, why he’d taken her, or what he’d done to her. We didn’t know yet how very strong Molly Little was or that we would have found her faster if we’d really been looking. Why had we ignored the young girl sitting on the sidewalk with the bearded man and his coarse-faced wife? Polygamy. We knew our shared history. We agreed to leave polygamists alone. Only they weren’t that kind of polygamists, and we all knew there was a missing girl.

The day they found Molly Little was the same day one of the Bountiful Braves slammed into Tal with such force that he couldn’t get up off the grass after the fall. Two teammates helped him off the field. When I realized he was hurt, I wanted to run down the hill to the sidelines to be with him. But it wasn’t my place. I watched his agonized face from afar, though his dark curls mostly covered his eyes. I worried about his future. I wondered how long I’d have to wait to hear the story in his own words.

Tal tore his ACL. For months he felt trapped, his courage sapped. I knew we were truly best friends during Tal’s recovery because all the time he would have spent at practice, in conditioning, or traveling for tournaments, Tal spent talking with me. We talked all spring, all summer. He understood me in a way others didn’t. He knew I was afraid of making decisions that would trap me. He knew I didn’t want what I was supposed to want. I admitted that I wanted to be an artist, that it was more than a hobby to me. I told him I thought I might not have a testimony, that I might not stay in the church once I left home. He said he felt the same way. He said he wished he hadn’t been born in the church. He said he wanted to be worldly—that’s how he put it. He was my best friend, and we were brave. We imagined a life beyond the Wasatch Front. We spent every day together and promised each other we’d never grow up to be ordinary.

*

We started our senior year. I was thinking about my college applications, letting myself dream about RISD or Pratt, though Brigham Young had a solid art program, the best in Utah. I hadn’t thought much about Molly Little for a while.

One day that fall I was in seminary again, waiting for class to begin from my usual seat near the back. For the first time I could remember, Brother Leishman wasn’t weaving through the desks, firmly gripping each student’s hand, looking each of us in the eye with an aggressive smile. He sat in the front row with someone I didn’t recognize, both of their backs facing us. Hannah pounded out hymns on the upright, turning page after page for an extra-long prelude.

Hannah clearly had enough of the delay. She wasn’t much of a show off, and though she played the piano pretty well, she only played because her mother insisted that she play, just as she insisted Hannah couldn’t wear makeup or participate in sleepovers. She slowed down the timing to resolve the last lines of the final verse, giving Brother Leishman his cue to please put on his suit jacket and welcome us all to class already.

He ignored the nagging hymn. I couldn’t tell who demanded his attention.

“It looks like we have a visitor today,” Tal said, walking in late with the marble-headed cane. When Brother Leishman finally stood up and turned around to conduct devotional, I expected him to ask the visitor to introduce herself. “Thank you, Hannah,” he said. “Today, we’ll skip singing.” He invited me to pray.

As I made my way to the front of the classroom, I saw exactly who the visitor was— the nice blonde hair, the reserved smile, I think the sweater she wore was even lost girl light blue—our visitor was Molly Little, now ready to return to school.

I stuttered out a generic please-let-this-lesson-edify-us-on-this-beautiful-day prayer, opening my eyes to peek out at her. I wanted to be sure the once-missing girl was really there, wearing a sweater the color of the ribbons her family tied around so many trees.

*

I’d never visited a courtroom until that first assignment, six years after they found Molly Little. The trial presented a distinct opportunity for me to sketch for money. It was a high-profile case and cameras were not permitted. The defendant was a religious extremist. He claimed he was told to take Molly Little in a vision from God. He dressed like a Biblical prophet. Before I agreed to the job, the editor made it clear that the defendant’s face was what they wanted most. I didn’t want to study Molly’s captor so closely but knew I could do it. I agreed to render his expressions with my oil pastels on vellum for the paper to print.

On the first day of the trial, the defendant entered the room eerily singing one of my favorite hymns, escorted by officers unamused by his attempt at a devotional. I began my uncomfortable commissions, rendering the would-be-prophet’s mouth wide open in song, the hunch of his shoulders, the mess of his wild hair. I couldn’t help thinking of that time years ago, when we were all looking for Molly, not knowing what face to look for in our failed search of the foothills. This was the face. I’d learn it well, drawing it over and over again, hoping to become numb to it. But the numbness never arrived. His face disturbed me. My portrayal was honest in its ugliness.

His face changed from boredom to indignation to reverent calm as Molly Little testified about what he’d done to her and as his state-appointed lawyers pled his case after years of unsuccessfully trying to prove that he was insane, insane, insane. As the proceedings continued, I lost myself in my work, trying to capture the judge presiding from the bench, Molly Little’s perfect posture as she delivered her testimony, the lawyers at turns stiff and then suddenly animated. The defendant caught my eye just once, and I kept my hand moving over the clean sheet of paper during this exchange. I stayed with the task until it was over. It happened as a witness told the defendant’s life story. Though his brief stare troubled me, I kept drawing. That sketch was one of my best.

At many turns during the trial, I felt grateful that I’d decided not to become a lawyer, though I’d thought about it for a few years for the sake of my worried parents. Talmage Benson was the one who become a lawyer. Though I hadn’t seen him in years, I imagined he took on a lawyerly look of contemptuous exhaustion. Tal did everything he promised in youth he’d never do— he served a mission, went to law school, and even married a girl in the temple though he swore to me many times that he’d never believe the gospel. On the other hand, I was attached to the ideals of my youth: I did what I thought was brave. First, I earned a degree in studio art, then I moved to Chicago and stopped going to church, which dismayed my friends from home. When I came back to Salt Lake, I took strange jobs to make a living, like sketching a convicted kidnapper. I offered the public their last glimpse of an evil man before he was put away forever. Tal and I were lost to each other, each inhabiting a life the other couldn’t understand.

Each evening when the court adjourned, I rushed through the heavy doors into the hallway where an editor for the paper waited as I ripped out the day’s pages from my sketchbook. He told me I was doing good work. I repeated this routine every day until the conviction, which came in December. A victory for Molly Little and her parents after years of delay, a victory for everyone who lived in the Wasatch Front. I thought the relief I felt would carry me through that winter but understood too well the world I lived in.

When I walked out of the courtroom, it hurt to breathe in the cold, dry air. The sidewalk, though salted, was slippery. Two cars collided at the corner and their horns blared. A clock declared the time. Soon there were sirens. A man I’d never met caught up with me and asked what I wanted for Christmas. He asked if I’d seen the lights at Temple Square. There was danger everywhere.