"My mother would say that she didn't know any of this. It was a hard time for her — I think her emotions included many things at once. She was vested in keeping the silence because who would want that to be known about their family ... She would die before she would let anyone know that. It would affect her husband's career."

Linda has since felt an ethical and moral responsibility to tell the rest of her siblings as they have married and had children of their own, warning them that they should protect their own children. "That was difficult ... because it was so painful for me to have to talk about it again."

At the same time, she began questioning her LDS faith. "How could my father have been a bishop? Were there people in the LDS Church who knew and did nothing? What did Heavenly Father think of me because of what I had been involved in?" A five-year struggle with such questions led her "to sort out in my mind the separations between my father, the LDS Church as an organization and my own faith, belief and testimony about the church, about God, about where I fit in with all that."

She plodded through the tough times, continuing to attend and serve in her ward, and found that she had an important role to play using the understanding she had developed about God and deeper truths that went beyond surface talk about gospel principles. She has come to see her struggle as the foundation for a deeper way of relating to others in pain.

One friend she confided in asked her how she stayed in the church. "My father took so much away from me," Linda says. "I was a little girl and couldn't do anything about it. Why should I let him take my faith away from me now — I'm not a little girl any more. I want this, I need this, it's so important to me and he's not going to take that away from me."

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E-mail: carrie@desnews.com