 She began to see her sister Iris's former fiancé, Mark Elliott, a successful architect in San Francisco.This was good for her, since Mark's stuffy mother, Helen Elliott Donnelly, liked her more than Iris.In a complete irony, Helen would become Laura's sister in-law, as well as her mother in-law, after she married Tom Donnelly, Laura and Iris' older brother, a police officer on the San Francisco Police Department.