The farther away we got from the city, the more confident Mitchell became. “I stood face-to-face with a homicide detective,” he sneered. “He is trained to look for signs of lying and deception. Yet he believed everything I told him. He looked into my eyes and I convinced him that you were not who they were looking for. I convinced him of that while you were sitting there. God has provided another miracle! And why did he do it? Because no one else will ever see my Esther’s face until the Lord has called Hephzibah and my seven wives to testify unto a wicked world. Then I will call them to repentance! And that day is very near!”
Then he suddenly fell silent. We walked a few minutes in quiet as he thought. His mood seemed to shift. He was more sullen. He could bask in his own glory only for so long before it hit him. He was a breath away from having lost me. He was a breath away from having been arrested, a breath away from having to spend the rest of his life in prison. The reality seemed to sober him, crushing his mood. “What happened in the library had to be a message,” he said. “Surely the Lord is telling me that the world is not yet ready to receive the light in my Esther’s eyes. No, we can’t take any more chances. We can’t do anything so dangerous!” He turned and glared at Barzee, as if it were somehow her fault. “Hephzibah, from now on you and Esther have to stay in camp. No more going into the city. You have to stay up on the mountain until we move to San Diego.”
Barzee grunted. She didn’t like it, but she knew it had to be that way.
At that moment, I didn’t care about anything anymore.
I felt like I was moving through a blur. Though I was walking through my own neighborhood, I saw none of it anymore. The things that used to make me happy, things that used to give me hope, all of these things were invisible to me now. The streets I used to walk on, cars like my family used to drive, flowers that reminded me of my mom … all of these things seemed to melt from my sight. I no longer kept an eye out for an opportunity to escape. I didn’t even think about it anymore.
I felt nothing but misery. It was maybe the lowest that I had ever felt.
How could the officer have turned around and walked away? How could he not have known that I was the one he was looking for? How could I have been left to live with the devil and hell’s mistress?
Hiking up the main trail, I felt like a prisoner walking back to her cell. I was in solitary confinement, with only my guards for company. And I was innocent. I was innocent! But no one seemed to care.
26.
California Dreaming
After the crisis at the library, Mitchell seemed to hunker down. Though his initial reaction had been an explosion of pride in his ability to manipulate law enforcement, as well as the realization that there was a certain sensitivity to people’s religious customs that would allow him to hide me in plain sight, the reality quickly set in: He had almost been caught. Like the hit of a drug, the effect of manipulating the officer quickly wore off, leaving him paranoid and all the more anxious to get out of Salt Lake.
No more was I allowed to go down with him into the city. Neither was Barzee. She had to stay with me all the time, my personal prison guard. But Mitchell didn’t back off on the frequency of his own trips into the city. He still had to plunder and minister for food. And he was working hard—okay, he was begging hard—to get enough money for the bus tickets to California. Plus there was the constant demand for alcohol. A few bags of dope from the generous grocer. Pornography. A certain amount of daily needs he had to fulfill.
So he’d go down and do his thing, leaving Barzee and me up at the lower camp by ourselves, where we did … well, pretty much nothing. All day. Every day. There just wasn’t that much to do when you’re confined to a tent and a small clearing in the trees. It was horribly boring. You can’t even begin to imagine. We rarely cooked. There was little cleaning. I had read every book they had in camp, and I hated them all. I had read the entire scriptures by now, parts of them many times through. And other than reading, there was nothing else to do.
My life pretty much consisted of three things: getting raped, being forced to drink alcohol, and sitting on a bucket in a clearing in the trees.
But as horribly boring as it was to be left up in the camp, I was still relieved when Mitchell wasn’t there. There was the obvious reason that it meant a few hours when I didn’t have to wonder when I was going to be raped. Plus, I was just a little more relaxed when he wasn’t around. I didn’t have to listen to the sound of his constant preaching. His constant talking about himself. The constant singing of church hymns that once I thought were beautiful but now hated to hear sung in his voice. And Barzee was a little easier to live with when he wasn’t around. She was always irritable and whiny and as pleasant as a thorn underneath your fingernail, but she was a tiny bit better when Mitchell wasn’t leering at me or pulling me into the tent.
But I want to be clear. I never developed any kind of affection for Barzee. She was a monster and I knew that. She never showed me a single moment of kindness. She never demonstrated a single act of compassion or understanding toward me. If Mitchell was the devil, then she was his sneering sidekick. In some ways, I think that she was even worse. She was a woman. She was a mother. She knew what I was going through.