Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer by Escape Page A

live this way anymore. I am going and nobody can do anything about it.” Linda bolted through the door. I watched her run until she was swallowed up by the night.
    Rosie was yelling, “Linda, you get back here. You’re not going to get away with this. I’m calling your father right now.” Rosie soon realized that the more she yelled, the more time she was giving Linda to escape. She quit and ran to the phone.
    Rosie raced upstairs and called my father at the hotel where he was staying. Minutes later men appeared at our house. They planned to restrain Linda until my father got home. But she was already gone.
    The mayor of the community came and questioned me. Linda had protected me by not telling me of her plans. I told the mayor the truth: I didn’t know she had been planning to escape, nor did I know where she was headed.
    My father and mother drove all night to get home. As soon as Father arrived, he teamed up with Claudel’s stepfather. Claudel and Linda had fled together. Her stepfather had brought about twenty men with him to hunt the girls down. They looked tall and ominous.
    My father was tired from driving all night, but I could feel the deeper sadness behind his fatigue and stress. Linda’s dash for freedom was a complete disgrace to my father, mother, and entire family. We had lost our status in the community as a completely faithful family. The image my father had nurtured for a lifetime was in smithereens.
    I could hear him crying in my mother’s bedroom. It was then that I felt the weight of his sadness and the brokenness of his heart. When my father came into the kitchen for breakfast he couldn’t eat. He stared at his plate and then asked me if I would ever do something like this and hurt him in the same way.
    “Never!”
    My fate was sealed.
    I loved my father; his love for me was the ballast of my life. It upset me to see how much he was suffering. Both of my parents were worried about Linda’s safety. They knew how vulnerable she was, how unsophisticated in the ways of the world.
    My mother was crushed that her image of a faithful mother of God was now in ruins. She knew she would never again be complimented within the community for her obedient children. Overnight she had become a mother who’d raised an apostate—someone who had turned against God and the prophet. There was nothing worse a person could become. As an apostate, Linda was now condemned to spend the afterlife in the lowest realm of hell, a place of such torment that it was beyond human comprehension.
    Even if Linda was found, we knew she would be out of our lives forever. We would never be allowed to associate with her because she had abandoned the work of God. My father could not risk contaminating his other children by letting them have contact with Linda. Linda’s escape was worse than death. She would never be part of our lives on earth again, nor would we see her in the afterlife. I hated the thought of letting her go, but as I watched her disappear into the night, secretly I envied her. What worried me was that I knew Linda didn’t have any kind of survival skills. But I certainly didn’t think she should be forced to wed someone she didn’t want to marry. I said this to Rosie at one point and she said there was no way Linda would be coerced into a marriage; she could always say no. But this was a joke. People said that all the time, but the pressure that was applied to a woman who tried to resist an assigned marriage was crushing.
    After several days, my father and several uncles of Linda’s friend tracked the two girls to a town not far from Salt Lake City. The posse of men surrounded the house, refusing to leave until the girls talked to them.
    Linda and Claudel refused.
    The woman who was sheltering them asked the men to leave, but they would not, so she called the police. When the officers arrived, the woman explained that she was protecting two runaways from Colorado City. When the police realized the girls were