Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [106]
I clung to her like a child when she embraced me for our final goodbye. Stepping up into the passenger seat, she tossed me my cell phone and car keys. The dust from the truck’s spinning tires blew into my face as she and Ryan drove off down the road. Heartbroken, I nearly collapsed. By the time I reached my mother’s, I was inconsolable.
“What’s wrong, Lesie?” Mom asked softly, stroking my hair and trying to calm me down. I was so upset I couldn’t speak and at first just stood before her, my shoulders shaking uncontrollably and tears rolling off my cheeks.
“Kassandra’s gone,” I finally told her. Both Sherrie and Ally were in the room when I blurted out the news, but I was too numb to relate any more of the story and could hardly react when Ally fell apart. We hadn’t lost a sibling since Caleb left two years before, and all the pain that had been lying dormant came flooding back. Once again our family had been torn apart; once again I had been left alone.
I didn’t tell Allen about Kassandra, but this kind of news traveled fast and he heard it from someone else. He said he was sorry but expressed concern about the influence that Kassandra’s departure might have on me.
“She is a wicked example,” he told me. “And I hope she doesn’t wear off on you.”
In the days following Kassandra’s departure, the shakedown was intense. Uncle Fred began with my mother, interrogating her for hours, wanting to know where Kassandra was, what had happened, and how. Mom was directed to write a letter of explanation to Uncle Warren outlining all she knew about the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s defection. My interrogation was even more rigorous. Kassandra had used my cell phone, and she and I had been captured removing her belongings on the video system that monitored the perimeter of the prophet’s compound. My unwitting role in Kassandra’s flight was now on tape and being used as evidence of my alleged involvement in her defiant act of betrayal.
It felt like I had just committed murder or a bank robbery with the way Uncle Warren and Fred questioned me for hours. Fred demanded to see my cell phone, and he almost confiscated it for good after he learned that Kassandra had used it to make calls in the days leading up to her escape.
“I had no idea,” I insisted. “I had no clue that Kassandra was doing anything other than what she told me. I trusted her. She told me she was preparing to be married, and I believed her.”
But Fred didn’t believe a word I said. He was certain that I had purposely moved my sister’s stuff from the prophet’s home and had acted as an accomplice by storing it in my shed. While I loved my sister, I grew furious at her for what she had done. I felt she had thrown Mom, Sherrie, Ally, and me to the wolves, seemingly without a thought about what impact her actions would have on us. I had thought she was my best friend and my closest confidante, but she had been hiding the truth from me. She had forced us to answer for her, but the only answer we could give the priesthood was “I don’t know.”
The pain and betrayal I felt were only compounded by the silent unease hovering over the community at large. The testimonies of the church elder and Issac Jeffs had stirred some confusion over who would lead us, and while no one dared question out loud, there were many who clung to the diminishing hope that Uncle Rulon would return.
Then, at a service on December 1, our community was shocked again when Warren stood at the podium and said, “Unbeknownst to me, Father had prepared witnesses for this time. May we now hear from Sister Mother Naomi.”
Naomi Jeffs was a wife of Uncle Rulon, and the daughter of Merrill Jessop, the church elder who owned the motel in Caliente where my wedding ceremony took place. She was barely twenty when she was sealed to the prophet in 1993 and was very well regarded in the community. Her angelic beauty