At long last, as I lounged on my bunk in the cell that now seemed so much like home (but only because I could barely remember ever living anywhere else), a guard unlocked the door to the cell and read four or five names from a list. Mine was one of the names. "Let's go!" he said. "Bail hearing!"

Those of us who had been named left the cell and joined a queue of about a dozen other inmates in the corridor outside. With a guard at the head of the line and one at the rear, we set off. Along the way, we stopped to let a few other inmates join us. Then we set off on a great, twisty backstage tour that would have had Willy Wonka turning mint-colored with envy.

We marched down corridors, around corners, up stairs, down stairs, into elevators, and through narrow spaces with pipes on the walls and ceilings until I was so thoroughly confused and lost that it almost seemed we were wandering through that M.C. Escher lithograph that has people walking on the undersides of staircases. The intention of all this wandering was, I'm certain, to make us lose track of where we were. I mean, how could we escape if we didn't know which way was out?

At one point we marched through the middle of the detention block where they kept convicts serving sentences of up to one year. Through the thick glass windows of their cells, I saw jumpsuited convicts playing poker, Monopoly, and Risk, with Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and Playboy centerfolds plastered on the walls all around them.

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Shortly after breakfast was over, and after all our used utensils had been collected and carted away with the rest of the garbage, a guard came to the door of the cell and called my name. "You've got a visitor," he said.

My heart leapt. Maybe Elder Snow had made it in to see me after all!

The guard unlocked the door and led me around a few corners to a small visitation room—where I was to be disappointed once again. Waiting for me inside the room was a man wearing a neat beard and a fairly nice suit. He stood up when I entered. "Who are you?" I asked as the guard locked us in the small room together.

I have forgotten his name in the time since, but the fellow introduced himself as an agent from Canada Immigration. "We're notified every time a foreign national is arrested on our soil," he said. "I've come to explain a few things to you, and to inform you of what the consequences of this little . . . incident of yours may be."

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We ended up somewhere in the middle of a cell block that was larger than I could properly perceive in the darkness. The cop unlocked a barred door and held it open for me. I walked through. The door slammed shut behind me. "Pick a bunk, kid," said the cop before lumbering away.

A couple of forms stirred in the darkness. There was no light in the cell itself, but dim illumination filtered in from the corridor. My eyes adjusted pretty quickly. The cell was big, maybe twenty feet by thirty. Jutting out from one wall were five two-level bunk beds—well, bunk cots, really—each decked out with a thin mattress and blanket. Maybe half the bunks were occupied.

Against the opposite wall were what looked like two metal picnic tables, complete with attached benches. There was a toilet in the corner, without a screen. The two side walls were made of bars.

I took the lower berth of the second bunk in line. The berth above was empty, but there were slumbering inmates to either side of me. One of them I thought I recognized from the holding cell earlier in the evening, but it was hard to tell in the dimness.

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I didn't realize it yet, but I was walking into one of the most harrowing nightmares of my life—one that, frighteningly enough, would have made me a true living legend in the Canada Calgary Mission if earlier events hadn't already made that certain.

After walking about halfway down a dim gray corridor, that cellulite orgy of a police officer I was following stopped beside a door that opened off to the left. He pointed into the room beyond—reminding me, despite his girth, of the Ghost of Christmas Future directing poor Scrooge's gaze toward his own tombstone. "In there," rumbled the cop.

I entered the room. It was a whitewashed box, maybe twelve feet square and eight feet high, with a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The room was completely devoid of furnishings—without even a bench to sit on. The cell door was a massive slab of riveted, banded, whitewashed steel that opened inward. This couldn't be where I was slated to spend the night . . .

I was standing in the center of the cell, back to the cop, gawking like a fish, waiting for the door to slam, when he said, "Give me your jacket."

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After another immeasurable period of waiting, in even deeper despair than before, I heard a new guard come to my cell. "Visitors, Shunn," he said, unlocking the door. "Coupla fellows from your church. They've even got some different clothes for you."

Finally! Although I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that clothes thing . . .

The guard escorted me back down the corridor, then into an area of the cell block that I hadn't seen before. He led me into a tiny, dim room containing a table and a few chairs. I sat down in one of the chairs, and the guard locked me in.

A few minutes later, the door opened again. President Tuttle entered, followed by Fred Harvey, a tall, thin, fiftyish fellow with white hair. Harvey was the first counselor to the president of the Calgary South Stake—the stake in which Elder Snow and I worked. I'd met Harvey before, in correlation meetings between the missionaries and the stake presidency. I wasn't thrilled to see him, though. I'd been hoping that Elder Snow would accompany President Tuttle.

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