Constable X read me my rights as I sat there in shock. I don't recall the words, but I remember thinking how strange the Miranda-style rights were in Canada. Very much like the rights you hear read in the States, but just different enough to make you feel as if you have fallen into an alternate universe. Very disorienting and Twilight Zone-ish.

(As an aside, a Canadian friend of mine in Brooks, Alberta, once told me the secret of Canadian culture—or the lack thereof. "We borrow everything from the U.S.," he said, "change it just enough to mess it up, and then call it Canadian." This also reminds me of an apocryphal story that someone Canadian once related to me. This person told me that Maclean's—the Canadian analogue to Time or Newsweek, not to be confused with McCall's—once ran a contest to find a Canadian counterpart to the phrase "as American as apple pie." Entrants, of course, were to fill in the blank in the phrase "as Canadian as . . ." The eventual winner? "As Canadian as possible.")

"You're being charged with public mischief," the constable told me when he was through with my rights.

That didn't sound so bad, as criminal charges go. "What does that mean, exactly?" I asked

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Now, before we go any farther, I should perhaps clarify a couple of things. First, you should know that, when I phoned in my bomb threat, I never expected that Elder Finn's flight would experience anything more than short delay. I admit that I was thinking no farther ahead than President Tuttle's arrival at the airport (which, as far as I knew as I stood there in the sterile Customs area, still had not occurred), but it still seemed to me that the delay would be relatively insignificant—no more than half an hour, in any event.

Second, I made the call less than half an hour before the flight was due to leave. Where would you have pictured the airplane with less than half an hour until takeoff? My thoughts exactly! The plane was surely on the runway, perhaps taking on luggage, maybe preboarding a few passengers! As it turned out, this was not the case, but I'm sure you can understand my thinking. (And yes, this point will become quite important later on in the story. Persevere!)

It was six straight up as my new friend Constable X led me through the Customs area and into a dim passage away from the corridors leading to the boarding gates. We entered a small but comfortable office a short way down this passage. Farther down the passage I spotted a sign that read: "Calgary Police Department, Airport Precinct."

The constable's office was dim, with dark blue-gray walls. A man was just sitting down at a typewriter stand beside the constable's desk as we entered. This fellow gave me a baleful look and muttered something about how it should have been time for him to be going home, thank me very much. The constable waved me to a chair, then seated himself behind the desk.

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I felt a moment's euphoria after making that rather dire pronouncement. I had done it! I had actually done it! I stood there next to the phone booth for several seconds, not moving—until suddenly the full import of what I had done and said came crashing in on me, like some monstrous tidal wave on a defenseless hermit crab.

I'd committed a felony.

I started to shake.

Then I started walking. Once more, I wasn't thinking very clearly, but this time I was lost in a panic of fear rather than in a swirl of conflicting imperatives. I was, however, thinking clearly enough to know that the authorities (whoever they were) might have been able to trace my phone call somehow. How, I didn't have a clue—I'd been on the phone no more than fifteen seconds—but it seemed wisest to get as far away from that telephone as possible.

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We pulled up in front of the airport before too much longer, Finn and I. It was a bit before five in the evening. We parked the car in a fifteen-minute zone right near the entrance, then hauled Finn's luggage inside the terminal. He got in line at the Western Airlines ticket counter. I set his bags down beside him in line, waited until his back was turned—and then made myself scarce.

If I was going to contact President Tuttle before Finn boarded his plane, this was my only chance. Finn was hardly likely to give up his place in line to come looking for me when he saw that I'd disappeared. At least, I hoped he wouldn't.

About halfway down the yawning airport terminal was a pair of escalators. I rode one up to the mezzanine overlooking the ticket counters, since there really wasn't anywhere else to go where Finn wouldn't have a line of sight to me from his place in line. And if he couldn't see me and what I was doing, I figured that it was less likely that he would come after me.

I found a bank of video monitors displaying arrival and departure times. Only one flight was bound for Salt Lake City any time soon: Western Flight 789, departing at 5:55 p.m. I had less than an hour to get President Tuttle out to the airport if there was going to be any chance of him talking Finn out of leaving.

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Well, ma'am, at Elder Finn's little announcement you can be sure I was stunned and thrown into something of a panic. After all, to review a bit, my own experiences from the previous couple of months had taught me two big lessons—and taught them perhaps a bit too well.

The first lesson was that it's better to stick things out than to run away. The mission field wasn't always a miserable place, and in fact it could sometimes be really great—or so I had convinced myself. It was often very hard, but it was supposed to be hard, and I figured that there were also immeasurably wonderful experiences to be gained along the way. (Did those experiences outweigh the negative aspects of a mission? I certainly thought so at the time, though I would argue the other side now.) If nothing else—and this was a craven excuse, I know—staying on a mission was certainly preferable to facing humiliation and a sense of failure back home. Among many other things, the reactions of my family and friends to my own decampment had taught me this, and taught it well.

(As an aside, I wrote to Katrina shortly after being reassigned to Calgary, explaining what had happened, why I had tried to go home, and why I had decided to stay. She called me as soon as she got the letter. She was distraught. She was disappointed in me. She certainly hadn't intended to try to get me to come home, she said. So much for my amazing powers of perception, he said wryly.)

The second lesson I had learned was that if your companion wants to go home, you should do whatever is in your power to convince him otherwise. You should call the mission president immediately and let him know. You should use whatever techniques are necessary to buy enough time so that the president can at least talk with the missionary before he leaves. Free agency doesn't enter into the equation anywhere. Common sense and human decency play no role. Elder Dedman had unwittingly taught me this lesson. I wanted to do what was right, but I also didn't want to get into the kind of trouble that Dedman had bought himself for not doing more to keep me in Brooks. I hate confrontations with authority and will do almost anything to avoid them. To my eternal shame, this was true.

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