Salt Lake City ? For two months after Elizabeth Smart vanished from her bedroom in the middle of the night, she was camped in a canyon behind her home, achingly close to her anguished family, and at one point even heard her uncle calling out her name.

On Thursday, family and friends of the 15-year-old girl focused not on what could have been, but on the astounding event many of them are calling a miracle: Elizabeth, taken from her bed at knifepoint as she slept nine months ago, was home again, playing the harp and watching her favorite movie, “The Trouble with Angels,” with her family.

“Elizabeth is happy, she is well, and we are so happy to have her back in our arms,” said her beaming father, Ed Smart.

Amid the joyful reunion was a growing list of questions: What about the shaggy-haired drifter, Brian Mitchell, accused of kidnapping the girl? Why didn’t police find him sooner? Above all, what happened to Elizabeth since she vanished last June?

Police began outlining Elizabeth’s movements during the last nine months, saying she spent the first two months held against her will in the foothills behind her parents’ house. In October, Mitchell took her to San Diego; they returned to the Salt Lake area the same day they were captured.

Police Chief Rick Dinse said it was clear Elizabeth had difficulty escaping from her captors, perhaps because of their influence over her.

“There is clearly a psychological impact that occurred during this abduction at some point,” he said, without elaboration. “There’s no question that she was psychologically affected by the connection with this group.”

Dressed in a wig, veil and sunglasses, Elizabeth Smart told the police officers who discovered her Wednesday in the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy that her name was “Augustine.” She said the couple accompanying her — Brian Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee — were her parents.

“We took her aside … she kind of just blurted out, ‘I know who you think I am. You guys think I’m that Elizabeth Smart girl who ran away,'” Officer Bill O’Neal said.

Elizabeth Smart is embraced by her parents, Ed and Lois, Thursday at their Sandy, Utah, home. Elizabeth, who was taken from her home last June, was found Wednesday.

“Her heart was beating so hard you could see it through her chest,” he added.

The group was taken to the Sandy police station in handcuffs.

Ed Smart said he had not pressed his daughter for details of her captivity.

“What is going to come out is going to come out,” he said. “I don’t have it in me to try and make this harder for her than it is.”

Asked how she had changed, he said she had returned home “really a young woman.”

Elizabeth was found when two couples called police after spotting Mitchell walking down the street. He and Barzee remained jailed Thursday on suspicion of aggravated kidnapping.

For much of the time she was gone, it now appears Elizabeth was hiding in plain sight, sometimes swathed in robes and veils.

The daughter of a faithful and affluent Mormon family apparently camped behind her home in Dry Creek Canyon, a popular hiking area searched many times last summer. Hours after she vanished, she heard an uncle, David Francom, calling her.

Another uncle, Tom Smart, said Elizabeth wasn’t able to respond. “I don’t know why,” he said.