The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Willow knew that progress in the snow was all about steady momentum without sudden turns, stops or accelerations. She had nearly two miles to drive, and the hills between her and the station were modern grade, part of the new section of the city. They weren’t steep, but still a threat to the success of her mission.

  Puff balls of snow fell like the flotsam of a snow-globe. Just minutes into her sliding drive, Willow realized that she was chewing on the inside of her left cheek. She forced herself to stop. She prayed out loud after that, keeping her mouth busy in order to keep her teeth away from the raw skin on the inside of that cheek. She didn’t pray in English. That would have taken too much conscious thought. She remained focused on the feeling of the weight of her vehicle in the snow, snow that would slide her forward, slow her ascent and then allow her to sink through to pavement for an instant.

  About half a mile from the station, she came upon the scene of an apparent accident, a pickup truck wedged between two parked cars, its bed stuck out across one lane. On the other side of the street, someone had attempted to park along the curb, but had given up, with their black SUV still hanging out into the other lane. This might have caused the accident with the pickup. Willow couldn’t tell and didn’t have time to consider the possibilities. She just slid to a stop two feet from the too-narrow passage between the wayward vehicles. If a tow truck didn’t get there first, a city snow plow would total both vehicles, and probably not even dent the blade. Willow didn’t intend to stick around to participate in that demolition.

  No room to turn around, she tried backing down the hill she had just started to climb. The wall-to-wall white of the world around her made driving backward, amid the popcorn-sized flakes, very disorienting. She managed to avoid cars on both sides of the road. Even as she navigated in reverse, she was trying to think of an alternative route. The only options she could see would take her away from the station before turning back. She was only half a mile away now; she didn’t want to give up her hard-won progress.

  Willow decided to risk leaving her car illegally parked in an alleyway, the only available parking in that neighborhood. She would trudge the seven blocks to the station. After wedging her vehicle between humps of snow like a train of giant white camels, she had to fight to get the door open. She grunted with the effort, staying just shy of frustration.

  She was determined that this time she would do everything possible to help the captive girl. She thought of those plaintive eyes as she waded through the snow, her head down, lifting her feet as high as she could to clear the dense snowpack.

  As she conquered one block after another, she realized that this trek was helping her to take herself seriously. The willful part of her that insisted on getting to the police station as soon as possible was convincing the doubtful part of her, which knew that sometimes she misinterpreted a vision or prophetic word. She entertained none of that doubt, in order to maintain her momentum toward an unknown reception among the local police.

  Forty-five minutes after hanging up with Sergeant Wakeman, Willow stomped snow off her boots and clapped snow off her shoulders and front, in the wet space between the outside automatic doors and the inside sliding doors of the station. The fluorescent lighting between the doors felt much less friendly than the muted glow of the snow, but part of that feeling probably came from knowing she still had to convince the police to trust her gifts and take action to save the girl.

  It took two minutes and three brief conversations to locate Sergeant Wakeman. He greeted Willow at an inner door, one that opened with an electric buzzing sound when he hit a pad on the wall inside. He seemed to be looking for signs of insanity, or even danger, but apparently found nothing alarming.

  “Hello, Ms. Pierce,” he said. “I’m surprised you got here this fast.”

  She smiled. “Please call me Willow.”

  Sergeant Wakeman nodded. Willow knew she would still call him by his official title. But she did sense that he was a bit relieved to see no overt signs of lunacy in her, at least so far.

  With few words, he led her to a private room with a big glass window. Willow noted that it wasn’t a two-way mirror, as in the movies.

  “Can I get you anything?” he said, as Willow began to take off her coat and accessories.

  “Is it okay if I put these wet things on that chair?” Willow indicated a plastic chair in the corner of the little room.

  “Go right ahead.” The sergeant took his seat and opened a file he had been carrying, setting aside a sheet of paper that had been on the outside of the file.

  When Willow’s outerwear was draped over the extra chair and she had taken a deep breath, she looked at Sergeant Wakeman and sat down across from him

  He pulled that single sheet of paper back in front of him and held it so he could read it. “I hope you’re not surprised that I did some checking on you,” he said, glancing up from that computer-generated page, through which Willow could barely make out dozens of lines of text.

  “No, of course not. You have to know whether I’m credible. That makes sense.”

  The sergeant watched her, nodded again, and then launched into the first agenda he had been loading up for her. “I found information about you only back to about thirty years ago, when all records seem to vanish. I can’t find a birth certificate or any other confirmation of your date or place of birth.”

  Though this was obviously a problem, Wakeman didn’t seem critically concerned, just curious. Willow had to decide how much to tell him.

  “Well, my name wasn’t Willow Pierce when I was born. I changed it as soon as I turned eighteen. I had run away from an abusive situation in my hometown in Kansas and didn’t want anyone coming after me. I took the name Willow Pierce and made it official as soon as I could.

  Sergeant Wakeman gave a small smile with the left side of his mouth. “Actually, I did find a note from the Social Security Administration that you changed your name. Your birth name was Wanda Parker.”

  Willow grinned, resisting the grimace that arose when she heard her birth name spoken aloud. It had been a very long time. Even her mother managed not to call her Wanda, though mostly she didn’t say her name, in order to avoid the possible slip.

  “That’s right. So you knew, and you were testing me.”

  He nodded. “Sorry. It’s a habit. Part of the job.”

  Willow shrugged, she relaxed into the barely comfortable chair a little more. “No problem. I understand.”

  Setting that sheet of paper aside, the sergeant also relaxed a bit. “You know, police around the area have consulted psychics in the past, or accepted testimony from folks claiming to see things like that, but not in this department, and not me.” He saw the way Willow’s eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. Her thumbs tapped each other, where she had her hands folded in front of her.

  “I know you’re not a psychic, exactly,” he said, apologetically. “But I just said that to let you know that we do have some room for following leads that come from nontraditional sources.”

  Willow nodded, short little nods. She was anxious to get past these preliminaries, to get to helping the girl in the vision. She also knew that she was being evaluated, and not just by the sergeant in the room. She sensed that someone was currently watching them through the cameras mounted in two of the upper corners of the room, one behind her and one behind Sergeant Wakeman.

  “I appreciate you noting the difference. But, right now, the most important thing is finding out if this is real and if you can reach this girl before any more harm comes to her.”

  “You have some information about what they plan to do with her?” Wakeman said, his voice a bit stilted, unnatural.

  Willow bypassed that change in tone when she suddenly felt that she did know what awaited the girl. “I have a strong sense that she doesn’t have long to live, that the man who has her is going to kill her soon.”

  “Man?” Sergeant Wakeman noted the certainty with which Willow slipped that into her story.

 
; As soon as he questioned this unplanned assertion, Willow saw a flash of a man’s face, a face she didn’t recognize. “I get a strong impression of a forty-year-old, balding man with dark hair and dark eyes, heavy eyebrows and lips, sort of pouty lips, and a pointed chin. He’s pale, like he doesn’t go outside much.”

  “You didn’t mention any of this over the phone.”

  “It just popped into my head. That’s often how this goes for me when I’m doing this in church, not involved in police work. I guess I’m not surprised that’s how it works for this too.”

  “You’ve never had a vision about a crime like this?”

  “Not like this. Not recently.”

  Sergeant Wakeman looked down at his file. He pulled an envelope out of the inch-high pile of papers. He slipped several photos out of the envelope and onto the table.

  “I want you to see if you recognize any of these girls that have been reported missing in the area.”

  He began arranging photos of six young girls in front of Willow, but she interrupted him, grabbing one before he had even spun it to right-side up for her.

  Studying it for just a second, she said, “This is her. This is the girl.” She could feel her skin become electric. Her hand began to shake, the photo metering her tremors.

  “You sound certain. What about these others?”

  Willow kept that photo pinched in her right hand but held it aside so she could look at the other five. When she did this, she received a wave of knowledge that at least three of them were not in danger. One of the others gave her a very strong impression of already being dead. She paused, deciding whether to say any of that. When she remembered the guilty barbs that had dug deep into her soul the last time she withheld information about a victimized girl, she decided to tell all that she felt she knew.

  “This is definitely her,” she said. “And I think these three are okay, they aren’t in danger.” She paused and touched the other two, stopping on a Hispanic girl perhaps a bit older than the girl in the photo she held. “I have a strong feeling that this girl is dead. And I think this other one is in danger, though I don’t know more.”

  When she looked up at Wakeman, she caught him glancing up at the camera behind her.

  “Why don’t they just come join us?” Willow gestured with her free hand toward the camera. “We need to get to her as soon as possible,” she said, looking again at the photo.

  The sergeant looked at Willow for a moment and then turned to the camera, making no effort to conceal what looked like remote eye contact. He even shrugged, as if communicating with his colleagues on the other end of that camera feed.

  He spoke now to those unseen colleagues. “Let’s get hold of the detectives right away.”

  Willow laughed under her breath, more out of relief than from any humor to be found in this situation. She was struggling to free herself from a dark tangle of feelings over those two other abducted girls. She assumed that the ones not in danger had been included to further test her credibility. Apparently she had passed the test.

  Within five minutes, two officers specializing in abduction cases, Detective Donna Ramirez and Detective Peter Curtis, sat with Willow in front of a computer, as she described the mental image she saw of the perpetrator. They entered her description and then made alterations according to her instructions using software for facial recognition. By the time she was satisfied that the image matched what she saw, she had been in the station over an hour. It was late and she was getting tired. Both detectives drank coffee to stay awake, or perhaps just to stay jittery.

  Willow sensed that they both feared touching her, as if they might contact whatever alien power she carried within her. It was strange for her to be believed but not trusted. But she tried to stay focused by recalling the face of the missing girl, whose name she now knew was Heather Tomlinson. Even the name sounded right, though it had not been included in her vision.

  After five minutes of searching through regional and then national databases of photos of men with a history of sexual crimes, they located an old picture of a man who lived right there in Palos Heights. Willow stared at him. The photo was very old. He was much younger, maybe twenty years younger, but she thought it was the right man.

  “How sure are you?” Detective Ramirez said. Her tone cut like a cleaver, the weight of her doubt lowering her voice.

  “It’s an old picture, but I think it’s him. Maybe ninety-five percent sure.”

  In detective work, ninety-five percent was convincing, but the nature of Willow’s information required higher standards, in the minds of the two officers.

  “It’s no more exact than seeing someone with your eyes, most of the time,” Willow said, trying to overcome their skepticism.

  Detective Curtis was pulling up the information they had on the suspect, Ronald Percy. The Division of Motor Vehicles placed him in the old section of the city, where houses like the one Willow saw in her vision stood, the only section of town where structures had survived both a city-wide fire toward the end of the nineteenth century and a massive flood in the nineteen-nineties. The address included his current driver’s license photo. Willow nodded confidently. That was him.

  Willow noticed an exchange of looks and a feeling of resolution between the two officers. Little tips of a head, the flick of an eyebrow, and they seemed to say to each other, “This looks legitimate,” without admitting as much openly to Willow.

  The detectives left Willow alone at Detective Curtis’s desk, moving to Detective Ramirez’s desk twenty feet away. She overheard them debating what to do, discovering one of the reasons they were pressing her so hard. They weren’t certain that they could get a judge to issue a warrant based on the information they had received from Willow. Detective Ramirez made a call and confirmed that they needed to get more.

  “We can’t go to a judge with this yet,” Ramirez said to Willow. “The captain is adamant about that. He doesn’t want us to look bad or burn our credibility on this.” She paused. “That’s kinda good for you, though, ‘cause it means the captain is convinced, and doesn’t want to see us set back.”

  Willow took the note of encouragement, the first nearly friendly thing Detective Ramirez had said to her. Again, she felt as if she had passed some kind of test, or probably multiple tests. To add to that cache of belief, she offered more.

  “I’ll describe in detail the building I saw, from the outside and on the inside. If you find it exactly as I say, then at least you can feel more certain,” she said, offering a boost of confidence.

  Detective Curtis took down her detailed description of the gray door, freshly painted, the brass colored padlock, the sloping sidewalk. Inside, she detailed the hallway and the stairs down to an apartment with a kitchen with old yellow, green and red tiles on the floor. Though she felt good that she could give this much verifying information, Willow noticed another exchange of looks between the two officers, this one more suspicious.

  Too tired to discern the meaning of this suspicion aimed at her, Willow accepted their insistence that she head back home. The snow had stopped and the plows had made some progress. She described how and where she had left her car, and Detective Ramirez agreed to drop her off there on her way home, both detectives going off duty.

  When the two women pulled up next to Willow’s car, illegally parked, she laughed to find a parking ticket on the front windshield. She just shrugged slightly, getting out of Detective Ramirez’s SUV. “Well, at least they didn’t tow it.”

  The detective added, “Or run into it with a plow.”

  Willow held onto the passenger door of the tall vehicle with one hand, bundled again in her scarf, hat and long coat. The detective could only see her eyes and nose. “Thanks so much for the ride, and for taking my information seriously,” Willow said.

  Ramirez nodded. “We’ll get a rotation of officers watching that building. Detective Curtis and I will go over there tomorrow to confirm your description of the place. I expect we’ll find it just as yo
u said.”

  For the second time, Willow thought she heard a slightly ominous tone in this vote of confidence from the detective, whose alto voice deepened toward the end of that statement. Perhaps it was just resignation at having to admit that Willow was right. But it felt like something more, something that might come back to bite Willow.

  Her weariness was enough to stop her from speculating about what was missing in this picture. She said goodbye to the detective, closed the door firmly and stepped through two feet of snow to her car.

  Recalling Captivity

  That night, Willow slept fitfully, an unusual occurrence in recent years. She had one very vivid dream about being locked in a kitchen and knowing the owners of the house would be returning soon, feeling that she needed to get out before they found her there.

  Waking from that dream, Willow couldn’t return to sleep. She lay in her queen-sized bed, feet reaching for the corners, flannel sheets cozy. But her thoughts turned to darker places and uncomfortable things. The hours in the police station had taken her back to her escape from her hometown, at the age of seventeen.

  Going to the police to get help, to get relief from her bondage and abuse, would have been useless back then. At least three of the local cops participated in the rituals, especially with the young girls. And the judge who kept her mother on the county dole had ties in the sheriff’s department. No, Willow—still Wanda back then—didn’t even consider officers of the law as a way out.

  To leave that town, she would have to find an ally from outside, from some place far away and with no close ties to the influential people who kept the demonic rituals at the little church both secret and thriving. Some of the participants wore masks during the rituals, so Willow didn’t know the identity of everyone involved.

  As she thought about it over the years, she felt that God had provided her way out, as good as sending an angel to set her free from her prison. It was late March, the prairie spring had flourished and abated twice already that year. But it was cold again, barely fifty degrees in midafternoon, when Willow was shopping in the local grocery store. That day, as any day in that entangled little town, she felt she was being watched, even as she pushed the metal shopping cart, with its one meandering wheel, down the cereal aisle. A short woman with a pouf of brown hair and silver reading glasses perched on her nose asked Willow to reach a box for her.