The PowWow

The river at night had its own sound.

Not loud. Not the rushing dramatic sound of water that had somewhere urgent to be. Just a low, patient movement — the sound of something that had been doing this for a very long time and expected to be doing it considerably longer. The bank was soft under Evelyn Marsh's shoes. She had walked here in the dark without a flashlight, which she would not have done four years ago, but four years ago she had not been looking for anything.

Tonight she was.

She stood at the edge of the water and looked out at the surface of it. The city threw its light up into the low clouds and the clouds gave some of it back, and in that borrowed glow the river moved darkly, turning small eddies near the bank where the current disagreed with itself about which way to go.

He wanted you to come, Elias had said.

She had sat in the audience of Beyond the Veil three nights ago with the particular skepticism of a practical woman who had agreed to attend as a favor to her daughter. She had not expected to be moved. And then Elias Crane had stopped, and his eyes had found her across the rows of strangers, and he had said: There's a man. A husband. He has a message for someone here. He says he's been waiting for you. He needs you to go to the river. He says he'll be there.

She had told herself it meant nothing. In the days since she had woken at three and four and five in the morning and told herself, in the particular conviction of the sleepless, that it meant nothing.

She was at the river.

She closed her eyes.

Darkness first. Then — him. Not fully, not all at once. The way a signal finds itself — first the outline, then the fill. Glen standing at the water's edge, not ten feet from where she stood. Glen as he had been before. Steady. Solid. His particular way of standing, the slight forward lean of a man who was interested in whatever was in front of him.

She opened her eyes.

He was gone.

The river moved. The borrowed light lay across it without warmth. She stood alone on the soft bank and pressed her lips together and breathed.

She closed her eyes again. Tightly this time. Deliberate. The way you close a door against the cold.

He came back.

Looking at her with the expression she remembered — the one that meant she was the thing he was most interested in, had always been the thing, would always be. Four years of waking up to the wrong side of the bed empty and it was still the thing that undid her most.

Evelyn.

His voice. She would have known it anywhere.

Glen. Her own voice barely made it past her lips.

He extended his hand.

Come to me. We can be together.

The ache of it moved through her like a tide. Four years of practical management, of getting on with it, of being fine — and underneath all of it, this. The wanting that had never resolved itself into anything because there was nothing to resolve it into. And here was Glen, hand extended, asking her to put it down.

She lifted one foot, the smallest beginning of a step forward, and then — because Evelyn Marsh had been a practical woman before she had been a grieving one, and the practical woman had not entirely gone anywhere — she stopped.

But if I go with you, she said, I'll drown.

She kept her eyes closed, tightly, against the darkness that wanted to take him back.

Glen's hand remained extended. The patience of it was the same patience she had loved for thirty-six years.

Please, Evelyn. I miss you. Come with me.

Her foot hovered.

The water was cold. She could feel the cold of it, the pull of it, the patient indifferent certainty of something that had been doing this for a very long time.

She lifted her foot.

Chapter One: The Client

The office was new enough that it still felt slightly provisional, which was part of what I liked about it. Four months ago we were working out of Jeremiah's living room and the back of the Highlander. Then Jeremiah had said, with the particular gentleness of a man communicating something inevitable, that perhaps the time had come for a proper space. Second floor of a building on the east side, reasonable rent, landlord who asked no questions about hours.

Jacob's desk had order. My desk had personality. The Jewish Messianic Family Bible sat on Jacob's desk — worn cover, tabbed, the book of a man who used it rather than displayed it. There was a dog bed under his desk. We did not have a dog. Neither of us had addressed this.

It was a Tuesday in late autumn. Jacob was at his desk with the Bible and a coffee that had been going cold for the better part of an hour. I was on the couch with a legal pad, working through notes from the Dressler case — the one with the antique mirror, which had been considerably less interesting than the portrait of Dorian Grey.

I was still thinking about it when the footsteps started on the stairs. Not fast. Not slow. The particular pace of someone who had made a decision but was still making peace with it.

I set down the legal pad.

The door opened.

She was somewhere in her late forties, with the upright posture of a woman who had decided certain things were non-negotiable and bearing was one of them. The kind of composed that is not the same as calm — composed is when you've put everything in order on purpose. She had needed to. I could see the effort of it in the way she held her bag, in the slight tension at the corners of her eyes, in the particular way she looked at the room. Checking it. Assessing whether she had made a mistake.

She paused at seeing Jacob's bare feet resting in the dog bed.

"Come in," I said. "Sit down. Tell me how we can help you."

She sat on the edge of the couch, looked at the room, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders by a fraction.

"I wasn't sure," she said. "About coming."

"Most people aren't," I said. "The ones who come anyway are usually here because they've run out of other options. Which means whatever you're dealing with has survived your skepticism. That's actually useful information."

Something moved across her face. The recognition of someone who had been met more accurately than they expected.

"My name is Margaret Hollis," she said. "My mother is missing."

Her name was Evelyn Marsh. Sixty-seven years old. Widow, four years. No concerning relationships, no health problems, no history of anything that would explain a disappearance. Two days ago she had left to run an errand and had not come back. No cards used, no phone. She had simply stopped.

"Did anything change before she disappeared?"

"She went to a taping." Margaret set her bag down beside her. "Three days before. Beyond the Veil."

Jacob looked up from the Jewish Messianic Family Bible for the first time.

He looked at Margaret the way he looked at things that had just declared themselves — with the patient certainty of a man confirming what he had already suspected.

"She came back different," Margaret continued. "Not frightened. Unsettled. Something had reached her. She wouldn't say what — I asked twice and she changed the subject, which my mother does not do." She looked at her hands. "She was always very direct."

"Past tense," I said.

"She's not dead." Immediately. With a force that told me she had been having this particular fight with herself for two days. "I refuse to — she is not dead."

"I didn't say she was," I said quietly. "I noted the tense. It tells me what you're afraid of."

Jacob said, "Elias Crane."

Two words. Flat. Just the name, placed into the room with the certainty of a man putting a tool on a table.

Margaret looked at him. "Yes. That's the program."

Something settled. The particular shift of a space where the shape of a thing has just come clear.

"We'll help you," I said.

She reached into her bag and produced a photograph. Evelyn Marsh, standing in a garden, caught mid-sentence, one hand slightly raised — a woman in the middle of saying something she meant. Warm eyes. The forward lean of someone interested in whatever was in front of her.

I put the photograph in the legal pad and picked up my pen.

"Start from the beginning," I said. "Everything you know."

The couch had been right. It was better for this than for research.

Though we would need it for that too, before this was finished.