The PowWow

We didn't speak until we were in the Highlander.

Not a conscious decision — just what happened. The night air outside the studio had a particular quality to it, the quality of air that has just had something significant pass through it and hasn't settled yet. We walked to the car in the quiet that wasn't uncomfortable so much as necessary, the kind that means both people are still processing and have agreed without discussing it to wait until they have more of it assembled.

Jacob got in. I got in. I sat with my hands on the wheel without starting the engine.

"Even if it's a demon talking," I said. "Even if everything you said in there is right — the source, the mechanism, all of it." I looked at the dashboard. "What if there's a sister?"

Jacob didn't answer immediately.

He looked down the street through the windshield, the way he looked at things he was deciding about — not the theological consideration, not the processing, just a man looking at a street while something worked through him that was going to come out the other side as a conclusion.

"Then she's out there," he said. "Without anyone looking for her."

The street held that for a moment.

I reached for the ignition.

We looked at each other.

"Jeremiah," we said.

I started the car.

The porch light was on when we pulled up, which meant Rebecca had heard us coming, which meant we had approximately thirty seconds before the door opened. I had long since stopped trying to understand how she did this and had moved on to simply appreciating it as one of the reliable constants of a world that didn't offer enough of them.

Twenty-eight seconds. I counted. The door opened.

Rebecca stood in the frame with the particular warmth of a woman who had been waiting without worrying — the distinction being that waiting implies uncertainty and Rebecca, in my experience, didn't deal much in uncertainty about the people she loved. She had expected us. She was glad we'd arrived. These were separate facts that coexisted comfortably.

"Boys," she said. "Come in."

The house received us the way it always did — warmth, the smell of something that had been baked earlier and was still present in the air, the lamp light instead of overheads. Jeremiah was in his chair with a book that wasn't being read. He set it aside when we came in and looked at us with the attention of a man who had already determined that whatever we were carrying required his full presence.

"Sit," Rebecca said, and disappeared toward the kitchen.

We sat. Jeremiah waited.

I walked him through it in order. The studio. Crane's genuine warmth, the Jeremiah connection. Jacob's opening word and what followed. The careful exchange, the scripture, the question that finally found the seam. Then the shift — the cold read, the bloodline, the biological mother, the sister, the dangerous husband, the five numbers with the uncertain middle.

Jeremiah listened to all of it without interrupting once. This was one of his gifts — not passive listening, the kind that's really just waiting for its turn, but the active, weight-bearing kind that makes the person speaking feel that what they're saying is being genuinely received rather than processed for a response.

Rebecca returned with coffee and sat down — not moving through the room, not refreshing things, just sat, which was how you knew she intended to be present for what came next.

When I finished, Jeremiah was quiet.

Not the quiet of someone assembling a response. The quiet of someone who had just received something that landed near something else he was already carrying, and was deciding how to hold both things at once.

He looked at Jacob first.

"What you told him was correct," he said. "Whatever Elias Crane is receiving — and I believe he's receiving something — it is not what he believes it to be. A man with a genuine gift and no theological framework for it is an open door. Something will always walk through an open door."

Jacob nodded. He had known this. The confirmation wasn't new information — it was Jeremiah setting the table so that what came next had the right context around it.

"But," Jeremiah said, and he said it the way he said things that were going to cost something, "that doesn't make the message false."

He leaned forward. Elbows on knees, hands folded.

"The wrong hands can carry the right letter," he said. "The source being compromised doesn't mean the contents are."

Rebecca quietly asked, “If it’s demonic, why are they helping?”

Rebecca's question settled over the room with the weight of both concern and implication.  For a few moments, there was silence. I sipped some coffee to quiet my nerves.

"A sister," I said.

Jeremiah looked at me. Something moved behind his eyes — brief, almost invisible, the particular movement of a man stepping carefully around the edge of something.

"I don't disbelieve it," he said.

Which was not the same as saying he didn't know. I heard the distinction. I wasn't sure Jacob did, or if he did, whether he filed it the same way I did. I filed it and left it alone.

"What do you know about the adoption?" Jacob asked. Quiet. Direct. The question of a man who has decided the time for not asking it has passed.

Jeremiah was quiet for a moment.

"You came to us through St. Catherine's," he said. "You know that. You were together — they would not separate you, which was the right call and one I was grateful for." A pause. "What I know about your history before St. Catherine's is limited. What I know about your biological parents I was told in general terms only. The orphanage had its protocols. We followed them."

He looked at his hands.

"As for a sister — " He stopped. Something in his face tightened almost imperceptibly, the tightening of a man choosing his words with more care than the sentence seemed to require. "I cannot speak to everything that St. Catherine's held in confidence. Those records were sealed. I respected that when we adopted you and I respect it now."

He looked up.

"But I will tell you this." His voice was steady and his eyes were clear and he meant every word of what came next. "If there is a child from that line who is alive and in danger, then the question of where she's been is a question for later. The question of where she is right now is the only one that matters."

Rebecca's hand found Jeremiah's. He turned his palm up and held it.

"Find her," he said. Simply. Completely.

Jacob looked at me.

I looked at Jacob.

The legal pad was in my jacket pocket with five numbers written on it, the middle two uncertain, possibly transposed, probably an address. Somewhere in the city — or outside it — a woman we had never met was in a house with a dangerous man, and she did not know that anyone was looking for her, because until forty minutes ago nobody had been.

"Okay," I said.

Jacob stood. I stood with him.

Rebecca walked us to the door. At the threshold she put her hand on Jacob's arm and held it a moment — not a pat, not a gesture, just her hand resting there with the particular weight of someone who understands that some things don't need to be said to be communicated.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

She let go.

We stepped out into the night.

Behind us, through the closed door, I heard Jeremiah's voice — low, unhurried, the cadence of a man who had been having this conversation for decades and found it no less necessary for that.

Praying. There would be a lot of that tonight.