The PowWow

Jacob was praying when I left.

I didn't interrupt. I never did. This was the pattern we had arrived at somewhere in our working lives and had never felt the need to discuss — when Jacob was seeking, I was moving. Two paths. We always seem to wind up in the same place.

I called Rachel from the car.

"I need to go back to Crane," I said. "I have more questions. Will you come?"

A pause. The particular pause of a woman deciding whether what she was about to agree to was professional, personal, or some navigable combination of both.

"When?" she said.

Elias met us in the same green room. He looked better than he had after the cold read — rested, composed, the television warmth back in place. He greeted me with genuine recognition and turned to Rachel with the open, assessing attention he brought to everyone he met.

I watched him try to read the room.

Rachel's face when Elias Crane attempted to cold read her is one of the finer things I have witnessed in a professional context. She gave him nothing. Absolutely nothing — not a micro-expression, not a tell, not the faintest involuntary response to whatever he was reaching for. The professional surface was total and immaculate, the composure of a woman who had spent years extracting confessions from people considerably more motivated to resist than a television psychic, and who found the current enterprise mildly interesting at best.

Elias's expression shifted. He looked, briefly, like a man who had reached for a door handle and found only wall. I almost felt sorry for him.

"I apologize," he said. He meant it genuinely. "The room feels — quiet. I don't have anything."

"That's fine," Rachel said. With the complete, gracious neutrality of someone who had not expected anything and was neither disappointed nor relieved. “We’re not here for that anyway.”

"I want to ask you about the voices," I said. "What you hear during the readings. How it works."

Elias settled back. This was territory he was comfortable in — the ease of a man describing something he had lived with long enough to have language for.

"Most of what comes through is specific to the person in front of me," he said. "Brief. Particular. A name, a detail, something that belongs to that family and no other. It arrives and it goes. It's — " he considered the word "— transient. Like a message being relayed."

"Most," I said.

He looked at me. "Yes. Most."

"There's something else."

He was quiet for a moment. The quality of the quiet was different from his other pauses — less consideration, more the silence of someone deciding how to put words to something they had never fully described before.

"There's a voice that doesn't wait for a reading," he said. "It's simply — present. The way background noise is present. You stop noticing it after a while because it's always there." He frowned slightly. "It knows things the others don't. Things that aren't specific to one family, one case. It crosses — lines. Connects things I couldn't connect on my own."

Rachel spoke in a soft voice. "Does it have a name?"

I was impressed, and it was a struggle not to show it. She was handling him like he tried to handle her. Using voice inflection and her demeanor to elicit answers. She was amazing.

Elias looked at her. Something in his expression shifted — the careful attention of a man being asked a question that had occurred to him before and hadn't fully resolved itself.

"No," he said. "If it has one, it hasn't offered it."

Rachel wrote something in her notepad. Her face gave nothing away. I had stopped expecting it to and had started finding the consistency of it privately admirable, not to mention the fact that we both had notepads.

"The information about the sister," I said. "The name. The danger she's in." I held his eyes. "That came from the unnamed voice. Not from our mother."

It wasn't quite a question.

Elias answered it anyway. Without hesitation, without hedging.

"Yes," he said. "Your mother was present. I believe that — I want to be clear that I believe that. But the specific information — the name, the husband, the danger — that came from the other voice. It knew where to look in a way the others don't."

The room held that.

"The name," I said. "What was the name it gave you?"

"Roiya," he said.

I wrote it down.

Rachel wrote it down.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then I shifted. "I want to ask you about someone else. A man named Gerald Marsh."

Something changed in Elias immediately. Not dramatically — he didn't flinch, didn't pull back. But the ease went out of him. He went careful and still in the way of someone who has just stepped onto ground they know is unsteady.

"Gerald Marsh," he repeated.

"He passed away four years ago. His wife Evelyn attended one of your tapings three days before she disappeared."

Elias was very still.

"Gerald came through during a reading," he said. Slowly. Each word placed deliberately, like a man navigating a path he could see but couldn't quite trust. "I remember him. The reading was — strong. Clear."

"What did he say?"

A pause.

"He received a directive," Elias said. The word directive arrived with a particular weight, like he had chosen it carefully from a shelf of less accurate words. "Something told him — told him through the reading, through what came to me — to go to the river." He looked at his hands. "It said he would find what he was looking for there."

"And he followed it," I said.

"He followed it," Elias said quietly. "He told me afterward — after the reading, he was emotional, grateful. He said he finally knew what he needed to do." A pause. "I thought I had helped him."

The room was very quiet.

Rachel had stopped writing. She was looking at Elias with the focused, unreadable attention she brought to witness statements — the kind of listening that was also cataloguing.

"Mr. Crane," I said carefully. "Gerald Marsh walked into that river and didn't come back."

Elias looked up.

The color left his face slowly, the way color leaves a room when the light changes — not all at once, just a gradual draining until what remained was something different from what had been there before.

He didn't speak.

He didn't need to. The understanding was arriving in his face without any help from me, assembling itself from the pieces I had just put in front of him, and it was considerable, and it was only the beginning of what he was going to have to sit with.

I let it land.

Then I stood.

"We'll be back," I said. "There's more you need to hear. But not today."

He nodded. Barely.

Rachel and I walked out into the corridor. Neither of us spoke until we reached the lobby.

Then she said, quietly, not looking at me: "The unnamed voice directed Gerald Marsh to the river."

"Yes."

"And Evelyn followed the same trail."

"Yes."

She looked at the door ahead of us. Her jaw had the set it got when something had moved from professionally inconvenient into something that required a different category entirely.

"Levi."

"I know," I said.

We stepped outside.

I called Jacob on the way to the car. He picked up on the second ring, which meant he had finished, which meant whatever he had been seeking he had found or been given.

"Roiya," I said. "That's her name. R-O-I-Y-A."

A pause.

"Curtis," he said.

"Already thinking it," I said.

He hung up.

I got in the car.

Rachel was already in the passenger seat, which was new, and which I was choosing not to examine too closely because some things were better received than analyzed.

"Curtis?" she said.

"Our tech guy."

"The immaculate one? He’s so sweet. Well, at least to me."

"That's him."

She nodded and looked out the windshield. "I want in on that."

I started the engine.

"I was hoping you'd say that," I said.