The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  “Hi, my name’s Maggie. What’s yours?” she said, with a grand grin. To a small town girl like Willow, even one on the run for her life, that question demanded an answer.

  Fortunately, Willow remembered the new answer to that question. “I’m Willow,” she said, her face tipped down a bit so that she saw Maggie just under her own eyebrows.

  “You look like you just rode into town,” Maggie said, still smiling.

  Willow measured this young woman with her eyes. She had been vigilant for so long that she couldn’t help testing the gregarious stranger. “What makes you say that?”

  Maggie nodded at the fully stuffed backpack hanging from Willow’s shoulder.

  Willow grinned, knowing she had been caught, but not really regretting it. “Pretty obvious, huh?”

  Stretching her smile a little tighter, her shiny cheeks turning her eyes into half-moons, Maggie said, “I recognize the look, ‘cause I was there myself.”

  Curiosity overpowered Willow’s shy reserve. She already felt as if she knew this young woman, perhaps a few years older than she was. She wanted to know more. “Oh, yeah? When was that?”

  Maggie began to tell her story. She told about escaping a drunken and sexually-aggressive stepfather, in some town in a state she didn’t name. She told about arriving one night on Rush Street, just like this. She spoke of her gratitude that she was scooped up by the people who found her there. “It could have been so much worse,” she said with pointed solemnity.

  She told about the sort of extended family she found in an old penthouse apartment, further west in the city, an apartment in which lived two dozen young men and women, lost people who had found each other. Part of the consolation offered by this new family came in the form of pharmaceuticals; particularly, for Maggie, it was acid. She thought she had learned how to fly.

  Then, one night, at a Gerry Garcia concert downtown, she had lost track of her group of friends, just as a particularly powerful dose of acid took effect. There she was, fifteen years old, wearing just a sleeveless t-shirt and thin cotton skirt, no shoes on her feet. And the world had become a gigantic and threatening place. Eventually, she lost consciousness. The last thing she remembered was the startled faces of two young men with friendly eyes and gentle voices.

  When she woke up in the hospital, a woman she had never seen before sat in the chair next to her bed. The woman introduced herself as “Betty.” With skin a deep tan color and chocolate-colored eyes, Betty wore her hair in corn rows, beads clattering together all around her head. Maggie learned from the strange woman that two “brothers” from her church had found her at the concert and carried her to the emergency room. The doctors said those young men had saved her life.

  “And that was my introduction to yet another new family,” Maggie said, lifting her hands like a model on a game show, indicating the prizes all around her. Those long-haired young men and women mixing in with the regular inhabitants of Rush Street at night, were her new family.

  “A drug-free family, this time,” Maggie added.

  Willow smiled. She had known only one tight-knit religious group in her life, and they specialized in torture and contacting demons. But those people had never seemed as carefree and playful as these. There was clearly something different. For Willow, the feeling was different: meaning her spiritual radar was picking up strong images that didn’t look like the same enemy entities she was used to sensing. During her long talk with Maggie she occasionally turned to try to catch a clearer look at something flashing across above them. At least part of her mind attributed this to her lack of familiarity with the big city. But only part.

  Knowing that she was going to have to take a chance on a place to stay that night, a chance with some other strangers, if not these, Willow agreed to get on the bus with Maggie and her friends, for a ride to Uptown, three or four miles north.

  Instead of the dormitory monitored by monks with shaved heads and smelling of incense that Willow expected, Maggie invited her to stay at her apartment. Though many of the people on the bus lived together, they didn’t all live in one communal pile. They had simply invaded a particular neighborhood, living within a few blocks of each other. Two single guys from the church lived in the apartment below Maggie. She thought of them as her big brothers, there to protect her. That one of those guys had spent ten years in the state penitentiary lifting weights reinforced this feeling.

  When she accepted Maggie’s smiling invitation to have a seat on the couch, Willow suddenly discovered how tired she was. As Maggie went to the kitchen to make tea, Willow felt a warm blanket of sleep sinking over her whole body. Though Maggie maintained a peppy commentary about the building and the neighbors, Willow drifted off to sleep in the few short minutes that Maggie was out of the room.

  Returning with the tray, Maggie started to introduce the tea and cookies, and to offer something more substantial if Willow needed it. She was grateful that she had looked up from the tea tray before giving her whole spiel. Willow lay curled up against the throw pillows at one end of the couch, in a position similar to the one imposed by the confines of Dorothy’s trunk.

  That Willow remained asleep through Maggie covering her with a blanket and turning off the lights, testified both to her extreme emotional and physical exhaustion and to the trust that she had admitted into her bruised and tender heart.

  The foundation of Willow’s faith was laid by the caring people of Maggie’s church, and especially by Maggie, over the next two years. When Maggie discovered Willow’s penetrating spiritual gifts, Willow had made her promise to keep them secret. That hippie church in Uptown didn’t really know what to do with those gifts, as it turned out. But Willow and Maggie found a man with a powerful healing gift who was traveling with his wife and a few others, quietly healing people across the country, while avoiding making a name for himself or starting a TV program.

  But that’s another story altogether.

  Setting Free the Captives

  Willow woke up the next morning, a Friday, and knew she wasn’t going in to work at the library. Another few inches of snow had fallen since she went to bed, and then the temperature had dropped dramatically. Schools were closed. The library would be closed, at least for the morning. She called Annetta and confirmed that she could take the whole day, even if the library opened after the streets were cleared.

  After Annetta, Willow called the police department. She spoke with a detective who confirmed that there were officers watching Ronald Percy’s house already and would do so around the clock. Detective Ramirez had left instructions to keep Willow posted.

  Having confirmed that the police were in place, Willow knew what she would do that day and that weekend, if needed. She would fast and pray for the safety of Heather Tomlinson, certain that she had done all that she could up to that point, and confident that the police had located the girl and her captor. Her new plan for the weekend would require one more phone call. Willow was supposed to eat supper with her mother that night.

  She dialed Claudia’s number and listened to the ringing, the answering machine kicking on after four rings. Just before she began to leave her message, her mother picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom, this is Willow.”

  “Oh, hello, dear. How are you? Are you home from work ‘cause o’ the snow?”

  “Yeah. How are you? You have everything you need for being stranded the rest of the day?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m fine. I went shopping day before yesterday. Did you call to make sure I was alright?”

  Willow wished that was why she was calling. “No, actually, I called to say I can’t do dinner tonight. A sort of crisis came up last night and I’m gonna have to stay focused on that for the next day or two.”

  “Crisis? What kinda crisis? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. No need for you to worry. It’s just a ministry situation. Someone needs my help, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” Claudia said, using an exclamation generally intended t
o signify comprehension, but she wasn’t comprehending anything. “Okay. Well, I hope things go well for you. I know you’re much in demand. That’s how I found you on the Internet.”

  She often mentioned finding Willow on the Internet, as if that was how they were reunited. To Willow, this was strange and unexplained. To Claudia, this is how she experienced it. She wouldn’t have moved all the way to Colorado just on the basis of a birthday card. It was the stories about Willow that she found on the Internet that convinced her that life would be better near her daughter than near the relatives she had spent her life with in Kansas.

  “Okay. Well, I’m glad you’re set for a snow day. It shouldn’t be long before they have things cleared up,” Willow said. “I’ll talk to you again soon. And we can have dinner early next week.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. That would be real nice,” Claudia said. “You take care now.”

  “You too. Goodbye, Mom.”

  “Goodbye, dear.”

  Now, Willow felt that her social commitments had been sorted and cleared out of the way. She would check messages, but would not answer her cell or home phone for the next day or two. Instead, she would go to battle.

  When Willow interceded for a person, or for a church, she did more than utter prayers of petition aimed at the throne of Heaven. For her, the process of intercession involved stationing herself in a strategic place within the unseen realm around her. That realm was far more clearly visible to Willow than to most people. She had learned early that she needed to conceal her gift, because of how strange it seemed to others. And, of course, this gift had attracted her abusers when she was a teen. In fact, their unique acceptance of her gift had endeared them to her, at first.

  Her job during the dark rituals had been to look into the spiritual air inhabited by angels and demons and describe what she saw. For the leader of that gathering of pagan worshippers, Willow provided spiritual insight that shaped what the group would do. In order to lubricate that information, one of the doctors involved in the group had concocted a mix of intravenous drugs that made it difficult for Willow to resist the demands of her oppressors. Once she had received the shot, she could not help seeing what lurked in the corners or loomed over the proceedings, and she could not focus enough resistance to withhold what she saw. At least, that’s how she remembered it. But remembering what happened under the influence of that drug cocktail was part of the problem for Willow.

  Free now to see or not see beyond the physical, she occasionally chose to discern the enemy arrayed against her or the people for whom she prayed. That kind of warfare prayer gave Willow the tentative nausea one feels at returning to eating some barely tolerated food that once made her very sick. War is Hell, after all.

  Though she did occasionally kneel in prayer, more often Willow paced as she listened and responded to the voice of the spirit within her. She had learned over the years that the path to effective intercession led inward first, to where her spirit had been united with the spirit of Jesus. And, though he was her champion, he had commissioned her to bring the Kingdom of God to her world, with force.

  Much of the time she prayed in this way, Willow would pray in a spiritual language that she didn’t understand. In doing so, she followed a tradition and biblical practice advocated by the Apostle Paul, who knew a good bit about spiritual warfare and the weapons that bring down enemy strongholds.

  Throughout her times of actively praying, or of resting and waiting, Willow thought often of Heather. The frightened face of that girl whom she had never physically met motivated Willow to persist. In fact, she passed most of that day and the following night in constant prayer, dozing off for only a few minutes at a time.

  Of course, critics would point out that the weary state induced by this intensive prayer and lack of sleep would certainly cloud Willow’s thinking. But Willow didn’t worry about that. She placed much less value on rational thought than most people she knew, including most church people. In her experience, her rational mind was what talked her out of radical obedience to God.

  In the middle of the night, Willow had entered a sort of spiritual portal, as she would later describe it. Whether she was awake or asleep at the time mattered little to her. What mattered is that she faced a dark enemy of immense strength. She believed it was the spiritual power behind the torture, rape and murders committed by Ronald Percy. Though she knew she had no authority to break that spirit’s connection with Ronald Percy, Willow understood that her heavenly father had given her authority to block that spirit’s power over Heather Tomlinson.

  On the south side of town, at approximately the same time, two police officers sat in a plain sedan around the corner and across the street from Ronald Percy’s house. One of them dozed in the early morning darkness, but the other remained awake, as agreed between them.

  At first, the semi-alert officer thought nothing of a young woman running up the street, as if someone might be jogging at this time of night and in sub-zero weather. When he focused, however, Officer Ken Roundy knew that the young woman was actually a teenage girl who was running barefoot and half-dressed, running for her life. Seated in the passenger side of the car, Roundy poked his partner to wake up. Rick Shmaley, the other officer, barely roused. Roundy thumped him hard on the shoulder, but didn’t wait for him to respond. Ronald Percy had just burst out of his house, pursuing the young girl.

  Officer Roundy shouted instructions to his partner even as he bailed out of the passenger side of the vehicle, reaching for his gun at the same time. Roundy stumbled into the deep snowbank next to the car, but when he regained his balance, he saw that Ronald Percy had also lost his footing in the snow and was scrambling to his feet next to the curb of the street. Percy wore a sort of white lab coat, with rubber boots on his feet. He wasn’t dressed for a speedy pursuit.

  In his winter uniform, including heated underwear and a Kevlar vest, Office Roundy was not suited for speed either, but adrenalin lit the same fire in him that he had ridden to the state finals in football twelve years before. His rugged service boots pounded an insistent beat on the damp and salty pavement.

  Ronald Percy looked over his shoulder when he heard those footsteps. Heather, for that is who had escaped from that gray door, didn’t slow down to look at anyone. If Roundy had to catch her, he would have to wait for his partner to get the car rolling. But what he cared about first was catching Ronald Percy.

  With little regard to the impact of a full force tackle on asphalt, Ken Roundy brought down Ronald Percy in a skidding, clothes-ripping pile. Percy swore shrilly, as if he were an innocent victim being assaulted by some evil maniac.

  Officer Shmaley had recovered consciousness in time to see his partner sprinting across the street toward the building they had been watching. He had the car started by the time Roundy made his flying tackle and sped right past the pile of men on the pavement as soon as he saw the barefoot girl sprinting up the street. Without time to put labels and narrative to what was happening, both officers knew that the case had burst wide open and in the best possible way.

  Officer Shmaley tapped his lights and siren just briefly. Only then did Heather slow her escape enough to look back over her shoulder. Even though she clearly saw the sedan with police lights between her and Ronald Percy, she didn’t stop running for another half a block, covering the last few feet next to the police car. Once she finally absorbed what was happening, that her escape had been secured by two police officers, Heather collapsed into a snow pile, just missing a large black mailbox.

  When Rick Shmaley ran to her side, ripping his coat off, Heather was crying in wretched screams. When he wrapped her up in the warm insulated coat, her crying turned to deep sobs. She surrendered to safe arms, as Officer Shmaley carried her somewhat awkwardly to the police cruiser. He bundled her into the front seat of the car, not having remembered to open the back door for his passenger. With Heather’s bare feet now beneath the blasting heat in the car, Office Shmaley stood up straight to get a good look at his pa
rtner, in case he needed assistance.

  Even before he had jumped out of the cruiser and wrapped up Heather Tomlinson, Shmaley had radioed to the station. Another unit arrived within two minutes, and an ambulance five minutes after that. The second police vehicle, this one a SUV, offered a better place to keep Heather while waiting for the paramedics. Percy was hauled into the first vehicle only after Heather had been carried to the larger car. For two officers who were selected for surveillance based primarily on their availability, Roundy and Shmaley showed tremendous sensitivity to the needs of the victim and even took measures to protect the accused from frostbite during the wait for backup. Both officers would later receive commendations for their actions that predawn morning.

  She Knew Too Much

  Willow had fallen asleep as the sun rose, a sense of peace overcoming her just before sleep did the same. At nine a.m., Detective Donna Ramirez called.

  “Ms. Parker?” she said, when Willow answered, using Willow’s birth name.

  “Yes?” Willow replied, sleep and the use of her old name confusing her.

  “This is Detective Ramirez,” her voice deepened as she considered whether she had said something she didn’t intend. “Did I wake you?” This was an attempt to soften her approach.

  “Yes. But that’s okay. You have news about Heather? Is she free?”

  The detective hesitated, which caused Willow’s heart to drop. Her instincts piled the worst possible news into that brief pause.

  Detective Ramirez finally answered in time to prevent Willow from crumbling into a teary mess. “She’s okay.” Again, her tone didn’t communicate what Willow was hoping for, or what she was expecting.

  “But?” Willow wanted to jump right to the reason for the hesitations and ominous tone.

  “No, she’s fine. She was rescued this morning when she escaped the house and was spotted by the officers in the surveillance vehicle. She’s injured, but not severely. Most of the damage will be psychological, of course.”