“You have an ‘S’ curve to your back, that causes you pain, especially the lower back, where the curve is most severe,” Paul said to an eighteen-year-old girl, who was still staggering from Willow telling her things from her past, her present and her future that even her parents didn’t know.
That girl received a straight and pain-free back, and her sparkling blonde friend saw her leg grow out to match the other. Two more of their friends received words of insight and encouragement from the people in that booth. Before they left, those high school girls had all committed themselves to following Jesus and had information about a church that met near where they went to school.
The uncomfortable and foreboding experience that Willow and her team had feared, evaporated in the face of reality. That reality included the fact that only one booth at the convention was seeing people physically healed, not to mention their lives laid open by insightful words from Willow and the others. It felt as if there was only one discernable spiritual power in that place.
As one woman said, when she repeatedly returned to the booth, to just sit and bask, “There is so much light here. I just get depressed when I walk around, but you have light here.”
Willow and company could feel it too.
On Sunday morning, Willow was scheduled to deliver her talk in a room that seated two hundred. The organizers had paid her a $500 honorarium, on top of covering airfare and hotel for her and Kylie, her assistant. The church paid the expenses of the other three from Colorado.
As she lay in her queen-sized bed in her cozy hotel room that morning, Willow knew that she was not going to deliver the talk she had planned. She felt strongly that she was being directed to simply share her story of being arrested. The article by Anna Conyers had provided only bare bones facts, with emphasis on the legal controversy and a strong sense of injustice. Willow would tell it more as she experienced it, all of its worry and struggle, as well as the grace and wonder. She knew, for example, that she would tell about Bobby Nightingale’s visit, something she hadn’t yet told anyone at home about.
When she stood in the big party room designated for her talk, behind a dark wooden podium and looking out at her audience of a hundred and fifty or more, Willow solidified an impression she had been building during her time on the convention floor. The attendees of that conference seemed more diverse and eccentric than church people, and many of them reminded her of the neediest people in the churches she had been part of, the ones who craved attention and often risked social awkwardness to get it—the ones who felt that they didn’t fit anywhere. And she felt overwhelming compassion for them.
With only a few notes to keep her on course and on time, Willow told her story, the story that had made her famous in the world inhabited by the strangers in front of her. She knew she had her audience with her throughout her story, and detected discomfort and doubt only when she told about Bobby popping into her jail cell. After telling that piece of the story, she took a look at Scott, who sat in the front row. She noted his strenuously raised eyebrows. Breaking out that revelation before this audience had simply come to her as an obvious choice that morning. Only as she stood in front of that crowd, during that brief eye-contact with Scott, did she wonder if she should have told him earlier.
Opening the floor for questions meant explaining Bobby Nightingale’s visit three more times in three different ways. Willow persisted patiently, keeping her sighs to an inaudible level, even from the front row. Scott was wearing a sideways grin during the third explanation, knowing how much more restrained his friend was being than he would have been in her place.
One of the convention officials closed the meeting, ending the questions and leading in applause for Willow. Instead of challenging them with a theological perspective on listening to God, and how that worked for her, she had told them a story, a true story, which still challenged their beliefs. It wasn’t preaching; it was storytelling.
As the applause died, Willow spoke up. “I’ll be at our booth on the floor, with my colleagues, and would be glad to offer readings to everyone who sat through this talk. I’ll see you there.”
Scott maintained a version of his half-formed grin all the way through the handshaking crowd, pressing in and flowing with them out of the meeting room, through the broad hotel corridor and out into the ballroom. He felt a bit like a bodyguard, helping Kylie maintain space for Willow to walk. He kept close, one hand on the small of Willow’s back.
Willow sported her own little grin, warmed by that quiet man’s simple touch, guiding and supporting her through the crush of the crowd.
At the booth, the two folks from Malibu, along with the Songers, had been continuing to offer prophetic insight and physical healings to any who wanted it. When Willow arrived, a line formed across the front table, people from her talk willing to wait for some insight from the woman who could see into the basements of child-abductors and into the souls of imprisoned prostitutes.
The first woman in line, an athletic brunette with a triangular face and short, boyish hair, seemed to alternate between glowing at Willow and glaring at her. Scott, standing beside Willow behind the table, saw this odd effect and couldn’t hide his consternation. Willow pressed through.
“Hi, what’s your name?” she said, shaking the woman’s hand.
“Mira,” she said, her face contorting slightly even at the pronunciation of her own name.
Willow understood that she was facing a woman who was not entirely in control of herself, and expected that several spirits were distracting and distorting Mira’s responses. Just before she could begin to deal with the struggle, Mira spoke again.
“But you should call me Michael,” the young woman said, her voice taking on a deeper tone and her pupils suddenly shrinking until they almost disappeared.
Now Scott knew what was happening. He had dealt with some spiritually oppressed people in his mission to Thailand and recognized the signs. He started praying under his breath in a language Willow didn’t recognize. She just received it as appropriate support for what she was about to do.
Karen Songer, a grandmotherly woman with short light gray hair, had stepped up to Willow’s other side. She turned and spoke softly into Willow’s ear. “You just have to get Michael out of the way.”
Willow took that as confirmation that she should, right here in the middle of a psychic convention, confront a demonic spirit in the young woman in front of her. A dependable pattern from years of experience was that demons don’t let themselves be known voluntarily. Willow sensed it was time for this one to go.
Instead of turning stern and confrontational, Willow reached out her hand again. Mira reached out and rested her hand in Willow’s as if hypnotized. From where Willow stood, it was as if Mira had vacated the shell of her body, and her hands were on automatic pilot.
When Karen saw the attitude that Willow was taking, she turned, walked slowly around the end of the table and slipped an arm around Mira’s rigid shoulders.
“You can go now, and I won’t let the angels torture you,” Willow said, in a low and confidential tone.
Across the physical face that used to be Mira, another face imposed itself, a masculine face that seemed to Willow to almost be black and white, no human color to it. And then Mira started to scream.
Karen gently tightened her hold on the young woman’s shoulders and snuffed out that scream as soon as it left Mira’s throat. And it was over.
Mira’s own eyes returned to her face again, her mouth relaxed to a more natural shape and she looked utterly exhausted, like a woman who has just finished birthing a child. As those things go, it was a pretty easy birth.
“You’re free. And you can stay free, if you want,” Willow said.
Mira nodded and allowed Karen to lead her off to the side. Raylynn joined them for an intimate conference outside the attention of anyone else in the room.
The next two people in line, however, had not missed what happened. Two middle-aged women with short-cropped hair a
nd apprehensive eyes stood where they were, not stepping forward. The man standing behind them cleared his throat, breaking their lock on that spot on the floor. But, instead of stepping up to receive from Willow, they parted and left the line in opposite directions.
Willow just looked at the man next in line and raise her face in a slight nod, to signal her readiness for him.
As she had become accustomed in her long experience listening for God’s words to the people in front of her, and as she had come to expect in the atmosphere of God’s preeminence at that convention, Willow found something to deliver to each person, some things dramatic, some joyous, and all landing a visible impact on the receiver. Those people walked away with tears in their eyes, or star-struck smiles, or conferring with the person next to them, who knew as well as they did that the woman behind the table had opened the book of their life and read an important page to them.
With the talk behind her, and the familiar flow of God’s words meeting strangers there in Southern California, Willow relaxed, back on familiar ground.
Scott stood by and marveled, occasionally having something to contribute, but mostly praying silently for Willow, as she did her thing. He was as amazed as the people on that other side of the table, but he didn’t have to leave his place and walk away. He just stood by her and saw some of what she saw. He experienced for himself the undeniable fact that she was meant to do this as much as anyone had ever been meant to do anything on this Earth.
Finding Lila
After the psychic convention, Willow welcomed the return to her daily routine. She had traveled for ministry opportunities for most of two decades, some years more than this one. Through all of that, she never ceased longing for her natural habitat, a quiet living room with a fire in the fireplace and silence all around her. If she allowed herself to daydream at all these days, she would see a place next to that fire for one more person, and the silence replaced by the steady breathing of another human being, against whom she could rest and read and simply listen—listen to her father in Heaven and listen to the rhythm of another heart and another set of lungs.
Even a bit more so than her church, the library was Willow’s second home. Though not as silent or secluded as her living room, no fire to curl up next to, it suited her better than any working environment she could imagine.
A week after her trip to the Southern California, Willow sat in front of her computer, searching for music CD’s requested by a customer for inter-library loan. “P-e-r-u-v-i-a-n...” she typed inattentively. A thought scratched at the back door of her mind, like a stray cat wanting to be let in. She ignored it, intent on her work. Questions about why this particular style of music didn’t show up on the customer computer out on the main library floor distracted her for a few moments. But that homeless cat was back, and more adamant this time.
Willow checked the time in the lower right hand corner of her computer screen. It was a good time to stop for lunch. She printed out what she had found about the particular instrumental music the customer had requested and set that next to her keyboard. She lifted her blue cardigan off the back of her chair and slipped her arms into each sleeve. The cluttered room behind the reference desk tended to be much warmer than the break room, a small village of computers warming the space between folios of old newspapers and a large scanner/printer/copier used only by staff.
As soon as she had retrieved her lunch from the staff fridge and stepped into the breakroom, Willow saw a picture of Lila, her cellmate just two months ago, flashing through the video section of her mind. Lila’s face was bruised, her latte-colored skin turned deep purple along one side of her mouth. The look in Lila’s eyes, imprinted in a fraction of a second, was plaintive.
Since her release from jail, Willow had occasionally thought of Lila and had launched a few prayers heavenward on her behalf. But the image of the usually-imposing woman begging for rescue startled Willow. Instead of eating her lunch, she shut herself in one of the private study rooms and waited for instructions. Clearly she was hearing a call for help, but the form that this help should take was far from obvious.
Willow sat on one wooden and metal chair tipped slightly back against a paneled wall, with her shoes planted on the edge of another chair, propped against a third. Years ago she had discovered this combination, requiring borrowing the third chair from elsewhere, and found it the best approximation of a comfortable seat, in a spot where no one could see her. Seeking that silent, sheltered place had become instinctual.
For half an hour, Willow listened and prayed. She felt as if she were trying to see someone through a dense passing crowd, like a small child unable to see over, hoping for a break between people passing across her line of sight. And she did finally see what she needed. It was an address—four numbers and a street name. She knew then that she would go to find Lila, and she also knew that she would ask Scott to go with her, if possible, given where that address would take her.
Before she left work, Willow had texted back and forth with Scott several times. He wouldn’t be available right away, but Willow was sure it was worth waiting for him, after checking on that address. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to go to a dangerous neighborhood alone, though that was true; it was that she specifically wanted Scott to be part of whatever sort of adventure this would become.
Scott was working as a design engineer for an electrical engineering firm, in a suburb between Denver and Palos Heights. It was a couple of steps down the ladder from where he had been when he left his previous job to spend nine months training and then serving in Thailand. A significant project deadline kept him from leaving work on time, but Willow greeted him with supper when he picked her up at her house. She had made sandwiches, packed fruit and water bottles and was ready to go when he arrived.
Scott looked quizzically at the lunch bag she was handing him. “So, are we like going on a stakeout or something?”
Willow tipped her head sideways and shrugged. “I have no idea what we’re gonna find, and thought it would be good to prepare for the long haul.”
Scott grinned at her. “But I thought you did have an idea of what we’re gonna find, which is why we’re going.” He instantly remembered the seriousness of the images Willow had described and repented of his teasing grin.
Willow granted a small smile of her own, pulled her front door closed behind her and laced one hand under his arm. “Well, I don’t know everything. Let’s just leave it at that.”
He glanced at her hand gripping his bicep through his down coat, and then adjusted his focus toward the task ahead. “Sounds good to me,” he said.
“I’ll drive so you can eat,” Willow said, releasing his arm at the bottom of the stairs and gesturing toward her car, which she had left out on the driveway, in spite of the sub-freezing temperatures.
“That also sounds good to me,” Scott said. “Thanks. You ate something already?”
“I ate a little, but don’t have much of an appetite just now. Maybe later.”
Beneath all of the arrangements and niceties, she was worried about her friend, even a friend that she had only known for a few days. Willow didn’t pause to measure the appropriateness of all that, compelled instead by the mental images that she believed her heavenly father had provided her.
Back in the old part of town, not far from where Ronald Percy had held Heather Tomlinson captive, Willow pulled her car into a diagonal parking place on a commercial street, across from the address she had seen in her vision. That there was such an address had been an early confirmation for Willow when she checked the location via her phone.
Looking at the door with the address displayed in old plastic numbers that had once been painted gold, it was easy to believe that this was where Lila lived and probably worked. Scott finished his sandwich and glugged water to wash it down. He checked Willow to find his cue for what would come next. She answered his unspoken question.
“I think we should both go to the door, but be ready for her to say you ha
ve to stay outside,” Willow said, looking apologetic.
“No problem,” Scott said in a way that was convincing. He wrapped up his lunch bag and set it on the dashboard in front of him, wiping his hands on a paper napkin and stuffing it into the curled end of the lunch bag.
“Thanks for coming with me,” Willow said, after watching him getting ready for action, as if what came next was helping to carry a couch up some stairs.
He smiled at her ready gratitude and reached over for a quick stroke of her cheek with the back of his left hand. “I’m pretty much ready to go anywhere with you,” he said, with a glimmer in his eye that kept that statement from sounding as monumental as it might in other circumstances. Willow took note, nevertheless.
She pulled the handle on the door and stepped out into the cold, under a yellowish streetlight that seemed designed to make the surroundings look cheap and worn. Scott was on the street now, too. Even he looked unfamiliar in that light, in that neighborhood. If Willow had her choice, she wouldn’t have followed this prompting so late in the day, well after dark.
Sensing her discomfort with the surroundings, Scott wrapped an arm around her waist, something he had never done before. Willow knew why he did it and was grateful, though she kept her nose pointed at Lila’s door and her face locked with determination. She was praying quietly in her prayer language. Scott followed that example and they sounded like two crazy people muttering to themselves. They fit right into the neighborhood.
Willow took a deep breath before she knocked on the door that she believed to be Lila’s. She rapped four times and waited. For several seconds there was no response, then the sound of a chair on tile, scooting roughly. Willow feared that she had awakened the beast that was torturing Lila, but the face that peaked through the crack in the cautiously opened door was Lila’s.
When she saw Willow, Lila stepped back and started to cry and laugh and swear, all jumbled together.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 24
