Leaving Time: A Novel (5 page)

At the bottom of the page, my mother had written this:

My mother did not know at the time she wrote this that she was already pregnant with me.

“I don’t do missing people,” Serenity says, in a voice that doesn’t allow even a sliver of
but
.

“You don’t do kids,” I say, ticking one of my fingers. “You don’t do missing people. What exactly
do
you do?”

She narrows her eyes. “You want energy alignment? No problem. Tarot? Step right up. Communicating with someone who’s passed?
I’m your girl.” She leans forward, so I understand, in no uncertain terms, that I’ve hit a brick wall. “But I do
not
do missing people.”

“You’re a psychic.”

“Different psychics have different gifts,” she says. “Precognition, aura reading, channeling spirits, telepathy. Just because I’ve been given a taste doesn’t mean I get the whole smorgasbord.”

“She vanished ten years ago,” I continue, as if Serenity hasn’t spoken. I wonder if I should tell her about the trampling, or the fact that my mother was brought to the hospital, and decide not to. I don’t want to feed her the answers. “I was only three.”

“Most missing people disappear because they want to,” Serenity says.

“But not all,” I reply. “She didn’t leave me. I know it.” I hesitate, unwinding my mother’s scarf and pushing it toward her. “This belonged to her. Maybe that would help …?”

Serenity doesn’t touch it. “I never said I
couldn’t
find her. I said I
wouldn’t
.”

In all the ways I’ve imagined this meeting going down, this was not one of them. “Why?” I ask, stunned. “Why wouldn’t you want to help me, if you can?”

“Because I am not Mother Freaking Teresa!” she snaps. Her face turns tomato red; I wonder if she’s seen her own imminent death by high blood pressure. “Excuse me,” she says, and she disappears down a hallway. A moment later, I hear a faucet running.

She’s gone for five minutes. Ten. I get up and start wandering around the living room. Arranged on the fireplace mantel are pictures of Serenity with George and Barbara Bush, with Cher, with the guy from
Zoolander
. It makes no sense to me. Why would someone who hobnobs with celebrities be hawking ten-dollar tarot readings in East Nowhere, New Hampshire?

When I hear the toilet flush I race back to the couch and sit down again, as if I’ve been there the whole time. Serenity returns, composed. Her pink bangs are damp, as if she’s splashed water on her face. “I’m not going to charge you for my time today,” she says, and I snort.
“I’m truly sorry to hear about your mother. Maybe someone else can tell you what you want to hear.”

“Like who?”

“I have no idea. It’s not like we all hang out at the Paranormal Café on Wednesday nights.” She moves to the door, holding it wide open, my cue to leave. “If I hear of anyone who does that sort of thing, I’ll be in touch.”

I suspect this is a flat-out lie, spoken to get me the hell out of her living room. I step into the foyer and wrangle my bike upright. “If you won’t find her for me,” I say, “can you at least tell me if she’s dead?”

I can’t believe I’ve asked that until the words are hanging between us, like curtains that keep us from seeing each other clearly. For a second I think about grabbing my bike and running out the door before I have to hear the answer.

Serenity shudders as if I’ve hit her with a Taser. “She’s not.”

As she closes the door in my face, I wonder if this is a flat-out lie, too.

Instead of going back home, I bike past the outskirts of Boone, three miles down a dirt road, to the entrance of the Stark Nature Preserve, named after the Revolutionary War general who coined the state motto, “Live Free or Die.” But ten years ago, before it was the Stark Nature Preserve, it was the New England Elephant Sanctuary, which had been founded by my father, Thomas Metcalf. Back then, it sprawled over two thousand acres, with a two-hundred-acre perimeter between the sanctuary and the nearest residential home. Now, more than half the acreage has become a strip mall, a Costco, and a housing development. The rest is kept in conservation by the state.

I park my bike and walk for twenty minutes, passing the birch forest and the lake, overgrown and weedy now, where the elephants would come daily for water. Finally, I reach my favorite spot, under a massive oak with arms twisted like a witch. Although most of the woodlands are blanketed with moss and ferns this time of the year, the ground under this tree has always been carpeted with bright purple
mushrooms. It looks like the kind of place fairies would live, if they were real.

They’re called
Laccaria amethystina
. I looked them up online. It seemed like something my mother would have done, if she’d seen them.

I sit down in the middle of the mushrooms. You’d think I’d crush the heads, but they give way to my weight. I stroke the underside of one, with its ridged accordion pleats. It feels like velvet and muscle at the same time, just like the tip of an elephant’s trunk.

This was the spot where Maura had buried her calf, the only elephant ever born at the sanctuary. I was too young to remember it, but I’ve read about it in my mother’s journals. Maura arrived at the sanctuary already pregnant, although the zoo that had shipped her off didn’t know it at the time. She delivered nearly fifteen months after her arrival, and the calf was stillborn. Maura carried him to the spot beneath the oak and covered him with pine needles and branches. The next spring, the most beautiful violet mushrooms exploded there, where the calf’s remains had eventually been formally buried by the sanctuary staff.

I take my cell phone out of my pocket. The only good thing about selling off half the sanctuary property is that now there is a huge cellular tower not too far away, and service is probably better here than in all the rest of New Hampshire. I open a browser and type: “Serenity Jones Psychic.”

The first thing I read is her Wikipedia entry.
Serenity Jones (b. November 1, 1966) is an American psychic and medium. She appeared multiple times on
Good Morning America,
and had her own television show
, Serenity!,
where she did cold readings of the audience and also one-on-one readings with individuals, but specialized in missing persons cases
.

Missing persons cases? Are you
kidding
me?

She worked with various police departments and the FBI and claimed a success rate of 88 percent. However, her failed prediction about the kidnapped son of Senator John McCoy was widely reported in the media and led the family to press charges. Jones has not been in the public eye since 2007
.

Is it possible that a famous medium—even a disgraced one—had
dropped off the face of the earth and resurfaced a decade later near Boone, New Hampshire? Absolutely. If anyone was ever looking for a place to keep a low profile, it was in my hometown, where the most exciting thing to happen all year is the July Fourth Cow Plop Bingo tournament.

I scan a list of her public predictions.

In 1999, Jones told Thea Katanopoulis that her son Adam, who had been missing for seven years, was alive. In 2001 Adam was located, working on a merchant marine ship off the coast of Africa
.

Jones accurately predicted the acquittal of O. J. Simpson and the great quake of 1989
.

In 1998, Jones said the next presidential election would be postponed. Although the election itself in 2000 was not delayed, the official results were not reported for 36 days
.

In 1998, Jones told the mother of missing college student Kerry Rashid that her daughter had been stabbed and DNA evidence would exonerate the man eventually convicted of the crime. In 2004, Orlando Ickes was freed as a result of the Innocence Project and his former roommate indicted for the crime instead
.

In 2001, Jones told police that Chandra Levy’s body would be found in a heavily wooded area on a slope. It was located the following year in Rock Creek Park, Maryland, on a steep incline. She also predicted that Thomas Quintanos IV, a NYC firefighter presumed dead after 9/11, was alive, and he was indeed pulled from the rubble five days after the attack on the World Trade Center
.

On her television show in 2001, Jones led police on camera to the Pensacola, Florida, home of mail carrier Earlen O’Doule, locating a secret locked room in his basement and the presumed-dead Justine Fawker, who had been abducted eight years earlier at age 11
.

On her television show in November 2003, Jones told Senator John McCoy and his wife that their abducted son was still alive and could be found at a bus terminal in Ocala, Florida. The boy’s remains were located there, decomposing
.

From there on, things had gone downhill for Serenity Jones.

In December 2003, Jones told the widow of a Navy SEAL she would give birth to a healthy boy. The woman miscarried fourteen days later
.

In January 2004, Jones told Yolanda Rawls of Orem, Utah, that her missing five-year-old daughter, Velvet, had been brainwashed and was being raised by a Mormon family, touching off a wave of protests in Salt Lake City. Six months later Yolanda’s boyfriend confessed to the girl’s murder and led police to a shallow grave near the local dump
.

In February 2004, Jones predicted that Jimmy Hoffa’s remains would be discovered in the cement walls of a bomb cellar built by the Rockefeller family in Woodstock, Vermont. This proved incorrect
.

In March 2004, Jones stated that Audrey Seiler, a University of Wisconsin–Madison student who went missing, was the victim of a serial killer and that a knife would be found with evidence on it. Seiler was found to have staged her own kidnapping in an attempt to get her boyfriend’s attention
.

In May 2007, she predicted that Madeleine McCann, who had disappeared while on vacation with her parents in Portugal, would be found by August. The case remains unsolved
.

She hasn’t made any public psychic predictions since that. From what I can see,
she
went missing.

No wonder she doesn’t
do kids
.

Okay, she made one colossal public mistake in the McCoy case, but in her defense, she had been half right: They
did
find the missing boy. He just wasn’t alive. It was bad luck that, after having a string of successes, her first failure involved a superfamous politician.

There are pictures of Serenity at the Grammys with Snoop Dogg and at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with George W. Bush. There’s another photo of her in
US Weekly
’s Fashion Police section wearing a dress with two giant silk rosettes sewn over her boobs.

I click on my YouTube app and type in Serenity’s name and the senator’s. A video loads, showing Serenity on a television show set, with her ice cream swirl of hair, wearing a pink pantsuit just a few shades darker. Across from her on a purple couch is Senator McCoy, a guy with a jaw that could be used to measure right angles and a perfect
glint of silver at his temples. His wife sits beside him, clutching his hand.

I’m not really into politics, but we studied Senator McCoy in school as an example of political failure. He’d been groomed for a presidential run, hanging out with the Kennedys in Hyannisport and giving a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. But then his seven-year-old son was abducted from his private school’s playground.

In the clip, Serenity leans toward the politician. “Senator McCoy,” she says, “I have had a
vision
.”

Cut to a gospel choir on the set. “A vision!” they sing out, like musical punctuation.

“A vision of your little boy …” Serenity pauses. “Alive and well.”

The senator’s wife collapses into her husband’s arms and sobs.

I wonder if she picked Senator McCoy on purpose; if she really had a vision of the kid, or just wanted the media hype to surround her, too.

The video jumps to the bus terminal in Ocala. There is Serenity, accompanying the McCoys into the building, heading in a zombie trance to a bunch of lockers near the men’s room. There’s Senator McCoy’s wife, crying,
“Henry?”
as Serenity tells a policeman to open locker number 341. There’s the stained suitcase, which is hauled out by the cop, as everyone else reels backward from the stench of the body inside.

For a moment, the camera tumbles and the video goes sideways. Then the cameraman pulls his shit together, in time to catch Serenity throwing up, Ginny McCoy fainting dead away, and Senator McCoy, the Democratic Party golden boy, yelling at him to stop filming, and punching him when he doesn’t.

Serenity Jones hadn’t just fallen from grace—she’d crashed and burned. The McCoys sued Serenity, who eventually settled. Senator McCoy was subsequently arrested twice on DUI convictions, resigned from the Senate, and went somewhere to treat his “exhaustion.” His wife died a year later from an overdose of sleeping pills. And Serenity quietly, quickly, became invisible.

The woman who’d royally screwed up with the McCoys was the same woman who’d also found dozens of kids who had disappeared. She was also the Serenity Jones who now resided in the seediest part of town and who was starved for cash. But had she lost her ability to find missing people … or had she always been faking it? Was she once
actually
psychic—or just lucky?