and Brianna had made the first move. This was about three months after the Norris County tent revival and four into our computer-sleuthing. I hadn’t been a particularly tough sell, especially after she slipped out of her blouse and skirt one evening in my apartment.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I had asked.
“Absolutely.” She flashed a grin. “Soon I’ll be in the big wide world, and I think I better work out my daddy issues first.”
“Was your daddy a white ex–guitar player, then?”
That made her laugh. “All cats are gray in the dark, Jamie. Now are we going to get it on or not?”
We got it on, and it was terrific. I’d be lying if I said her youth didn’t excite me—she was twenty-four—and I’d also be lying if I said I could always keep up with her. Stretched out next to her that first night and pretty much exhausted after the second go, I asked her what Georgia would say.
“She’s not going to find out from me. Is she from you?”
“Nope, but Nederland’s a small town.”
“That’s true, and in small towns, discretion only goes so far, I guess. If she should speak to me, I’d just remind her that she once did more for Hugh Yates than keep his books.”
“Are you serious?”
She giggled. “You white boys can be so dumb.”
• • •
Now, with coffee on her side of the bed and tea on mine, we sat propped up on pillows with her laptop between us. Summer sunshine—morning sunshine, always the best—made an oblong on the floor. Bree was wearing one of my tee-shirts and nothing else. Her hair, kept short, was a curly black cap.
“You could continue without me just fine,” she said. “You pretend to be computer illiterate—mostly so you can keep me where you can nudge me in the night, I think—but running search engines ain’t rocket science. And I think you’ve got enough already, don’t you?”
As a matter of fact, I did. We had started with three names from the Miracle Testimony page of C. Danny Jacobs’s website. Robert Rivard, the boy cured of muscular dystrophy in St. Louis, led the list. To these three Bree had added the ones I was sure of from the Norris County revival meeting—ones like Rowena Mintour, whose sudden recovery was hard to argue with. If that tottery, weeping walk to her husband had been a put-up job, she deserved an Academy Award for it.
Bree had tracked the Pastor Danny Jacobs Healing Revival Tour from Colorado to California, ten stops in all. Together we had watched the new YouTube vids added to the website’s Miracle Testimony page with the avidity of marine biologists studying some newly discovered species of fish. We debated the validity of each (first in my living room, later in this same bed), eventually putting them into four categories: utter bullshit, probable bullshit, impossible to be sure, and hard not to believe.
By this process, a master list had slowly emerged. On that sunny August morning in the bedroom of my second-floor apartment, there were fifteen names on it. These were cures we felt ninety-eight percent sure of, culled down from a roster of almost seven hundred and fifty possibles. Robert Rivard was on that list; Mabel Jergens from Albuquerque was on it; so was Rowena Mintour and Ben Hicks, the man in the Norris County Fairgrounds tent who had torn off his neck brace and tossed his crutches aside.
Hicks was an interesting case. Both he and his wife had confirmed the authenticity of the cure in a Denver Post article published a couple of weeks after Jacobs’s traveling show moved on. He was a history prof at the Community College of Denver with an impeccable reputation. He termed himself a religious skeptic and described his attendance at the Norris County revival as “a last resort.” His wife confirmed this. “We are amazed and thankful,” she said. She added that they had started going to church again.
Rivard, Jergens, Mintour, Hicks, and everyone else on our master list had been touched by Jacobs’s “holy rings” between May of 2007 and December of 2008, when the Healing Revival Tour had concluded in San Diego.
Bree had begun the follow-up work with a light heart, but by October of 2008, her attitude had darkened. That was when she had found a story about Robert Rivard—no more than a squib, really—in the Monroe County Weekly Telegram. It said the “miracle boy” had been admitted to St. Louis Children’s Hospital “for reasons