Leaving Time(13)

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?

For all I know, paranormal talent is like riding a bike. For all I know, it comes back, if you just give it a try.

So in spite of the fact that I am pretty sure Serenity Jones does not ever want to see me on her doorstep again, I also know that finding my mother is exactly the sort of training wheels she needs.





ALICE




We’ve all heard the phrase before: He’s got a memory like an elephant. As it turns out, this is not cliché but science.

I once saw an Asian elephant in Thailand who had been trained to do a trick. All the schoolchildren brought to meet him at the reserve where he was kept in captivity were told to sit in a line. Then they were asked to take off their shoes, and these shoes were jumbled into a pile. The mahout who worked with the elephant then instructed her to give the shoes back to the children. The elephant did, carefully weeding through the pile with her trunk and dropping the shoes that belonged to each child in his or her lap.