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 unrelated to his former muscular dystrophy.”
Bree made enquiries, both by computer and telephone. Rivard’s parents refused to speak to her, but a nurse at Children’s finally did when Bree told her she was trying to expose C. Danny Jacobs as a fraud. This was not what we were doing, exactly, but it worked. After being assured by Bree that she would never be named in any article or book, the nurse said Bobby Rivard had been admitted suffering what she called “chain headaches,” and was given a battery of tests to rule out a brain tumor. Which they did. Eventually the boy had been transferred to Gad’s Ridge, in Oakville, Missouri.
“What kind of hospital is that?” Bree had asked.
“Mental,” the nurse said. And while Bree was digesting this: “Most people who go into Gad’s, they never come out.”
Bree’s efforts to find out more were met by a stone wall at Gad’s Ridge. Because I considered Rivard our Patient Zero, I flew to St. Louis, rented a car, and drove to Oakville. After several afternoons spent in the bar nearest to the hospital, I found an orderly who would talk for the small emolument of sixty dollars. Robert Rivard was still walking fine, the orderly said, but never walked any farther than the corner of his room. When he did, he would simply stand there, like a child being punished for misbehavior, until someone led him back to his bed or the nearest chair. On good days he ate; during his bad stretches, which were far more common, he had to be tube-fed. He was classed semicatatonic. A gork, in the orderly’s words.
“Is he still suffering from chain headaches?” I asked him.
The orderly shrugged meaty shoulders. “Who knows?”
Who, indeed.
So far as we could tell, nine of the people on our master list were fine. This included Rowena Mintour, who had resumed teaching, and Ben Hicks, whom I interviewed myself in November of 2008, five months after his cure. I didn’t tell him everything (for one thing, I never mentioned electricity of either the ordinary or the special type), but I shared enough to establish my bona fides: heroin addiction cured by Jacobs in the early nineties, followed by troubling aftereffects that eventually diminished and then disappeared. What I wanted to know was if he had suffered any aftereffects—blackouts, flashing lights, sleepwalking, perhaps lapses into Tourette’s-like speech.
No to all, he said. He was fine as could be.
“I don’t know if it was God working through him or not,” Hicks told me over coffee in his office. “My wife does, and that’s fine, but I don’t care. I’m pain-free and walking two miles a day. In another two months I expect to be cleared to play tennis, as long as it’s doubles, where I only have to run a few steps. Those are the things I care about. If he did for you what you say he did, you’ll know what I mean.”
I did, but I also knew more.
That Robert Rivard was enjoying his cure in a mental institution, sipping glucose via IV rather than Cokes with his friends.
That Patricia Farmingdale, cured of peripheral neuropathy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had poured salt into her eyes in an apparent effort to blind herself. She had no memory of doing it, let alone why.
That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. These walks, some of them fifteen-mile marathons, did not occur during blackouts; the urge just came on him, he said, and he had to go.
That Veronica Freemont of Anaheim had suffered what she called “interruptions of vision.” One had resulted in a low-speed collision with another driver. She tested negative for drugs and alcohol, but turned in her license just the same, afraid it would happen again.
That in San Diego, Emil Klein’s miracle cure of a neck injury was followed by a periodic compulsion to go out into his backyard and eat dirt.
And there was Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008. A month later he lost his job as a blackjack dealer when he began to spew profanity at the customers—stuff like “Take a hit, take a fucking hit, you chickenshit asshole.” When he began shouting similar things at his three kids, his wife threw him out. He moved to a no-tell motel north of Fashion Show Drive. Two weeks later he was found dead on the bathroom floor with a bottle of Krazy Glue in one hand. He had used it to plug his nostrils and seal his mouth shut. His wasn’t the only obit coupled to Jacobs that Bree had found with her search engine, but it was the only one we felt sure was connected.
Until Cathy Morse, that was.
I was feeling sleepy again in spite of an infusion of black breakfast tea. I blamed it on the auto-scroll feature of Bree’s laptop. It was helpful, I said, but also hypnotic.
“Honey, if I may misquote Al Jolson, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said. “Next year Apple’s going to release a pad-style computer that’ll revolutionize—” There was a bing before she could finish, and the auto-scroll came to a halt. She peered at the screen, where a line was highlighted in red. “Uh-oh. That’s one of the names you gave me when we started.”
“What?” Meaning who. I’d only been able to give her a few back then, and one had been that of my brother Con. Jacobs had claimed that one was just a placebo, but—
“Hold your water and let me click the link.”
I leaned over to look. My first feeling was relief: not Con, of course not. My second was a species of dismal horror.
The obituary, from the Tulsa World, was for one Catherine Anne Morse, age thirty-eight. Died suddenly, the obit said. And this: Cathy’s grieving parents ask that in lieu of flowers, mourners send contributions to the Suicide Prevention Action Network. These contributions are tax deductible.
“Bree,” I said. “Go to last week’s—”