The Gift
by Charlie Kondek
Detroit Police Officer Tim Miner had two women on his mind.
One was Mother Grace, his mentor in the gift of prophecy, whom the church folk called Mother because of how much she did with foster kids. She’d always told him never to adulterate the gift. “You got to take what the Holy Spirit gives you and nothing more,” she said. “Look what happened to King Solomon. He thought he could mix in all them other gods, and his kingdom got took as a result. Sometimes the Holy Spirit’s gonna give you what you want. Sometimes not. You just have to accept it.”
The other was Madame Luster, the medium, who sometimes consulted with police. She said, “I can see the power on you, Tim. Real power. But you’re a fool not to let others help you. Like a man that wants to build without tools. I know they’re strict in your denomination, but we could work together if you’d let me. Don’t be so afraid of my methods.”
Hillbilly is a white ethnic group in metro Detroit. Like Germans, Irish, Italians and Poles, Southerners had come to the city for automotive jobs and settled in neighborhoods where others of their kind lived, so much so that people added the suffix “-tucky” to the names of some suburbs: “Hazel-tucky,” “Taylor-tucky.” Kids in these neighborhoods, even to the third generation, could be caught speaking some words with a Midwesternized Mississippi, North Carolina, or Tennessee accent. Miner was just such a man from just such an enclave in Warren, round-shouldered and blue eyed. On Sunday morning, when the Elmyra girl had been gone about 36 hours, he was in the First Citadel of Faith Apostolic Church worshipping and praying to find her. The congregation prayed with him, loud, with music, some laying hands on him, others—including his wife, Kayleigh—speaking in tongues. Miner stood in this sea of believers with his hands out to his sides, palms up to catch the blessings, eyes closed and concentrating, singing words with his mouth but saying others in his mind. Lord, help me, help me find that girl. Where is she? Show me, God, please.
When Miner got a vision, it was as if, just for a moment, his mind and God’s mind overlapped in the same spot, and he could hear God’s voice in his head like reading bolded words on a printed page. When as a child his gift had become apparent, under the nurturing of the Citadel apostles and Mother Grace in particular, he received and passed on prophetic words, sometimes finding lost things, other times clarifying someone’s choice or making them aware of choices they didn’t know they had. When he became a policeman and prayed for his work, he received ideas that helped solve two killings, a string of bank robberies, and a hot car ring. He prayed now for something, anything, that would keep this latest abduction from becoming a murder. But when the service ended, even though he lingered, praying with some of the elders while Kayleigh gathered up the kids, the vision still hadn’t come.
It was a leaf-trembling, apple-promising kind of day. Miner was strapping his daughter into her car seat when he looked across the parking lot and saw the particular blue of an MSP cruiser parked under the ghetto palms that blocked the noise of 696, a deputy he knew, Sgt. Dakesian, leaning against it. Behind him, cruisers from several other departments were parked: Romulus, Waterford, Macomb County Sheriff’s, cops sipping coffee and talking under the elms. Miner left Kay and the kids for a moment to walk over to them. “Anything?” Dakesian asked. Miner frowned and looked at the asphalt. “Keep trying,” Dakesian urged.
***
Claudia Elmyra, four years old, had been missing for about fourteen hours when somebody recognized her abductor, Claudia’s mother’s boyfriend, on social media. Since then, they’d learned the man was not who he claimed to be, that his real name was Alphonse Tatum, and that he’d done this before in Florida—abused his girlfriend until she tried to leave him, then abducted, and eventually killed, her child. The assumption was that if they didn’t find Claudia alive in 48 hours, they’d find her dead. Squad rooms across the lower third of the state and in neighboring towns across the borders of Ohio and Indiana went on high alert, and the state police quickly convened a task force to coordinate the efforts of various departments and agencies.
Some cops won’t work with psychics. Many will; their attitude is that any lead is helpful, as long as it’s not distracting resources from other, better leads. And besides, there’d been some incredible successes. Madame Luster had a track record of predictions and uncanny clues that dwarfed Miner’s; she’d also been at this longer. But cops liked working with Miner, not just because he was a fellow officer but because his visions, when they came, tended to be straightforward. “The killer was someone close to her,” he might say, “someone that was supposed to protect her.” Or, “I see a blue house on a hill overlooking a river or a creek. Like one of those houses that backs up to Hines Drive, maybe? We’ll find something there that can help us.” Madame Luster’s premonitions were often riddles or confounding phrases. Things like, “Look twice for the man you’re seeking, because he can shed his skin. Fire is under his hand, and death at his back pursues him.” Even when these turned out to be true—that last one referenced a make-up artist emboldened by a terminal illness to shoot a cabaret owner—they were hard to work with.
Madame Luster caught up with Miner halfway through his shift on Saturday, when Claudia Elmyra had been missing about eighteen hours and a cloudy October sky hung over the city like blue blossoms caught in a silver net. She’d left messages for him that he ignored, then tracked him down to where he and his partner were having a late lunch at a gas station on Jefferson. It was hard to tell Madame Luster’s age, although her file put her in her mid-forties. With thick dark hair and heavily made-up eyes and lips, she could have been a crone trying to disguise herself as a maiden, or the reverse. Probably she was pretty under all that subterfuge. An ankle-length, pale purple coat over a dress of similar fabric concealed a womanly figure, and brazen Egyptian jewelry completed the costume. “Has the Holy Spirit given you a vision about this?” she asked. Even Madame Luster’s natural voice was hidden under layers of theater.
Miner looked at her with his careful cop’s eyes and shook his head patiently. “No.”
“I have consulted my sources. The cards tell me this is going to be bad. I had a dream with a medicine bag under my pillow. I saw a serpent writhing in this man’s heart. It has bitten itself and envenomed the venom already in his veins.” That tracked. Alphonse Tatum’s mental health and substance abuse problems were now known to them. “Worse yet, I cast the stalks, and they tell me only one man can stop this. I lit sacred smoke, and it drifted towards you.”
“Madame Luster, I hope you didn’t cut open any pigeons. We’ve talked in the past about how that’s illegal.” She frowned and tried to pierce him with her hooded stare, and he added, “We’re all doing all we can.”
“No. There is more you can do. Only you. Come to my studio. Let me channel your power. There’s too much at stake not to work together on this. I have it plainly. It’s the only thing that will save this girl.”
The radio on Miner’s vest chirped and babbled softly while traffic on Jefferson passed. “Sheri,” he said, using her real name from her file, “we’ve been over this. I’m not interested.”
“That’s because you don’t understand it. Your conception of our faith is too limited.”
“Our faith?”
“I’m a Christian, too, Tim. And Christ followers all over the world, and throughout history, have used these methods to achieve knowledge and avoid doom. An amazing thing about our faith is that as it spread, it absorbed the native practices of wherever it reached, blended them. From tea leaves to Tarot, these things are harmless at worst and life-saving at best. Our own ancestor, King Solomon, saw the wisdom in this and assembled libraries of such lore.”
“We have strong opinions on Solomon where I come from.”
“Even your own people consulted fortune tellers and bog witches, were not averse to using voodoo or shamanism to avert disaster.” My people, he thought. She means rednecks. “If Christ is supreme in your heart, how can there be any danger? I wouldn’t be saying this to you, Tim, if I didn’t think this was a matter of life and death and I knew we could solve it.”
“Listen, Sheri, what you say about the world may be true, but it’s not for me.”
“That’s pride talking.”
“It’s discipline.”
“It’s your church. It’s their interpretation. And it’s the exception, not the rule. What would it hurt to bend, just this once?”
“My word is final, ma’am.”
Another gentle trill on his radio gave Miner an excuse to end the conversation. He reached up to his shoulder, keyed the mic, and tilted it toward his mouth. “This is ten-thirty-six, we’ll have a look.” To Madame Luster, “I gotta go. Good luck.”
He added hopefully, as he turned toward his vehicle, “If you hear of anything, be sure to let Lt. Colonel Novak know.”
“I’ll be praying for you,” Madame Luster said, in what sounded like her actual voice. A desire to contradict her rose in Miner’s chest, but all he said was, “Thanks.”
Later in his shift, as he was coming out of another gas station with some bottles of water and some trail mix for him and his partner, Miner saw on the television playing in the store a news broadcast about the child Alphonse Tatum had killed in Florida. The mother of this girl was on the screen, lamenting the loss of her world and pleading for Tatum to turn himself in, and they showed some pictures of her slain daughter. Miner didn’t need a vision to imagine a knife splitting the screen that showed the child’s face and tiny, branded clothing. He could do that all by himself. It accompanied him, along with Madame Luster’s words, as he and his partner took turns piloting their patrol car down the dusty, desperate streets of their watch, their eyes on every doorway and window.
***
Sunday night. Miner was putting his daughter to bed while his infant son slept on Kayleigh’s chest downstairs; his daughter, who was about the same age as Claudia Elmyra, missing now for 46 hours, maybe dead already. While he coaxed his own child into her night clothes, he couldn’t get out of his thoughts the image of the girl he’d seen on TV yesterday, an image already seared into his brain from the case file they’d been working with the last two feverish days. He tried to keep from imaging the little body under his hands harmed, remembered the way being present for her birth changed him as he could never have anticipated. Remembered, too, the lamentations of the Florida woman on TV. Crowding these thoughts was a vision, but it wasn’t the one he wanted, and he wasn’t sure it was from the Lord. A prophetic sense that Madame Luster was right. That they could find the girl if he let her work her sorcery on him.
When Miner’s grandfather retired from Chrysler, he and his grandma moved back down to Mississippi, but when he died, grandma came back up to live with them in Michigan. His dad fixed up a little mother-in-law apartment for her in the addition on their house, and he remembered grandma pinning newspaper to the wall of the kitchenette as a kind of decoration. “Why newspaper?” he asked. She said it was a silly old thing some Southern folks did to ward off ghosts. “I guess the ghosts are supposed to stop and read the paper and not bother folks.” This was a thoroughly orthodox Baptist woman, whose theology told her there was no pause in a soul’s flight to the afterlife, no lingering, and that anything else causing supernatural malady in a home could get prayed away, rebuked by the power granted a disciple of Christ Jesus. “That ain’t it,” Miner’s dad gently rejoined. “It’s just that newspaper was the only insulation they had for those little company shacks they lived in. They probably made up that thing about ghosts to explain it.” And yet there was a color of blue paint some Southern houses used called “haint blue” that was used to keep spirits away, because they could not cross water, which it resembled. When grandma died, they covered all the mirrors in the house with sheets. Why?
Miner didn’t pretend to understand these things. He thought of himself as a simple beat cop. Yet his two natures nagged at him: the one, to follow the advice of his mentor and eschew all things occult; the other, to acquire every lead and pursue it with all the power of his office. He supposed if he were a lawman in the old days of those Westerns his dad loved, and he were leading a posse like John Wayne or somebody over miles of wilderness in search of a bad guy, he, being himself, would still take advice from some pagan, some “fortune teller or bog witch,” as Madame Luster had put it. Maybe that was a stupid fancy, and he was just trying to find some way to justify what he wanted to do. Under his hand, his daughter’s hair and head, her back as she snuggled into her pillow under the blanket, lay intact and safe. “Go to sleep now,” he urged, and turned out the light.
He wished Mother Grace were still alive to advise him. He thought about asking Kayleigh her opinion, but he had a feeling he knew what that good woman would say. He told her he had to go out, a police errand, not dangerous, and he wouldn’t be long.
***
Forty-eight hours gone. The arbitrary deadline for murder. Madame Luster’s shop was on Grand River in west Detroit, above a row of old, abandoned, once-proud retail buildings that, frankly, made Miner wonder why it wasn’t condemned. But he was standing on her back stairs when the door opened and she stood in a trapezoid of orange light. “I knew you’d come!” she exclaimed. “We’re not so different, you and I. We both want the same things.”
“All I want is to get the girl back. How would we do it? I won’t bow before no false gods or pray any magic spells.”
He followed her up the stairs and through a waiting room indistinguishable from a psychologist’s office except for the choice of foreboding, abstract art and astrological charts on the walls, through a consulting room, cozy, smelling of incense and adorned with plants and exotic statuary, to the living quarters, where the objects of an ordinary life—a hastily made bed strewn with unhung clothing, a plate speckled with bread crumbs and crossed by a knife still sticky with honey—mixed with the artifacts and instruments of Madame Luster’s trade: a model head mapping phrenological territories, a model palm, a stiletto partially sheathed; lexicons and grimoires left open to pages showing ingredients to some potion or other; candles, crystals, glass jars of plant clippings, feathers and scales.
“We’ll use this,” she said, holding up a Y-shaped branch perhaps three feet in overall length. “A divining rod. Your people used it to find water and minerals, so you should have some affinity with it. I’ve invested it with my power. Help me clear this furniture.”
Bewildered, Miner nonetheless obeyed in moving her kitchen table and couch to the edges of the room, allowing her to grasp and roll up the large rug that dominated the wooden floor. There, hand painted by someone, was a large map of the city and many of its surrounding suburbs, not too detailed, the names of major neighborhoods and roads spelled out in a calligraphic hand.
She held out the divining rod to him. “All you have to do is take these two split ends in both your hands, palms up. Hold it out in front of you. Then relax. Pray. Ask God to use you and it as his instrument in finding Claudia. Let it lead you—” she pointed to the map on the floor, “—to the right spot.”
Reluctantly, unenthusiastically, Miner grasped the Y-shape and held it in front of him. “Relax,” she again instructed. “The forces of the earth will pull you to the right place, if it is utilized by a sensitive person.” She took a step back, made the Sign of the Cross, and prayed something in an Arabic dialect.
At first, Miner felt nothing, except a little silly, standing with a stick in his hands over a map of Detroit that was like something you’d see on the wall of a coffee shop, the rectangular city cut in slices by the spokes of the major roads that started from the bottom, ragged where it touched the Detroit River, then up and out, Michigan Avenue to the west, Grand River northwest, Woodward to the north, Gratiot northeast and Jefferson east. His prayer was awkward. “Lord, what am I doing here…?” Then he felt the first pull, almost like a twitch of his arms, natural fatigue from holding the stick, maybe. Not for the first time, Miner changed his mind, but it was pulling him now—or was he pushing it? He felt his stomach and legs joined to it, taking a few steps forward, almost involuntarily. Was there really power in this thing, he wondered, accelerating now, circling the map that covered the floor, the point of the stick gaining momentum, wanting to plunge? And if Miner hadn’t felt himself losing control before, he acknowledged it now as it did plunge, to a spot somewhere on the west side of the map. He had a moment to contemplate the distance from where he stood to where the rod told them Claudia Elmyra was. Then the rod struck the floor and, perhaps because he had been spinning, Miner passed out.
***
He couldn’t have been out for very long. When he came to, he saw Madam Luster standing over him, expectant, concerned. “My phone,” Miner said.
***
Across a short side street from a scrap yard in Dearborn Heights was a row of abandoned shacks, in one of which Alphonse Tatum had been hiding, self-medicating his disintegrating mind with crystal meth and trying to decide who to kill—his ex, her daughter, the next person he saw, himself. A combined force of Dearborn and Detroit police caught up with him that night and made the decision for him by putting bullets through him, and bundled Claudia Elmyra, unharmed except for some blows and chokes she’d received at Tatum’s hands, and malnourishment, and the trauma that would live in her after she had spent two days in hell, into a blanket and a squad car that rushed her to a social worker and Garden City Hospital.
The unexpected good news lit up televisions, radios and social media all over Michigan that Monday morning. From Port Huron to Grand Rapids, from Lansing to Monroe, to Toledo and Fort Wayne, cops and citizens alike celebrated the child’s safe return. But officer Tim Miner, who had not slept, who’d been on the scene when officers emerged from the horror house with Claudia in their arms, who watched more squad cars and crime scene vehicles pull up while the responding officers that had pulled the triggers spoke with their commanding officers and Internal Affairs, who went to the hospital unnecessarily to ascertain the child was in good hands, and who went home to store his sidearm in its locker and sit, motionless and in darkness, at his kitchen table with an untouched bourbon in front of him while Kayleigh and the children slept and dozens of congratulatory texts lit up his phone, felt eerily the absence of something in his mind, like something amputated. A room that had been sealed off. A place he could no longer get back to.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit. His work has appeared in crime, literary and niche publications, including Dark Yonder, Black Cat Weekly, BULL, and elsewhere. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
Author’s Note: “I’m always attempting to tension crime stories with the implications of faith, which sometimes enables me to cross over into speculative or horror territory. In this case, we unfortunately had a real-life crime in Detroit similar to the one depicted that I used for my inspiration, as well as some thoughts about how spiritual gifts could affect sleuthing. But I was glad to be able to depict Southern-American Detroiters. I married into just such a family, and if I got any details wrong, tell my wife—she’ll correct me.”
“The Gift” by Charlie Kondek. Copyright © 2025 by Charlie Kondek.
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One was Mother Grace, his mentor in the gift of prophecy, whom the church folk called Mother because of how much she did with foster kids. She’d always told him never to adulterate the gift. “You got to take what the Holy Spirit gives you and nothing more,” she said. “Look what happened to King Solomon. He thought he could mix in all them other gods, and his kingdom got took as a result. Sometimes the Holy Spirit’s gonna give you what you want. Sometimes not. You just have to accept it.”
The other was Madame Luster, the medium, who sometimes consulted with police. She said, “I can see the power on you, Tim. Real power. But you’re a fool not to let others help you. Like a man that wants to build without tools. I know they’re strict in your denomination, but we could work together if you’d let me. Don’t be so afraid of my methods.”
Hillbilly is a white ethnic group in metro Detroit. Like Germans, Irish, Italians and Poles, Southerners had come to the city for automotive jobs and settled in neighborhoods where others of their kind lived, so much so that people added the suffix “-tucky” to the names of some suburbs: “Hazel-tucky,” “Taylor-tucky.” Kids in these neighborhoods, even to the third generation, could be caught speaking some words with a Midwesternized Mississippi, North Carolina, or Tennessee accent. Miner was just such a man from just such an enclave in Warren, round-shouldered and blue eyed. On Sunday morning, when the Elmyra girl had been gone about 36 hours, he was in the First Citadel of Faith Apostolic Church worshipping and praying to find her. The congregation prayed with him, loud, with music, some laying hands on him, others—including his wife, Kayleigh—speaking in tongues. Miner stood in this sea of believers with his hands out to his sides, palms up to catch the blessings, eyes closed and concentrating, singing words with his mouth but saying others in his mind. Lord, help me, help me find that girl. Where is she? Show me, God, please.
When Miner got a vision, it was as if, just for a moment, his mind and God’s mind overlapped in the same spot, and he could hear God’s voice in his head like reading bolded words on a printed page. When as a child his gift had become apparent, under the nurturing of the Citadel apostles and Mother Grace in particular, he received and passed on prophetic words, sometimes finding lost things, other times clarifying someone’s choice or making them aware of choices they didn’t know they had. When he became a policeman and prayed for his work, he received ideas that helped solve two killings, a string of bank robberies, and a hot car ring. He prayed now for something, anything, that would keep this latest abduction from becoming a murder. But when the service ended, even though he lingered, praying with some of the elders while Kayleigh gathered up the kids, the vision still hadn’t come.
It was a leaf-trembling, apple-promising kind of day. Miner was strapping his daughter into her car seat when he looked across the parking lot and saw the particular blue of an MSP cruiser parked under the ghetto palms that blocked the noise of 696, a deputy he knew, Sgt. Dakesian, leaning against it. Behind him, cruisers from several other departments were parked: Romulus, Waterford, Macomb County Sheriff’s, cops sipping coffee and talking under the elms. Miner left Kay and the kids for a moment to walk over to them. “Anything?” Dakesian asked. Miner frowned and looked at the asphalt. “Keep trying,” Dakesian urged.
Claudia Elmyra, four years old, had been missing for about fourteen hours when somebody recognized her abductor, Claudia’s mother’s boyfriend, on social media. Since then, they’d learned the man was not who he claimed to be, that his real name was Alphonse Tatum, and that he’d done this before in Florida—abused his girlfriend until she tried to leave him, then abducted, and eventually killed, her child. The assumption was that if they didn’t find Claudia alive in 48 hours, they’d find her dead. Squad rooms across the lower third of the state and in neighboring towns across the borders of Ohio and Indiana went on high alert, and the state police quickly convened a task force to coordinate the efforts of various departments and agencies.
Some cops won’t work with psychics. Many will; their attitude is that any lead is helpful, as long as it’s not distracting resources from other, better leads. And besides, there’d been some incredible successes. Madame Luster had a track record of predictions and uncanny clues that dwarfed Miner’s; she’d also been at this longer. But cops liked working with Miner, not just because he was a fellow officer but because his visions, when they came, tended to be straightforward. “The killer was someone close to her,” he might say, “someone that was supposed to protect her.” Or, “I see a blue house on a hill overlooking a river or a creek. Like one of those houses that backs up to Hines Drive, maybe? We’ll find something there that can help us.” Madame Luster’s premonitions were often riddles or confounding phrases. Things like, “Look twice for the man you’re seeking, because he can shed his skin. Fire is under his hand, and death at his back pursues him.” Even when these turned out to be true—that last one referenced a make-up artist emboldened by a terminal illness to shoot a cabaret owner—they were hard to work with.
Madame Luster caught up with Miner halfway through his shift on Saturday, when Claudia Elmyra had been missing about eighteen hours and a cloudy October sky hung over the city like blue blossoms caught in a silver net. She’d left messages for him that he ignored, then tracked him down to where he and his partner were having a late lunch at a gas station on Jefferson. It was hard to tell Madame Luster’s age, although her file put her in her mid-forties. With thick dark hair and heavily made-up eyes and lips, she could have been a crone trying to disguise herself as a maiden, or the reverse. Probably she was pretty under all that subterfuge. An ankle-length, pale purple coat over a dress of similar fabric concealed a womanly figure, and brazen Egyptian jewelry completed the costume. “Has the Holy Spirit given you a vision about this?” she asked. Even Madame Luster’s natural voice was hidden under layers of theater.
Miner looked at her with his careful cop’s eyes and shook his head patiently. “No.”
“I have consulted my sources. The cards tell me this is going to be bad. I had a dream with a medicine bag under my pillow. I saw a serpent writhing in this man’s heart. It has bitten itself and envenomed the venom already in his veins.” That tracked. Alphonse Tatum’s mental health and substance abuse problems were now known to them. “Worse yet, I cast the stalks, and they tell me only one man can stop this. I lit sacred smoke, and it drifted towards you.”
“Madame Luster, I hope you didn’t cut open any pigeons. We’ve talked in the past about how that’s illegal.” She frowned and tried to pierce him with her hooded stare, and he added, “We’re all doing all we can.”
“No. There is more you can do. Only you. Come to my studio. Let me channel your power. There’s too much at stake not to work together on this. I have it plainly. It’s the only thing that will save this girl.”
The radio on Miner’s vest chirped and babbled softly while traffic on Jefferson passed. “Sheri,” he said, using her real name from her file, “we’ve been over this. I’m not interested.”
“That’s because you don’t understand it. Your conception of our faith is too limited.”
“Our faith?”
“I’m a Christian, too, Tim. And Christ followers all over the world, and throughout history, have used these methods to achieve knowledge and avoid doom. An amazing thing about our faith is that as it spread, it absorbed the native practices of wherever it reached, blended them. From tea leaves to Tarot, these things are harmless at worst and life-saving at best. Our own ancestor, King Solomon, saw the wisdom in this and assembled libraries of such lore.”
“We have strong opinions on Solomon where I come from.”
“Even your own people consulted fortune tellers and bog witches, were not averse to using voodoo or shamanism to avert disaster.” My people, he thought. She means rednecks. “If Christ is supreme in your heart, how can there be any danger? I wouldn’t be saying this to you, Tim, if I didn’t think this was a matter of life and death and I knew we could solve it.”
“Listen, Sheri, what you say about the world may be true, but it’s not for me.”
“That’s pride talking.”
“It’s discipline.”
“It’s your church. It’s their interpretation. And it’s the exception, not the rule. What would it hurt to bend, just this once?”
“My word is final, ma’am.”
Another gentle trill on his radio gave Miner an excuse to end the conversation. He reached up to his shoulder, keyed the mic, and tilted it toward his mouth. “This is ten-thirty-six, we’ll have a look.” To Madame Luster, “I gotta go. Good luck.”
He added hopefully, as he turned toward his vehicle, “If you hear of anything, be sure to let Lt. Colonel Novak know.”
“I’ll be praying for you,” Madame Luster said, in what sounded like her actual voice. A desire to contradict her rose in Miner’s chest, but all he said was, “Thanks.”
Later in his shift, as he was coming out of another gas station with some bottles of water and some trail mix for him and his partner, Miner saw on the television playing in the store a news broadcast about the child Alphonse Tatum had killed in Florida. The mother of this girl was on the screen, lamenting the loss of her world and pleading for Tatum to turn himself in, and they showed some pictures of her slain daughter. Miner didn’t need a vision to imagine a knife splitting the screen that showed the child’s face and tiny, branded clothing. He could do that all by himself. It accompanied him, along with Madame Luster’s words, as he and his partner took turns piloting their patrol car down the dusty, desperate streets of their watch, their eyes on every doorway and window.
Sunday night. Miner was putting his daughter to bed while his infant son slept on Kayleigh’s chest downstairs; his daughter, who was about the same age as Claudia Elmyra, missing now for 46 hours, maybe dead already. While he coaxed his own child into her night clothes, he couldn’t get out of his thoughts the image of the girl he’d seen on TV yesterday, an image already seared into his brain from the case file they’d been working with the last two feverish days. He tried to keep from imaging the little body under his hands harmed, remembered the way being present for her birth changed him as he could never have anticipated. Remembered, too, the lamentations of the Florida woman on TV. Crowding these thoughts was a vision, but it wasn’t the one he wanted, and he wasn’t sure it was from the Lord. A prophetic sense that Madame Luster was right. That they could find the girl if he let her work her sorcery on him.
When Miner’s grandfather retired from Chrysler, he and his grandma moved back down to Mississippi, but when he died, grandma came back up to live with them in Michigan. His dad fixed up a little mother-in-law apartment for her in the addition on their house, and he remembered grandma pinning newspaper to the wall of the kitchenette as a kind of decoration. “Why newspaper?” he asked. She said it was a silly old thing some Southern folks did to ward off ghosts. “I guess the ghosts are supposed to stop and read the paper and not bother folks.” This was a thoroughly orthodox Baptist woman, whose theology told her there was no pause in a soul’s flight to the afterlife, no lingering, and that anything else causing supernatural malady in a home could get prayed away, rebuked by the power granted a disciple of Christ Jesus. “That ain’t it,” Miner’s dad gently rejoined. “It’s just that newspaper was the only insulation they had for those little company shacks they lived in. They probably made up that thing about ghosts to explain it.” And yet there was a color of blue paint some Southern houses used called “haint blue” that was used to keep spirits away, because they could not cross water, which it resembled. When grandma died, they covered all the mirrors in the house with sheets. Why?
Miner didn’t pretend to understand these things. He thought of himself as a simple beat cop. Yet his two natures nagged at him: the one, to follow the advice of his mentor and eschew all things occult; the other, to acquire every lead and pursue it with all the power of his office. He supposed if he were a lawman in the old days of those Westerns his dad loved, and he were leading a posse like John Wayne or somebody over miles of wilderness in search of a bad guy, he, being himself, would still take advice from some pagan, some “fortune teller or bog witch,” as Madame Luster had put it. Maybe that was a stupid fancy, and he was just trying to find some way to justify what he wanted to do. Under his hand, his daughter’s hair and head, her back as she snuggled into her pillow under the blanket, lay intact and safe. “Go to sleep now,” he urged, and turned out the light.
He wished Mother Grace were still alive to advise him. He thought about asking Kayleigh her opinion, but he had a feeling he knew what that good woman would say. He told her he had to go out, a police errand, not dangerous, and he wouldn’t be long.
Forty-eight hours gone. The arbitrary deadline for murder. Madame Luster’s shop was on Grand River in west Detroit, above a row of old, abandoned, once-proud retail buildings that, frankly, made Miner wonder why it wasn’t condemned. But he was standing on her back stairs when the door opened and she stood in a trapezoid of orange light. “I knew you’d come!” she exclaimed. “We’re not so different, you and I. We both want the same things.”
“All I want is to get the girl back. How would we do it? I won’t bow before no false gods or pray any magic spells.”
He followed her up the stairs and through a waiting room indistinguishable from a psychologist’s office except for the choice of foreboding, abstract art and astrological charts on the walls, through a consulting room, cozy, smelling of incense and adorned with plants and exotic statuary, to the living quarters, where the objects of an ordinary life—a hastily made bed strewn with unhung clothing, a plate speckled with bread crumbs and crossed by a knife still sticky with honey—mixed with the artifacts and instruments of Madame Luster’s trade: a model head mapping phrenological territories, a model palm, a stiletto partially sheathed; lexicons and grimoires left open to pages showing ingredients to some potion or other; candles, crystals, glass jars of plant clippings, feathers and scales.
“We’ll use this,” she said, holding up a Y-shaped branch perhaps three feet in overall length. “A divining rod. Your people used it to find water and minerals, so you should have some affinity with it. I’ve invested it with my power. Help me clear this furniture.”
Bewildered, Miner nonetheless obeyed in moving her kitchen table and couch to the edges of the room, allowing her to grasp and roll up the large rug that dominated the wooden floor. There, hand painted by someone, was a large map of the city and many of its surrounding suburbs, not too detailed, the names of major neighborhoods and roads spelled out in a calligraphic hand.
She held out the divining rod to him. “All you have to do is take these two split ends in both your hands, palms up. Hold it out in front of you. Then relax. Pray. Ask God to use you and it as his instrument in finding Claudia. Let it lead you—” she pointed to the map on the floor, “—to the right spot.”
Reluctantly, unenthusiastically, Miner grasped the Y-shape and held it in front of him. “Relax,” she again instructed. “The forces of the earth will pull you to the right place, if it is utilized by a sensitive person.” She took a step back, made the Sign of the Cross, and prayed something in an Arabic dialect.
At first, Miner felt nothing, except a little silly, standing with a stick in his hands over a map of Detroit that was like something you’d see on the wall of a coffee shop, the rectangular city cut in slices by the spokes of the major roads that started from the bottom, ragged where it touched the Detroit River, then up and out, Michigan Avenue to the west, Grand River northwest, Woodward to the north, Gratiot northeast and Jefferson east. His prayer was awkward. “Lord, what am I doing here…?” Then he felt the first pull, almost like a twitch of his arms, natural fatigue from holding the stick, maybe. Not for the first time, Miner changed his mind, but it was pulling him now—or was he pushing it? He felt his stomach and legs joined to it, taking a few steps forward, almost involuntarily. Was there really power in this thing, he wondered, accelerating now, circling the map that covered the floor, the point of the stick gaining momentum, wanting to plunge? And if Miner hadn’t felt himself losing control before, he acknowledged it now as it did plunge, to a spot somewhere on the west side of the map. He had a moment to contemplate the distance from where he stood to where the rod told them Claudia Elmyra was. Then the rod struck the floor and, perhaps because he had been spinning, Miner passed out.
He couldn’t have been out for very long. When he came to, he saw Madam Luster standing over him, expectant, concerned. “My phone,” Miner said.
Across a short side street from a scrap yard in Dearborn Heights was a row of abandoned shacks, in one of which Alphonse Tatum had been hiding, self-medicating his disintegrating mind with crystal meth and trying to decide who to kill—his ex, her daughter, the next person he saw, himself. A combined force of Dearborn and Detroit police caught up with him that night and made the decision for him by putting bullets through him, and bundled Claudia Elmyra, unharmed except for some blows and chokes she’d received at Tatum’s hands, and malnourishment, and the trauma that would live in her after she had spent two days in hell, into a blanket and a squad car that rushed her to a social worker and Garden City Hospital.
The unexpected good news lit up televisions, radios and social media all over Michigan that Monday morning. From Port Huron to Grand Rapids, from Lansing to Monroe, to Toledo and Fort Wayne, cops and citizens alike celebrated the child’s safe return. But officer Tim Miner, who had not slept, who’d been on the scene when officers emerged from the horror house with Claudia in their arms, who watched more squad cars and crime scene vehicles pull up while the responding officers that had pulled the triggers spoke with their commanding officers and Internal Affairs, who went to the hospital unnecessarily to ascertain the child was in good hands, and who went home to store his sidearm in its locker and sit, motionless and in darkness, at his kitchen table with an untouched bourbon in front of him while Kayleigh and the children slept and dozens of congratulatory texts lit up his phone, felt eerily the absence of something in his mind, like something amputated. A room that had been sealed off. A place he could no longer get back to.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit. His work has appeared in crime, literary and niche publications, including Dark Yonder, Black Cat Weekly, BULL, and elsewhere. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
Author’s Note: “I’m always attempting to tension crime stories with the implications of faith, which sometimes enables me to cross over into speculative or horror territory. In this case, we unfortunately had a real-life crime in Detroit similar to the one depicted that I used for my inspiration, as well as some thoughts about how spiritual gifts could affect sleuthing. But I was glad to be able to depict Southern-American Detroiters. I married into just such a family, and if I got any details wrong, tell my wife—she’ll correct me.”
“The Gift” by Charlie Kondek. Copyright © 2025 by Charlie Kondek.
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