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It is important to understand that if the wife of a dead hunter does not want to be found, she cannot be found. Jake discovers this quickly in regard to his search for Ellen Harvelle. Her name is nowhere to be found on the internet, let alone the yellow pages. He tries very hard not to use magic until he has no choice but to do so.
Jake has a hard time rationalizing his decisions since he crawled out of his shallow grave, so hear this. He cannot find his sister or his mother until he is clean of guilt. Granted, he will always feel guilty and he is mostly tugging at the hope that a sincere apology to Ellen Harvelle will rid him of the hole in his chest. It will not work. After his apology, he thinks he will look for Sam Winchester. Despite them killing each other, they shared a brief moment of camaraderie in Cold Oak. They understand each other. In a twisted sort of way, they could be brothers. Jake was willing to learn from him back then, years ago. Perhaps, Jake hopes once more, Sam Winchester will answer his questions.
Legally, Jake Talley is a dead man whose body has gone missing across and far beyond the Atlantic. Legally, Jake is homeless as of now with not twenty dollars to his name. And if it’s not for nothing, Jake will more than likely be stopped by the police for driving a stolen car belonging to an elderly woman by the name of Rebecca Adams.
He is driving to meet a psychic. The newspaper called her Pamela Barnes, and the forums online noted that she was helpful if not a bit disorganized and blunt. It would work for him. Blunt was what he needed. Jake Talley rose from the dead with a yellow eyed demon’s blood no longer coursing through him. He could not help the question eating at his insides of what could bring him back so clean.
He does not know of Pamela Barnes in the slightest, nor her latest run in with any of Azazel’s children. She is newly blind, and angry about it. It is nothing but an awful coincidence that she is the only psychic that has ever been deemed legitimate within six hundred miles of Fossil Butte Cemetery.
It’s a short drive from his grave in Wyoming to Chamberlain, South Dakota. At least, this is the shortest distance Jake will spend driving a stolen car for some time. The sun is unforgiving, and the sky is a cartoon image of blue. Cloudless and empty, only brightened by the half-dead miles of bluegrass he’s sped past on the highway. He thinks about Iman during most of it. He wonders if she knew he was dead at all, in the two years since they’d last spoken to each other. He considers the likelihood of Iman looking for him, and promptly decides that she wouldn’t be so stupid. This is, of course, wrong.
Jake stops at a gas station and decides it would be best to leave the car here. The station was old and ugly, and the only people inside of it were three white men with expressions not unsimilar to ones his captains once wore. He is clad in the clothing he was shot in the back in, and while the blood is gone, the holes are hopelessly prominent. Still, he needed something to eat, and he needed to get past one more town to reach Pamela Barnes.
He shuts the car door and enters the gas station cautiously, not saying anything but offering a short nod greeting the loitering customers. They respond with uniform looks of scrutiny, and Jake makes his way over to the store’s small selection of clothing. The souvenir T-shirts were sold for five dollars a piece, and Jake takes one that read: South Dakota—Rush, More! in bold lettering. It was a startling shade of purple, one that his sister would no doubt tease him relentlessly for.
He browses the store and tries not to turn around at three pairs of eyes boring into the back of his head from the register. During this time, he picks up a turkey bacon breakfast sandwich and a bottle of water. When he places his items on the counter top, he hands the cashier three crumpled five dollar bills and hopes that he does not ask him anything.
“Just going through town?” The cashier asks him. The nametag had Greg scribbled on it with the stroke of perhaps a kindergartner. He is a middle-aged man with brown hair, pale skin, and a couple of missing teeth. He is wiry and small, but this does not stop his shameless bravado. “Haven’t seen you before.”
“Yeah,” Jake responds, his voice hoarse from not being used in years. “Just visiting family out east.”
Greg the cashier nods, and he doesn’t believe him. He is taking his time scanning the items. “What’d you say your name was, boy?”
Jake is not unused to being called ‘boy.’ He was, after all, a black soldier. He is offended, but Jake takes pride in his poker face. “Mike,” he tells him, and the lie slips easily enough off his tongue.
“I wanna know more about the holes in your back there, Mike,” Greg tells him before taking his bills. He stares at Jake hardly, and he spits his name with an angry sort of vehemence.
Here is another important thing to note: Jake is a poor liar, generally. He cannot come up with stories on the spot to sing to strangers, and he stutters. It’s a pitiful thing to watch. “Just needed something to wear,” he says. He could have said anything else. Paintball, or a fashion-school thing, or unravel some long-winded story that Greg the cashier would not be able to wrap his mind around. Even less sure of himself, he adds: “It’s old.”
Greg does not respond, and Jake leaves the store before he gets his change back. He decides against leaving the red Honda at the gas station, and speeds out of the driveway a moment after he hurriedly changes into his new shirt. It is scratchy and not as long on him as he would prefer, but he is a man out of options, and Greg has just called the police. The cashier laughs with the men in the store as he rattles off Rebecca Adams’ license plate numbers.
As it happens, Jake makes it to Pamela Barnes’ small home before the sun sets. He is freshly fed, somewhat hydrated, and still smells of smoke and pinewood from the cemetery in Wyoming he died in. He has nothing in his hands, and no payment to give to the psychic. He knows what he looks like: tall and dark and broad and disheveled, a haircut cropped close to his head and patches of stubble appearing on the lower hemisphere of his face. Before he leaves the car, he reaches for his jacket and is only a little disheartened when he remembers that he cannot walk into a stranger’s house with a jacket littered with bullet holes.
Her door is open before he raises a fist to knock, and a small young woman with fully white eyes opens the door. “Good afternoon,” she greets him with a coltish smile. “Right back into the fishbowl with you then, I’m guessing.”
“Hi,” Jake replies. He wonders if she’s able to see his eyebrows meet in confusion. Then again, he supposes, she is a psychic. A good one, at that. “Can you help me?”
She moves to open the door further, and Jake can smell the incense burning in the dimly lit home. There’s scorch marks on a chestnut coffee table, and mismatched curtains decorating the windows. When he enters, she shuts and locks the door, and her eyes without pupils follow him to the center of the room. She sits down, and he doesn’t.
“Yakoub Talley,” she says aloud, rolling the sound of his first name in her mouth. It’s an unfamiliar name to her, the harshness of the vowels following the ‘k’ sounding harsh and stilted. In every way he could deduct, she butchered his name. When he doesn’t respond, she tilts her head to the side. “Well that’s you, isn’t it?”
It is. You see, Jakob is the name his father wrote hurriedly on the forms the doctor sent into the hospital room following his birth twenty five years ago, but his mother would only call him Yakoub. Your name is a prophet’s name, she told him. His father would walk into the kitchen and sigh: Jacob and Yakoub were the same people. It was his mother’s earnestness when she gripped his hands and told him to repeat his name at eight years old that cemented the fact into his head.
His mother was less willing to let his father decide on the name they’d give their daughter. Iman was an unabashedly Muslim name, and Samira was an unabashedly Muslim woman.
“Yeah,” Jake nods, and he sits down across from her. Pamela smiles at the sound of the chair pulling out, and Jake’s bouncing knee lightly brushes the smooth underside of the table. “Everyone calls me Jake.”
“Okay, Jake,” Pamela replies easily. “What do you need my help with?”
“I thought you were a psychic,” Jake says.
“I am,” she responds, blithe. “That doesn’t mean you don’t get to use your words.”
Jake’s hands are open on his lap, his dirtied palms staring at him. He hadn’t considered what to ask of her. He wanted too much. He wanted to know who brought him back, and why, and what happened after Cold Oak. He wanted to know how Sam Winchester killed him after a clean cut through his spine. He wanted to know if Hell was real or if he’d hallucinated a sort of religious persecution for himself. He wanted to know where Ellen Harvelle was, or if he had any right to ask for her forgiveness. He wanted to know if his sister was okay, if his mom was still sick.
Still, Jake is a practical person, so he has to lay his cards down before asking such things. “I don’t have any money.”
“I know,” Pamela nods thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t think you would have any.”
“Will you help me even if I can’t pay you?” Jake asks her.
“You’ll pay me,” Pamela decides firmly. “Not today. But you will, at some point.”
Jake’s eyebrows are furrowed at the center of his head. “Okay.”
Pamela nods again. “Ellen Harvelle?”
“I can’t find her,” Jake says. “I don’t even know where to look.”
A smile plays on the psychic’s lips. She knows that Jake will not be forgiven by Ellen Harvelle, but she also knows he is honest of his intentions. Reading a person’s mind is tricky work, one that often will take strength from her as quickly as she tells them. With Jake Talley, his intentions and the words lining at his tongue seem to cloud over him. He reads something like a newspaper. Headlines and all.
“Well, she’s good at hiding,” Pamela tells him. “What makes you think she’ll want to speak with you? After what you did?”
“I don’t know if she will,” Jake says, guilt hanging over his head like the branch of a willow. “I want to explain it to her. That if I didn’t do what he told me to, my family would die. I’m sure she has a family too. She might understand.”
“It’s a selfish thing,” Pamela sighs. “You apologizing to her and hope that it makes your conscience clear enough to move on. It would be about you, and not her.”
Jake fights the urge to scoff and walk away. What anchors him is that he has nowhere to go, and nothing he’s learned. “If you say so,” he mutters, and he rubs a hand over his face. He can almost feel the depth of his eye bags, the dryness in his eyes after looking out of a bright windshield for so long. “She should know, is all.”
“That’s all, huh?” Pamela laughs a bit. It’s a melodic laugh, but not untouched with bitterness. “I’ll tell you where to find her, Jake. But only if you promise not to ask anything more from her.”
Jake nods solemnly, but he knows he’s lying, and Pamela knows it too.
Pamela sends him off with a change of clothes that fit a little better than the T-shirt tight around his arms and riding up his torso. Her cloudy eyes watch him drive off towards Minnesota. They do not meet again, not in person, but Pamela decides she likes Jake Talley. It is a feat for her to like someone when they are unable to hide all that they are, but she cannot help but to hope Ellen Harvelle forgives him, even if she is sure she will not.