Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) (3 page)

Three

The thing was, Keisha usually worked alone.

Okay, sometimes she’d have her boyfriend Kirk on standby to take a phone call if necessary, to provide a testimonial to a skeptical prospective client. But other than that, she liked to run her own show. The way you maintained control was to handle all the details yourself.

Bringing someone else into the mix, particularly someone without much experience, was risky. But there hadn’t been much money coming in lately, what with Kirk not back to work, Keisha’s car needing all new tires—she’d been running on three bald ones for months—and Matthew having to have those couple of teeth pulled. Keisha didn’t have the luxury of being picky these days, and besides, she figured Justin Wilcox had as much to lose as she did—maybe even more—by screwing up this con on his mother and stepfather.

She had to admit, the kid was good. He not only conceived the whole thing, but pulled off his part without a hitch. He’d heard about Keisha from one of his old high school English teachers, Terry Archer, who had been persuaded to tell the class some of the details of what had happened to his wife, Cynthia, whose family had disappeared when she was only fourteen, and whose fate had been unknown for twenty-five years.

It was big news at the time, when they found out what had actually happened. The story even made CNN. Archer had told his students that an incident like that, it brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork, which led him to tell them about the Milford psychic who’d claimed to know what had happened to Cynthia’s family. How she watched the news, hunted for people who were desperate for information about missing loved ones, then swooped in and offered to help bring them all together again. Once they’d coughed up a thousand bucks, of course.

Keisha certainly remembered Terry Archer. It would have been hard to forget him. She hadn’t liked him one little bit, or the wife, either. Not during her first visit with the Archers, at the TV station, where they were going to do a story on Keisha’s amazing vision, or her second visit, to the Archers’ home, when they literally threw her out on her ass.

You try to help people.
No good deed goes unpunished, her mother used to say.

Justin told her Archer’s experience had stayed with him, even though it had been four years since he’d heard it. His new stepfather, Dwayne, was a total sucker for this stuff, it turned out. He believed some people really possessed this ability, to sense things that others could not. He even watched repeats of
Ghost Whisperer
, which drove his mother crazy. Marcia said she could probably get the dead to communicate with her too, if she wandered around all the time in low-cut halter dresses like Jennifer Love What’s-her-face.

“There are some things,” Dwayne had evidently told his wife, “that we aren’t meant to understand.”

Justin told Keisha that was about the time the idea started forming in his head. What really helped spur it along was that his mother had cut him off financially. She used to give him, right off the top, fifty dollars a week, no questions asked, but how far did that go, really? You couldn’t even do one night on the town for fifty bucks. How were you supposed to buy your beer and your weed and maybe something a little stronger, and something to eat on top of that? He tried to tell his mother, without actually mentioning the beer and the weed, that fifty bucks might have been a year’s salary when she was a little girl riding around in a rumble seat, but these days you couldn’t even put half a tank of gas in the car for that.

Then get a job, Marcia told him.

So that was how she was going to play it.

For a while, he managed to wheedle a hundred here, a hundred there, out of her. One time, he said he was debating whether to go back to school, which brought a smile to his mother’s face. He had dropped out of UConn after the first semester. Loved the partying, but found the going-to-classes thing very intrusive. He told her he’d gotten his head back on straight, and was thinking about enrolling in a business school in Manhattan. There were several he wanted to check out. It was time to learn something
practical
, not all this airy-fairy shit they taught at university. That was music to his mother’s ears. So he needed train and cab fare, and he might need to stay over one night. She gave him four hundred. Just like that. He never got on the train, but he did attend a fabulous party in New Haven and passed out on a Yale buddy’s floor. Another time, after telling his mother he’d decided against school, but was going to get a job instead, he said he needed new clothes for interviews. He pocketed the cash she gave him, but stole a few things from a Gap so he’d have proof of a shopping trip.

Marcia asked him to model his new tops for her. When he pulled them on, he realized everything he’d stolen was a small, and he needed a large because he was six feet tall. No problem, his mother said. She asked for the receipt. She’d exchange the items for the right size next time she was at the mall.

No big deal, he said. He’d do it.

But she insisted.

Lost the receipt, Justin said.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what he’d done. That was when she cut him off completely. Even the fifty bucks.

Zero cash flow.

He didn’t have any qualms about lifting a few things from the Gap, but he wasn’t about to start robbing banks. A little too risky. Justin needed a way to get money out of his mother and stepfather, because when you were ripping off your family, it wasn’t like you were actually stealing.

But you had to be creative.

Which was when he found Keisha Ceylon online, got her number, and got in touch. Face to face, he made his pitch. It was pretty simple.

“I vanish. They bring you in. You find me. They pay you. We split it.”

Keisha saw a hundred things wrong with the idea. “Suppose they don’t want to hire me. I show up, they slam the door in my face.”

“You’re not going to call
them
. They’ll call
you
. Or Dwayne—that’s my mom’s new husband—will. See, my mom, she’s not going to be in a hurry to call the cops, ’cause she’ll figure the reason I haven’t come home is I’ve done something really bad, like stolen a DVD at Best Buy or broken a cop car window or bitten the head off a squirrel. If she calls the cops and they find me, I’ll just be in even more trouble, and when I’m in trouble, that means more aggravation for her.” He grinned. “But Dwayne, he’s totally into the kind of shit you do, no offence intended.”

Keisha said nothing.

Justin continued. “I’ll plant the seed. Next time we’re watching
Ghost Whisperer
. I’ll tell him, hey, there’s a lady right here in Milford, does this kind of thing all the time. I’ll tell him about when my teacher was talking all about you.”

“Terry Archer.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t exactly have an endorsement from him on my website.” The truth was, all the endorsements on her website had been made up.

“I won’t tell Dwayne that part. But I’ll send him a link to the website, so when I vanish, he’ll know just how to find you. Who knows, he might even call you
before
we do this thing. Because he says he hears from his dead mother every now and then. He’s a pretty nice guy, but he is a bit of a whack job. Do you believe that stuff? That you can get in touch with the dead and talk to them?”

She knew there wasn’t much point in bullshitting with this kid, but it was hard for her to admit outright that what she did was all a crock. “Well . . .”

He grinned. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too. Anyway, when I disappear, Dwayne’ll remember that link I sent him.”

Keisha shook her head. “He might not take the bait. He might never call me.”

“Okay, well, I think you’re wrong there, but the worst thing that could happen is I have to come back and think of some
other
way to get money out of them. But if he goes for it, and he calls you, then you text me, tell me it’s on. No, wait, there’s records of that shit. I’ll check in with you from pay phones.”

She thought about it. “There’s another problem.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s not enough money in it. I usually charge people a thousand. This is a lot of trouble to go to split that much money.”

Justin flashed her a pitying smile. “You aim too low. Dwayne, and my mom, they’ve both got money. They’d be insulted to be ripped off for only a thousand. You could charge them at least five.”

If she went fifty-fifty with the kid, that was a fast twenty-five hundred, tax free, because this was definitely a cash-under-the-table kind of transaction. Not bad for what would be a day’s work, when all was said and done. It was hard to say no to a job this straightforward, even if it did mean taking on a partner. And it wasn’t like there were people going missing every day to whose families she could offer her special talents.

A girl had to make a living. If something didn’t come along soon, she’d be back to cleaning houses, and she did not want to start dealing again with rich, bitchy, mid-cleanse Darien housewives who had coronaries when they came home and found a soggy Cheerio in the drain basket.

Maybe it was the recession, but Keisha’d been seeing fewer clients lately for many of the services she offered. She read palms, told fortunes, organized psychic reunions. She’d throw in a little astrology if that was what floated their boat. The thing was, as long as you had a good imagination, there really was nothing to it. All you had to do was make it up.

Years ago, Keisha cleaned for a woman—not one of those Darien housewife types, but a nice lady—who’d once worked on the copy desk of a newspaper out west. Three weeks of their syndicated astrology column went missing in the mail so she cranked it out herself, off the top of her head. “Take the second bus, not the first. A good day for investing in friendship. A simple act of kindness will reap great rewards.” How hard was it, really? The paper even got a few phone calls, that the horoscopes of late had been really dead-on, good stuff. Keisha figured if this lady could do it, what was to stop her?

At least Keisha had a few regulars, like Penny, the eighty-two-year-old totally batshit lady she went to visit every week so the old woman could talk to the child she aborted when she was seventeen. Handed over a hundred bucks every time because Keisha told her just what she wanted to hear: “Your unborn child forgives you, she’s even grateful. This is not a world she wanted to be brought up in.”

And there was Chad, the gay guy who ran a health-food store in Bridgeport and wanted his palm read whenever he was about to start a new relationship, which was often. Or Gail, one of her most needy, and well-heeled, clients, who believed she was, in an earlier life, either an Egyptian queen, Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, or Joan of Arc. She managed at least a visit every two weeks, and would have been in even more often if husband Jerry hadn’t been clamping down on her nutbar spending.

Still, it was all barely enough to pay the bills, especially when her live-in boyfriend Kirk wasn’t able to do much work since he dropped a cinder block on his foot five months ago when he had that part-time job with Garber Contracting. The foot was close to healed. Kirk wasn’t limping all that much now except when he wanted to get out of doing something, like taking out the trash, or shoveling the driveway when there was enough snow that Keisha was probably going to get stuck.

He hadn’t always been this way.

Okay, she had to admit, he’d never been a genius. He wasn’t the sharpest tooth in the rotary saw. He didn’t get a lot of jokes, unless they involved boobs, and once asked how they got the bones out of boneless chicken wings. But Kirk seemed like a good guy when she met him thirteen months ago. She was coming out of Penny’s house after telling her that her aborted child, had she lived and grown to adulthood, would have ended up in a very unhappy marriage, and saw that her front right tire was flat. She’d never had a flat tire before. She’d had cars
stolen
before, but never a flat. Keisha didn’t know if there was a spare in the trunk, and even if there was, she didn’t have the first clue how to put it on. She stared at that tire the way she used to stare at formulas scribbled on the blackboard in high school chemistry class.

She didn’t have money to call a tow truck. Well, she had Penny’s hundred, but she needed that for groceries, and the rent, which was overdue. That was probably why she started to cry.

Across the street, a construction company was replacing a rotting porch on one of Milford’s century-old homes. One of the workers cutting some boards for the decking noticed Keisha’s plight, took his finger off the trigger of the saw, and strolled over.

Introduced himself as Kirk Nicholson.

Kirk looked in the trunk and found no spare. But there was a jack, which he used to get the flat off the car. He said his boss, a nice guy named Glen, would probably let him take his lunch break early. He’d take the flat over to the nearby Firestone store in his 2003 Ford F-150—how he kept it so immaculate when it was a working vehicle amazed Keisha—so she could get a new tire put on the rim. He knew a guy there, could give her a deal, wholesale price. Shouldn’t take that long. Then he’d give her a lift back and put the tire on for her.

That’s the way it happened.

While they were waiting at the Firestone store, Keisha learned that Kirk’s mother, who raised him on her own, had died recently of a heart attack. He had no brothers or sisters. He told her about Glen, the man he was working for, whose wife Sheila had died in a bad car accident, and how he was raising their daughter on his own. Then he talked about his truck, that he’d got a great deal on it, he’d done a number of repairs on it himself, and was saving up to buy some high-end rims for it.

Keisha was more interested in learning whether he was seeing anyone. She asked him something really clever, like “Does your girlfriend like your truck?” At which point he said he wasn’t seeing anybody right now. He was patient, and courteous, and never put a move on her once. When he was done putting the new tire on her car and had the jack stored back in the trunk, Keisha blurted out that he was welcome to come over for dinner.