Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) (7 page)

Nine

While Keisha was waiting to see whether he’d take the bait, thereby giving her a chance to reel him in, she was thinking about her starting point. Cast a wide net to begin with, then narrow the focus. Why not start with the weather?

It was winter, after all.
Everybody
was cold. Wherever Ellie Garfield was, it only stood to reason she’d be feeling chilled. Okay, maybe that wasn’t true. The night she disappeared, she could have steered her car south and headed straight to Florida. She could have been there in a day, and by now might be working on a pretty decent tan.

“What do you mean, cold?” Garfield asked. For the first time since she’d gotten here, he seemed intrigued. Drawn in.

“Just what I said. She’s very cold. Did she take a jacket with her when she left Thursday night?”

“A jacket? Of course she’d have taken a jacket. She wouldn’t have left the house without a jacket. Not this time of year.”

Keisha nodded. “I’m still picking up that she’s cold. Not just, you know, a little bit cold. I mean chilled to the bone. Maybe it wasn’t a warm enough coat. Or maybe . . . maybe she lost her coat?”

“I don’t see how. All you have to do is look outside and know you’re going to need your coat. There’s three inches of snow out there, for God’s sake.” He sank back into the couch, looking annoyed. “I don’t see how this is very helpful.”

“I can come back to it,” she said. “Maybe, as I start picking up other things, the part about her being cold will take on more meaning.”

“I thought you had a vision. Why don’t you just tell me what the vision was instead of rubbing your hands all over my wife’s robe?”

“Please, Mr. Garfield, it’s not as though my vision is an episode of
Seinfeld
and I can just tell you what I watched. There are flashes, images. It’s a little like dumping a shoebox full of snapshots onto a table. They’re in a jumble, no particular order. What I’m trying to do, it’s like sorting those pictures. Sitting here, now, in your wife’s home, holding something that touched her, I can start assembling those images, like a jigsaw puzzle.”

“You’re pulling a fast one here. I think—”

“Melissa.”

“What?”

“Something about Melissa.”

“What about her?”

“There are these flashes, of your daughter. And she’s crying. She’s very upset.”

“Of course she’s upset. Her mother’s missing.”

“But even before. She’s very troubled, Melissa is.”

“I already told you as much. She’s been a difficult kid. She moved out at sixteen, and now she’s knocked up. She’s troubled. Brilliant deduction.”

“There’s more,” Keisha said.

Garfield leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees. Really interested. Keisha liked what she was seeing. Another couple of tugs and the hook would be well set into that cheek of his. And all she’d really done so far was tell him things he already knew, things everyone knew. It was winter. He had a pregnant daughter. Her mother was missing. Who wouldn’t be upset? In another minute or so she’d get to the next stunningly obvious thing—the car. But first, tease him with the daughter a little longer.

“What do you mean, more?”

“Something about the baby . . .”

“What about the baby?”

“Tell me about the father,” Keisha said. Turning it around, letting him do some of the work, and feeding her a few more nuggets to work with at the same time.

“Lester Cody,” Wendell Garfield said, shaking his head in frustration. “A dentist, makes more than twice what I do, drives a Lexus, a pretty damn good catch for Melissa if she’d only wake up and realize it. But guess what? She’s not in
love
with him. Yeah, he’s about seventy pounds overweight and’ll probably have a heart attack before he’s forty, but in the mean time, she could make a life with him.” He pointed a finger at Keisha. “There’s more to marriage than love. That’s important in the beginning, but after a while, it’s the daily stuff you have to get through. And Melissa’s going to have a lot of that, raising a baby. She needs that man’s support. Financial and emotional.”

“And how does Ellie feel about all this?”

He blinked. “She, uh, she feels the same way. I mean, at first she was upset because he’s so much older, but you balance everything out and Melissa could do a lot worse. Like that guy at the Cinnabon. Give me a break.”

“Have Ellie and this Mr. Cody . . . has there been some kind of confrontation between the two of them? I’m seeing flashes, some arguments.”

Flashes, yeah, that was good. Keisha knew that if she had a daughter who’d been knocked up and didn’t want to marry the father, she’d be trying to talk some sense into her, unless the guy was a total asshole. But a dentist? What they made? What the hell was wrong with this girl? Keisha’d probably take the guy aside, give him some tips on how to win the girl over.

It was reasonable to assume Eleanor Garfield might feel the same way.

“She phoned Lester a couple of times,” Garfield said. “The guy’s pretty crushed about the whole thing. He really likes Melissa, and he seems ready to step up to the plate to support the child, but she doesn’t want anything to with him.” He frowned. “Ellie was very upset about the whole situation. She talked about it all the time.”

Was
upset?
Talked
?

Move on, Keisha thought. The man’s upset, not thinking clearly about his choice of words.

“Well,” she said, “do you think Ellie might have gone to see Lester, to talk to him about the situation?”

But there
was
something funny about it, wasn’t there? He’d talked about Melissa and Lester in the present tense. But when he mentioned Ellie, he’d slipped into the past tense.

Keisha was sure she hadn’t imagined it. She wished she had the conversation recorded, that she could listen to it again. She supposed it could mean Garfield had already lost hope that his wife would be coming home alive. He’d already accepted the fact that she was dead. That was certainly a possibility, and if so, that was too bad, because
hope
was the essential ingredient. If the man had lost hope, he wasn’t going to see the value in engaging Keisha. It had, after all, been nearly four days since he’d seen his wife. He could be forgiven for fearing the worst.

“Are you suggesting Lester may be involved in my wife’s disappearance?” Garfield asked.

Now, there was an interesting thought. Maybe, at some level, Garfield harbored suspicions about the man. And Keisha liked that he was starting to ask her questions. Like he thought she might actually have answers. It would be easy to take him down this road, that maybe his wife had run into Lester and somehow they’d had an argument about Melissa, but Keisha thought it would be wiser to hold off on that, come back to it later if it seemed right. Maybe that’s what Garfield was expecting her to do, to steer this discussion whatever way he led her. Maybe this was some kind of a test, so best to go off in another direction now.

Time to throw him a curveball.

“The car,” she said.

“What?”

“I keep seeing something about the car.”

“Which car? Lester’s car?”

“No, your wife’s car. A Nissan.” She had read what kind it was online.

“That’s right. A 2007. It’s silver. What about the car?”

Keisha closed her eyes again. Took her hands off the robe that was still in her lap and rubbed her temples. “It’s . . . the car’s not on the road.”

Garfield said nothing.

“It’s definitely not on the road. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

Garfield seemed to be holding his breath. “It’s what?” he asked, suddenly impatient. “If it’s not on the road, then where the hell is it?”

Keisha took her fingers away from her head, opened her eyes, and looked the man squarely in the eye.

“I think that’s as far as I can go right now, Mr. Garfield.”

“What are you talking about? What’s this about her car?”

“Mr. Garfield, I believe I’m closing in on something, and it’s going to require all my powers of concentration. I don’t want to be distracted, wondering whether you’re going to do the right thing.”

He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and over his teeth.

“The money,” he said.

“Yes,” Keisha said.

“I don’t have a thousand dollars lying around the house.”

“How much do you have?”

“Three hundred, maybe.”

“I’ll take a check for the balance,” she said obligingly.

Ten

Garfield had to admit, when this so-called psychic talked about Ellie being so very cold, it scared the shit out of him.

When she hadn’t gone into specifics, he figured it meant nothing. It was winter. It was cold. Big deal. Didn’t mean the woman was frickin’ Nostradamus. She had about as much skill communicating with the missing and the dead as that weather lady on the six o’clock news did predicting whether it was going to snow tomorrow.

But then she mentioned the car. Why had she suddenly wanted to talk about the car? And then she went and said it was “definitely not on the road.”

She sure had that right.

That car was at the bottom of Fairfield Lake, forty miles north of here. No one was going to find it, not for a very long time, if ever. Water had to be forty, fifty feet deep there, he bet. It was probably already covered over with ice. It had gotten colder since Thursday night. It’d be spring before there was even a remote chance of anyone finding it. Someone would have to be diving, right there, to come across it. And even if some fishermen snagged on to it, it wasn’t like the car was going to float to the surface like an old boot. They’d have to cut their line, put on a new hook.

How could Keisha Ceylon know the car was not on the road?

It could be a lucky guess. Simple as that. She could just be making the whole thing up. But what if she wasn’t?

In that case, Garfield could imagine only two scenarios.

One, this woman actually had some kind of second sight. He’d never bought into that kind of thing, not like his older sister Gail, who believed it was very possible she was Nefertiti in an earlier life, bought all those books by Sylvia Browne—even got them on audio so she could hear them in the car—and claimed that at the moment their father died, he appeared before her to say how sorry he was he’d never told her he loved her. Gail’s husband, Jerry, said she was snoring up a storm at the time, but so be it.

While Garfield was a skeptic, he was also willing to admit there might be forces at work out there he didn’t fully understand. Maybe some people really did have special sensitivities and could pick up things everyone else missed. Maybe this woman did have visions. How else could you explain that story about Nina, the little girl kidnapped by the neighbor?

So if she had this gift, and really had had a vision about Ellie, then she knew something.

The other scenario—a no less comforting one—was that this psychic thing was an act. A total sham. Complete and utter bullshit. A performance, to cover the fact that the information she had had come to her in a much less mystical way.

She had
seen
what happened. Not in a vision, but with her own eyes.

Garfield thought about that as he went into the kitchen for the three hundred in cash and his checkbook.

Suppose she had been there?

What if Keisha Ceylon had been at the lake that night? Maybe she lived in one of the cabins that lined the shore. On his way up there, Garfield had felt confident there wouldn’t be any witnesses. That stretch of the lake was taken up mostly with seasonal properties. This time of year, most of the cabins were boarded up. By the end of November, most everyone had turned off the water, poured antifreeze into the pipes, put out the mousetraps, spread around the mothballs, covered over the windows, and headed back to their comfortable homes in the city, no plans to return until spring.

But Garfield now had to consider the possibility that one of the cabins had been occupied. Maybe someone—Keisha—had been looking out the window that night and noticed a car with its lights turned off being driven out onto the new ice with only a thin layer of snow on it. That sliver of moon was all the light anyone would need to get an idea of what was going on.

Someone could have seen that car creep out there and stop. Then seen a man get out of the driver’s side with a broom in his hand, and watched as he attempted to sweep away the tire tracks as he made his way back to shore.

And then someone could have seen that same man stop and look back, waiting,
waiting
for the car to plunge through the thin ice.

Garfield shuddered at the memory. It had been agonizing. For a few moments there, standing out in the freezing cold, he was convinced the car was not going to drop through. That it would sit there, and still be there in the morning when the sun came up.

With his wife’s dead body still strapped into the passenger seat.

He’d been talking, earlier in the day, to some customers at the Home Depot, a couple of fellows who lived up that way, who’d said the lake was starting to freeze over pretty quickly, that you could already walk out on it, but it wasn’t thick enough to take any real weight yet. At least not for long.

He didn’t think much about it at the time. But the conversation came back to him later that night.

After it had happened. After she was dead.

When he needed a plan.

Maybe Keisha Ceylon had been there, at the lake. Been that someone watching from one of those cabins. When the story about his wife hit the news, she put it all together.

And now she’s here, shaking me down for money
, he thought. Not quite blackmail. If she were that direct, if she were to say to him, “I saw what you did, and I’ll go to the police with what I know unless you pay me,” that would be taking quite a risk. For all she knew, he’d find a way to keep her quiet that didn’t involve money.

He’d just kill her.

But using this whole psychic shtick, that was pure genius. She knew enough to get him curious, to get him worried. Worried enough that he’d pay her to find out just how much she really knew. Then, once she had his money, she’d keep things vague enough so he’d always be left wondering. She’d never have to tip her hand. She’d never have to let on that she was there. But she’d leave him knowing that if she wanted to, she could put him away for the rest of his life.

Well, Keisha Ceylon wasn’t nearly as clever as she thought she was.

Wendell Garfield wasn’t interested in taking any chances.