“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 took 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 she could lose her coat. Once you go outside, you know you need it.” He sank back into the couch, looking annoyed. “I don’t see where 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 was an episode of Seinfeld and I can just tell you what I watched. There are flashes, images, like fleeting snapshots. 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?”
“Melissa. That’s your daughter’s name, correct?”
“That’s no big trick. Her name’s been in the paper.”
“I’m not trying to impress you with knowing her name, Mr. Garfield. I’m trying to tell you about the images, the flashes.”
Garfield looked as though he’d been scolded. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“She’s terribly troubled, Melissa is.”
“Well, of course.”
“But this goes beyond what you would expect a daughter to feel when her mother goes missing.”
Garfield leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees. Really interested. Keisha thought maybe she’d struck some sort of nerve here. All she was doing, really, so far, was telling Garfield things he already knew, things everyone knew. It was winter. He had a pregnant daughter. It was logical she’d be upset. In another minute or so, she’d get to the next stunningly obvious thing-the car. But first, she wanted to feel Garfield out about his daughter’s pregnancy, which was pretty hard to miss during the TV coverage.
“What do you mean, it goes beyond?” he asked.
“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 getting him to feed her a few more nuggets to work with at the same time.
“Lester Cody. A useless son of a bitch.” Wendell Garfield shook his head in anger and frustration. “Thirty years old, no job, lives at home with his parents. When we learned Melissa was pregnant, we were upset, but we figured, if she’d found the right guy, settling down with him, having a baby, that would help her turn her life around, give her some stability.”
“And your wife and Lester… I see tension here… on the periphery at least.”
“Sure,” Garfield said. “I mean, we’d both been hoping he’d step up to the plate, but I don’t see that happening.”
“Ellie… did Ellie confront him? I’ve seen some flashes that would seem to indicate that.”
Flashes, yeah. Keisha knew that if she had a daughter who’d been knocked up by some asshole, she’d be in his face night and day to make sure he did the right thing, at least at those times when she wasn’t giving her own daughter hell for getting in this mess. Keisha’d be all over a guy like that.
It seemed reasonable to assume Eleanor Garfield might feel the same way.
“She phoned him a few times,” Garfield said. “But any time she called his house, she got his mother.” The man frowned. “Ellie was extremely upset about the whole situation.”
Was Keisha picking up something else here? Ellie was. Any time she called. Had Garfield already given up on finding his wife? Was he already thinking she was dead?
Keisha told herself she was reading too much into the comments. Garfield was talking about incidents that had happened in the past. So speaking of his wife in the past tense, that made sense, at least in this context.
“Do you think that maybe Lester is involved in my wife’s disappearance?” he asked her.
She liked that. Him starting to ask her questions. Like he thought she might actually have answers. The hook was firmly set now. He wasn’t going to get away. It would be easy to start taking him down that road, that maybe his wife had run into Lester and things had turned bad, but if she did that, it might confirm suspicions she guessed Garfield already had about her. That she was steering this whatever way he led her. She could come back to this later. Best to go in another direction now. 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.”
“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 this is where we have to talk about my fee, 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.
“You’ll take a check?”
SEVEN
Wendell
When she’d talked about Ellie being so very cold, he had to admit, that had thrown him. But when she hadn’t gotten into specifics, he figured it didn’t mean anything. It was winter. It was cold. Big deal. Didn’t mean the woman was some fucking genius psychic. 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 rain tomorrow.
But then she went and 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 a lake. No one was going to find it, not for a very, 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 even colder since Thursday night. It’d be spring before there was a chance of anyone finding it, and even then the odds seemed pretty remote. 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. But what if it wasn’t?
If it wasn’t, Garfield saw two possibilities.
One, this woman actually had the gift. He’d never bought into this kind of thing, but who knew? Maybe some people really were born with special powers. 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 a vision about Ellie, then she knew something.
Or the other possibility-a no less disturbing 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.