Linwood Barclay: Clouded Vision

“I’m not in this to make money,” she’d informed Keisha a year and a half ago when they’d both had their sights set on a couple whose two-year-old daughter had wandered away and was believed to have drowned in a creek. “I want to help these people. All I ask is that they cover my expenses, which are minimal.”

“Bite me,” Keisha’d told her.

She got squeezed out of that one. And Winona had nailed it. Told the parents where she believed the kid was. But before they could get to the location, a father and son playing with a radio-controlled boat found the child’s body lodged under a bridge. Right where Winona had said it would be.

Keisha wondered how the hell she did it. She didn’t want to believe that Winona really had the gift, but some things were very hard to explain. Keisha was pretty sure Winona had not beaten her to this one.

The missing woman’s name was Eleanor Garfield. She was, according to the news reports, white, forty-one years old, five foot three, about a hundred and fifty pounds, with short black hair and brown eyes.

Everyone called her Ellie.

Ellie Garfield was last seen, according to her husband, Wendell, on Thursday evening, around seven. She got in her car, a silver Nissan, with the intention of going to the grocery store to pick up the things they needed for the week. Ellie had a job in the administrative offices of the local board of education, and she didn’t like to leave all her errands for the weekend. She wanted Saturday and Sunday to be without chores. And to her way of thinking, the weekend actually began Friday night.

So Thursday night was dedicated to errands.

That way, come Friday, she could have a long soak in a hot tub. After that, she’d slip into her pajamas and pink robe and park herself in front of the television. It was mostly for background noise, because she rarely had her eyes on it. Her primary focus was her knitting.

Knitting had always been a hobby for her, but Ellie hadn’t shown much interest in it the last few years. However, according to a newspaper backgrounder who had tried to capture the essence of this missing woman, Ellie had gone back to it when she learned she was going to become a grandmother. She had made baby booties and socks and a couple of sweaters. “I’m knitting up a storm,” she’d told one of her friends.

But this particular week, Ellie Garfield did not make it to Friday night.

Nor did she, by all accounts, make it to the store on Thursday. None of the grocery store staff, who knew Ellie Garfield by sight, if not by name, recalled seeing her. Nor was there any record that her credit card-which she preferred to cash since she collected points-had been used that evening. Nor had it been used since. Her car was not picked up on the surveillance cameras that kept watch over the grocery store lot.

From Keisha’s reading of the news stories on the woman’s disappearance, and from what she’d seen on television, the police didn’t know what to make of it. Had Ellie met with foul play? Did she start off intending to go to the grocery store and then just decide to just keep on driving? Leave her old life behind and start a new one?

That seemed unlikely. Especially considering that she was about to have her first grandchild. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?

Police tossed out the theory that she was the victim of a carjacking. There had been three incidents in the last year where a female driver stopped at a traffic light had been pulled from her vehicle. The perpetrator-believed to be the same man in all three cases-had then made off with the car. The three women had been shaken up, but not seriously hurt.

Maybe Ellie Garfield had run into the same man. And maybe this time things had turned violent.

On Saturday, Wendell Garfield went before the cameras, his pregnant daughter at his side. The girl was crying too hard to say anything, but Wendell held back his tears long enough to make his plea.

“I just want to say, honey, if you’re watching, please, please come home. We love you, Ellie, and we miss you and we just want you back. And… and if something has happened to… if someone has done something to you, then I make this appeal to whoever has done this… I’m asking you, please let us know what’s happened to Ellie. Please let us know where she is, that she’s okay… just tell us something… I… I…”

At that point he turned away from the camera, overcome.

Keisha almost shed a tear herself. It was time to make her move. She was willing to bet her tarot cards and Ouija board that Winona was watching this, thinking the same thing.

So that evening, Keisha took a drive past the Garfield home, which was set back from the street in a heavily wooded neighborhood. Got the lay of the land, as it were. Wanted to see whether the place was surrounded with cop cars, marked or unmarked. See if Winona’s Prius was on the street. Keisha spotted what she believed was one unmarked car, but that was it.

She decided to make her pitch Sunday morning. First thing.

You did this enough, it got pretty easy. It was the people themselves who fed you the vision. You started off vague, something like “I see a house… a white house with a fence out front…”

And then they’d say, “A white house? Wait, wait, didn’t Aunt Gwen live in a white house?”

And someone else would say, “That’s right, she did!”

And then, picking up on the past tense, you said, “And this Aunt Gwen, I’m sensing… I’m sensing she’s passed on.”

And they said, “Oh my God, that’s right, she has!”

The key was to listen, have them give you the clues. Give them something to latch onto, and then you were golden.

It wouldn’t be any different with Wendell Garfield.

Not that everyone bought into it. There was that one woman a few years back, the one whose parents and brother disappeared one night twenty-five years earlier when she was only fourteen. Cynthia, that was her name. You’d have thought if there was anyone who’d be willing to take a leap of faith with someone like Keisha, it would have been this woman. They even got as far as the TV studio, where they were going to film Keisha outlining her vision for Cynthia, and the moment she raised the issue of being paid, everything shut down. It was the husband. The teacher. As soon as Keisha wanted to be paid for her services, he started making out like she was some kind of con artist or something.

The prick.

But Wendell Garfield, she had a good feeling about him from the TV appearance.

Keisha was up early Sunday. She’d spent time the night before selecting the right outfit. Nothing too flashy, but you needed a touch of eccentricity somewhere. People figured if you could talk to the dead, see into other dimensions, you had to be a little off your rocker, right? Eccentricity was expected. So she went with the earrings that looked like tiny green parrots.

She got in her Toyota, hit the wipers to clear the dusting of snow from the night before. When she got to the Garfield house, she was relieved to see no police cars out front. It was always better if you could do this without the cops offering their opinion that you might as well set your cash on fire as hand it over to some shyster psychic.

Keisha sat in the car a moment, getting her head in the right place.

She was ready.

Time to go in and explain to the frantic husband that she could help him in his hour of need. She could be his instrument to help determine what had happened to his beloved Ellie.

Because Keisha had seen something. She’d had a vision. A vision that very possibly held the answer to why his wife of twenty-one years had been missing for three nights now.

A vision that she would be happy to share with him.

For the right price.