Linwood Barclay: Clouded Vision

But you were compelled to be here. You simply had no choice.

She saw the man pull back the curtain to get a look at her, and gave him the smile. Almost apologetic.

Then the door opened.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Garfield?”

“That’s right.” He leaned out of the door, looking past her down to the street.

“My name is Keisha Ceylon. I’m so sorry to trouble you at a time like this.” She extended a hand. The man hesitated before he took it.

“Yes, well, this is a very stressful time. Who are you… who are you with?”

Keisha guessed, what with those parrots dangling from her lobes, Garfield wasn’t going to figure she was some plainclothes detective.

“I guess I’m what you’d call a consultant,” she replied.

“For who?”

“I work for people who find themselves in situations such as yours, Mr. Garfield.”

“You’re, what, a private detective?”

“No. Perhaps, if I could come inside, I could explain it better to you?”

When you were still on the front step, they could slam the door in your face. But once you were in the house, it was harder for them to get rid of you. She could see he was thinking about it.

After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the door wide. “Of course, come in.”

He led her into the living room and invited her to take one of the chairs across from the couch, which was where he sat.

“What was the name again?” he asked.

“Keisha Ceylon. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.” Before she could sit, she had to move a ball of green yarn with two blue, foot-long knitting needles speared through it. She slid the bundle over to the edge of the chair.

“I… I can’t say that I have. What is it that you do? I mean, what’s the nature of your consulting?”

“As I said, I offer my services to people when they’re dealing with the kind of crisis you’re currently experiencing.”

“Missing wives?”

“Well, any kind of missing person. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions first?”

“I suppose not.”

“I know you and your daughter made yourself available to the media yesterday to outline your concerns about Mrs. Garfield.”

“That’s right.”

“What sort of tips have the police received since then?”

Garfield shook his head. “Nothing.”

Keisha nodded sympathetically, as though this was exactly what she’d expected. “And what other efforts have the police been making to find Mrs. Garfield?”

“Well, they’ve been trying to trace her movements since she left here Thursday night. That’s the night she does the grocery shopping, but she never went to the store.”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“And her credit cards haven’t been used. I know they’ve been showing her picture around to all the places she usually goes, talking to her friends, talking to people she works with. All the things you might expect.”

Another sympathetic nod. “But so far, no leads. Is that what you’re telling me, Mr. Garfield?”

“It would seem so,” he said.

Keisha Ceylon paused for what she thought was a dramatically appropriate period of time, and then said, “I believe I can help you where the police cannot.”

“How’s that?”

“The police have employed all the typical methods that you would expect,” she said. “They do what they do, but they are not trained to, what’s the phrase? Think outside the box. What I offer is something more unconventional.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

She looked him in the eye. “I see things, Mr. Garfield.”

His mouth opened, but he was briefly at a loss for words. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry?”

“I can see things,” she repeated. “Let me make this as simple and as straightforward as I can. Mr. Garfield, I have visions.”

A small laugh erupted from him. “Visions?”

Keisha was very careful to maintain her cool. Don’t get defensive. Don’t overplay your hand. “Yes,” she said simply. Draw him out. Make him ask the questions.

“What, uh, what kind of visions?”

“I’ve had this gift-if you can call it that, I’m not really sure-since I was a child, Mr. Garfield. I have visions of people in distress.”

“Distress,” he said quietly. “Really.”

“Yes,” she said again.

“And you’ve had a vision of my wife? In distress?”

She nodded solemnly. “Yes, I have.”

“I see.” A bemused smile crossed his lips. Keisha had expected this. “And you’ve decided to share this vision with me, and not the police.”

“As I’m sure you can understand, Mr. Garfield, the police are often not receptive to people with my talents. It’s not just that they’re skeptical. When I’m able to make progress where they have not, they feel it reflects badly on them. So I approach the principals involved directly.”

“Of course you do,” he said. “And how is it you get these visions? Do you have, like, a TV antenna built into your head or something?”

She smiled. “I wish I could answer your question in a way that someone could understand. Because if I knew how these visions come to me, I might be able to find a way to turn them off.”

“So it’s a curse as well as a blessing,” he said.

Keisha ignored the sarcasm. “Yes, a bit like that. Let me tell you a story. One night, this would have been about three years ago, I was driving to the mall, just minding my own business, when this… image came into my head. All of a sudden I could barely see the road in front of me. It was as though my windshield had turned into a movie screen. And I saw this girl, she couldn’t have been more than five or six, and she was in a bedroom, but it was not a little girl’s bedroom. There were no dolls or playhouses or anything like that. The room was decorated with sports memorabilia. Trophies, posters of football players on the wall, a catcher’s mitt on the desk, a baseball bat leaning against the wall in the corner. And this little girl, she was crying, saying she wanted to go home, pleading to someone to let her leave. And then there was a man’s voice, and he was saying, ‘Not yet, you can’t go home yet, not until we get to know each other a little better.’ ”

She took a breath. Garfield was trying to look disinterested, but Keisha could tell she had him hooked.

“Well, I nearly ran off the road. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the shoulder. By then, this vision, these images, had vanished, like smoke that had been blown away. But I knew what I’d seen. I’d seen a little girl in trouble, a little girl who was being held against her will.

“So, in this particular situation, because I did not know who the actual people involved were, I made a decision to go to the police. I called them and said, ‘Are you working on a missing girl case? Perhaps something you haven’t yet made a statement about?’ Well, they were quite taken aback. They said they really couldn’t give out that kind of information. And I said, ‘Is the girl about six years old? And was she last seen wearing a shirt with a Sesame Street character on it?’ Well, now I had their attention. They sent out a detective to talk to me, and he didn’t believe in visions any more than I would imagine you do. I think maybe they were thinking I might have actually had something to do with this girl’s disappearance, because how else could I know those kinds of details? But I said to him, ‘Talk to the family, find out who they know who’s really into sports, who’s won lots of trophies, particularly football trophies, maybe even baseball,’ and the detective said, ‘Yeah, sure, we’ll get right on that,’ like he was humoring me. But then he left, and he made some calls, and within the hour, the police had gone to the home of a neighbor who fit that description, and they rescued that little girl. They got to her just in time.” Keisha paused. “Her name was Nina. And last week she celebrated her ninth birthday. Alive, and well.”