Linwood Barclay: Clouded Vision

“Tingling?”

“It’s a little bit like when the hairs go up on the back of your neck. That’s when I know I’m starting to sense something.”

“What? What are you sensing?”

“Your wife, she’s…”

“She’s what?”

“She’s cold,” Keisha said. “Your wife is very, very cold.”

Keisha

While Keisha was waiting to see if he’d take the bait and give 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, Ellie 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.

But the thing was, Keisha wasn’t all that concerned with where this man’s wife really was. She just wanted to offer him some possibilities. And in return, make her money.

“What do you mean, cold?” Garfield asked. He seemed, for the first time, intrigued.

“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?”

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.