Linwood Barclay - Never Saw It Coming

“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. “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 questions in a way that everyone would understand. Because if I knew how these visions come to me, I might be able 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 memorabila. 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 uninterested, 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. But 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. 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.”

Total bullshit.

Keisha clasped her hands together and rested them in her lap, never taking her eyes off Garfield.

“Would you like to call Nina’s father?” she asked. “I could arrange that.” She didn’t think he’d take her up on the offer, but if he did, she had Kirk on standby. If Garfield called, Kirk would pretend to be the father of the little girl who’d disappeared. He’d say how they owed their girl’s life to Keisha. He’d done this one other time for Keisha-not with a missing person case, just a woman who wanted a reference before she let Keisha read her palm-and he handled it okay. The trick was, keep the call short. Kirk was the kind of guy who couldn’t keep track of the lies he’d told, and the more questions there were, the more likely he was going to trip himself up.

As Keisha had suspected, Garfield was not interested in confirming her story. “No, no, that’s okay,” he said. “But that’s quite a tale.”

Keisha detected sarcasm, but not as much as she might have expected.

“Still, I’d totally understand,” she said, “if you’d like me to leave. Perhaps you’ve got me pegged as a con artist. There are plenty out there, believe me. If you don’t want me to share my vision with you, I’ll leave right now and you won’t hear from me again. And I just want to say, I hope the police find your wife soon, Mr. Garfield, so that you and your daughter can get your lives back to normal.”

She stood. Garfield was on his feet too, and when Keisha extended her hand, he took it. “Thank you for your time, and I’m so sorry to have troubled you.”

“What will you do?” he said. “I mean, if you’ve had this so-called vision, and I’m not the kind of person who buys into that sort of thing, what will you do now?”

“I suppose,” she said, “I’ll go to the police with what I know, and see if there’s anyone there who cares. Sometimes, though, that can have a negative effect. They’re not always as receptive to my involvement as they were when I called them about Nina. I’ve found they have a tendency to get their back up, and the tip you give them is the last one they follow up.” She smiled. “They can be somewhat dismissive of the skills I bring to the table. I hope, for your wife’s sake, they don’t take that attitude.”

“So you are going to the police,” he said, more to himself than to Keisha.

“Again, thank you for-”

“Sit down. You might as well tell me how this works.”

What the hell was he to make of this woman?

Wendell Garfield didn’t know what to think. Did Keisha Ceylon really have visions? Her telling of that story about the little girl was pretty convincing, but it wasn’t enough to persuade him she was legit. There was something about her, though, that was hard to dismiss.

And worrisome.

His mind raced through the possibilities. The woman was trying to shake him down, plain and simple. He had a feeling that, even though they hadn’t gotten around to the topic of money, it was just around the corner. What better mark than a husband desperate to find out what had happened to his missing wife? Wouldn’t plenty of people in his position be willing to engage a psychic, a medium, a spiritualist, a paranormal expert-whatever the hell this woman wanted to call herself-even if they believed, at best, there was only a one in a million chance she really knew anything? Isn’t that what someone who truly loved his wife would do?

Or maybe she wasn’t trying to con him. Maybe she really believed she could do what she claimed. It was possible she was here out of a sincere wish to help. It didn’t have to mean she actually had some psychic gift. She could be a well-intentioned nut. Deluded. Her visions could be the product of a twisted, disordered mind.

And then, of course, there was a third possibility: She was the real thing.