Linwood Barclay - Never Saw It Coming

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. All you have to do is look outside and know you’re going to need your coat. There’s three inches of snow out there, for God’s sake.” He sank back into the couch, looking annoyed. “I don’t see how 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 is an episode of Seinfeld and I can just tell you what I watched. There are flashes, images. 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?”

“Something about Melissa.”

“What about her?”

“There are these flashes, of your daughter. And she’s crying. She’s very upset.”

“Of course she’s upset. Her mother’s missing.”

“But even before. She’s very troubled, Melissa is.”

“I already told you as much. She’s been a difficult kid. She moved out at sixteen, and now she’s knocked up. She’s troubled. Brilliant deduction.”

“There’s more,” Keisha said.

Garfield leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees. Really interested. Keisha liked what she was seeing. Another couple of tugs and the hook would be well set into that cheek of his. And all she’d really done so far was tell him things he already knew, things everyone knew. It was winter. He had a pregnant daughter. Her mother was missing. Who wouldn’t be upset? In another minute or so she’d get to the next stunningly obvious thing-the car. But first, tease him with the daughter a little longer.

“What do you mean, more?”

“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 feeding her a few more nuggets to work with at the same time.

“Lester Cody,” Wendell Garfield said, shaking his head in frustration. “A dentist, makes more than twice what I do, drives a Lexus, a pretty damn good catch for Melissa if she’d only wake up and realize it. But guess what? She’s not in love with him. Yeah, he’s about seventy pounds overweight and’ll probably have a heart attack before he’s forty, but in the mean time, she could make a life with him.” He pointed a finger at Keisha. “There’s more to marriage than love. That’s important in the beginning, but after a while, it’s the daily stuff you have to get through. And Melissa’s going to have a lot of that, raising a baby. She needs that man’s support. Financial and emotional.”

“And how does Ellie feel about all this?”

He blinked. “She, uh, she feels the same way. I mean, at first she was upset because he’s so much older, but you balance everything out and Melissa could do a lot worse. Like that guy at the Cinnabon. Give me a break.”

“Have Ellie and this Mr. Cody… has there been some kind of confrontation between the two of them? I’m seeing flashes, some arguments.”

Flashes, yeah, that was good. Keisha knew that if she had a daughter who’d been knocked up and didn’t want to marry the father, she’d be trying to talk some sense into her, unless the guy was a total asshole. But a dentist? What they made? What the hell was wrong with this girl? Keisha’d probably take the guy aside, give him some tips on how to win the girl over.

It was reasonable to assume Eleanor Garfield might feel the same way.

“She phoned Lester a couple of times,” Garfield said. “The guy’s pretty crushed about the whole thing. He really likes Melissa, and he seems ready to step up to the plate to support the child, but she doesn’t want anything to with him.” He frowned. “Ellie was very upset about the whole situation. She talked about it all the time.”

Was upset? Talked?

Move on, Keisha thought. The man’s upset, not thinking clearly about his choice of words.

“Well,” she said, “do you think Ellie might have gone to see Lester, to talk to him about the situation?”

But there was something funny about it, wasn’t there? He’d talked about Melissa and Lester in the present tense. But when he mentioned Ellie, he’d slipped into the past tense.

Keisha was sure she hadn’t imagined it. She wished she had the conversation recorded, that she could listen to it again. She supposed it could mean Garfield had already lost hope that his wife would be coming home alive. He’d already accepted the fact that she was dead. That was certainly a possibility, and if so, that was too bad, because hope was the essential ingredient. If the man had lost hope, he wasn’t going to see the value in engaging Keisha. It had, after all, been nearly four days since he’d seen his wife. He could be forgiven for fearing the worst.

“Are you suggesting Lester may be involved in my wife’s disappearance?” Garfield asked.

Now, there was an interesting thought. Maybe, at some level, Garfield harbored suspicions about the man. And Keisha liked that he was starting to ask her questions. Like he thought she might actually have answers. It would be easy to take him down this road, that maybe his wife had run into Lester and somehow they’d had an argument about Melissa, but Keisha thought it would be wiser to hold off on that, come back to it later if it seemed right. Maybe that’s what Garfield was expecting her to do, to steer this discussion whatever way he led her. Maybe this was some kind of a test, so best to go off in another direction now.

Time to 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.” She had read what kind it was online.

“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 that’s as far as I can go right now, Mr. Garfield.”

“What are you talking about? What’s this about her car?”

“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.

“The money,” he said.

“Yes,” Keisha said.

“I don’t have a thousand dollars lying around the house.”

“How much do you have?”

“Three hundred, maybe.”

“I’ll take a check for the balance,” she said obligingly.

Garfield had to admit, when this so-called psychic talked about Ellie being so very cold, it scared the shit out of him.