Linwood Barclay - Never Saw It Coming

There was a decade-old Buick in the drive, dusted white from a light overnight snowfall. Nothing else. This looked like as good a time as any.

She’d done enough of these that she didn’t have to think about strategy. In many ways, dealing with someone whose loved one was missing wasn’t all that different from dealing with someone who wanted their fortune told. It was the people themselves who fed the vision. She’d start 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 the past tense, Keisha would say, “And this Aunt Gwen, I’m sensing… I’m sensing she’s passed on.”

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

The key was to listen, have them provide the clues. Give them something to latch onto. Let them lead where she thought they wanted her to go.

Keisha just hoped Wendell Garfield wasn’t as closed-minded as that Terry Archer character, who wouldn’t let Keisha help his wife, Cynthia. The hell of it was, she’d actually got part of it right. Just before the Archers threw her out of their house, she’d told them their daughter would be in danger. In a car. Up someplace high.

Wasn’t that exactly what happened?

Let it go, she told herself. It was years ago.

But Keisha had a better feeling about Wendell Garfield. And the circumstances were totally different. With the Archers, it was a twenty-five-year-old case. There was no real urgency. But Mrs. Garfield’s disappearance was in its early stages. If she was in some kind of trouble, presumably there was still time to rescue her.

Before heading up here, Keisha had tiptoed into the bedroom to do some accessorizing. You needed a touch of eccentricity somewhere. People figured that if you could talk to the dead, or visualize the hiding places of people still alive, or see into other dimensions, you had to be a little off your rocker, right? It was expected. So she went with the earrings that looked like tiny green parrots.

“What’s going on, babe?” Kirk said, his face half buried into his pillow.

“I’ve got a lead,” Keisha told him. “I need you on standby in case they want a reference.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill,” he said, never even opening his eyes.

Sitting out front of the Garfield house in her little Korean import a moment longer, she checked the rear-view mirror to be sure she didn’t have any lipstick on her teeth. Got her head into the right space.

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 in determining what had happened to his wife.

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 four nights now.

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

For the right price.

Keisha Ceylon took a deep breath, took one last look at her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, and opened the car door.

Showtime.

“So, what are you telling me, that there’s been nothing, nothing at all?” Wendell Garfield said into the phone. “I thought, I really thought someone… well, if you hear anything, anything at all, I expect to hear from somebody, goddamn it. Do you have any idea what we’re going through, what my daughter is going through? You tell Detective Wedmore I called. I want to hear from her. I want to hear from her the moment she gets this message.”

He slammed the phone down. He’d decided, when he got up that morning, that he was going to be all over the police today, call them every hour if he had to. It had been a full day since the news conference. Half a dozen stations had aired the story. There was a clip on YouTube. It had made that morning’s papers. If anyone was going to call in with a tip, it would be now. Wendell needed the police to know just how impatient he was. How he was expecting some action on this.

He’d called demanding to speak to the lead detective, a woman named Rona Wedmore. But she was out, and Wendell was transferred to someone else who claimed to be more or less up to speed on the investigation, and what sort of response the news conference had produced. There had been half a dozen calls to the hotline police had set up. None had been considered useful. At least one was from an outright lunatic-a woman who claimed to have seen an actress on an Italian soap opera who looked just like the picture of Ellie Garfield. Had the police checked to see whether the woman had run off to pursue an acting career?

After hanging up, Garfield decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes overnight. He was trying to think, since Thursday, when this had all started, just how much sleep he’d had. Five, six hours maybe? His daughter Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy so exhausted her.

Garfield hadn’t wanted Melissa to go before the cameras. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. She was seven months pregnant, her mother was missing, and now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?

“I don’t want to put her through that,” he’d told the police.

But it was Melissa herself who’d insisted she appear alongside her father. “We’ll do it together, Dad,” she told him. “Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found, that we want her to come home.”

With some reluctance, he agreed, but only on the condition that he would do all the talking. Once the lights were on and the cameras in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She managed only to splutter, “Mommy, please come back to us” before she dissolved into tears and put her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie and wanted her back.

He could hear murmurs among the news people, all indistinct save for one: “Good stuff.”

Leeches.

He took Melissa home with him, tried to get her to eat something. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “We’re going to get through this. We will, I promise you. But you have to eat. You have to take care of yourself. You have to think about the baby. You’re going to have this baby, and you’re going to take care of it, and everything’s going to be okay.”

She sat there at the kitchen table, looking as though she would crumble. “Oh, Daddy…”

“Trust me,” he said. “Everything will turn out fine.”

“How can you say that?” Melissa asked, her eyes red from crying.

“Because it has to,” he said.

Melissa spent the night at her parents’ home, but around six in the morning she walked into her father’s bedroom to say she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Garfield was still under the covers, but he was awake, and had been all night. He was reluctant to let her out of his sight, but Melissa said she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay at her place. She’d return and stay overnight in the room she lived in before moving out. But she needed to pick up some things, clothes mostly, and wanted a moment or two by herself. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver. She didn’t know anything about Melissa’s mother.

Garfield said, hesitantly, “You’re not going to do anything I should be worried about, are you? I mean, your state of mind and all.”

She said no.

So he drove his daughter back to her place. Parked out front of the apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance. “Why don’t I just wait here while you grab a few things?” he said. “Then you can come back with me.”