Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

As long as they had hope, they were willing to try anything, throw their
money
at anything. This was especially true when all conventional methods—door-to-door canvasses, sniffer dogs, aerial patrols, Neighborhood Watch—had turned up zilch. That’s when relatives were open to the unorthodox. Like a nice lady who showed up on their doorstep and said, “I have a gift, and I want to share it with you.”
    For a price, of course.
    Today’s missing person was Eleanor Garfield. She was, according to the news reports, white, forty-three, five foot three, about a hundred and fifty pounds, with short black hair and brown eyes.
    Everyone called her Ellie.
    She was last seen, according to her husband Wendell, on Thursday evening, around seven. She got in her car, a silver Nissan, with the intention of going to the grocery store to pick up the things they needed for the coming week. Ellie Garfield had a job in the administrative offices of the local board of education, and she didn’t like to leave all her errands to the weekend. She wanted Saturday and Sunday to be without chores. And to her way of thinking, the weekend actually began Friday night.
    So Thursday night was dedicated to errands.
    That way, come Friday, she could have a long soak in a hot tub, according to everything Keisha had quickly read and seen online or on television. After her soak, she’d slip into her pajamas and pink robe and park herself in front of the television. It was mostly for background noise, because she rarely had her eyes on it. Her primary focus was her knitting.
    Knitting had always been a hobby for her, though she hadn’t been as devoted to it the last few years. But according to one newspaper backgrounder that had tried to capture the essence of the woman, Ellie had picked up the needles again when she learned she was going to become a grandmother. She had been making baby booties and socks and a couple of sweaters. “I’m knitting up a storm,” she’d told one of her friends.
    But this particular week, Ellie Garfield did not make it to Friday night.
    Nor did she, by all accounts, make it to the store on Thursday. None of the grocery store staff, who knew Ellie Garfield by sight, if not by name, could remember her coming in that night. Nor was there any record that her credit card, which she preferred to cash (she collected points), had been used at that store or any other that evening. Nor had it been used since. Her car was not picked up on the surveillance cameras that kept watch over the grocery store lot.
    From what Keisha could glean, the police didn’t know what to make of it. Had Ellie met with foul play? Did she start off intending to go to the grocery store but someone prevented her from getting there? Or was it possible she had vanished of her own accord? The news reports didn’t pose all the questions running through Keisha’s mind. Was the woman having an affair? Had she gone to meet a lover? Did she wake up that morning and decide she’d had enough of married life? Got in the car and just kept on going, not caring where she ended up?
    She certainly wouldn’t have been the first.
    But the woman had no history of that kind of behavior. She’d never run off, not even for half a day. The marriage, from all appearances, was sound. And there was the matter of the grandchild. Ellie Garfield was about to have her first, and had already knitted the kid a full wardrobe. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?
    Police considered the theory that she was the victim of a carjacking gone horribly wrong. There’d been three incidents in the last year where a female driver stopped at a traffic light had been pulled from her vehicle. The perpetrator—believed to be the same man in all three cases—had then made off with the car. But none of the women, while shaken up, had been seriously hurt.
    Maybe Ellie Garfield had run into the same man. But this time things had turned violent.
    On Sunday, Wendell Garfield went before the cameras, his pregnant daughter at his side. The girl was crying too much to say anything, but Wendell held back his tears long enough to make his plea.
    “I just want to say, honey, if you’re watching, please, please come home. We love you and we miss you and we just want you back. And . . . and, if something has happened to . . . if someone has done something to you, then I make this appeal to whoever has done this . . . I’m asking you, please let us know what’s happened to