Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

Ellie. Please let us know where she is, that she’s okay . . . just tell us something . . . I . . . I . . .”
    At that point he turned away from the camera, overcome.
    Keisha almost shed a tear herself when she rewatched the clip on the TV station’s website. It was time to make her move.
    So that morning, about an hour after Justin had left, she looked up the address for the Garfield home, which she found set back from the street in a heavily wooded neighborhood just off the road that led up to Derby. The lots were large, and the houses spaced well apart, some not even within view of each other. Keisha wanted to see whether the place was surrounded with cop cars, marked or unmarked.
    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.

Five
    “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