Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

the ice.”
    “Where were you?”
    “I was on the shore, watching.” A solitary tear ran down her cheek. She bit her lip, trying to hold it together.
    “Why were you there?”
    “Dad needed a car to come back. I drove up behind him.”
    “So you saw all this?”
    Melissa nodded.
    “Melissa, do you know a woman named Laci Harmon?”
    “I know who she is. She works at the Home Depot with my dad.”
    “Do you know whether they’re close friends?”
    Melissa cast her eyes down. “I think they’ve been having an affair.”
    “How long do you think that’s been going on?”
    “I don’t know. I only saw them the one time.”
    “When was that?”
    “Like, a month ago? I was driving past a hotel and I saw my dad’s car and I saw her in the front seat with him. They were kind of making out a little.”
    “How did that make you feel?”
    “Sad. And kind of . . . creepy.”
    “Did you tell your father you’d seen him with this woman?”
    “No.”
    “What about your mother? Did you tell her?”
    “No, I didn’t tell her. I kept hoping maybe I was wrong, maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw, so I didn’t want to say anything.”
    “Do you think that’s why your father killed your mother? Because of this woman? That maybe he wanted to run away with her?”
    Melissa blinked. “What?”
    Wedmore repeated the question, and added, “It happens, you know. A man starts seeing another woman, his wife finds out about it, they have a fight, and then, well, you know. The wife ends up dead.”
    “Is
that
what you think happened?”
    “It’s one possibility. But maybe you know differently. Do you know why your father killed your mother?”
    “Dad didn’t kill her. Is that what you’ve been thinking?”
    Now it was Wedmore’s turn to look surprised.
    “Isn’t that why you’re here, Melissa?”
    The dead woman’s daughter sighed and shook her head. “I guess I should start at the beginning.”

Fifteen
    When Keisha Ceylon saw the pink sash drop past her eyes, she reached up instinctively to get her fingers between it and her neck. But she wasn’t quick enough. Wendell Garfield wrapped it tightly around her throat and began to twist.
    “I swear, I don’t know how you know, but you’re not going to tell anyone,” he said.
    Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. But the satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck and there wasn’t a hope of getting her fingers in there.
    Garfield was leaning down over her, his mouth close to her right ear. His breath was hot against her cheek.
    She tried to say something, to scream, but with her windpipe squeezed, nothing came out. Not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, dug into the carpet with her heels.
    Keisha Ceylon knew, in that instant, that she was going to die. She didn’t need mystical skills for that vision of the future.
    It certainly wasn’t going to be the
distant
future.
    A number of thoughts ran through her head during those milliseconds. One wouldn’t have expected there to be much time for introspection, but the world has a way of slowing down during such moments, and Keisha had an opportunity to think:
Maybe I’ve had this coming
.
    You go around making your living by exploiting people at their most vulnerable, wasn’t there bound to be a reckoning at some point? If there was anyone who’d believe in karma, wouldn’t it be Keisha?
    Wouldn’t English teacher Terry Archer love to see her now? Wouldn’t her predicament make the perfect lesson the next time he was trying to get across to his students the concept of irony? Especially the part about how Keisha never saw it coming. How she walked right into it.
    Pretty goddamn rich, she had to admit.
    And yet, in that moment, she didn’t feel bitter. What she felt was regretful. If she could have spoken, if she’d been able to get a breath of air, what she might have said was, “Sorry.”
    There were more than a few people who deserved an apology. But the person whose face floated before her eyes first was Matthew’s.
    “Sorry, sweetheart,” she heard herself saying. “Sorry Mommy fucked up.”
    All these thoughts fired through her synapses in a fraction of a second. She might have liked to spend even more time considering how her misdeeds had impacted herself and others, to have done a bit of soul-searching, but there was a part of her brain that was deliberating over more