Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

for help, they could be looking for her out on the ice, she wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to—
    Crack.
    The car lurched forward. The way it was leaning, her view through the windshield was snow-dusted ice instead of the shoreline. The moon was casting enough light for her to see the interior of the car. Where was her purse? She had to find her purse. She kept her cell phone in her purse.
    There was no purse.
    No way to call for help. No way to get someone to come and rescue her. Which made it even more critical that she get out of this car.
    Now.
    She reached around to her side, looking for the button to release the seat belt. She found it, pressed hard with her thumb. The combined lap and shoulder strap began to retract, catching briefly on her arm. She wriggled it out of the way and the belt receded into the pillar between the front and rear doors.
    Crack.
    She reached down for the door handle and pulled. The door opened only slightly. Enough for freezing-cold water to rush in around her feet.
    “No no,” she whispered.
    So cold. So very very cold.
    As water began swirling in, the car tilted more, its trajectory becoming alarmingly apparent. With her hands placed on the dash, she braced herself as her world began angling down. She took her right hand off the dash and used it to push against the door, but she couldn’t get it to open any further. The front part of the door, at the bottom, was jamming up against the ice.
    “Please no.”
    The last crack she heard was the loudest, echoing across the lake like a clap of thunder.
    The front end of the car plunged. More water rushed in. It was over her knees. Then up to her waist. The windshield went black.
    In seconds, the water was to her neck.
    The intense pain, where the knife had pierced her twice, receded. Numbness spread throughout her body.
    Everything became very black, and very cold, and then, in a strange way, very calm.
    Her last thoughts were of her daughter, and of the grandchild she would never see.
    “Melissa,” she whispered.
    And then the car was gone.

Three
    The thing was, Keisha usually worked alone.
    Okay, sometimes she’d have her boyfriend Kirk on standby to take a phone call if necessary, to provide a testimonial to a skeptical prospective client. But other than that, she liked to run her own show. The way you maintained control was to handle all the details yourself.
    Bringing someone else into the mix, particularly someone without much experience, was risky. But there hadn’t been much money coming in lately, what with Kirk not back to work, Keisha’s car needing all new tires—she’d been running on three bald ones for months—and Matthew having to have those couple of teeth pulled. Keisha didn’t have the luxury of being picky these days, and besides, she figured Justin Wilcox had as much to lose as she did—maybe even more—by screwing up this con on his mother and stepfather.
    She had to admit, the kid was good. He not only conceived the whole thing, but pulled off his part without a hitch. He’d heard about Keisha from one of his old high school English teachers, Terry Archer, who had been persuaded to tell the class some of the details of what had happened to his wife, Cynthia, whose family had disappeared when she was only fourteen, and whose fate had been unknown for twenty-five years.
    It was big news at the time, when they found out what had actually happened. The story even made CNN. Archer had told his students that an incident like that, it brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork, which led him to tell them about the Milford psychic who’d claimed to know what had happened to Cynthia’s family. How she watched the news, hunted for people who were desperate for information about missing loved ones, then swooped in and offered to help bring them all together again. Once they’d coughed up a thousand bucks, of course.
    Keisha certainly remembered Terry Archer. It would have been hard to forget him. She hadn’t liked him one little bit, or the wife, either. Not during her first visit with the Archers, at the TV station, where they were going to do a story on Keisha’s amazing vision, or her second visit, to the Archers’ home, when they literally threw her out on her ass.
    You try to help people.
No good deed goes unpunished, her mother used to say.
    Justin told her Archer’s experience had stayed with him, even though it had been four years since he’d heard it. His new stepfather, Dwayne,