Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

my teacher was talking all about you.”
    “Terry Archer.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t exactly have an endorsement from him on my website.” The truth was, all the endorsements on her website had been made up.
    “I won’t tell Dwayne that part. But I’ll send him a link to the website, so when I vanish, he’ll know just how to find you. Who knows, he might even call you
before
we do this thing. Because he says he hears from his dead mother every now and then. He’s a pretty nice guy, but he is a bit of a whack job. Do you believe that stuff? That you can get in touch with the dead and talk to them?”
    She knew there wasn’t much point in bullshitting with this kid, but it was hard for her to admit outright that what she did was all a crock. “Well . . .”
    He grinned. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too. Anyway, when I disappear, Dwayne’ll remember that link I sent him.”
    Keisha shook her head. “He might not take the bait. He might never call me.”
    “Okay, well, I think you’re wrong there, but the worst thing that could happen is I have to come back and think of some
other
way to get money out of them. But if he goes for it, and he calls you, then you text me, tell me it’s on. No, wait, there’s records of that shit. I’ll check in with you from pay phones.”
    She thought about it. “There’s another problem.”
    “What’s that?”
    “There’s not enough money in it. I usually charge people a thousand. This is a lot of trouble to go to split that much money.”
    Justin flashed her a pitying smile. “You aim too low. Dwayne, and my mom, they’ve both got money. They’d be insulted to be ripped off for only a thousand. You could charge them at least five.”
    If she went fifty-fifty with the kid, that was a fast twenty-five hundred, tax free, because this was definitely a cash-under-the-table kind of transaction. Not bad for what would be a day’s work, when all was said and done. It was hard to say no to a job this straightforward, even if it did mean taking on a partner. And it wasn’t like there were people going missing every day to whose families she could offer her special talents.
    A girl had to make a living. If something didn’t come along soon, she’d be back to cleaning houses, and she did not want to start dealing again with rich, bitchy, mid-cleanse Darien housewives who had coronaries when they came home and found a soggy Cheerio in the drain basket.
    Maybe it was the recession, but Keisha’d been seeing fewer clients lately for many of the services she offered. She read palms, told fortunes, organized psychic reunions. She’d throw in a little astrology if that was what floated their boat. The thing was, as long as you had a good imagination, there really was nothing to it. All you had to do was make it up.
    Years ago, Keisha cleaned for a woman—not one of those Darien housewife types, but a nice lady—who’d once worked on the copy desk of a newspaper out west. Three weeks of their syndicated astrology column went missing in the mail so she cranked it out herself, off the top of her head. “Take the second bus, not the first. A good day for investing in friendship. A simple act of kindness will reap great rewards.” How hard was it, really? The paper even got a few phone calls, that the horoscopes of late had been really dead-on, good stuff. Keisha figured if this lady could do it, what was to stop her?
    At least Keisha had a few regulars, like Penny, the eighty-two-year-old totally batshit lady she went to visit every week so the old woman could talk to the child she aborted when she was seventeen. Handed over a hundred bucks every time because Keisha told her just what she wanted to hear: “Your unborn child forgives you, she’s even grateful. This is not a world she wanted to be brought up in.”
    And there was Chad, the gay guy who ran a health-food store in Bridgeport and wanted his palm read whenever he was about to start a new relationship, which was often. Or Gail, one of her most needy, and well-heeled, clients, who believed she was, in an earlier life, either an Egyptian queen, Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, or Joan of Arc. She managed at least a visit every two weeks, and would have been in even more often if husband Jerry hadn’t been clamping down on her nutbar spending.
    Still, it was all barely enough to pay the bills, especially when her live-in boyfriend Kirk wasn’t able to do much work since he dropped a cinder block on his