Clouded Vision

by Linwood Barclay

  “It’s all part of the process. Some of the fuzzier details in my vision may come into sharper focus if I’m in possession of something that belongs to the person, something that’s come into close contact with them.”

  “What do you need?”

  “An article of clothing would be best.”

  “Like her bathrobe or something?”

  Keisha nodded. Wendell excused himself and went upstairs. A moment later, he was coming back down with a pink robe in his hands. It was faded and tattered from many years of wear.

  “Thank you,” Keisha said, placing the robe in her lap and laying both hands on it. She ran her fingertips over the material and closed her eyes.

  Several seconds went by without her saying a word. Finally, Wendell interrupted her trance state, saying, “Are you getting anything, or what?”

  “Just a moment.” She opened her eyes. “I’m feeling some … tingling.”

  “Tingling?”

  “It’s a little bit like when the hairs go up on the back of your neck. That’s when I know I’m starting to sense something.”

  “What? What are you sensing?”

  “Your wife, she’s …”

  “She’s what?”

  “She’s cold,” Keisha said. “Your wife is very, very cold.”

  SIX

  Keisha

  While Keisha was waiting to see if he’d take the bait and give her a chance to reel him in, she was thinking about her starting point. Cast a wide net to begin with, then narrow the focus. Why not start with the weather?

  It was winter, after all. Everybody was cold. Wherever Ellie Garfield was, it only stood to reason she’d be feeling chilled. Okay, maybe that wasn’t true. The night she disappeared, Ellie could have steered her car south and headed straight to Florida. She could have been there in a day, and by now might be working on a pretty decent tan.

  But the thing was, Keisha wasn’t all that concerned with where this man’s wife really was. She just wanted to offer him some possibilities. And in return, make her money.

  “What do you mean, cold?” Garfield asked. He seemed, for the first time, intrigued.

  “Just what I said. She’s very cold. Did she take a jacket with her when she left Thursday night?”

  “A jacket? Of course she took a jacket. She wouldn’t have left the house without a jacket. Not this time of year.”

  Keisha nodded. “I’m still picking up that she’s cold. Not just, you know, a little bit cold. I mean chilled to the bone. Maybe it wasn’t a warm enough coat. Or maybe … maybe she lost her coat?”

  “I don’t see how she could lose her coat. Once you go outside, you know you need it.” He sank back into the couch, looking annoyed. “I don’t see where this is very helpful.”

  “I can come back to it,” she said. “Maybe, as I start picking up other things, the part about her being cold will take on more meaning.”

  “I thought you had a vision. Why don’t you just tell me what the vision was instead of rubbing your hands all over my wife’s robe?”

  “Please, Mr. Garfield, it’s not as though my vision was an episode of Seinfeld and I can just tell you what I watched. There are flashes, images, like fleeting snapshots. It’s a little like dumping a shoebox full of snapshots onto a table. They’re in a jumble, no particular order. What I’m trying to do, it’s like sorting those pictures. Sitting here now, in your wife’s home, holding something that touched her, I can start assembling those images, like a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “You’re pulling a fast one here. I think—”

  “Melissa.”

  “What?”

  “Melissa. That’s your daughter’s name, correct?”

  “That’s no big trick. Her name’s been in the paper.”

  “I’m not trying to impress you with knowing her name, Mr. Garfield. I’m trying to tell you about the images, the flashes.”

  Garfield looked as though he’d been scolded. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “She’s terribly troubled, Melissa is.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “But this goes beyond what you would expect a daughter to feel when her mother goes missing.”

  Garfield leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees. Really interested. Keisha thought maybe she’d struck some sort of nerve here. All she was doing, really, so far, was telling Garfield things he already knew, things everyone knew. It was winter. He had a pregnant daughter. It was logical she’d be upset. In another minute or so, she’d get to the next stunningly obvious thing—the car. But first, she wanted to feel Garfield out about his daughter’s pregnancy, which was pretty hard to miss during the TV coverage.

  “What do you mean, it goes beyond?” he asked.

  “Something about the baby …”

  “What about the baby?”

  “Tell me about the father,” Keisha said. Turning it around, letting him do some of the work, and getting him to feed her a few more nuggets to work with at the same time.

  “Lester Cody. A useless son of a bitch.” Wendell Garfield shook his head in anger and frustration. “Thirty years old, no job, lives at home with his parents. When we learned Melissa was pregnant, we were upset, but we figured, if she’d found the right guy, settling down with him, having a baby, that would help her turn her life around, give her some stability.”

  “And your wife and Lester … I see tension here … on the periphery at least.”

  “Sure,” Garfield said. “I mean, we’d both been hoping he’d step up to the plate, but I don’t see that happening.”

  “Ellie … did Ellie confront him? I’ve seen some flashes that would seem to indicate that.”

  Flashes, yeah. Keisha knew that if she had a daughter who’d been knocked up by some asshole, she’d be in his face night and day to make sure he did the right thing, at least at those times when she wasn’t giving her own daughter hell for getting in this mess. Keisha’d be all over a guy like that.

  It seemed reasonable to assume Eleanor Garfield might feel the same way.

  “She phoned him a few times,” Garfield said. “But any time she called his house, she got his mother.” The man frowned. “Ellie was extremely upset about the whole situation.”

  Was Keisha picking up something else here? Ellie was. Any time she called. Had Garfield already given up on finding his wife? Was he already thinking she was dead?

  Keisha told herself she was reading too much into the comments. Garfield was talking about incidents that had happened in the past. So speaking of his wife in the past tense, that made sense, at least in this context.

  “Do you think that maybe Lester is involved in my wife’s disappearance?” he asked her.

  She liked that. Him starting to ask her questions. Like he thought she might actually have answers. The hook was firmly set now. He wasn’t going to get away. It would be easy to start taking him down that road, that maybe his wife had run into Lester and things had turned bad, but if she did that, it might confirm suspicions she guessed Garfield already had about her. That she was steering this whatever way he led her. She could come back to this later. Best to go in another direction now. Throw him a curveball.

  “The car,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I keep seeing something about the car.”

  “Which car? Lester’s car?”

  “No, your wife’s car. A Nissan.”

  “That’s right. A 2007. It’s silver. What about the car?”

  Keisha closed her eyes again. Took her hands off the robe that was still in her lap and rubbed her temples. “It’s … the car’s not on the road.”

  Garfield said nothing.

  “It’s definitely not on the road. It’s … it’s …”

  Garfield seemed to be holding his breath. “It’s what?” he asked, suddenly impatient. “If it’s not on the road, then where the hell is it?”

  Keisha took her fingers away from her head, opened her eyes, and looked the man squarely in the eye.

&nb
sp; “I think this is where we have to talk about my fee, Mr. Garfield. I believe I’m closing in on something, and it’s going to require all my powers of concentration. I don’t want to be distracted, wondering whether you’re going to do the right thing.”

  He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and over his teeth.

  “You’ll take a check?”

  SEVEN

  Wendell

  When she’d talked about Ellie being so very cold, he had to admit, that had thrown him. But when she hadn’t gotten into specifics, he figured it didn’t mean anything. It was winter. It was cold. Big deal. Didn’t mean the woman was some fucking genius psychic. She had about as much skill communicating with the missing and the dead as that weather lady on the six o’clock news did predicting whether it was going to rain tomorrow.

  But then she went and mentioned the car. Why had she suddenly wanted to talk about the car? And then she went and said it was “definitely not on the road.”

  She sure had that right.

  That car was at the bottom of a lake. No one was going to find it, not for a very, very long time, if ever. Water had to be forty, fifty feet deep there, he bet. It was probably already covered over with ice. It had gotten even colder since Thursday night. It’d be spring before there was a chance of anyone finding it, and even then the odds seemed pretty remote. Someone would have to be diving, right there, to come across it. And even if some fishermen snagged on to it, it wasn’t like the car was going to float to the surface like an old boot. They’d have to cut their line, put on a new hook.

  How could Keisha Ceylon know the car was not on the road?

  It could be a lucky guess. Simple as that. But what if it wasn’t?

  If it wasn’t, Garfield saw two possibilities.

  One, this woman actually had the gift. He’d never bought into this kind of thing, but who knew? Maybe some people really were born with special powers. Maybe this woman did have visions. How else could you explain that story about Nina, the little girl kidnapped by the neighbor?

  So if she had this gift, and really had a vision about Ellie, then she knew something.

  Or the other possibility—a no less disturbing one—was that this psychic thing was an act. A total sham. Complete and utter bullshit. A performance, to cover the fact that the information she had had come to her in a much less mystical way.

  She had seen what happened. Not in a vision, but with her own eyes.

  Wendell thought about that as he went into the kitchen to find his checkbook.

  She could have been there. She could have been at the lake that night. Maybe she lived in one of the cabins that lined the shore. On his way up there, Garfield had felt confident that would not be a problem. Most of the places on the lake were seasonal. This time of year, the cabins were boarded up. By the end of November, most everyone had turned off the water, poured antifreeze into the pipes, put out the mousetraps, spread around the mothballs, covered over the windows, and headed back to their comfortable homes in the city, no plans to return until spring.

  But Garfield now had to consider the possibility one of the cabins had been occupied. Maybe someone had been looking out the window that night and noticed a car with no lights on being driven out onto that new ice with only a dusting of snow on it. That sliver of moon was all the light anyone would need to get an idea of what was going on.

  Someone could have seen the car creep out there and stop. Then seen a man get out of the driver’s side, with an actual broom in his hand, and watched as he attempted to sweep away tire tracks as made his way back to shore.

  And then someone could have seen that same man stop and look back, waiting, waiting for the car to plunge through the thin ice.

  Garfield shuddered at the memory. It had been agonizing. For a few moments there, standing out in the freezing cold, he was convinced the car was not going to drop through. That it was going to sit there, and be there in the morning when the sun came up.

  With his wife’s dead body still strapped to the passenger seat.

  He’d been talking earlier in the day to some customers at Home Depot, a couple of fellows who lived up this way, who’d said the lake was starting to freeze over pretty quickly, that you could already walk out on it, but it wasn’t thick enough to take any real weight yet. Some winters, when the ice got thick enough, they’d actually race cars out there, but they didn’t see that happening until at least February, so long as the temperatures stayed well below freezing.

  He didn’t think much about it at the time. But the conversation came back to him later that night.

  After it had happened. After she was dead.

  When he needed a plan.

  Maybe Keisha Ceylon had been there, at the lake. Been that someone watching from one of those cabins. When the story about his wife hit the news, maybe she put it all together.

  And now she’s here, shaking me down for money, he thought. Not quite blackmail. If she were that direct, if she were to say to him, “I saw what you did, and I’ll go to the police with what I know unless you pay me,” that would be taking quite a risk. For all she knew, he wouldn’t pay her off to keep her quiet.

  He’d just kill her.

  But using this whole psychic shtick, that was pure genius. She knew enough to get him curious, to get him worried. Worried enough that he’d pay her some money to find out just how much she really knew. Then, once she had the check, she’d keep things just vague enough so he’d always be left wondering. She’d never have to tip her hand. She’d never have to let on that she was there, that if she wanted to, she could put him away for the rest of his life.

  Well, Keisha Ceylon wasn’t nearly as clever as she thought she was.

  Wendell Garfield wasn’t interested in taking any chances.

  EIGHT

  Melissa

  After her father dropped her off and she went up to her apartment, Melissa felt woozy. And nauseated.

  She’d only been inside the door a minute when she suddenly felt very ill. She ran into the bathroom, dropped to her knees in front of the toilet. Made it just in time.

  She cleaned up and peered at herself in the mirror. Her hair was dirty and stringy, and there were bags under eyes. She’d hardly slept in the last couple of days. More than her father, but not much.

  Melissa rested her hand on the top of her very pregnant belly, rubbed it, felt something move around beneath it. Then she felt her body begin to shake, her eyes begin to moisten. All the crying she’d done in the last few days, she couldn’t believe she had any more tears in her, but they just kept on coming.

  She wanted to crawl into bed and never wake up. Just get under the covers, pull them over her head, and stay that way forever. She didn’t want to ever have to face the world again.

  It was all so terrible.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, about her father, about Lester, about the baby, about how her life had spiraled totally out of control in the last year. How it didn’t look to her like it was going to get any better.

  She thought about the press conference. About how strongly her father had felt she should not be a part of it.

  “Don’t do this,” he’d told her. “Don’t put yourself through it. It’s not necessary. I can handle it.”

  “No, I should do it.”

  “Melissa, I’m telling you—”

  “No, Dad, I have to do it. You can’t stop me.”

  She recalled how he’d gripped her arm, how it almost hurt. How he’d looked into her eyes. “I’m telling you, it would be a mistake.”

  “If I don’t do it,” she’d said, “people will think I don’t care.”

  And so, reluctantly, he had relented. But he was very firm with her. “Let me do the talking. I don’t want you saying anything, you understand? You can cry all you want, but you’re not going to say one word.”

  So she hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she could have, anyway. Just as he’d guessed, she cried. And the tears were genuine. She hadn’t been
able to stop. She was so incredibly sad. And not just sad.

  She was scared.

  She knew her father loved her very much. She believed that in her heart. But it didn’t give her comfort. Not now.

  He’d told her what to say. He’d rehearsed it with her.

  “Your mother went shopping and that’s all we know,” he’d said. “She went off like she always did. Anything could have happened. Maybe she ran off to be with another man, or—”

  “Mom would never do that,” Melissa had said, sniffing, trying to hold back the tears long enough for her father to drill into her what her story was going to be when the police talked to her. Because the police were going to want to talk to her, she could be sure of that.

  “—or maybe that guy who’s been going around doing carjackings, maybe he did this. It could have been any number of things. The world is full of sick people. The police will have all sorts of theories, and if they never solve it, they never solve it.”

  “Okay.”

  “The main thing is, you just don’t know. You have no idea. Are we clear on that?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  She crawled into the bed, lay on her side, rested her head on the pillow. She grabbed a couple of tissues from the box on her bedside table and dabbed her eyes.

  “I can’t do this,” she said to herself.

  What was it her mother used to tell her?

  “You have to live your life like someone’s watching you all the time. Behave in a way that you will never be ashamed.”

  She turned to other side, then back. It was so hard to get comfortable because of the baby. Finally, she threw off the covers and put her feet on the floor, sat there on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands.

  “I can’t do this,” she said again. “I have to do what’s right. No matter who it hurts.”

  She wondered, should she call a lawyer? But she didn’t know any lawyers. She didn’t want to pick one at random out of the phone book. And was there really any point? If her plan was to tell the truth, did she really need one?