Clouded Vision

by Linwood Barclay

  He had the ends of the sash twisted several times around his palms and kept pulling. Keisha could feel herself starting to lose consciousness. She wondered what he would do with her body. Hoped he wouldn’t put her in the lake along with Mrs. Garfield.

  She didn’t like the water.

  In the seconds just before she figured she was going to black out, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.

  Her right hand brushed up against something.

  Something soft, almost furry.

  Yarn.

  And as her fingers fumbled across the yarn, they landed on something else. Something long, and narrow, and pointed. Like a stick, or a needle.

  A knitting needle.

  In the last second Keisha had before she blacked out, she grabbed hold of the knitting needle with her right hand and swung it up and over her shoulder. As hard as she could.

  The scream was only an inch from her ear. And it was horrific.

  As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair. She collapsed onto the floor, wheezing and gasping for breath. She was on her knees. Air rushed into her lungs so quickly it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s cries of agony.

  Keisha, even as she struggled to get her breath back, had to turn and see what she had done.

  The knitting needle was sticking straight out of Garfield’s right eye. Blood poured from the socket, spattering the right side of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha figured that a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.

  But he could see her with his left eye, and, still screaming, he started coming around the chair after her.

  Keisha struggled to her feet and tried moving for the door. But she hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand onto her arm.

  “You bitch!” Garfield said, although there was so much blood in his throat it sounded as though he was gargling.

  Garfield yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down to the floor again. She ended up sprawled on her back. Before she had a chance to roll away, he landed on top of her, straddling her.

  He didn’t have the sash anymore. He was going to have to make do with his hands.

  He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping onto Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but his hands had her neck pinned to the floor.

  She started blacking out again. With her last ounce of strength, she shot the heel of her hand straight up against the end of the knitting needle.

  She drove it into Garfield’s head another three inches.

  There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he seemed to freeze above her. His grip on her neck relaxed, his arms went weak, and his body collapsed on top of her.

  This time, Keisha didn’t even take time to get her breath back. She pushed frantically at his dead body until it was off of her, crawled a few feet away, and then, once she was able to breathe normally again, decided she was entitled to take a moment and become hysterical.

  TWELVE

  Melissa

  “You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?” Detective Marshall asked.

  “I’m positive,” Melissa Garfield said. “I’m going to plead guilty to everything.”

  “Then you have to sign here. And here.”

  Melissa scribbled her signature.

  “Okay. Now, why don’t you start from the beginning.”

  “You see,” Melissa said, “instead of going shopping first, Mom decided to visit me. She’d do that once in a while, just drop by without calling or anything first. She’d say, ‘What, a mother can’t pop in and visit her daughter?’ She comes in and I’m in the kitchen, cutting up some celery and carrot sticks to put in a salad because I’m actually trying to eat the right things so the baby will be healthy, you know, even though I’d rather just be eating pizza and burgers, but I’m trying, okay? I’m really trying.”

  “Sure,” the detective said.

  “It’s like she was checking up on me all the time. She was always asking me these questions, like what’s happening with Lester and was he going to marry me and was he going to help take care of the baby and maybe I could move in with him and his mom and dad and she’d be able to help me look after the baby, like I was really going to do that, right? And then she wanted to know if I’d applied to the veterinarian school I was talking about because I happened to mention it, you know, and I said not yet, but I was thinking about it and she said what’s the holdup? Couldn’t I just go on the computer and press a couple of buttons and I’d be registered and if it was that easy I should just go and do it now and I said, Jesus, will be you just give me some room to breathe, you know? I got a baby coming in a few weeks and I got a lot on my mind and, okay, maybe I’m thinking about it, but do I have to do something about it right this very fucking second? And she said, it’ll take you like two minutes so why don’t you do it and I’ll cut up your celery and your carrots for you and she tries to take the knife from me and I don’t know what happened but I kind of snapped or something, you know?”

  “I hear ya,” the detective said.

  “So, like, I don’t know how exactly it happened, but the knife sort of went into her, and then I guess I must have put it into her a second time, and then she looks at me and she’s all like, what have you done, and then she falls down and she doesn’t move or anything.”

  “So what did you do then? Did you think about calling for an ambulance?”

  “I guess I went all crazy for a while, you know? But I managed to call my dad.”

  “Okay.”

  “I said, something’s happened to Mom, you have to get over here, and he said, is it a heart attack or something, and I said no, and he said I should call 911, and then I said that I’d kind of stabbed her, and then he was all ‘What?’ And he said I shouldn’t do anything and he’d be right over.”

  “To help you out.”

  Melissa nodded. “So he got over real soon, and he was kind of all freaked out, and he took one look at Mom and could see that she was dead, and he said he had to think. I asked him, was I going to go to jail, was I going to have my baby in jail? And he kept telling me to shut up, that he was thinking, and then he got this idea. He carried Mom out of the apartment the back way and got her into her car, and then he told me I was going to have to follow in his car, drive along after him. And I followed him up to this lake, and he put the car on the ice and it went through and I guess I already told you about that part.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Dad came back to my place and cleaned up. There was blood everywhere. It was horrible. It took hours to clean up the blood. I couldn’t do it. I stayed in my bed, under the covers. I couldn’t stop shivering. When he was finished, he told me everything was going to be okay. He said I wasn’t going to have to go to jail.” She smiled sadly. “He said he loved me very much and he wanted everything to be okay for me. He said I’d done a bad thing but sometimes people make mistakes and he didn’t want my whole life to be ruined, you know? He’s a really good dad. He said the police would just think Mom ran away, or maybe she got killed by that carjacker guy, but they’d never really know what happened because they’d never be able to find Mom’s car. And if the police didn’t know what happened, they couldn’t really charge anyone.”

  She shook her head. “He’s going to be so mad at me. Because he did all this to protect me, and now … well, here I am. But I just … I can’t do it. I feel bad about what I did. I really loved my mom.”

  Detective Marshall reached out and touched her hand. “I know.”

  “Is my dad going to be in a lot of trouble?”

  “Well, I’d have to say yes. But with the right lawyer, and a sympathetic jury … A lot of them will understand the lengths a father might go to, to help his daugh
ter. He might have to go to jail, but maybe not for a long time.”

  “Not as long as me.”

  Detective Marshall nodded. “You might be right about that.”

  For the first time since she’d been in this room, a shadow of a smile crossed Melissa’s lips. “That’d be okay. Just so he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life in jail. That wouldn’t be fair. He’s not that old a guy. He’s got a lot of time left.”

  THIRTEEN

  Keisha

  She wasn’t calling the police.

  She knew it was self-defense. She knew it wasn’t murder. But she didn’t have any confidence that the police would see it that way. Not once they started looking into her background. Saw her convictions for fraud back in 1999 and 2003 in Connecticut. Started figuring out what kind of scam she’d been hoping to run here with Wendell Garfield. Even if the guy did murder his wife, they’d find something to pin on her.

  Keisha hadn’t told anyone she was coming here. She’d put her boyfriend on alert, said he might have to do the Nina shtick, but she never told him where she was going, who she was going to see. And the Garfield house, it was on a street where the houses were pretty spread out. She thought there was a good chance no one had seen her get out of her car and go into the house. If she could get out of here and back into her car unseen, she’d be all set.

  Fingerprints.

  She wondered what she’d touched. The robe, but it wouldn’t hold a fingerprint. Surely the cops couldn’t lift a print off the fabric of the chair.

  Just to be sure, she wiped down the coffee table, any other surfaces she thought she might have touched. There was plenty of blood around, but none of it was hers, so she thought she’d be okay where DNA was concerned.

  Once she got home, she’d get out of these blood-soaked clothes and burn them.

  Keisha had a good feeling about this. She believed she could walk away from this and no one would ever know she was here.

  Wendell Garfield, sprawled out across the floor, certainly wouldn’t be talking.

  She’d have to wear a scarf at her neck for a few weeks. She’d caught a look at herself in the mirror. There was an ugly purple ring around her throat.

  “No more of this,” she promised herself. “No more.”

  This was a message, no doubt about it. Keisha had never been a particularly religious person, but this sure felt like it was a warning from the Man upstairs. “Knock it off,” He was telling her.

  She was going to knock it off.

  “Lord, just let me walk out of here and I’m yours,” she vowed.

  She took one last look at the room, at Garfield’s dead body, just to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. She was good. She was as sure as she could be.

  Keisha slipped out of the house, wiped down the door handle on her way. She was halfway across the yard when she happened to reach up and touch her ear.

  There was nothing dangling from it.

  She reached over and touched her other ear. The parrot earring was there. But the other one, it was gone.

  It had been lost in the house.

  “Oh God,” she said under her breath. She had to go back in.

  She went back to the door, stood there a moment, steeling herself. She went inside, took in the scene all over again. She started by the chair where she had been sitting. Patted around it, stuck her fingers down into the cushion cracks.

  No luck.

  She looked at the coffee table, scanned the carpets. The earring was nowhere to be seen.

  There was only one place left to look.

  Keisha got down on her knees next to the body, slipped her hands under him, and rolled him over. The carpet was completely soaked with the blood that had poured out of Garfield’s eye.

  She spotted a small bump in the pool of blood. She stuck her fingers into it and lifted up her earring. The parrot looked like a seagull caught in a red oil spill. She dropped the earring into her purse and went back out the front door.

  Got in her car.

  Got her keys out of her purse.

  Keyed the ignition.

  As she was driving away, looking ahead, she saw a police car turn the corner.

  No no no no.

  As it approached, Keisha wondered how visible the bloodstains splattered across the front of her dress were. Would the cop notice them as they passed each other? Why hadn’t she gotten these windows tinted?

  The police car got closer. Two officers inside. A woman behind the wheel, a man riding shotgun.

  Just look ahead, she told herself. Like you don’t care. Be cool.

  The cars met.

  As the police car slid past, Keisha was certain no one looked over. She kept her eyes front. Then, seconds later, she glanced in the rearview, expecting the patrol car’s brake lights to come on. The car to turn around. To come after her. Lights flashing.

  Nothing happened. The police car drove on, pulling over to the shoulder out front of the Garfield house.

  Keisha put on her blinker, turned left at the corner.

  Home free.

  Lesson learned.

  FOURTEEN

  Winona

  She’d drifted off during a National Geographic special. Something about the rain forests. She’d never been all that interested in the rain forests.

  But only a few minutes into sleep, Winona Simpson woke with a start.

  Her heart was pounding. She reached under the various necklaces she always wore and put her palm between her breasts, felt the rapid beating.

  That was some nightmare.

  So real. So frightening.

  No, she thought. Not a nightmare.

  Something else.

  She’d had a vision. That was the way they often came to her. As she slept.

  Winona blinked a couple of times, trying to bring the images in her head into focus.

  She drew in a sharp breath.

  “Oh, Keisha,” she said. “What on earth have you done?”

  Read on for an excerpt from Linwood Barclay’s

  THE ACCIDENT

  PROLOGUE

  Their names were Edna Bauder and Pam Steigerwald, and they were grade school teachers from Butler, Pennsylvania, and they had never been to New York before in their entire lives. New York was hardly the other side of the planet, but when you lived in Butler, almost everything seemed that way. As Pam’s fortieth birthday approached, her friend Edna said you’re going to have a birthday weekend you are never, ever going to forget, and on that count she turned out to be absolutely right.

  Their husbands were delighted when they heard this was a “girls only” weekend. When they learned it was going to be two full days of shopping, a Broadway show, and going on the Sex and the City tour, they said they would rather stay home and blow their brains out. So they put their wives on the bus and said have fun and try not to get too drunk because there’s a lot of muggers in New York, everybody knows that, and you have to keep your wits about you.

  They found a hotel near Fiftieth and Third that was, at least by New York standards, reasonable, although it still seemed like a lot considering all they were going to do was sleep there. They’d vowed to save money by not taking cabs, but the maps of the subway system looked like a schematic for the space shuttle, so they decided, what the hell. They went to Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s and a huge shoe outlet in Union Square that would have held every store in Butler and still had room left over for the post office.

  “I want my ashes scattered through this place when I die,” Edna said, trying on a pair of sandals.

  They tried to get to the top of the Empire State Building, but the line to get in was huge, and when you had only forty-eight hours in the Big Apple you didn’t want to spend three of them waiting in line, so they bailed.

  Pam wanted to eat lunch at that deli, the one from that movie where Meg Ryan had the fake orgasm. Their table was right next to the one they used in the movie—there was even a sign hanging over it to mark the spot—but when they got back to Butle
r they’d tell everyone they got the actual table. Edna ordered a pastrami sandwich with a knish, even though she had no idea what a knish was. Pam said, “I’ll have what she’s having!” and the two of them went into fits of hysterics when the waitress rolled her eyes.

  While having coffee afterward, Edna said, almost out of nowhere, “I think Phil’s been seeing that waitress at Denny’s.” And then she burst into tears, and Pam asked why she suspected such a thing, that she thought Edna’s husband, Phil, was a good guy who’d never cheat, and Edna said she didn’t think he was actually sleeping with her or anything, but he went there for coffee every single day, so that had to mean something. And the thing was, he hardly ever touched her anymore.

  “Come on,” Pam said. “We’re all busy, we got kids, Phil’s working two jobs, who’s got the energy?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Edna said.

  Pam said, “You need to get your mind off that nonsense. You brought me here to have fun.” She opened her New York Fodor’s tourist guidebook to the spot where she’d put a sticky note and said, “You need more retail therapy. We’re going to Canal Street.”

  Edna had no idea what that was. Pam said you could buy purses—designer purses, or at least purses that looked just like designer purses—for next to nothing down there. You have to ask around for the best deals, she said. She’d read in a magazine somewhere that sometimes the best stuff, it’s not even out where the people can see it. You have to go into a back room or something.

  “You’re talkin’ my language, honey,” Edna said.

  So they grabbed yet another cab and asked to be taken to the corner of Canal and Broadway, but at Lafayette and Grand the taxi came to a dead stop.

  “What’s happened?” Edna asked the driver.

  “Accident,” he said in an accent Pam thought could be anything from Salvadoran to Swiss. “I can’t turn around. Is just few blocks that way.”

  Pam paid the driver and they started walking in the direction of Canal. A block up, a crowd had gathered. Edna said, “Oh my God.”