Clouded Vision

by Linwood Barclay

  That way, come Friday, she could have a long soak in a hot tub. After that, she’d slip into her pajamas and pink robe and park herself in front of the television. It was mostly for background noise, because she rarely had her eyes on it. Her primary focus was her knitting.

  Knitting had always been a hobby for her, but Ellie hadn’t shown much interest in it the last few years. However, according to a newspaper backgrounder who had tried to capture the essence of this missing woman, Ellie had gone back to it when she learned she was going to become a grandmother. She had made baby booties and socks and a couple of sweaters. “I’m knitting up a storm,” she’d told one of her friends.

  But this particular week, Ellie Garfield did not make it to Friday night.

  Nor did she, by all accounts, make it to the store on Thursday. None of the grocery store staff, who knew Ellie Garfield by sight, if not by name, recalled seeing her. Nor was there any record that her credit card—which she preferred to cash since she collected points—had been used that evening. Nor had it been used since. Her car was not picked up on the surveillance cameras that kept watch over the grocery store lot.

  From Keisha’s reading of the news stories on the woman’s disappearance, and from what she’d seen on television, the police didn’t know what to make of it. Had Ellie met with foul play? Did she start off intending to go to the grocery store and then just decide to just keep on driving? Leave her old life behind and start a new one?

  That seemed unlikely. Especially considering that she was about to have her first grandchild. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?

  Police tossed out the theory that she was the victim of a carjacking. There had been three incidents in the last year where a female driver stopped at a traffic light had been pulled from her vehicle. The perpetrator—believed to be the same man in all three cases—had then made off with the car. The three women had been shaken up, but not seriously hurt.

  Maybe Ellie Garfield had run into the same man. And maybe this time things had turned violent.

  On Saturday, Wendell Garfield went before the cameras, his pregnant daughter at his side. The girl was crying too hard to say anything, but Wendell held back his tears long enough to make his plea.

  “I just want to say, honey, if you’re watching, please, please come home. We love you, Ellie, and we miss you and we just want you back. And … and if something has happened to … if someone has done something to you, then I make this appeal to whoever has done this … I’m asking you, please let us know what’s happened to Ellie. Please let us know where she is, that she’s okay … just tell us something … I … I …”

  At that point he turned away from the camera, overcome.

  Keisha almost shed a tear herself. It was time to make her move. She was willing to bet her tarot cards and Ouija board that Winona was watching this, thinking the same thing.

  So that evening, Keisha took a drive past the Garfield home, which was set back from the street in a heavily wooded neighborhood. Got the lay of the land, as it were. Wanted to see whether the place was surrounded with cop cars, marked or unmarked. See if Winona’s Prius was on the street. Keisha spotted what she believed was one unmarked car, but that was it.

  She decided to make her pitch Sunday morning. First thing.

  You did this enough, it got pretty easy. It was the people themselves who fed you the vision. You started off vague, something like “I see a house … a white house with a fence out front.…”

  And then they’d say, “A white house? Wait, wait, didn’t Aunt Gwen live in a white house?”

  And someone else would say, “That’s right, she did!”

  And then, picking up on the past tense, you said, “And this Aunt Gwen, I’m sensing … I’m sensing she’s passed on.”

  And they said, “Oh my God, that’s right, she has!”

  The key was to listen, have them give you the clues. Give them something to latch onto, and then you were golden.

  It wouldn’t be any different with Wendell Garfield.

  Not that everyone bought into it. There was that one woman a few years back, the one whose parents and brother disappeared one night twenty-five years earlier when she was only fourteen. Cynthia, that was her name. You’d have thought if there was anyone who’d be willing to take a leap of faith with someone like Keisha, it would have been this woman. They even got as far as the TV studio, where they were going to film Keisha outlining her vision for Cynthia, and the moment she raised the issue of being paid, everything shut down. It was the husband. The teacher. As soon as Keisha wanted to be paid for her services, he started making out like she was some kind of con artist or something.

  The prick.

  But Wendell Garfield, she had a good feeling about him from the TV appearance.

  Keisha was up early Sunday. She’d spent time the night before selecting the right outfit. Nothing too flashy, but you needed a touch of eccentricity somewhere. People figured if you could talk to the dead, see into other dimensions, you had to be a little off your rocker, right? Eccentricity was expected. So she went with the earrings that looked like tiny green parrots.

  She got in her Toyota, hit the wipers to clear the dusting of snow from the night before. When she got to the Garfield house, she was relieved to see no police cars out front. It was always better if you could do this without the cops offering their opinion that you might as well set your cash on fire as hand it over to some shyster psychic.

  Keisha sat in the car a moment, getting her head in the right place.

  She was ready.

  Time to go in and explain to the frantic husband that she could help him in his hour of need. She could be his instrument to help determine what had happened to his beloved Ellie.

  Because Keisha had seen something. She’d had a vision. A vision that very possibly held the answer to why his wife of twenty-one years had been missing for three nights now.

  A vision that she would be happy to share with him.

  For the right price.

  Keisha Ceylon took a deep breath, took one last look at her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and opened the car door.

  Showtime.

  TWO

  Wendell

  “So, what are you telling me, that there’s been nothing, nothing at all?” Wendell Garfield said into the phone. “I thought, I really thought someone … Well, if you hear anything, anything at all, please, please call me. I’m desperate for any kind of news.”

  He replaced the receiver in its cradle. He had decided when he got up that morning that he would call the police first thing, see whether the news conference he and his daughter had done yesterday had produced any valuable tips.

  The detective he’d just spoken to was not the one in charge of the investigation, but he claimed to be up to speed on what was happening. There had been only about half a dozen calls to the special hotline police had set up. None of them had been considered useful.

  Wendell decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes all night. He was trying to remember, since Thursday, when this had all started, just how much sleep he’d had. Five, six hours maybe. Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy made her so tired.

  Garfield hadn’t wanted his daughter to be part of the press conference. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. Melissa was seven months pregnant, her mother was missing, and now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?

  “I don’t want to put her through that,” he’d told the police.

  But it was Melissa herself who insisted she appear alongside her father. “We’ll do it together, Dad,” she told him. “Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found, that we want her to come home.”

  With some reluctance, he agreed, but only if he did all the talking. As it turned out, once the lights were on and the cameras in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She tried to splutter “Mommy,
please come back to us” but dissolved into tears and pressed her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie very much and wanted her to come home.

  Then he made his appeal to anyone out there who might have anything to do with his wife’s disappearance. Please, tell us what’s happened. Send Ellie home to us.

  And then he lost it, too.

  He could hear murmurs among some of the newspeople, phrases like “good stuff” and “perfect” and “awesome.”

  What despicable pieces of humanity, Wendell Garfield thought.

  He took Melissa home with him, tried to get her to eat something. “It’s going to be okay,” he soothed her. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this.”

  She sat slumped at the kitchen table, her head nearly on the table. “Oh, Daddy …”

  “Trust me,” Wendell said.

  She stayed overnight, but around dawn said she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Wendell wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but Melissa insisted she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay there. She’d come back and stay overnight in the room she used to live in. But she needed some time by herself, to think. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver.

  Wendell was awake at five—he’d never been asleep—and said he would drive his daughter back to her place.

  Parked out front of her apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance, Wendell asked, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? Do you want me to wait?”

  Melissa said no.

  Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home three years. She was the first to admit she’d been a difficult teen from the beginning. She drank, used drugs, slept around. She ignored the limits her parents attempted to set for her.

  When she was sixteen, Ellie and Wendell decided they could take no more. They gave her an ultimatum. Live by the rules of this house, or get out.

  She chose to get out.

  Melissa found a place to live with Olivia. She dropped of school and got a job waiting tables at Denny’s. It turned out that getting kicked out of her parents’ house was the best thing that had ever happened to her. It forced her to get her act together. She didn’t have anyone else to take care of her, so she had to take care of herself.

  She started to become responsible. Who would have guessed?

  Ellie and Wendell were cautiously optimistic. Once Melissa got her head screwed on right, they figured, she could go back and finish school. If she did well enough, she might even have a chance at college, Ellie mused one evening. Maybe she’d even think about becoming a veterinarian. Remember, when she was little, how she said one day she’d loved to work with animals and—

  “For God’s sake, Ellie, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Wendell had said.

  Melissa would come over for dinner. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night, Melissa would tell them about how she was getting her life back on track and her parents would nod and try to be encouraging. But another night, Ellie, anxious to see her daughter’s rehabilitation move with more speed, would start pushing. She’d tell her daughter it was time—now—to stop being nothing more than a waitress and get back to school and make something of herself. Did Melissa have any idea just how embarrassing it was for her mother, an employee of the board of education, to have a daughter who was a dropout? Who hadn’t even completed the eleventh grade? How long was she expected to wait to see her daughter get on a path where she would amount to something?

  Then they’d start fighting and Melissa would storm out, but not before asking out loud how she’d managed to live in this house as long as she had without blowing her brains out.

  It always took a few days for the dust to settle.

  Ellie and Wendell still kept their fingers crossed that Melissa was growing up. She held on to her waitressing job. She was saving some money. Not a lot. About twenty-five dollars a week. But it was something. And one day, talking to her mother on the phone, Melissa happened to mention that she’d been on a college website, looking at what qualifications you needed to enroll in the veterinary program.

  Ellie was beside herself with joy when she told Wendell the news.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “She’s growing up, that’s what she’s doing. She’s growing up and thinking about the future.”

  What neither Ellie or Wendell had counted on was that the immediate future would include a baby.

  Melissa was already three months along when she broke the news to her parents. They did not, to say the least, take it well, but Wendell tried to find the silver lining. Maybe this meant Melissa would get married. She’d be a very young mother, but at least if she had a man in her life, a man who could look after her and the baby, wouldn’t that take some of the pressure off Ellie and him?

  Then they found out about the man. It soon became clear that the only thing that might be worse than Melissa having this baby with no father on the scene would be having this baby with the father on the scene.

  His name was Lester Cody. Thirty years old. A regular at Denny’s. He’d never hung on to a job longer than three months, and none of those had ever paid a penny more than minimum wage. Always ended up injured. Hurt his back. Threw out his shoulder. Sprained his ankle. But luckily, no matter how badly he might have gotten hurt, he could still play his Nintendo Wii. Lester lived in his parents’ basement, still had Spider-Man posters on his bedroom wall. His favorite hat was adorned with a plastic dog turd.

  Ellie cried for the better part of a week before she was able to accept that her daughter was really going to have this child, that she was not going to marry Lester Cody, and that Ellie was going to become a grandmother.

  “This baby’s coming,” she said to Wendell. “There’s not a damn thing I can do about it.” So she took up her knitting again.

  Sometimes, it was all more than Wendell Garfield could stand. The tension between his wife and daughter, the relentless discussions Ellie wanted to have with him about what their girl was going to do with her life. And now all this new talk about the baby. How would Melissa manage? Would she need to move back home? Would the man who got her pregnant step up to the plate and accept some responsibility?

  The discussions never stopped.

  Wendell Garfield wondered if it was all this that had driven him into the arms of Laci Harmon, or if it would have happened anyway.

  THREE

  Wendell

  They both worked at Home Depot, Wendell primarily in plumbing and Laci over in home lighting fixtures. They’d had coffee breaks together, talked about their families, the joys and—mostly—heartaches of raising kids. She had two boys, aged fifteen and seventeen, who did nothing but fight with each other. Laci confessed once, only half jokingly, that she wished they’d have one final no-holds-barred battle and kill each other.

  Wendell laughed. He said he knew exactly how she felt.

  He always found reasons to stroll through the lighting section.

  Laci often seemed to be passing through the plumbing supplies aisle.

  It started with friendly teasing, then double entendres. When Laci wandered by, she’d narrow her eyes and say she needed help with her plumbing. When Garfield was over in light fixtures, he’d bump into Laci on purpose and say he wondered if she could help him keep his light switch in the up position.

  It was all in fun.

  Then one day Wendell had been asked to assemble, for display purposes, a vinyl-sided utility shed. He was inside the nearly finished structure, tightening up some bolts to make sure the thing wouldn’t blow down in the wind, when Laci Harmon stepped inside, slid the door shut behind her, and placed his right hand on her left breast.

  It was a Thursday. That night, when Ellie was doing the weekly grocery shopping, Wendell slipped away from home and met Laci at a Days Inn. They had been findin
g ways to rendezvous once or twice a week since then, always in places that were nicer than a vinyl-sided utility shed, although not always by much. Laci’s Dodge minivan, for example. Wendell longed for these moments away from home, away from the endless stresses that Ellie and Melissa provided.

  * * *

  He’d only just got off the phone with the police when it rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, Wen, I just had to get in touch.”

  “Laci, this isn’t a good time.”

  “But I can’t stop thinking about you, about what you must be going through,” she said. She wasn’t whispering, which told Garfield that she was alone in her house.

  “Where’s your husband? The boys?” he asked her.

  “They’re out. It’s just me,” Laci said. “Wendell, you have to talk to me.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Have they found out anything? Do the police know what happened? I watched the press conference. I watched it at six, and I watched it again at eleven. It was very moving. You were very good, if you know what I mean. You held it together really well. I think if anyone knew anything, if they knew anything at all, they’d call when they saw that.”

  “I just got off the phone with the police,” Wendell told her. “They haven’t received any good tips.”

  “I feel … I feel so … it’s hard to explain,” Laci said. “I feel sort of guilty, you know? Because of what we’ve been doing behind her back.”

  “They don’t have anything to do with each other.”

  “I know that, but I keep thinking, what if someone finds out? What if someone finds out what’s going on between us, and they think it has something to do with what’s happened to Ellie? And if, God forbid, something has actually happened to Ellie, then how is it going to look if—”

  “Laci, please, don’t go there,” he interrupted. “Maybe she just decided to go away for a while, clear her head.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But I suppose it’s a possibility. I mean, they haven’t found her car or anything. If something had happened to her around here, you’d think they’d at least have found her car. We’re into the third day now.”