Clouded Vision

by Linwood Barclay

  Melissa decided to take a shower first, make herself presentable. Before she stepped under the water, she phoned for a taxi. Asked for it to be out front in an hour.

  She was standing on the curb when the yellow car came around the corner. When she got in, the driver asked where she’d like to go.

  “The police station,” she said.

  “Okeydoke,” he said, then laughed. “I was thinking maybe you were going to say the hospital.”

  “I got another couple of months to go,” she told him. “I’m not having a baby in your cab.”

  “Good to know,” he said, and put the car in drive.

  She didn’t say anything the rest of the way. Mostly, she just thought. About how angry her father was going to be with her.

  NINE

  Keisha

  Garfield seemed to take a long time in the kitchen, but when he returned he had a check between his thumb and index finger. Keisha smiled as she took it from him, glanced down at it, saw that it was for the right amount. She folded the check once and slipped it into her purse.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “I couldn’t find a pen.”

  “You should have asked me. I have a couple in my purse here.”

  “I finally found one. In the drawer.”

  “Well, that’s okay.” She put her purse down on the floor next to the chair. “Shall I continue?”

  “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

  “No, I’m fine, thank you.”

  “I was actually just about to make a cup of tea when you knocked on the door. Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Garfield sat down on the couch. “So, do you live around here?”

  Keisha wondered what was going on. She’d brought Garfield right up to the edge of the cliff with that thing about his wife’s car not being on the road. She had him then. He was curious, no doubt about it.

  It was the ideal moment to hit him up for the money.

  So off he’d gone to the kitchen to write the check. And now he was back, ready to continue, and he’s asking her if she wants coffee? Tea? Asking her where she lived?

  She wondered, was he stalling for time? Had he called the police while he was out of her sight? Told them there was this crazy lady here, trying to exploit his situation for money?

  Keisha didn’t think so. She’d have heard something if he’d tried that. He was no more than ten feet away the whole time, just on the other side of the wall. And the doorway between the living room and the kitchen was open the entire time.

  “I’m sorry, what was the question?” she asked.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Not far from here,” she said. “The other side of town.”

  He nodded pleasantly. “Have you lived there long?”

  “I moved up here a couple of years ago.”

  “Where from?”

  “Connecticut. Near New Haven.”

  “Do you have a summer place?”

  “I’ve just got the one place, Mr. Garfield, and I live in it all year long. Do you want to hear what I have to say or not? I mean, you’ve paid me. I’m guessing you’d like to get your money’s worth.”

  He gave her a go-ahead wave. “By all means.”

  “As I was saying, I’ve been seeing some kind of flashes of the car your wife was driving.” Keisha still had her hands on the pink robe, occasionally kneading the fabric between her fingers. “The silver Nissan.”

  “You were saying that the car was not on the road. If it’s not on the road, where do you see it?”

  Keisha closed her eyes again. “It’s not a parking lot. I guess that would still count as being on the road, in a way. I’m not seeing it in a garage.”

  “What about water?” Garfield asked. “Do you see any water?”

  Curious, Keisha thought. He’s just asked if I have a summer place, and now he mentions water. She’d been thinking about Florida earlier. Maybe Garfield was thinking the missus had taken off for Miami. But then again, she’d already put it out there that Ellie Garfield was very cold, so if she raised Florida as a possibility, she was going to get caught in a contradiction.

  Stick with cold. So if it’s cold, the water … could be frozen.

  She opened her eyes for a moment, then closed them again. “It’s funny you should mention water. I was seeing something, something shimmery, that I thought might be water, but I was thinking maybe it was actually ice.”

  “Ice,” Garfield said.

  This time, she kept her eyes open. “Yes, ice. Ice in a glass? Ice at a skating rink? Ice, like, on a lake? Does ice of any kind have any significance to you? Any significance where your wife is concerned?”

  “Why should it mean something to me?” A defensive tone had edged into his voice.

  “You were the one who mentioned water.”

  “And then you mentioned ice. I didn’t mention ice.”

  “But it seems to have some meaning for you,” Keisha insisted. “I could see it, in your expression.”

  “Why would you say ice on a lake?”

  “That was just one of the kinds of ice I mentioned. But I can tell there seems to be a connection there.”

  Garfield stood up. He took a few steps to the right of the couch, then turned and paced in the other direction. He was stroking the end of his chin, pondering something.

  “What is it?” Keisha asked.

  He paced back and forth one more time and then stopped. He looked at Keisha, studied her a moment, then pointed an accusing finger in her direction. “Maybe it’s time you just leveled with me.”

  “Leveled with you about what?”

  “About what’s really going on here.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Garfield, but I’m not sure I understand.”

  “This whole psychic mumbo-jumbo act you’ve got going on, that’s a load of bullshit, isn’t it?”

  Keisha sighed. “I told you, if you want to call Nina’s father for a reference, I have no problem with that. I’m happy to give you the number.”

  “You got somebody all set up to take the call? Someone who’ll tell me what I want to hear?”

  Keisha shook her head and gave him a bruised look. Trying to appear disappointed, hurt. But what she was thinking was, At least I’ve got the check. Smart thing to do would be to get to the bank when it opens tomorrow morning and cash it, before Garfield has a chance to phone and put a stop payment on it.

  “I’m very sorry you’d think that of me, Mr. Garfield. Just when I thought we were making some progress.”

  “Whatever you know, whatever you think you know, it’s got nothing to do with visions or communicating with the dead or goddamn tea leaves. Whatever you know, you found out some other way.”

  “I assure you, I—”

  “Would you please hand me my wife’s robe? I don’t want you touching it anymore.”

  “Oh, sure,” Keisha said. This certainly seemed to suggest that they were done.

  “Thank you,” he said, gathering the robe up into a ball.

  Keisha reached down for her purse. She set it into her lap, made sure it was zipped tight at the top, and started to stand.

  Garfield said, “No, don’t go yet.”

  “I can’t see what possible point there would be in staying any longer, Mr. Garfield. It’s clear you think I’m some kind of con artist. I’ve been at this too long to take offense. That is how some people react, thinking that what I do is a sham, and if that’s your conclusion, then I’m happy to be on my way.” Thinking, Don’t ask for the check back.

  “Did I offend you? I’m very sorry if I did that.” He didn’t look at all sincere.

  “You just accused me of having someone standing by to—to lie to you about my successes. Wouldn’t you expect me to take offense at that?”

  He was still pacing, still fondling the robe, doing something with it, like it was a mound of clay he was shaping into something. Keisha watched as he took a few st
eps one way, then the other. It struck her that this was how he formed his thoughts, by making these little journeys around the room.

  “You are very clever, I have to give you that,” he said.

  Keisha said nothing. She was starting to get an inkling of what was going on. She should have caught on a little sooner.

  “Very, very clever,” he said, stepping over to the window, pulling back the curtain to get a look at the street. This put him off to one side and slightly behind Keisha, and she had to twist around in her chair to see him. “I’d like to apologize. Forget what I just said. Why don’t you carry on, let me hear some more about your vision.”

  “Mr. Garfield, I’m not sure—”

  “No no, please, go on.”

  Keisha put her purse back down on the carpet and rested her hands by her thighs on the seat cushion. “Would you like me start again with the ice? Or move on to something else?”

  “Why don’t you just say whatever comes into your head.”

  Keisha had a bad feeling. She couldn’t recall dealing with anyone like this before, someone who’d seemingly lost interest in what she had to say, wanted her to leave, then had an abrupt change of heart. Judging by his tone now, she didn’t believe he was even interested in anything else she had to say.

  He just didn’t want her to leave.

  Something was very wrong here. She thought she had it figured out.

  It’s him. He did it.

  It explained his strange behavior. Keisha wanted to kick herself for not realizing it sooner. She’d been at this long enough, of course, to know that when a wife was murdered—or missing—the husband was always a prime suspect. It wasn’t very often people were killed by strangers. They were killed by people they knew. Wives were killed by husbands. Husbands were killed by wives.

  The man had moved away from the window and was taking a route behind Keisha’s chair. She was going to have to turn around to keep her eye on him.

  “On second thought, sure, tell me about the ice.”

  What threw her off was the televised news conference. She’d figured, first of all, that if the police strongly suspected Garfield had offed his wife, they’d never have let him go before the cameras. Would they? She had to admit, Garfield was good. Those tears had looked real. The way he took his pregnant daughter into his arms to comfort her, that was pretty darn convincing, too.

  Not that it had never occurred to Keisha that the people she preyed upon could be something other than innocent. Guilty people often made the best targets. They could be so eager to prove they were as much in the dark as everyone else that they leapt at the chance to pay to hear what she had to say.

  Telling themselves, I look so innocent. A real murderer would never do this, right?

  Maybe that explained why Garfield, at first, agreed to listen to her. But something had happened during their conversation. Things had shifted. He’d become anxious. Had she actually hit on something? By accident?

  Was it when she said his wife was cold? When she said something about the car being off the road? Had those comments been close enough to the truth to make Garfield think she was on to something?

  It was time to bail. Maybe—and she couldn’t believe she was even thinking of this—even give him back his check. Say something like, “You know what? Whatever vision I may have had, it’s gone. I’m not picking up anything. The signals have faded. The flashes, they’re over. So I think the best thing to do would be for me to return your money and I’ll just be on my—”

  But just then, a flash of pink before her eyes. Not a vision this time, though. It was the sash, from the robe.

  And now Garfield was looping it around her neck and drawing it tight.

  TEN

  Melissa

  Before Melissa would tell her story to the detective, whose name was Marshall—which struck her as kind of funny, a policeman named Marshall—she wanted assurances that the police would go easy on her father. “There are, what do you call them, extenuating circumstances?”

  Marshall, seated across the table from her in the interrogation room, said, “It’s kind of hard for us to make promises where your dad is concerned when we don’t know exactly what it is he’s done.”

  “I don’t want to get him in trouble,” Melissa said. “Even though I know that’s probably what’s going to happen.”

  “But he knows something about what really happened to your mother,” Detective Marshall said. “That is why you’re here.”

  “Sort of,” Melissa said. “You know what? I know I only just sat down, but I really have to pee.”

  “Sure, okay,” Marshall said. “Let me show you where to go.”

  Melissa went to the bathroom and a couple of minutes later they were back sitting across from each other. Melissa had one hand on the table and the other on her belly.

  “I really love my dad,” she said. “I really do.”

  “Of course. And I bet you love your mom, too.”

  Melissa looked down.

  “Melissa,” Detective Marshall said gently. “Can you tell me … is your mother still alive?” She mumbled something so softly he couldn’t hear what she’d said. “What was that?”

  “No.”

  “No, she’s not alive?”

  “That’s right. But if I tell you everything, you have to promise to be nice to Dad. Because he’s a good man, really.”

  “Like I said, Melissa, without knowing the facts—”

  “I don’t want to get him into trouble. He’s already going to be really mad at me.”

  “We can make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt me, but he’s going to be super pissed.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” the detective said. “But I’m guessing you’re thinking that sometimes you have to do what’s right.”

  “Yeah, I guess that is kind of what I’m thinking.”

  “And you want to do right by your mother.”

  “Yeah, I’ve kind of been thinking that, too.”

  “Why don’t we start with you telling me where your mother is.”

  “She’s in the car.”

  The detective nodded. “This would be your mother’s car. The Nissan.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And where’s the car, Melissa?”

  “It’s at the bottom of the lake.”

  The detective nodded again. “Okay. What lake would that be?”

  “I don’t know the name of it, but I think I could show you how to get there. It’s about an hour’s drive, I think. Although, even if I take you there, I don’t know where exactly it is in the lake. And the ice has probably already frozen over. It’s been cold. I just know she’s in the lake. In the car.”

  “Okay, that’s okay, we have divers for that kind of thing.”

  Melissa was surprised. “They can go in the water even when it’s super cold?”

  “Oh yeah, they’ve got these special wetsuits that help keep them warm.”

  “I couldn’t do that. Swim in freezing cold water. I can’t even go in a pool unless it’s like eighty-five or ninety.”

  Marshall gave her a warm smile. “That’s my wife. It’s got to be like a sauna before she’ll get in. So, Melissa, your father, he put the car in the water?”

  “Yep. He drove Mom’s car out onto the lake, where the ice was thin. And then he waited for the car to go through.” She started to tear up. “And then it did.”

  “How do you know this, Melissa? Did your father tell you what he did?”

  “I saw it. I saw the car go through the ice.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was on the shore, watching.” A solitary tear ran down her cheek. She bit her lip, trying to hold it together. “I feel real bad, but I also feel a bit better, you know? Coming in here and telling you what happened.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “It’s not the kind of secret I could keep.”

  “Melissa, you realize we’re going to have
to go out and talk to your father, but I need to ask you, does he keep any guns in the house?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He’s never been interested in guns.”

  “We just don’t want to have to hurt him, you know? When we go out there. We want to be able to bring him in peacefully. Do you think he’s dangerous?”

  She was puzzled by the question, and shook her head. “Dad’s not dangerous. I mean, it’s not like he’s ever killed anybody or anything.”

  “You mean, before your mother.”

  “Oh, he didn’t kill my mother. Is that what you were thinking? I guess I should start at the beginning.”

  ELEVEN

  Keisha

  When Keisha Ceylon saw the pink sash drop past her eyes, she reached up instinctively to get her fingers between it and her neck. But she wasn’t quick enough. Wendell Garfield wrapped it tightly around her throat and began to twist.

  “I swear, I don’t know how you know, but you’re not going to tell anyone,” he said.

  Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. But the satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck.

  Garfield was leaning down over her, his mouth close to her right ear. His breath was hot against her cheek.

  She tried to say something, to scream, but with her windpipe squeezed, nothing came out. Not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, dug into the carpet with her heels.

  Keisha Ceylon knew that she was going to die. She didn’t need any vision for that glimpse into the future.

  Any second now, she thought, it’s going to be over. Maybe I had it coming. Ripping people off, taking advantage of them when they were at their most vulnerable. I’m getting what I deserve.

  Didn’t make her feel any better about it, though.

  She gave up clawing at her throat and dropped her hands to her sides.

  “You must have been there,” Garfield said through gritted teeth. “You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can figure it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you figured you could blackmail me. A thousand today, another thousand next week, and then the week after that, until I had nothing left.”