“It’s all right,” Keisha said with unoffended patience as she tucked the slip of paper into the pocket of her jacket.
Marcia, plowing through her opportunity to apologize, said, “You were seeing Justin with his eyes closed. What’s that supposed to mean?”
Instead of answering, Keisha took the hat from Dwayne, stood up and started to walk around the room very slowly.
“What are you doing?” Marcia asked, but Keisha, who seemed to have slipped into some kind of trance, did not respond.
“Just let her do her job,” Dwayne said.
Keisha was saying something under breath, mumbling. Marcia said, “What did you say?”
She held up a hand and continued wandering. Then she stopped abruptly, turned and looked at Marcia. “What does scarf, or scarfy, or something like that mean to you? Does that word make any sense?”
Marcia’s mouth opened. “What? That doesn’t mean anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Keisha made a show of mental struggle. “Could it be ‘scar free?’ Is that possible? I’m seeing some kind of office. With empty filing cabinets. But ‘scar free,’ that must be wrong. Does Justin have any scars? Let me see his picture again.”
Dwayne had shown her a picture of his stepson moments after she’d arrived, a framed high school graduation shot. A thin boy, with a long, angular face. Dwayne was about to grab it off the mantel and show it to her again when Marcia said, “Oh my God. You said ‘scar free?’ Is that what you said? That does mean something.”
Keisha stopped kneading the hat in her hands. “What?”
“It was a clinic,” she said quietly.
“A clinic?”
“They did laser treatments, that kind of thing.”
“What could that have to do with your son, Ms. Taggart?”
Marcia had become flustered. “They rented from—I have some properties. Investment properties, business space I rent out. I rented office space to the Scar Free Clinic, out past the Post Mall.”
Keisha said, “Well, I must have this wrong. Your son could hardly be hiding out in a clinic.”
“No, but they went out of business. The office space is empty.”
Dwayne’s eyes lit up. He gave Keisha an approving look. “That’s why you just saw the empty filing cabinets.”
“Could Justin have got a key to that place?” Keisha asked.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Marcia said. “Just a minute.”
She got off the couch and hurriedly left the room. Dwayne said, “She’s got an office in the house where she keeps keys to her various rental properties. Do you think he could be there? Is that what you’re getting? Is that the vision you’re seeing?”
“Please,” Keisha cautioned. “Don’t get your hopes up. I get these little flashes, I see things, but this might not be the thing that—”
“They’re gone!” Marcia screamed from another part of the house. “The keys are gone!”
“There’s something else,” Keisha said. “I keep seeing him with his eyes closed.” She paused. “Maybe he’s just sleeping.”
* * *
The three of them went over in Dwayne’s Range Rover. Marcia, rattled, sat in the passenger seat, squeezing her hands together. Dwayne hit the wipers to keep the windshield cleared of snow.
“Why’s he sleeping?” Marcia kept asking. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Keisha said quietly from the backseat. “But I think we should hurry.”
“Can’t you go any faster?” Marcia said.
“The roads are slippery!” Dwayne said.
“It’s four-wheel drive, for Christ’s sake!”
The former offices of Scar Free were on the second floor of a four-story office building. The three of them ran into the lobby, and after waiting ten seconds for the elevator to show up, Marcia lost patience. She took off down a nearby hall, pushed open a door marked “Stairs” and scurried up the single flight.
As they exited onto the second floor, they faced a door to an accounting firm. “This way,” Marcia said, turning left, running to the end of the hall and stopping at a frosted-glass door with “Scar Free Clinic” painted on it in black letters. Someone had Magic Markered “CLOSED” on a sheet of paper and taped it to the glass.
“I have no key, I have no key,” Marcia said. “How am I supposed to get in?”
Dwayne tried the door, in the unlikely event it was unlocked. No luck. He puffed up his chest and said to the women, “Stand back.”
Keisha said, “I could be wrong. He may not even be in there.”
But Dwayne wasn’t hearing her. He reared back, brought up his leg, and kicked in the glass with his heel. It crashed to the floor with the sound of a hundred cymbals. Seconds later, the accounting office door whipped open and a short, heavyset man in a white shirt and skinny black tie looked on with alarm.
“What the hell is—Marcia?”
“It’s okay, Frank,” she said.
She reached in through the broken door to turn the deadbolt. The door swept back some broken glass as she swung it into the room. Their shoes crunched on the shards as they entered.
“Justin?” Marcia called out.
There was no answer.
The place was as Keisha had so briefly described it. Empty. Shelves cleared, filing cabinets half open, nothing inside them. No generic landscape pictures or diplomas or anything else on the walls.
But on the floor, several discarded fast-food containers. A pizza box, a Big Mac container still smeared with special sauce. Several empty beer cans.
“Someone’s been here,” Dwayne said. “Someone’s been living here.”
There was a spacious foyer, then a short corridor that serviced four examining rooms. Marcia was moving that way, opening one door, then another, Dwayne and Keisha running to keep up with her.
When she opened the last door, she screamed. “Oh God!”
A second later, Keisha and Dwayne found her on her knees next to Justin, who was lying on the floor, dressed in a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, feet bare. His shoes and socks were scattered alongside him, and a winter coat was rolled up and tucked under his head as a pillow.
The young man’s eyes were closed.
An orangey opaque pill container lay on its side a foot away from his head. Dwayne bent over at the waist, one leg raised behind him, and snatched it off the floor.
“Marcia,” he said. “Aren’t these the sleeping pills you were on a year ago?”
“Justin!” she said. “Wake up!”
“It’s full of pills,” he said. “It doesn’t look like he’s taken any.”
Justin stirred. “What, what’s going on?”
Marcia pulled him into her arms. “Are you okay? Are you all right?”
Groggily, he said, “I’m okay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
Now Dwayne had seen something else on the floor. A sheet of paper, with something scribbled on it. He grabbed it, saw what was written on it, handed it to Keisha without saying a word.
It read: “I know I’ve been a huge pain, Mom. Maybe your life will be better now.”
“My word,” Keisha whispered. Dwayne shook his head, looked at the pill container in his hand.
“God, if we’d been a few minutes later . . .” he whispered back.
“Justin, listen to me,” Marcia said. “Have you taken anything? Have you taken any pills?”
“No, no, I just . . . I just had some beers, that’s all. I was going to take them later, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was going to do. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
Marcia clung to him and began to sob as he patted her head. Before Dwayne knelt down next to his wife and wrapped his arms around her and his stepson, he said to Keisha, “I’ll see that you get your money this afternoon.”
Keisha Ceylon smiled modestly.
Justin weakly put his own arms around his mother and stepfather. His face was buried in his mother’s neck, his ey
es closed. But then they opened, and fixed on Keisha.
Justin winked at her.
And Keisha winked back.
Two
Ellie Garfield had been dreaming that she was already dead. But then, just before the dream became a reality, she opened her eyes.
With what little energy she had, she tried to move, but she was secured, tied in somehow. She wearily lifted a bloody hand from her lap and touched her fingers to the strap that ran across her chest, felt its familiar texture, its smoothness. A seat belt.
She was in a car. She was sitting in the front seat of a car.
She looked around and realized it was her own car. But she wasn’t behind the steering wheel. She was buckled into the passenger seat.
She blinked a couple of times, thinking there must be something wrong with her vision because she couldn’t make anything out beyond the windshield. There was nothing out there. No road. No buildings. No street lights.
Then it dawned on her that it wasn’t a problem with her eyes.
There really was nothing out there. Only stars.
She could see them twinkling in the sky. It was a beautiful evening, if she overlooked the part about how all the blood was draining from her body.
It was difficult to hold her head up, but with what strength she still had, she looked around. As she took in the starkness, the strangeness of her surroundings, she wondered if she might actually be dead already. Maybe this was heaven. There was a peacefulness about it. Everything was so white. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudless sky that illuminated the landscape, which was dead flat and went forever. It was, it occurred to her, more like a moonscape than a landscape.
Was the car parked on a snowy field? Off in the distance, she thought she could make out something. A dark, uneven border running straight across the top of the whiteness. Trees, maybe? The thick black line, it almost had the look of a . . . of a shoreline.
“What?” she whispered quietly to herself.
Slowly, she began to understand where she was. No—not understand. She was starting to figure out where she was, but she couldn’t understand it.
She was on ice.
The car was sitting on a frozen pond. Or maybe a lake. And quite a ways out, as far as she could tell.
“No no no no no,” she said to herself as she struggled to think. It was the first week of January. Winter had been slow to get going, and temperatures had only started to plunge a week or two ago, right after Christmas. While it might have been cold enough for the lake to start freezing, it certainly hadn’t been cold long enough to make the ice thick enough to support a—
Crack.
She felt the front end of the car dip ever so slightly. Probably no more than an inch. That would make sense. The car was heaviest at the front, where the engine was.
She had to get out. If the ice had managed to support something as heavy as a car, at least for this long, surely it would keep her up if she could get herself out. She could start walking, in whichever direction would get her to the closest shore.
If she could even walk.
She touched her hand to her belly. Everything was warm, and wet. How many times had she been stabbed? That was what had happened, right? She remembered seeing the knife, the light catching the blade, and then—
She’d been stabbed twice. Of that, she was pretty sure. She remembered looking down, watching in disbelief as the knife went into her the first time, then seeing it come back out, the blade crimson. But it was only out of her for a moment before it broke her skin and was driven in a second time.
After that, everything went black.
Dead.
Except she wasn’t.
There must have been just a hint of a pulse that went unnoticed as she was put into the car and buckled in, then driven out here to the middle of this lake. Where, someone must have figured, the car would soon go through the ice and sink to the bottom.
A car with a body inside it, dumped in a lake close to shore, someone might discover that.
But a car with a body inside it that sank to the bottom out in the middle of a lake, what were the odds anyone would ever find that?
She had to find the strength within her. She had to get out of this car now, before it dropped through. Did she have her cell phone? If she could call for help, they could be looking for her out on the ice, she wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to—
Crack.
The car lurched forward. The way it was leaning, her view through the windshield was snow-dusted ice instead of the shoreline. The moon was casting enough light for her to see the interior of the car. Where was her purse? She had to find her purse. She kept her cell phone in her purse.
There was no purse.
No way to call for help. No way to get someone to come and rescue her. Which made it even more critical that she get out of this car.
Now.
She reached around to her side, looking for the button to release the seat belt. She found it, pressed hard with her thumb. The combined lap and shoulder strap began to retract, catching briefly on her arm. She wriggled it out of the way and the belt receded into the pillar between the front and rear doors.
Crack.
She reached down for the door handle and pulled. The door opened only slightly. Enough for freezing-cold water to rush in around her feet.
“No no,” she whispered.
So cold. So very very cold.
As water began swirling in, the car tilted more, its trajectory becoming alarmingly apparent. With her hands placed on the dash, she braced herself as her world began angling down. She took her right hand off the dash and used it to push against the door, but she couldn’t get it to open any further. The front part of the door, at the bottom, was jamming up against the ice.
“Please no.”
The last crack she heard was the loudest, echoing across the lake like a clap of thunder.
The front end of the car plunged. More water rushed in. It was over her knees. Then up to her waist. The windshield went black.
In seconds, the water was to her neck.
The intense pain, where the knife had pierced her twice, receded. Numbness spread throughout her body.
Everything became very black, and very cold, and then, in a strange way, very calm.
Her last thoughts were of her daughter, and of the grandchild she would never see.
“Melissa,” she whispered.
And then the car was gone.
Three
The thing was, Keisha usually worked alone.
Okay, sometimes she’d have her boyfriend Kirk on standby to take a phone call if necessary, to provide a testimonial to a skeptical prospective client. But other than that, she liked to run her own show. The way you maintained control was to handle all the details yourself.
Bringing someone else into the mix, particularly someone without much experience, was risky. But there hadn’t been much money coming in lately, what with Kirk not back to work, Keisha’s car needing all new tires—she’d been running on three bald ones for months—and Matthew having to have those couple of teeth pulled. Keisha didn’t have the luxury of being picky these days, and besides, she figured Justin Wilcox had as much to lose as she did—maybe even more—by screwing up this con on his mother and stepfather.
She had to admit, the kid was good. He not only conceived the whole thing, but pulled off his part without a hitch. He’d heard about Keisha from one of his old high school English teachers, Terry Archer, who had been persuaded to tell the class some of the details of what had happened to his wife, Cynthia, whose family had disappeared when she was only fourteen, and whose fate had been unknown for twenty-five years.
It was big news at the time, when they found out what had actually happened. The story even made CNN. Archer had told his students that an incident like that, it brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork, which led him to tell them about the Milford psychic who’d claimed to know what had happened to Cynthia’s family. How s
he watched the news, hunted for people who were desperate for information about missing loved ones, then swooped in and offered to help bring them all together again. Once they’d coughed up a thousand bucks, of course.
Keisha certainly remembered Terry Archer. It would have been hard to forget him. She hadn’t liked him one little bit, or the wife, either. Not during her first visit with the Archers, at the TV station, where they were going to do a story on Keisha’s amazing vision, or her second visit, to the Archers’ home, when they literally threw her out on her ass.
You try to help people. No good deed goes unpunished, her mother used to say.
Justin told her Archer’s experience had stayed with him, even though it had been four years since he’d heard it. His new stepfather, Dwayne, was a total sucker for this stuff, it turned out. He believed some people really possessed this ability, to sense things that others could not. He even watched repeats of Ghost Whisperer, which drove his mother crazy. Marcia said she could probably get the dead to communicate with her too, if she wandered around all the time in low-cut halter dresses like Jennifer Love What’s-her-face.
“There are some things,” Dwayne had evidently told his wife, “that we aren’t meant to understand.”
Justin told Keisha that was about the time the idea started forming in his head. What really helped spur it along was that his mother had cut him off financially. She used to give him, right off the top, fifty dollars a week, no questions asked, but how far did that go, really? You couldn’t even do one night on the town for fifty bucks. How were you supposed to buy your beer and your weed and maybe something a little stronger, and something to eat on top of that? He tried to tell his mother, without actually mentioning the beer and the weed, that fifty bucks might have been a year’s salary when she was a little girl riding around in a rumble seat, but these days you couldn’t even put half a tank of gas in the car for that.
Then get a job, Marcia told him.
So that was how she was going to play it.
For a while, he managed to wheedle a hundred here, a hundred there, out of her. One time, he said he was debating whether to go back to school, which brought a smile to his mother’s face. He had dropped out of UConn after the first semester. Loved the partying, but found the going-to-classes thing very intrusive. He told her he’d gotten his head back on straight, and was thinking about enrolling in a business school in Manhattan. There were several he wanted to check out. It was time to learn something practical, not all this airy-fairy shit they taught at university. That was music to his mother’s ears. So he needed train and cab fare, and he might need to stay over one night. She gave him four hundred. Just like that. He never got on the train, but he did attend a fabulous party in New Haven and passed out on a Yale buddy’s floor. Another time, after telling his mother he’d decided against school, but was going to get a job instead, he said he needed new clothes for interviews. He pocketed the cash she gave him, but stole a few things from a Gap so he’d have proof of a shopping trip.
Never Saw It Coming Page 2