Never Saw It Coming

by Linwood Barclay

  “Oh, my, yes. Melissa’s been a constant source of stress for him and Ellie. She—oh, I can’t believe Ellie’s actually dead too. Melissa left home at sixteen, lived on her own, then met this man who got her pregnant. Ellie and Wendell were worried sick about her.”

  “Did you try to offer advice to them? Give them any suggestions? I mean, you’re Melissa’s aunt. I could imagine you wanted to help them where you could.”

  “Of course, of course, I tried.”

  “Is that why you took my card?” Keisha said. This was either going to work or it wasn’t. “To give it to your brother and his wife? In case they ever wanted to consult with me? Because, given what you’ve said about him, it seems unlikely he’d have been in touch.”

  Gail pulled away from Keisha’s embrace. “Did I do that?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Gail blinked a couple of times. “I don’t . . . I’m not sure.”

  “It was some time ago. You know that period where you believed you were channeling Amelia Earhart?”

  Gail nodded. “That was a couple of years ago.”

  “I think it was while you were talking as Amelia that you asked me for a card. You said you had someone you thought I could help.”

  Gail was still trying to recall. “That’s possible. I think I remember. Maybe I was thinking of giving it to Ellie. She probably wouldn’t have believed in what you do any more than Wendell, but at least she wasn’t totally closed-minded.”

  Keisha liked the way this was going. Gail, like so many of Keisha’s regulars, was very suggestible.

  “So you must have given it to your brother or your sister-in-law at some point, or else one of them saw the card at your place and helped themselves to it.” Keisha waved her hand as though it didn’t matter. “But what I need to know is, what can I do for you, right now? How can I help you through this?”

  “I knew you’d be here for me,” Gail said. “I tried Jerry’s phone after I tried calling you.” That must have been when the phone rang earlier, Keisha thought. “But his went to voicemail, and the truth is, I didn’t really want to talk to him anyway. He’s never been there for me the way you have.”

  For fifty dollars an hour.

  Keisha hugged her again. “I just want you to know that any time you need to come by and talk, it’s okay.”

  Gail smiled and dabbed her eyes again. “There is something. And I’d certainly be willing to pay you for your time, more than your usual rate.”

  Keisha said, hesitantly, “Well, Gail, like I said, any time you want to talk . . .”

  “No, I need you for more than that. You see, Keisha, the police don’t know what they’re doing. They have Melissa in custody for something she couldn’t possibly have done. And if they’ve got that all wrong, I know they’re going to get the investigation into my brother’s death all mixed up too.”

  “I don’t really know what I could—”

  “I want you to help me. I want you to help me find out who killed Wendell, and what really happened to Ellie.”

  “Gail, I’m not a detective,” Keisha protested.

  “I know!” she said. “That’s what makes you the perfect person to help. You see things no one else can. I’ll bet you—I’ll bet you if you came with me to my brother’s house, you could just tell what happened. Remember that story you told me, about the little girl who was abducted and was in the neighbor’s house, with all the sports trophies around her? You solved that! If you hadn’t had that vision, that girl would be dead now. You told me that yourself.”

  Keisha disentangled herself from Gail Beaudry and stood up. “I might have embellished that story just a little bit.”

  Gail slapped Keisha’s hand. “You’re just being modest. I know what you can do.”

  “But I really don’t think I could help you here. I mean, the police aren’t going to want me sticking my nose into this. They have a thing about mediums and psychics. They think we’re crazy.”

  Gail stood defiantly. “I don’t care what they say. If you’re working for me, there’s nothing they can do about it.”

  Keisha looked at Kirk. She couldn’t read what was on his face, which was still bloodied from when she scratched him. Maybe he was too stupefied to register anything.

  All Keisha knew was, she could not go back to that house.

  She believed she’d successfully planted the seed with Gail about her business card, and that when the police finally came around to ask about it, she had a plausible explanation for how it ended up in Wendell Garfield’s pocket without her ever being at his house. He’d come upon the card, maybe in a drawer, and hung onto it, thinking he might work up the nerve to call Keisha to help him find his wife.

  Except it was clear from what Gail had told her that Garfield knew what had happened to his wife. His daughter had killed her, and he’d helped her cover her tracks. So why would he need a psychic’s help?

  But he and Melissa had held a press conference seeking information from the public when they really didn’t need it. So wasn’t it plausible that Garfield might engage a medium to maintain the fiction that he didn’t know what had happened to his—

  “I’ll pay you five thousand dollars,” Gail said.

  “What?” Keisha said.

  “I’ll pay you five thousand dollars to help me with this, to get to the truth.”

  Keisha shook her head, “I don’t know, Gail. I—”

  “She’ll do it,” Kirk said.

  Twenty-five

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” Keisha said to Kirk, drawing him into the kitchen while Gail Beaudry stayed in the living room.

  “Are you crazy?” she whispered to him once they were out of earshot.

  “It’s five grand,” he said. “Just don’t go into the house and go all weird and say holy shit, I think I did it.”

  “I can’t go into that house. Not again.”

  “Sure you can,” he said. “Might as well make something out of this fucked-up day.” Kirk didn’t know she’d actually gotten some cash out of Garfield before things went off the rails. But even if he did, he’d still want her to go after this. Five thousand was a lot of money.

  “It’s wrong,” Keisha said. “You don’t see something wrong, taking this woman’s money to help her figure out who killed her brother? You don’t see something just a bit off with that?”

  Kirk shrugged. “So? Like you’ve never faked this stuff before?”

  “I can’t do this. I—”

  “Is everything okay?” Gail asked. She was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Yes,” Kirk said. “Keisha was just saying, she hates to ask you at a time like this, but she needs her fee up front, in cash.”

  Gail’s eyes popped for a second, but she said, “We can stop at the bank on the way to my brother’s house. Would that be okay?”

  “That’d be fine,” Kirk said.

  Keisha struggled to focus. She said to Gail, “Why don’t you wait in the car and I’ll be right out.”

  Once the door was closed, Kirk said, “This lady has to be loaded. I bet you can get even more out of her. Where’s she get all the dough?”

  Keisha shook her head, like this was not uppermost in her mind, but said, “Her husband’s in real estate and she inherited some fortune when her parents died. I don’t care if she’s married to Bill Gates, I’m not going to milk this beyond the five grand.”

  Kirk gave her a disapproving look.

  “And you,” she said, “have to go back and find out what happened to that bag.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I hear ya.”

  Keisha glanced at the wall clock. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be with her. You have to be back here for when Matthew gets home.”

  “Why? He’s got his own key. Since when do I—”

  “What if the police are here? I don’t want him coming home, finding a cop on the doorstep. He’ll be scared to death, thinking something has happened to me.”

  Kirk sighed. “
Fine, I’ll be here. But you’re really turning him into a momma’s boy.”

  * * *

  Keisha got in Gail Beaudry’s Jaguar. The woman talked non-stop all the way to her bank in downtown Milford, on the green.

  “I don’t know why they have Melissa in custody or why they think she had anything to do with this. They say she confessed, but that’s ridiculous. Why would a girl kill her own mother? That’s absolutely unthinkable. I don’t understand how something like that could happen. Maybe if it were an accident, like if she’d backed into her with her car, didn’t know she was there, but to deliberately do it? That defies belief. I know that girl was a world of trouble to her mother, but deep down she loved her very much. I just know that.”

  Keisha wondered whether she was going to be sick again. Any second now, she might have to ask Gail to pull to the side of the road.

  Since killing Garfield, she’d devoted all of her energy to covering her tracks. Going back for the earring, disposing of her clothes (a problem she hoped would soon be resolved), standing in the shower until the water ran cold, getting Kirk to clean her car. And after an initial panic about her business card, she’d come up with a creative solution involving Gail that she believed could withstand scrutiny.

  But having made all these efforts to distance herself from the event, here she was, sitting in this car, heading back to the crime scene.

  “I’ll just bet the police put Melissa in a room and browbeat her with questions and that was how they made her confess to something she never did,” Gail continued. “That’s what the police do. We think that kind of thing only happens in Russia or China or Latin American countries, but it happens right here in the good ol’ USA, don’t you kid yourself. The police just want to close cases. It doesn’t matter to them whether they’ve got the right person or not. And I don’t even know what happened to Ellie. If they’re charging Melissa, what is it exactly they think she did to her mother? And what does it have to do with Wendell. I’m telling you—”

  “Please stop,” Keisha said.

  “What?”

  “I . . . I need to concentrate.”

  “Of course, of course you do. I’m so sorry. Here we are anyway. I’ll go in and get your money.” Gail left the motor running as she got out of the car and went into the bank.

  Take the car and run, Keisha thought. Or leave the car, but still run.

  But where would she go? How far could she get? How long would it take for the police to find her? And if she wasn’t already a suspect, wouldn’t running change that? And how could she even think of leaving Matthew behind?

  She’d never do that. Keisha was a lot of things—and she knew it—but she was not the kind of mother who’d abandon her child.

  I could take him with me.

  Sure, that was a plan. Go on the run with a kid. Keisha told herself to stop it. She was in this up to her eyeballs now, and she was going to have to see how things played out.

  Gail returned in five minutes, clutching a plain white banking envelope, the kind used for deposits at the ATMs. She got in the car and handed the envelope to Keisha.

  “There you go,” she said, doing up her seat belt. “Good thing I have my own account. Jerry would have an absolute heart attack if he knew I was doing this.”

  “Thank you,” Keisha said, putting the envelope into her purse. She’d had to grab one of her other ones as she was leaving, and toss her wallet into it.

  “You don’t want to count it?”

  “I trust you,” Keisha said.

  That made Gail Beaudry smile. She reached over and touched Keisha’s arm. “I trust you, too. I want to thank you for helping me.”

  Keisha couldn’t look at her.

  “Let’s go over to Wendell’s house now and see if any of the police there will tell us what’s going on. Maybe, as we get close, you’ll start picking up some signals or something,” Gail said.

  * * *

  They could see police cars as soon as Gail turned onto the street. Cruisers had been used to block off the street in both directions about a hundred feet each side of the house. Gail pulled the Jag over to the shoulder and said, “Watch your step. It looks slippery here.”

  They came around the front of the car and approached the house together. As they started walking up the driveway, a female uniformed officer came down to meet them.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Gail said, “I’m Mrs. Beaudry, and this is my associate. We’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge here. Is that you?”

  “No, ma’am. What’s your interest here?”

  “This is my brother’s house. Wendell Garfield. The man who was killed.”

  The officer nodded. “If you’ll wait here, I’ll see what I can do.” Keisha watched her go into the house and close the door.

  Don’t want to go in there.

  Gail stood with her arms crossed. After a couple of minutes, she said, “This is what they do. They keep you waiting to wear you down. It’s all part of the game they play.”

  Keisha thought that if anyone was playing a game, it was herself.

  The officer came back out of the house and told them she had reached the detective in charge of the investigation, and she’d be coming by shortly.

  “Would that be that black woman?” Gail asked. “Wedmore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine, but can we wait in the house, where it’s warmer?”

  “I’m sorry, no, you can’t come in. Not without Detective Wedmore’s approval.”

  “We’ll be in the car, then,” Gail said, and the two of them turned to start walking back to it. They were just about to open the doors when an unmarked car pulled up and Rona Wedmore got out.

  She recognized the dead man’s sister from their meeting at the station. “Hello, Mrs. Beaudry.”

  “I want some answers,” Gail said. “I want some answers right now.”

  Wedmore cast an eye at Keisha, then looked back at Gail. “What would you like to know?”

  “What happened to my brother?”

  Wedmore’s gaze turned back to Keisha. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Keisha Ceylon.”

  The corners of the detective’s mouth turned up. “I was just talking to someone who knows you.”

  Twenty-six

  “Excuse me?” Keisha said.

  “Terry Archer,” Wedmore said, giving Keisha a knowing look. “You offered to help him and his wife a few years back.”

  “I remember,” Keisha said. “If Mr. Archer says he knows me, that’s not true. We met twice, very briefly.”

  “Fair enough. But you certainly made an impression.”

  Don’t be evasive, Keisha thought. Don’t be defensive. Tackle this head on. “I’m sure. I offered to help him and his wife when they were having their troubles and they chose not to engage me. Mr. Archer, in particular, was very skeptical of my gifts. All I wanted to do was help them.”

  Wedmore nodded. Before she could reply, Gail said, “I’ve engaged Ms. Ceylon to help me. Clearly you already know her, but if you’re thinking she’s here to help you, she’s not. She’s representing my interests. All you people care about is making sure someone gets charged, whether it’s the right person or not. Do you know who did this to my brother?”

  “We’re in the early stages of the investigation,” Wedmore said patiently.

  “Are you still holding Melissa?”

  “We are.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You have to release her. Imagine what she’s going through. Losing her mother, and then her father, all within a few days. And suggesting she confessed! What on earth would she confess to? And where is Ellie? What’s happened to her body? Are you telling me Melissa was able to make her mother’s body disappear?”

  Tiredly, Wedmore said, “We can set up a meeting between you and Melissa. From what I can see, you’re the only family she has left. She waived her right to legal representation, but you should get her to rethink that, so she gets the best adv
ice possible as this moves forward. There may be extenuating circumstances that might have an impact on sentencing. You might want—”

  “Good heavens, what on earth did she tell you?”

  Wedmore sighed. “Melissa stabbed her mother, called her father, and he helped her cover it up. They drove the car out onto a lake and waited for it to go through the ice.”

  Wow, Keisha thought. Maybe I really can do this.

  Gail was speechless, so Wedmore added, “What we’re trying to figure out now is what kind of connection there may be between Ellie’s death, and what happened to your brother.”

  Gail managed to ask, “Is my brother’s body still in the house?”

  “No. The coroner is conducting a post-mortem.”

  “Ms. Ceylon wants to go inside.”

  “Excuse me?” said Wedmore.

  “No,” Keisha protested. “That’s not nece—”

  “She needs to go inside and see what she can feel,” Gail said. She looked at Keisha and said, “I’m betting the sooner you get in, the better, right? The vibrations, whatever it is you feel, will still be fresh?”

  “It may already be too late,” Keisha said.

  Gail took hold of Keisha’s arm and looked imploringly at her. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I can’t do it. I can’t go in there. I want you to be my eyes. I want you to see where it happened. Won’t that help you? Won’t that help you visualize, to connect, to feel what happened?”

  Keisha said, “If you could just find something of your brother’s for me. Maybe you have a letter at home from him.”

  Gail continued to squeeze her arm. “I really need you to do this.” She turned to Wedmore and pleaded, “Will you allow her to see where it happened?”

  Wedmore thought for a moment. “Ordinarily, I’d say no, but I think maybe it’d be a good idea for Ms. Ceylon to come in and have a look-see.”

  Keisha was taken aback. She couldn’t see Wedmore playing along with this unless there was something in it for her. “I totally understand if you’d rather I stayed out here and—”

  “Come on,” said Wedmore. “Mrs. Beaudry, why don’t you wait in your car and stay warm while we do this?”