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.
