“Don’t keep your stepdad waiting,” she said, and ushered him out.
By the time she got back to the kitchen, they’d moved on to the next story.
Four
Keisha Ceylon stared at the house and thought, maybe she did have a little bit of the gift. Because there were times when she thought she could tell, just by looking at a place, that there was hurt inside those walls. Even a house where the blinds had been lowered, and turned so no one could see inside.
She sat in the car with the motor running, the wheezy defrosters just barely keeping the windows clear. Keisha was sure her feelings about the house were not influenced by what she already knew. She told herself that if she’d been strolling through the neighborhood, and had merely glanced at this home, she’d have picked up something.
Despair. Anxiety, certainly. Maybe even fear.
She thought about what this man, this Mr. Garfield, must be going through. How was he dealing with it? Did he still have hope the police would find his wife? Was he starting to lose confidence in them? Had he had any to begin with? Was he at the point where he’d be open to considering other options? Would he be desperate enough to accept, and pay, for the very special service she could provide?
Keisha was confident her timing was right. The man had gone before the cameras the day before. He’d been all over the news this morning. That was evidence of desperation, going to the media. That surely meant the police weren’t making progress. That was always the best time to move in. You didn’t want to leave it too late. If you hesitated, the police might actually find a body, at which point no distressed relative was going to need Keisha Ceylon’s visions for directions.
It was, as she’d told Justin, all about hope. You had to get to these people while they still had some. As long as they had hope, they were willing to try anything, throw their money at anything. This was especially true when all conventional methods-door-to-door canvasses, sniffer dogs, aerial patrols, Neighborhood Watch-had turned up zilch. That’s when relatives were open to the unorthodox. Like a nice lady who showed up on their doorstep and said, “I have a gift, and I want to share it with you.”
For a price, of course.
Today’s missing person was Eleanor Garfield. She was, according to the news reports, white, forty-three, five foot three, about a hundred and fifty pounds, with short black hair and brown eyes.
Everyone called her Ellie.
She was last seen, according to her husband Wendell, on Thursday evening, around seven. She got in her car, a silver Nissan, with the intention of going to the grocery store to pick up the things they needed for the coming week. Ellie Garfield had a job in the administrative offices of the local board of education, and she didn’t like to leave all her errands to the weekend. She wanted Saturday and Sunday to be without chores. And to her way of thinking, the weekend actually began Friday night.
So Thursday night was dedicated to errands.
That way, come Friday, she could have a long soak in a hot tub, according to everything Keisha had quickly read and seen online or on television. After her soak, 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, though she hadn’t been as devoted to it the last few years. But according to one newspaper backgrounder that had tried to capture the essence of the woman, Ellie had picked up the needles again when she learned she was going to become a grandmother. She had been making 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, could remember her coming in that night. Nor was there any record that her credit card, which she preferred to cash (she collected points), had been used at that store or any other 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 what Keisha could glean, 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 but someone prevented her from getting there? Or was it possible she had vanished of her own accord? The news reports didn’t pose all the questions running through Keisha’s mind. Was the woman having an affair? Had she gone to meet a lover? Did she wake up that morning and decide she’d had enough of married life? Got in the car and just kept on going, not caring where she ended up?
She certainly wouldn’t have been the first.
But the woman had no history of that kind of behavior. She’d never run off, not even for half a day. The marriage, from all appearances, was sound. And there was the matter of the grandchild. Ellie Garfield was about to have her first, and had already knitted the kid a full wardrobe. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?
Police considered the theory that she was the victim of a carjacking gone horribly wrong. There’d 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. But none of the women, while shaken up, had been seriously hurt.
Maybe Ellie Garfield had run into the same man. But this time things had turned violent.
On Sunday, Wendell Garfield went before the cameras, his pregnant daughter at his side. The girl was crying too much 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 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 when she rewatched the clip on the TV station’s website. It was time to make her move.
So that morning, about an hour after Justin had left, she looked up the address for the Garfield home, which she found set back from the street in a heavily wooded neighborhood just off the road that led up to Derby. The lots were large, and the houses spaced well apart, some not even within view of each other. Keisha wanted to see whether the place was surrounded with cop cars, marked or unmarked.
There was a decade-old Buick in the drive, dusted white from a light overnight snowfall. Nothing else. This looked like as good a time as any.
She’d done enough of these that she didn’t have to think about strategy. In many ways, dealing with someone whose loved one was missing wasn’t all that different from dealing with someone who wanted their fortune told. It was the people themselves who fed the vision. She’d start 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 the past tense, Keisha would say, “And this Aunt Gwen, I’m sensing… I’m sensing she’s passed on.”
And they’d say, “Oh my God, that’s right, she has!”
The key was to listen, have them provide the clues. Give them something to latch onto. Let them lead where she thought they wanted her to go.
Keisha just hoped Wendell Garfield wasn’t as closed-minded as that Terry Archer character, who wouldn’t let Keisha help his wife, Cynthia. The hell of it was, she’d actually got part of it right. Just before the Archers threw her out of their house, she’d told them their daughter would be in danger. In a car. Up someplace high.
Wasn’t that exactly what happened?
Let it go, she told herself. It was years ago.
