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.
But Keisha had a better feeling about Wendell Garfield. And the circumstances were totally different. With the Archers, it was a twenty-five-year-old case. There was no real urgency. But Mrs. Garfield’s disappearance was in its early stages. If she was in some kind of trouble, presumably there was still time to rescue her.
Before heading up here, Keisha had tiptoed into the bedroom to do some accessorizing. You needed a touch of eccentricity somewhere. People figured that if you could talk to the dead, or visualize the hiding places of people still alive, or see into other dimensions, you had to be a little off your rocker, right? It was expected. So she went with the earrings that looked like tiny green parrots.
“What’s going on, babe?” Kirk said, his face half buried into his pillow.
“I’ve got a lead,” Keisha told him. “I need you on standby in case they want a reference.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill,” he said, never even opening his eyes.
Sitting out front of the Garfield house in her little Korean import a moment longer, she checked the rear-view mirror to be sure she didn’t have any lipstick on her teeth. Got her head into the right space.
She was ready.