“One thousand dollars,” she said, not being the slightest bit shy about it.
His eyebrows went up. “You’re not serious.”
“I believe the sum is reasonable,” Keisha said.
He thought about it. “I’m not a rich man.”
“I understand,” she said. “I’ve taken that into account.”
“So there’s a sliding scale? You take a look at the house and the kind of cars in the driveway, and if you see a Beemer you jack the price up? What the market will bear and all that?”
She started to get up once again. “I think I’ll just be on my way, Mr. Garfield, if that’s okay with-”
“How about this,” he said. “You give me a hint of what your vision’s all about, a little sneak peek, and if it sounds credible to me, then I’ll give you five hundred dollars. And if the information you have leads to my finding Ellie, I’ll pay you another five hundred.”
She considered his words a moment, then said, “I will tell you about a few of the initial flashes that have come to me. If you wish to hear more, how the images evolved, then I will tell you everything for the full amount of one thousand dollars.”
He let out a long sigh, wondering how this all might look to a third party. His wife is missing, and he’s going back and forth with this woman like he’s buying a new Toyota. But he still didn’t know what her game was, and he was wary, though it didn’t strike him that he had anything to lose by accepting the deal she was proposing.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m very pleased,” she said. “Not just because we’ve reached a satisfactory arrangement, but because I do very much want to help you.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine.”
“Do you have something of your wife’s that I might be able to hold?”
“What for?”
“It helps.”
“I thought you’d already had your vision. I don’t get why you need something of Ellie’s to hold onto.”
“It’s all part of the process. Some of the fuzzier details in my vision may come into sharper focus if I’m in possession of something that belongs to the person, something that’s come into close contact with them.”
“What do you need?”
“An article of clothing would be best.”
“Like, her bathrobe or something?”
Keisha nodded. Garfield sighed, stood, and went upstairs. A moment later he was coming back down the stairs with a pink robe in his hands. It was faded and tattered from years of wear.
“Thank you,” Keisha said, placing the robe in her lap and laying both hands on it. She ran her fingertips over the flannel material and closed her eyes.
Several seconds went by without her saying a word. Finally Garfield interrupted her trance state and said, “You getting bad reception there? You want to go outside or something? Get more bars for your vision?”
Keisha’s eyes flashed open and she looked at him with something bordering on contempt. “Is it all a joke to you, Mr. Garfield? Your wife is gone, you have no idea whether something’s happened to her, and you joke?”
“I’m sorry. Go ahead, do your thing.”
She closed her eyes again, took a few seconds to get back into the mood. “I’m feeling some… tingling.”
“Tingling?”
“It’s a little bit like when the hairs go up on the back of your neck. That’s when I know I’m starting to sense something.”
“What? What are you sensing?”
Keisha opened her eyes. “This was what first came to me, when I started picking up something about Ellie’s predicament. Your wife, she’s…”
“She’s what?”
“She’s cold,” Keisha said. “Your wife is very, very cold.”
Nine
While Keisha was waiting to see whether he’d take the bait, thereby giving her a chance to reel him in, she was thinking about her starting point. Cast a wide net to begin with, then narrow the focus. Why not start with the weather?
It was winter, after all. Everybody was cold. Wherever Ellie Garfield was, it only stood to reason she’d be feeling chilled. Okay, maybe that wasn’t true. The night she disappeared, she could have steered her car south and headed straight to Florida. She could have been there in a day, and by now might be working on a pretty decent tan.
“What do you mean, cold?” Garfield asked. For the first time since she’d gotten here, he seemed intrigued. Drawn in.
“Just what I said. She’s very cold. Did she take a jacket with her when she left Thursday night?”
“A jacket? Of course she’d have taken a jacket. She wouldn’t have left the house without a jacket. Not this time of year.”
Keisha nodded. “I’m still picking up that she’s cold. Not just, you know, a little bit cold. I mean chilled to the bone. Maybe it wasn’t a warm enough coat. Or maybe… maybe she lost her coat?”
“I don’t see how. All you have to do is look outside and know you’re going to need your coat. There’s three inches of snow out there, for God’s sake.” He sank back into the couch, looking annoyed. “I don’t see how this is very helpful.”
“I can come back to it,” she said. “Maybe, as I start picking up other things, the part about her being cold will take on more meaning.”
“I thought you had a vision. Why don’t you just tell me what the vision was instead of rubbing your hands all over my wife’s robe?”
“Please, Mr. Garfield, it’s not as though my vision is an episode of Seinfeld and I can just tell you what I watched. There are flashes, images. It’s a little like dumping a shoebox full of snapshots onto a table. They’re in a jumble, no particular order. What I’m trying to do, it’s like sorting those pictures. Sitting here, now, in your wife’s home, holding something that touched her, I can start assembling those images, like a jigsaw puzzle.”
“You’re pulling a fast one here. I think-”
“Melissa.”
“What?”
“Something about Melissa.”
“What about her?”
“There are these flashes, of your daughter. And she’s crying. She’s very upset.”
“Of course she’s upset. Her mother’s missing.”
“But even before. She’s very troubled, Melissa is.”
“I already told you as much. She’s been a difficult kid. She moved out at sixteen, and now she’s knocked up. She’s troubled. Brilliant deduction.”
“There’s more,” Keisha said.
Garfield leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees. Really interested. Keisha liked what she was seeing. Another couple of tugs and the hook would be well set into that cheek of his. And all she’d really done so far was tell him things he already knew, things everyone knew. It was winter. He had a pregnant daughter. Her mother was missing. Who wouldn’t be upset? In another minute or so she’d get to the next stunningly obvious thing-the car. But first, tease him with the daughter a little longer.
“What do you mean, more?”
“Something about the baby…”
“What about the baby?”
“Tell me about the father,” Keisha said. Turning it around, letting him do some of the work, and feeding her a few more nuggets to work with at the same time.
“Lester Cody,” Wendell Garfield said, shaking his head in frustration. “A dentist, makes more than twice what I do, drives a Lexus, a pretty damn good catch for Melissa if she’d only wake up and realize it. But guess what? She’s not in love with him. Yeah, he’s about seventy pounds overweight and’ll probably have a heart attack before he’s forty, but in the mean time, she could make a life with him.” He pointed a finger at Keisha. “There’s more to marriage than love. That’s important in the beginning, but after a while, it’s the daily stuff you have to get through. And Melissa’s going to have a lot of that, raising a baby. She needs that man’s support. Financial and emotional.”
“And how does Ellie feel about all this?”
He blinked. “She, uh, she feels the same way. I mean, at first she was upset because he’s so much older, but you balance everything out and Melissa could do a lot worse. Like that guy at the Cinnabon. Give me a break.”
“Have Ellie and this Mr. Cody… has there been some kind of confrontation between the two of them? I’m seeing flashes, some arguments.”