“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.”