While Keisha was seeing if Wendell would take the bait, giving her a chance to reel him in, she was thinking about her starting point. Her plan was to 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. OK, maybe that wasn’t true. The night Wendell’s wife 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.
However, Keisha wasn’t all that concerned with where this man’s wife really was. She just wanted to offer him some possibilities and, in return, make her money.
‘What do you mean, cold?’ Garfield asked, seeming, for the first time, intrigued.
‘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 at 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 she would lose her coat. Once you go outside, you know you need it.’ He sank back into the settee, looking annoyed. ‘I don’t see that 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 was an episode of Seinfeld and I can just tell you what I watched. There are flashes, images, like fleeting snapshots. It’s a little like dumping a shoebox full of snapshots on to a table. They’re in a jumble, in no particular order. What I’m trying to do is like sorting those photos. Sitting here, now, in your wife’s home, holding something that touched her, I can start piecing together those images, like a jigsaw puzzle.’
‘You’re pulling a fast one here. I think—’
‘Melissa.’
‘What?’
‘Melissa. That’s your daughter’s name, correct?’
‘That’s no big trick. Her name’s been in the paper.’
‘I’m not trying to impress you with knowing her name, Mr Garfield. I’m trying to tell you about the images, the flashes.’
Garfield looked as though he’d been told off. ‘I’m sorry. Go ahead.’
‘Melissa is terribly troubled.’
‘Well, of course.’
‘But this goes beyond what you would expect a daughter to feel when her mother goes missing.’
Garfield leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. He seemed really interested now. Keisha thought maybe she’d struck some sort of nerve here. All she was doing, really, so far, was telling Garfield things he already knew, things everyone knew. It was winter. He had a pregnant daughter. It was logical she’d be upset. In another minute or so she’d get to the next stunningly obvious thing – the car. But first, she wanted to sound Garfield out about his daughter’s pregnancy, which was pretty hard to miss during the TV coverage.
‘What do you mean, it goes beyond?’ he asked.
‘Something about the baby …’
‘What about the baby?’
‘Tell me about the father,’ Keisha said. She was 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. A useless son of a bitch.’ Wendell Garfield shook his head in anger and frustration. ‘He’s thirty years old, has no job, and lives at home with his parents. When we learned Melissa was pregnant, we were upset. However we figured that if she’d found the right guy, settled down with him and had a baby, that would help her turn her life around. It might give her some stability.’
‘And your wife and Lester … I see tension here … on the fringes at least.’
‘Sure,’ Garfield said. ‘I mean, we’d both been hoping he’d rise to the occasion, but I don’t see that happening.’
‘Ellie … did Ellie confront him? I’ve seen some flashes that would seem to indicate that.’
Flashes, yeah. Keisha knew that if she had a daughter who’d been knocked up by some no-good layabout, she’d put pressure on him night and day to make sure he did the right thing. This didn’t include those times when she would be giving her own daughter hell for getting in this mess. Keisha wouldn’t give a guy like that a moment’s peace.
It seemed reasonable to assume that Eleanor Garfield might feel the same way.