For the first time since she’d been in this room, a shadow of a smile crossed Melissa’s lips.
‘That’d be OK. As long as he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life in jail. That wouldn’t be fair. He’s not that old. He’s got a lot of time left in him.’
Thirteen
Keisha
She wasn’t going to call the police.
She knew it was self-defense. She knew it wasn’t murder. However, she didn’t have any confidence that the police would see it that way. They certainly wouldn’t, once they started looking into her background and saw her convictions for fraud back in 1999 and 2003 in Connecticut. It would be the end of her if they started figuring out what kind of trick she’d been hoping to play on Wendell Garfield. Even if the guy did murder his wife, they’d find something to charge her with.
Keisha hadn’t told anyone she was coming here. She’d put her boyfriend on alert, and told him he might have to be the reference for the Nina story. Yet she had never told him where she was going, or whom she was going to see. The Garfield house was on a street where the houses were pretty spread out. She thought there was a good chance no one had seen her get out of her car and come into the house. If she could get out of here and back into her car unseen, she’d be all right.
Fingerprints.
She wondered what she’d touched. The robe, but it wouldn’t hold a fingerprint. Surely the police couldn’t lift a print off the fabric of the chair.
Just to be sure, she wiped down the coffee table and any other surfaces she thought she might have touched. There was plenty of blood around, but none of it was hers, so she thought she’d be OK as far as DNA tests were concerned.
Once she got home, she’d get out of these blood-soaked clothes and burn them.
Keisha had a good feeling about this. She believed she could walk away and no one would ever know she was here.
Wendell Garfield, sprawled out across the floor, certainly wouldn’t be talking.
She’d have to wear a scarf at her neck for a few weeks. She’d caught a look at herself in the mirror. There was a purple ring around her throat.
‘No more of this vision nonsense,’ she said to herself. ‘No more.’
This was a message, no doubt about it. Keisha had never been a particularly religious person, but this certainly felt like a warning from the man upstairs. ‘Stop it,’ he was telling her.
She was going to stop.
‘Lord, just let me walk out of here and I’m yours,’ she said.
She took one last look at the room, at Garfield’s dead body, just to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. She was OK. She was as sure as she could be.
Keisha slipped out of the house, wiping down the door handle on her way. She was halfway across the yard when she happened to reach up and touch her ear.
There was nothing dangling from it.
She reached up and touched her other ear. The parrot earring was there but the other one was gone.
It had been lost in the house.
‘Oh God,’ she said under her breath. She had to go back inside.
She went back to the door and stood there a moment, steeling herself. She went in, and took in the scene all over again. She started by the chair where she had been sitting. She patted around it, sticking her fingers down into the cracks between the cushions.
No luck.
She looked at the coffee table, and scanned the carpets. The earring was nowhere to be seen.
There was only one place left to look.
Keisha got down on her knees next to the body, slipped her hands under him, and rolled him over. The carpet was completely soaked with the blood that had poured out of Garfield’s eye.
She spotted a small bump in the pool of blood. She stuck her fingers into it and lifted up her earring. The parrot looked a seagull caught in a red oil spill. She dropped the earring into her handbag, and went back out the front door.
She got in her car.
She got her keys out of her bag.
She turned the key in the ignition.
As she was driving away, looking ahead, she saw a police car turn the corner.
No no no no.
As it approached, Keisha wondered how visible the bloodstains were, splattered across the front of her dress. Would the policeman notice them as they passed each other? Why hadn’t she had her car windows tinted?
The police car got closer. There were two officers inside. A woman was behind the wheel, with a man in the passenger seat.
Just look ahead, she told herself, as if you don’t care. Be cool.
The cars came alongside one another.
As the police car slid past, Keisha was certain no one looked across at her. She kept her eyes to the front. Then, seconds later, she glanced in the rear-view mirror, expecting the patrol car’s brake lights to come on. At any moment, the car would turn around and come after her, its lights flashing.
Nothing happened. The police car drove on, pulling over to the side of the road out in front of the Garfield house.
Keisha put on her indicator, and turned left at the corner.
She was safe.
It was a lesson learned.
Fourteen
Winona