Everyone called her Ellie.
She was last seen, according to her husband Wendell, on Thursday evening, at about seven o’clock. She got in her car, a silver Nissan, with the intention of going to the grocery store to pick up the things they needed for the week. Ellie Garfield had a job in the offices of the local board of education, and she didn’t like to leave all her chores to the weekend. She wanted Saturday and Sunday to be without such jobs. To her way of thinking, the weekend actually began on Friday night.
So Thursday night was for running errands.
That way, come Friday, she could have a long soak in a hot bath. After that, she’d slip into her pyjamas and pink bathrobe and park herself in front of the television. It was mostly for background noise, because she rarely had her eyes on it. Her main focus was her knitting.
Knitting had always been a hobby for her, although she hadn’t shown much interest in it over the last few years. According to a newspaper reporter who had tried to capture the essence of this missing woman, Ellie had gone back to it when she learned she was going to become a grandmother. She had been making baby booties and socks and a couple of sweaters. ‘I’m knitting away as if my life depended on it,’ she’d told one of her friends.
But this particular week, Ellie Garfield did not make it to Friday night.
Nor did she, by all accounts, make it to the store on Thursday. None of the grocery store staff, who knew Ellie Garfield by sight, if not by name, recalled seeing her. There was no record that her credit card, which she preferred to using cash, had been used that evening. Her card had not been used since. Her car was not picked up on the closed-circuit cameras that kept watch over the grocery store car park.
Keisha had read the news stories on the woman’s disappearance and had seen reports on television. It looked to her as if the police didn’t know what to make of it. Had Ellie met with foul play? Did she begin by intending to go to the grocery store and decide instead to just keep on driving? Had she wanted to leave her old life behind and start a new one?
That seemed unlikely, especially as she was about to have her first grandchild. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?
Police floated the theory that she was the victim of a car-jacking. There had been three incidents in the last year where a female driver, who had come to a stop at a traffic light, had been pulled from the car. The car-jacker – believed to be the same man in all three cases – had then driven off in the car. The women had been shaken up, but not seriously hurt.
Maybe Ellie Garfield had run into the same man but, this time, things had become violent.
On Saturday, Wendell Garfield went before the television 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 OK … Just tell us something … I … I …’
At that point he turned away from the camera, overcome.
Keisha almost shed a tear herself. It was time to make her move. She was willing to bet her Tarot cards and Ouija board that Winona was watching this, thinking the same thing.
So that evening, Keisha took a drive past the Garfield home, which was set back from the street in a heavily wooded neighbourhood. She got the lay of the land, as it were. She wanted to see whether the place was surrounded with police cars, marked or unmarked. Was Winona’s car, a Toyota Prius, on the street? Keisha saw what she believed was one unmarked police car, but that was it.
She decided to make her move on Sunday morning, first thing.
If you did this enough, it got pretty easy. It was the people themselves who fed you the vision. You started off vaguely, with 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?’
Someone else would say, ‘That’s right, she did!’
Then, picking up the past tense, you said, ‘And this Aunt Gwen, I’m sensing … I’m sensing she’s passed on.’
And they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s right, she has!’
The key was to listen and have them give you the clues. If you gave them something to latch on to, then you would be fine.