It wouldn’t be any different with Wendell Garfield.
However, not everyone was convinced. There had been one woman, a few years ago. Her parents and brother had disappeared one night twenty-five years earlier when she was only fourteen. Cynthia, that was her name. You’d have thought that if there was anyone who’d be willing to take a leap of faith with someone like Keisha, it would have been this woman. They even got as far as the TV studio, where they were going to film Keisha outlining her vision for Cynthia. The moment she raised the issue of being paid, everything came to a standstill. It was the husband, the teacher, who protested. As soon as Keisha wanted to be paid for her services, he started saying that she was some kind of con artist or something.
The prick.
Wendell Garfield was different. She had a good feeling about him from the TV appearance.
Keisha was up early on Sunday. She’d spent time the night before choosing the right outfit. It must be nothing too flashy, but you needed something quirky somewhere. People thought that, if you could talk to the dead, see into unseen dimensions, you had to be a little off your rocker, right? It was expected. So she wore earrings that looked like tiny green parrots.
She got into her Toyota and used the windscreen wipers to clear the dusting of snow from the previous night. When she got to the Garfield house, she was relieved to see no police cars out front. It was always better if you could do this without the cops. They’d probably offer the opinion that you might as well set your cash on fire as hand it over to some pretend psychic.
Keisha sat in the car a moment, getting her head in the right space.
She was ready.
It was time to go in and explain to the frantic husband that she could help him in his hour of need. She could be his instrument to help determine what had happened to his wife Ellie.
Keisha had seen something. She’d had a vision. It very possibly held the answer to why his wife of twenty-one years had been missing for three nights now.
It was a vision that she would be happy to share with him.
For the right price.
Keisha Ceylon took a deep breath, took one last look at her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, and opened the car door.
It was time for the show to begin.
Two
Wendell
‘So, what are you telling me, that there’s been nothing, nothing at all?’ Wendell Garfield said into the phone. ‘I thought, I really thought someone … Well, if you hear anything, anything at all, please, please call me. I’m desperate for any kind of news.’
He replaced the receiver in its cradle. He had decided, when he got up that morning, that he would call the police first thing. He would ask whether the news conference that he and his daughter had done yesterday had produced any useful tip offs.
The officer he’d just spoken to was not the one in charge of the investigation, but he claimed to know what was happening. There had been only about half a dozen calls to the special hotline that the police had set up. None of them had been considered useful.
Garfield decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes overnight. He was trying to work out just how much sleep he’d had since Thursday, when this had all started. It was no more than five, six hours maybe. Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy made her so tired.
Garfield hadn’t wanted his daughter to be part of the press conference. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. She was seven months’ pregnant, and her mother was missing. Now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?
‘I don’t want to put her through that,’ he’d told the police.
Yet it was Melissa herself who insisted she appear alongside her father. ‘We’ll do it together, Dad,’ she told him. ‘Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found and that we want her to come home.’
With some reluctance, he agreed, but only if he did all the talking. As it turned out, once the lights were on and the cameras were in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She managed only to splutter, ‘Mommy, please come back to us,’ before she dissolved into tears and put her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie very much and wanted her to come home.
Then he made his appeal to anyone out there who might know anything to do with his wife’s disappearance. Please, tell us what’s happened. Send Ellie home to us.
And then he lost it, too.
He could hear murmurs among some of the news people, phrases like ‘good stuff’ and ‘perfect’ and ‘awesome’.
What disgusting human beings, Garfield thought.
He took Melissa home with him and tried to get her to eat something. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he told her. ‘Everything’s going to be OK. We’ll get through this.’
She sat there at the kitchen table, her head nearly on the table. ‘Oh, Daddy …’