Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. But the satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck and there wasn’t a hope of getting her fingers in there.
Garfield was leaning down over her, his mouth close to her right ear. His breath was hot against her cheek.
She tried to say something, to scream, but with her windpipe squeezed, nothing came out. Not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, dug into the carpet with her heels.
Keisha Ceylon knew, in that instant, that she was going to die. She didn’t need mystical skills for that vision of the future.
It certainly wasn’t going to be the distant future.
A number of thoughts ran through her head during those milliseconds. One wouldn’t have expected there to be much time for introspection, but the world has a way of slowing down during such moments, and Keisha had an opportunity to think: Maybe I’ve had this coming.
You go around making your living by exploiting people at their most vulnerable, wasn’t there bound to be a reckoning at some point? If there was anyone who’d believe in karma, wouldn’t it be Keisha?
Wouldn’t English teacher Terry Archer love to see her now? Wouldn’t her predicament make the perfect lesson the next time he was trying to get across to his students the concept of irony? Especially the part about how Keisha never saw it coming. How she walked right into it.
Pretty goddamn rich, she had to admit.
And yet, in that moment, she didn’t feel bitter. What she felt was regretful. If she could have spoken, if she’d been able to get a breath of air, what she might have said was, “Sorry.”
There were more than a few people who deserved an apology. But the person whose face floated before her eyes first was Matthew’s.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” she heard herself saying. “Sorry Mommy fucked up.”
All these thoughts fired through her synapses in a fraction of a second. She might have liked to spend even more time considering how her misdeeds had impacted herself and others, to have done a bit of soul-searching, but there was a part of her brain that was deliberating over more immediate matters.
Even though things look pretty bad right now, I need to try to get out of this.
Which was why was still clawing at her throat, trying, without success, to get her fingers under the bathrobe sash.
“You must have been there,” Garfield said through gritted teeth. “You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can figure it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you figured you could blackmail me. A thousand today, another thousand next week, and then the week after that, until I had nothing left.”
He had the ends of the sash twisted several times around his palms and kept pulling. Keisha could feel herself starting to lose consciousness. Her fingers stopped trying. Her hands fell away from her neck and landed next to her, resting on the chair cushion. She wondered, ever so briefly, what he would do with her body. He hoped he wouldn’t put her in the lake along with Mrs. Garfield.
She didn’t like the water. When she was ten, her mother briefly dated a man who had a place on Cape Cod, and Keisha never so much as stuck her toe into the Atlantic. She had a fear of sharks from that movie. No way she was going out into that. Luckily, they never went back because the man decided to return to his wife.
In the seconds just before Keisha figured she was going to black out, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.
Her right hand brushed up against something.
Something soft, almost furry.
Yarn.
And as her fingers fumbled across the yarn, they landed on something else. Something long, and narrow, and pointed. Like a stick, or a needle.
A knitting needle.
In the last second Keisha had before she blacked out, she grasped the knitting needle with her right hand and swung her hand up and over her shoulder. As hard as she could.
The scream was only an inch from her ear. And it was horrific.
As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair and collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath. She was on her knees, one hand on the floor supporting her, the other on her neck. Air rushed into her lungs so quickly it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s anguished screams.
Keisha, even as she struggled to get her breath back, had to turn and see what she had done.
The knitting needle was sticking straight out of Garfield’s right eye. Blood poured from the socket, covering the right half of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha figured a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.
But he could see her with his left eye, and, still screaming, proceeded to come around the chair after her.