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.
Keisha struggled to her feet, moving in the direction of the door. But she hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand onto her arm.
“You bitch!” Garfield said, although there was blood leaking into his throat and it sounded as though he was gargling.
He yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down to the floor again. She landed on her back, and before she had a chance to roll away, he was on top of her, straddling her mid-section.
He didn’t have the sash any more. He was going to finish her off with his bare hands. He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping—no, pouring—onto Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but he had her neck pinned to the floor.
She started blacking out all over again. With her last ounce of strength she raised her hand and shot the heel of it straight up against the end of the knitting needle.
She drove the plastic spear another three inches into Garfield’s head.
There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he froze above her. His grip on her neck relaxed, his arms went weak, and his body collapsed on top of her.
Keisha didn’t even take time to get her breath back this time. She pushed frantically at his dead body until it was off of her, crawled a few feet away, and then, once she was able to breathe normally again, decided she had earned the right to take a moment and become hysterical.
Sixteen
“You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?” Rona Wedmore asked.
“I’m positive,” Melissa Garfield said. “I’m going to plead guilty to everything.” Like a child saying she’d eaten all her vegetables.
“Then you have to sign here. And here.”
Melissa scribbled her signature.
“Okay, then why don’t you start from the beginning.”
“You see,” Melissa said, “instead of going shopping first, Mom decided to visit me. She’d do that once in a while, just drop by without calling or anything. She’d say, ‘What, a mother can’t pop in and visit her daughter?’ She comes in and I’m in the kitchen, cutting up some celery and carrot sticks to put in a salad because I’m actually trying to eat the right things so the baby will be healthy, you know, even though I’d rather just be eating pizza and burgers, but I’m trying, okay? I’m really trying.”
“Sure,” Wedmore said.
“It’s like she was checking up on me all the time. She was always asking me these questions, like what’s happening with Lester and would I marry him and let him take care of us or was I going to move back in with her and Dad, like I really wanted to do that, right? And then she wanted to know if I’d gotten any more information about the veterinarian school I’ve been thinking about going to one day because I like animals, like especially dogs and cats.”
“I like dogs and cats, too,” Wedmore said.
“Yeah. And so she was asking me about that and I said not yet, but I was thinking about it and she said what’s the holdup? Why don’t I see if I could register now, even though that makes no sense because I have to finish all my high school stuff first, you know, and she knows all that, right? But she’s saying if I applied early it would show them that I’m really interested and I said Jesus, will you just give me some room to breathe, you know? I got a baby coming in a few weeks and I got a lot on my mind and okay, maybe I’m thinking about my future, but do I have to do something about it right this very fucking second? And she said, it’ll take you like two minutes so why don’t you do it and I’ll cut up your celery and your carrots a
nd she says I’m not cutting them up small enough anyway and she tries to take the knife from me and I don’t know what happened but I kind of snapped or something, you know?”
“Sure,” Rona Wedmore said, nodding sympathetically.
“So, like, I don’t know how exactly it happened, but the knife sort of went into her, and then I guess I must have put it into her a second time, and then she looks at me and she’s all like, what have you done? And then she falls down and she doesn’t move or anything.”
“So what did you do then? Did you think about calling for an ambulance?”
“I guess I went all crazy for a while, you know? But I managed to call my dad.”
“Okay.”
“I said something’s happened to Mom, you have to get over here, and he said, is it a heart attack or something, and I said no, and he said I should call 911, and then I said that I’d kind of stabbed her, and that she wasn’t breathing or moving or anything and then he was all ‘What?’ And he said I shouldn’t do anything and he’d be right over.”
“To help you?”
Melissa nodded. “So he got over real soon, and he was kind of all freaked out, and he took one look at Mom and could see that she was dead, and he said he had to think. I asked him, was I going to go to jail? Was I going to have my baby in jail, and he kept telling me to shut up, that he was thinking, and then he had this idea. He got Mom out of the apartment the back way and into her car, and then he told me I was going to have to follow in his car, drive along after him. And I followed him up to this lake, and he put the car on the ice and it went through and I guess I already told you about that part.”
“And then what happened?”
“Dad came back to my place and cleaned up. There was blood all over the place. It was horrible. It took hours to clean it all up. It’s a good thing my roommate was away or she’d have seen everything that happened and that would have been bad. I couldn’t help my dad with cleaning up. My head had really kind of exploded by this point, and I was super tired. All that had happened, and then having to drive up to the lake. I stayed in my bed, under the covers. When he was finished, he told me everything was going to be okay. He said I wasn’t going to have to go to jail.” She smiled sadly. “He said he loved me very much and he wanted everything to be okay for me. He said I’d done a bad thing but sometimes people made mistakes and he didn’t want my whole life to be ruined, you know? He’s a really good dad. He said the police would just think Mom ran away, or maybe she got killed by that carjacker guy, but they’d never really know what happened because they’d never be able to find Mom or her car. And if the police didn’t know what happened, they couldn’t really charge anyone.”
She shook her head. “He’s going to be so mad at me. Because he did all this to protect me, and now . . . well, here I am. But I just . . . I can’t do it. I feel bad about what I did. I really loved my mom.”
Wedmore reached out and touched her hand. “Of course you did.”
“Is my dad going to be in a lot of trouble?”
“Well, I’d have to say yes. But with the right lawyer, and a sympathetic jury . . . A lot of them will understand the lengths a father might go to, to help his daughter. He might have to go to jail, but maybe not for a long term.”
“Not as long as me.”
Wedmore smiled. “You might be right about that.”
Melissa even managed a smile herself. “You’re very nice. I’m glad you were the one I got to tell all this to.”
“Me too,” the detective said.
“I just hope you’re right, that they don’t send Dad away to jail for a long time. That wouldn’t be fair. He’s not that old a guy. He’s got a lot of time left.”
Seventeen
Keisha was not calling the police.
It didn’t matter that what she’d done was in self-defense. This was no premeditated murder. Wendell Garfield had tried to kill her, and if she hadn’t put that knitting needle into his brain, he’d have succeeded.
She knew that if she did go to the police, she might even be able to make a pretty good case for herself. She’d start by telling them that Garfield had murdered his wife. He’d put her body in a car and left it on a frozen lake and waited for it to drop through the ice. Then he’d tried to kill Keisha when she’d figured out what he’d done.
Well, sort of figured it out. She’d be the first to admit she’d got a bit lucky with the vision thing, although lucky didn’t exactly seem like the right word in this instance.
And while she hadn’t yet looked in a mirror, she knew from touching her neck that there were some very serious marks where Garfield had tightened that sash. If her story didn’t entirely convince the police, surely those marks across her throat would.
So, maybe, if she went to the cops, they’d buy her story.
But why take the chance?
If she did come forward, she’d have to explain what she was doing there. She was not optimistic that the police would take well to her story about seeing in one of her visions what had happened to Ellie Garfield. The first thing they’d want to know would be why, if she had information about a missing person, regardless of how she’d come by it, she hadn’t come straight to the police with it. Well, she’d tell them, the police were generally very dismissive of tips from psychics, so she liked to approach the family directly. And what, the police would then ask, might you have been expecting from Mr. Garfield in exchange for this information? There was no use telling them she wanted nothing for it. They had her number. She’d come to the attention of the police during the Archer business, and a couple of her customers unhappy with their horoscope readings had been to the cops to see whether there were grounds to lay fraud charges against her. (The cops had decided that if they were to take her to court over this, they’d also have to charge every newspaper in the country.)
Given that the police were already predisposed to think poorly of her, there was every reason to believe they’d come up with another version of the events that had transpired in the Garfield home. Maybe, instead of Keisha trying to shake him down, to run a con on him, they’d think she’d just tried to rob him instead. That she’d attacked him with the knitting needle when he’d tried to stop her. The police’d believe any kind of stupid story so long as it suited their purposes.
No, calling the cops was not an option. If she could keep her name out of this, all the better.
Besides, no one could place her at the house. There were no witnesses. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming here, except for Kirk, who was on standby in case she needed him for the Nina shtick. The Garfield house was on a street where the houses were well spaced out, and there was no house directly across the street. Odds were no one had seen her get out of her car and go into the house. If she could get back into her car unseen, she’d be all set.
Wendell Garfield sure wasn’t going to be talking.
Then she thought: Fingerprints.
She wondered what she’d touched. The robe, but it wouldn’t hold a fingerprint. Surely the cops couldn’t lift a print off the fabric of the chair.
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 okay where DNA was concerned. Once she got home, she’d change out of these blood-soaked clothes and get rid of them.
Keisha believed she could ride this out. She could do it. She’d have to wear a scarf at her neck or high collars for a few weeks to hide the bruising, but otherwise she looked unharmed.
I am done with this shit.
This whole thing, it was a message, no doubt about it. Keisha had never been a particularly religious person, but this had all the hallmarks of a warning from the man upstairs. “Knock it off,” he was telling her.
She was going to knock it off.
“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 body, to be sure she
hadn’t missed anything. She was good. She was as sure as she could be.
Keisha slipped out of the house, wiped down the door handle on her way. She was halfway to the car when she happened to reach up and touch her right ear.
There was nothing dangling from it.
She reached up and touched her left ear. The parrot earring was there. But the other one was gone.
“Oh God,” she said under her breath.
She didn’t see she had much choice but to go back into that house and find it.
She walked back to the door, stood there a moment, steeling herself, then, wrapping her hand with her coat, turned the knob and entered. She started by the chair where she’d been sitting. Patted around it, stuck her fingers down into the cushion cracks.
No luck.
She looked at the coffee table, 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 it, and rolled it over, revealing a carpet soaked with the blood that had poured out of Garfield’s eye socket.
She spotted a small bump in the pool of blood. She stuck her fingers into it and lifted up her earring. The parrot looked like a seagull caught in a red oil spill. She wrapped the wet earring in some tissues from her purse, dropped it in, and went back out the front door.
Got in her car.
Got her keys out of her purse.
Keyed 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 splattered across the front of her dress were. Would the cop notice them as they passed each other? For once, she was grateful for the shitty defrosters on this car. Her view through the windshield was partially obscured by crystals of frost.