Clouded Vision (6 page)
When Keisha Ceylon saw the pink sash drop past her eyes, she reached up instinctively to get her fingers between it and her neck. But she wasn’t quick enough. Wendell Garfield wrapped it tightly around her throat and began to twist.
‘I swear, I don’t know how you know, but you’re not going to tell anyone,’ he said.
Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. The satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck and there wasn’t a hope of getting her fingers underneath it.
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 being squeezed, nothing came out, not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, digging into the carpet with her heels.
Keisha Ceylon knew that she was going to die. She didn’t need any vision for that glimpse into the future.
Any second now, she thought, it’s going to be over.
Maybe I had it coming. I’ve been ripping people off, taking advantage of them when they were at their most vulnerable. I’m getting what I deserve.
It didn’t make her feel any better about it, though.
She gave up clawing at her throat and dropped her hands to her side.
‘You must have been there,’ Garfield said through gritted teeth. ‘You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can understand it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you thought you could blackmail me. You’d ask for a thousand today, another thousand next week, and then another 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 faint, to black out. She wondered 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 water.
In the seconds just before it seemed to her that she was going to lose consciousness, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.
Her right hand brushed up against something.
Something soft, almost furry.
Knitting yarn.
And as her fingers fumbled across the ball of wool, they landed on something else. It was 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 grabbed hold of the knitting needle with her right hand and swung her hand up and over her shoulder. She swung it as hard as she could.
The scream was only an inch from her ear. It was horrific.
As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair. She collapsed on to 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 that it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s cries of agony.
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 side of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha thought that a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.
However, he could see her with his left eye and, still screaming, he started coming around the chair after her.
Keisha struggled to her feet and started moving towards the door. She hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand on to her arm.
‘You bitch!’ Garfield said, although there was so much blood in his throat it sounded as though he was gargling.
Garfield yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down on to the floor again. She ended up sprawled on her back. Before she had a chance to roll away, he landed on top of her, straddling her middle.
He didn’t have the sash any more. He was going to have to make do with his hands.
He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping on to Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but his hands had her neck pinned to the floor.
She started passing out all over again. With her last ounce of strength, she took the heel of her hand and shot it straight up against the end of the knitting needle.
She drove it into Garfield’s head another three inches.
There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he seemed to freeze 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 a second to get her breath back this time. She pushed frantically at his dead body until she had flung it off her and crawled a few feet away. Only then, once she was able to breathe normally again, did she decide she was entitled to take a moment and break down in hysterics.
‘You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?’ Detective Marshall asked.
‘I’m positive,’ Melissa Garfield said. ‘I’m going to plead guilty to everything.’
‘Then you have to sign here. And here.’
Melissa scribbled her signature.
‘OK, 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 beforehand. She’d say, ‘‘What, can’t a mother pop in and visit her daughter?’’ She comes in when I’m in the kitchen. I’m 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, OK? I’m really trying.’
‘Sure,’ the detective 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 was he going to marry me and help me take care of the baby. She’d say, maybe I could move in with him and his mom and dad, then she’d be able to help me look after the baby, like I was really going to do that, right? And then she wanted to know if I’d applied to the vet school I was talking about, because I happened to mention it, you know. I said, not yet, but I was thinking about it. She said, what’s the hold-up? She wanted to know why I couldn’t just go on the computer and press a couple of buttons. Then I’d be enrolled. If it was that easy, she said, I should just go and do it now.
‘I said, Please Mom, will you just give me some room to breathe, you know? I’ve got a baby coming in a few weeks and I’ve got a lot on my mind. OK, maybe I’m thinking about it, but do I have to do something about it right this very second? And she said, it’ll take you just two minutes, so why don’t you do it? I’ll cut up your celery and your carrots for you. Then she tried to take the knife from me. I don’t know what happened but I kind of snapped or something, you know?’
‘I hear you,’ the detective said.
‘So, I don’t know how exactly it happened, but the knife went into her. 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? 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 crazy for a while, you know? But I managed to call my dad.’
‘OK.’
‘I said, something’s happened to Mom. You have to get over here. He said, is it a heart attack or something? I said, no. He said I should call the ambulance. Then I said that I’d stabbed her, and he shouted ‘‘What?’’ Then he told me I shouldn’t do anything and he’d come right over.’
‘To help you out.’
Melissa nodded. ‘So he came over really quickly, and he was kind of all freaked out. He took one look at Mom and he could see that she was dead. 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? He kept telling me to shut up, because he was thinking, and then he had this idea. He took Mom out of the apartment the back way and got her into her car. Then he told me I was going to have to follow in his car and drive along after him. I followed him up to this lake. He put the car on the ice and it went through. 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 up the blood. I couldn’t do it. I stayed in my bed, under the covers. When he was finished he told me everything was going to be OK. 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 OK 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 car-jacker guy. He said they’d never really know what happened because they’d never be able to find Mom’s car. And if the police didn’t know what happened, they couldn’t really charge anyone.’
Melissa shook her head.
‘He’s going to be so angry with 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.’
Detective Marshall reached out and touched her hand. ‘I know.’
‘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 time.’
‘Not as long as me.’
Detective Marshall nodded. ‘You might be right about that.’
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.’
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.