Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library)
Read Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Never Saw It Coming
Linwood Barclay
N
EW
A
MERICAN
L
IBRARY
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Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Expanded from a previously published work called
Clouded Vision
.
Copyright © Barclay Perspectives, Inc., 2012
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ISBN: 978-1-101-59424-7
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
One
“This is ridiculous,” Marcia Taggart said. “You’re telling me this woman here, just by holding something of Justin’s, she’s going to be able to figure out where he is? Are you kidding me? She’s going to forge some kind of some psychic
link
with him by fondling one of his childhood action figures or wrapping her arms around his pillow? What kind of fool do you take me for?”
“Marcia, for the love of God,” said her husband, Dwayne. “If you’re not going to call the police, you need to do
something
. For all you know, your boy’s in a ditch somewhere. We have to find him.”
“You know as well as I do that’s probably
exactly
what’s happened,” Marcia snapped at him. “He’s gotten drunk, or high, or he’s shacked up with some slut somewhere, or most likely all of the above. If I go running to the police every time he does something like that, we’ll need a bigger driveway for all the patrol cars that’ll be sitting here all the time.”
Keisha Ceylon sat and listened, and watched. Let them have their argument. She could wait.
Dwayne said, “It’s been three days. The boy’s never been gone this long before.”
“That’s the problem,” Marcia said, pointing an accusing finger at her husband. “You think of him as a boy. He’s not a
boy
any more. He’s twenty-two and it’s time he learned to stand on his own two feet, not waiting around for handouts from his mother. Why do you think I’ve cut him off? So he’ll learn to be responsible, that’s why.”
Quietly, Dwayne said to her, “I’m not saying you’re wrong about any of this. I know what he’s put you through. I know it’s been hard, raising him on your own after Oscar passed away. I know Justin needs to get his act together. He’s a scheming little pain in the ass.”
Marcia shot him a look that said, I can call him that, but you’re not his father, so watch it.
“Sorry,” he said, receiving her unspoken message loud and clear. “But I’m not saying anything you haven’t said yourself. He can be a handful. But Marcia, just because he’s irresponsible doesn’t mean he couldn’t be in some real trouble.” He pointed to the window. A light snow was falling. “It’s freezing out there. Suppose you’re right. Suppose he did get drunk, or high, and ended up passing out in a snow bank. He could have frozen to death out there. Is that what you want for your own—”
“Of course not!” she shouted. Her lower lip quivered, her eyes glistened.
Here we go
, Keisha thought.
“Oh my God,” Marcia Taggart said, putting her hands over her face, walking over to the couch and sitting down. She kept her face covered, not wanting her husband, or Keisha, to see her lose control. She plucked a tissue from the box sitting on the coffee table and quickly dabbed her eyes, blew her nose, then sat up very straight. Composed now. Positively regal.
“Well,” she said. “So.”
Dwayne walked around behind the couch, standing at his wife’s back, and rested his hands uneasily on her shoulders. Like he was trying to be comforting, but they were too cold to the touch.
“Even if I accept what you’re saying,” she said, turning and talking to the hand on her left shoulder to indicate she meant these words for her husband and not their visitor, “why on earth would we turn to this woman for help?”
Still talking like she wasn’t there. Keisha knew the type. Before she got into this line of work, when she was cleaning houses for a living—something she still did when money ran short—she’d had clients who treated her like she was a piece of furniture. They’d leave her notes about what they wanted done—“dust TOPS of ceiling fans, wipe stainless-steel sinks dry”—even though she was standing there and they could have told her to her face.
“You won’t let me call the police,” Dwayne reminded Marcia.
“We’ve been through this,” she snapped. “I just—you know what he’s like, what the boy is capable of.” She sighed. “Suppose he’s fine, but the reason we haven’t heard from him is, I don’t know, maybe he stole someone’s car. Or shoplifted again. Sending the police out to look for him means they’ll probably end up charging him with something once they find him. Is that what you want?”
It was Dwayne’s turn to sigh. He nodded with false sympathy. “We’ve called all his friends, we’ve been to all the places we thought he might be. We’re running out of options.”
“But
her
?” Marcia tipped her head toward Keisha. “Wouldn’t we at least be better off with a private detective?”
Dwayne came around the couch and sat down next to her. “We’ve been through that, too, Marcia. When I suggested hiring a private eye, you just about bit my head off, because they ask lots of questions like the police would. That’s how they work. They have to find the facts, they have to dig them up, they have to talk to lots of people, and that’s how everyone gets to know your business, Marcia, and I know how you want to protect Justin, to be discreet about his . . . errors in judgment. But Ms. Ceylon here, she doesn’t work that way. She
senses
things. She might be able to find out where Justin is without having to stir things up, without having to talk to anyone.” He looked at Keisha. “Isn’t that right?”
She nodded. “That is the way I work.” It was the first time she’d spoken in twenty minutes.
Marcia Taggart shook her head. “But honestly, Dwayne, the woman—really, every New Age psychobabble thing that comes along, you buy into it. This woman—”
“My name,” Keisha said, interrupting for the first time, “is Keisha. Keisha Ceylon. I usually answer to Keisha, but if you’d like to keep referring to me as ‘this woman’, then I suppose that’s your prerogative.”
Marcia turned her eyes on her. “I don’t believe you can do what you claim to do.”
“You would be in the majority,” Keisha agreed.
“It’s utter nonsense,” Marcia said.
“Well, then,” Keisha said, standing, “I suppose I should be on my way.” She offered up her most sincere smile. “I wish you every success in finding your son.”
As she started for the door, Dwayne stood in her path. “Now wait, hang on just a second. Marcia, the woman—Ms. Ceylon—went to all the trouble of coming here. I think the least we could do is hear her out.”
Marcia snorted. “At what cost?”
Keisha turned to look at the woman, didn’t hesitate. “My fee is five thousand dollars.” She managed to say it without flinching. It was more than her usual rate, but from what she’d been told, the Taggarts could afford it.
Marcia threw her hands into the air. “Well, there you go, Dwayne. I think we know exactly where this woman’s coming from.”
“But
only
if I find your son,” Keisha added. “If I’m unable to lead you to him, then you pay me absolutely nothing.”
That made the room go quiet for several seconds.
“Well, that seems more than fair to me,” Dwayne said. “Doesn’t that seem fair to you, honey? I mean, come on. Even if you thought this woman was some kind of fraud, how can you lose here?”
Marcia Taggart was thinking and, Keisha guessed, swallowing her pride. Enough to say, “Sit down . . . Ms. Ceylon.”
Keisha sat back down.
“Just how do you go about this? We turn off the lights, get out a ouija board and start speaking in tongues?”
“No,” Keisha said. “Just bring me some of Justin’s things. Small, personal items. Things that mattered to him. A sample of his handwriting would be useful, too.”
“I can do that,” Dwayne said, and left the room hurriedly.
There was an awkward silence between the women. Marcia broke it with, “My husband believes his late mother communicates with him.” She accompanied the comment with a roll of the eyes. Telling Keisha she was entertaining this nonsense only to satisfy her husband.
Keisha said nothing.
“He says she gets in touch with him in his dreams, that she calls him from the beyond.” The woman made another one of her snorting sounds. “Knowing what a penny-pinching bitch she was, they’re probably
collect
calls.”
Keisha didn’t laugh. She said, “I know you feel a lot of anger toward your son, but I also sense that you love him very much.”
“Oh, you sense that, do you?”
“Yes, I do. And I know you’re actually very worried about him.”
“Because of these psychic powers you have?” Marcia asked sarcastically.
“No,” Keisha said. “Because I’m a mother. I have a son, too.”
Marcia’s face softened ever so slightly.
“Matthew. He’s ten. And believe me, there are days . . . But no matter what he does, no matter what kind of trouble he gets into at school, I love him. There’s nothing he could do that would ever change that. There might be times when I want to wring his neck, but I’d still love him as I was doing it.” Keisha smiled. “I’m joking, of course. About wringing his neck.”
“No, you don’t have to apologize,” Marcia said. “Justin, I swear . . . you just want to slap some sense into them.”
“I know.”
“He’s been a handful from the time he could walk, but once he hit his teens, it just got worse. Drinking, drugs, skipping school. I stopped giving him money because I knew he’d just blow it on drugs. But the thing is, this is the part that’s so heartbreaking, he’s such a
smart
boy.”
“I’ll bet he is,” Keisha said.
“I mean, anything he puts his mind to, he can do it. Computers, he’s a whiz with those. He can add up a column of numbers in his head. You say to him, what’s four hundred and twenty times six hundred and three, and just like that, he can tell you the answer. He’s probably some kind of genius, but instead of using his brain to accomplish something, he’s always trying to figure out how to work the system, get some money out of his mother, or”—and she nodded in the direction her husband had gone—“Dwayne. I know he gives Justin money behind my back. He’s got a soft spot for him, thinks I’m too tough on him. I think he was so taken with the idea of becoming a father, even a stepfather, that it’s blinded him to Justin’s faults. The thing is, he’s . . . there’s something not quite right about Justin. Sometimes he—and this is an awful thing to say, but sometimes he actually kind of scares me. Not physically, but what goes on in that head of his. I just wish . . .”
And then, without warning, tears welled out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “Oh, God, I hope nothing’s happened to him.”
Keisha got out of her chair and sat on the couch next to Marcia Taggart. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.
“I hope these will do,” Dwayne said, coming back into the living room with several items in his hands.
“Put them there,” Keisha said, indicating the coffee table, where she had already laid out two of her business cards.
Dwayne set them down gently. An iPod, a paperback copy of the novel
American Psycho
, a cancelled check, a plastic collectible figure of a grotesquely well-endowed woman in superhero garb.
Keisha handled them dubiously. “I’m not sure about—would you have an article of clothing? Something Justin wears regularly? Something that suggests his personality?”
Marcia said, “Get one of his hats.” She looked at Keisha. Her eyes were suddenly very weary. “Would a hat work?”
“I think so. In the meantime, let me have a look at these.”
Marcia picked up the cancelled check from the things Dwayne had delivered to Keisha and scowled. After a shake of her head, she folded it in half and held it in her fist. With her other hand she picked up the female action figure and studied it as though it were some obscure artifact from an alien civilization.
“Justin collects these things,” she said. “I just want to throw them all into the garbage. What’s a man in his twenties doing with toys like these? He must have five hundred of them. I don’t even know who this is supposed to be. Wonder Woman or—”
“Shh,” Keisha said gently, and closed her eyes. She handled the toy, then opened her eyes and picked up the iPod.
“He listens to this a lot,” Keisha said.
“He does.”
“I can feel . . . when he carries this, it’s often in his shirt pocket, right next to his heart,” she said.
“Well, I guess that’s where lots of people carry them,” Marcia said, looking skeptical again. “When you touch his earbuds, are you going to say he wore them right close to his brain?”
Keisha smiled ruefully at the woman. “I thought we were starting to get along.”
“All I’m saying is, that was a pretty obvious observation about the iPod.”
Keisha closed her eyes again and ran her fingers along the cool surface of the device. “I’m seeing . . . his eyes are closed.”
Marcia said, “What do you mean, closed? Like, sleeping? You see him sleeping? Lying down?”
“I don’t know. I’m just seeing him . . . I’m sure this doesn’t mean anything.”
“No, what is it?” Marcia asked. Pretty interested for someone so cynical.
“I don’t know whether he’s sleeping, or if it’s something else.”
“Like what? Are you saying he’s—are you saying he’s not alive?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m sure he’s alive. But his eyes are closed, and I’m wondering if he might be unconscious.”
“But you really don’t know,” Marcia said impatiently. “Don’t get me all upset if you don’t know what it—”
“Here’s one of his hats,” Dwayne said, coming back into the room. It was a basic ball cap, blue with a green visor, and a Hartford Whalers logo on the front.
Marcia opened her fist and displayed the check for her husband. “What’s this?”
“Justin endorsed it. His signature’s on the back,” Dwayne said defensively. “Keisha said she needed a sample of his handwriting. I didn’t know what else to get. Kids today, they do all their writing on the computer.”
“You wrote him a check for two hundred dollars behind my back?”
“Marcia, really, this isn’t the time.”
“Let me see that,” Keisha said, and took the check from the woman’s hand. She flipped it over and ran her index finger back and forth across Justin Wilcox’s signature. Wilcox was the last name of Marcia Taggart’s first husband, Justin’s father. “Can I have this?”
Marcia snatched it back, and tore away all the sections of the check surrounding the endorsement, including the part on the front with the account number, then returned the shred of paper bearing the signature to Keisha. “I don’t see any sense in giving you all my husband’s banking information.”