Never Saw It Coming

Three

The thing was, Keisha usually worked alone.

Okay, sometimes she’d have her boyfriend Kirk on standby to take a phone call if necessary, to provide a testimonial to a skeptical prospective client. But other than that, she liked to run her own show. The way you maintained control was to handle all the details yourself.

Bringing someone else into the mix, particularly someone without much experience, was risky. But there hadn’t been much money coming in lately, what with Kirk not back to work, Keisha’s car needing all new tires-she’d been running on three bald ones for months-and Matthew having to have those couple of teeth pulled. Keisha didn’t have the luxury of being picky these days, and besides, she figured Justin Wilcox had as much to lose as she did-maybe even more-by screwing up this con on his mother and stepfather.

She had to admit, the kid was good. He not only conceived the whole thing, but pulled off his part without a hitch. He’d heard about Keisha from one of his old high school English teachers, Terry Archer, who had been persuaded to tell the class some of the details of what had happened to his wife, Cynthia, whose family had disappeared when she was only fourteen, and whose fate had been unknown for twenty-five years.

It was big news at the time, when they found out what had actually happened. The story even made CNN. Archer had told his students that an incident like that, it brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork, which led him to tell them about the Milford psychic who’d claimed to know what had happened to Cynthia’s family. How she watched the news, hunted for people who were desperate for information about missing loved ones, then swooped in and offered to help bring them all together again. Once they’d coughed up a thousand bucks, of course.

Keisha certainly remembered Terry Archer. It would have been hard to forget him. She hadn’t liked him one little bit, or the wife, either. Not during her first visit with the Archers, at the TV station, where they were going to do a story on Keisha’s amazing vision, or her second visit, to the Archers’ home, when they literally threw her out on her ass.

You try to help people. No good deed goes unpunished, her mother used to say.

Justin told her Archer’s experience had stayed with him, even though it had been four years since he’d heard it. His new stepfather, Dwayne, was a total sucker for this stuff, it turned out. He believed some people really possessed this ability, to sense things that others could not. He even watched repeats of Ghost Whisperer, which drove his mother crazy. Marcia said she could probably get the dead to communicate with her too, if she wandered around all the time in low-cut halter dresses like Jennifer Love What’s-her-face.

“There are some things,” Dwayne had evidently told his wife, “that we aren’t meant to understand.”

Justin told Keisha that was about the time the idea started forming in his head. What really helped spur it along was that his mother had cut him off financially. She used to give him, right off the top, fifty dollars a week, no questions asked, but how far did that go, really? You couldn’t even do one night on the town for fifty bucks. How were you supposed to buy your beer and your weed and maybe something a little stronger, and something to eat on top of that? He tried to tell his mother, without actually mentioning the beer and the weed, that fifty bucks might have been a year’s salary when she was a little girl riding around in a rumble seat, but these days you couldn’t even put half a tank of gas in the car for that.

Then get a job, Marcia told him.

So that was how she was going to play it.

For a while, he managed to wheedle a hundred here, a hundred there, out of her. One time, he said he was debating whether to go back to school, which brought a smile to his mother’s face. He had dropped out of UConn after the first semester. Loved the partying, but found the going-to-classes thing very intrusive. He told her he’d gotten his head back on straight, and was thinking about enrolling in a business school in Manhattan. There were several he wanted to check out. It was time to learn something practical, not all this airy-fairy shit they taught at university. That was music to his mother’s ears. So he needed train and cab fare, and he might need to stay over one night. She gave him four hundred. Just like that. He never got on the train, but he did attend a fabulous party in New Haven and passed out on a Yale buddy’s floor. Another time, after telling his mother he’d decided against school, but was going to get a job instead, he said he needed new clothes for interviews. He pocketed the cash she gave him, but stole a few things from a Gap so he’d have proof of a shopping trip.

Marcia asked him to model his new tops for her. When he pulled them on, he realized everything he’d stolen was a small, and he needed a large because he was six feet tall. No problem, his mother said. She asked for the receipt. She’d exchange the items for the right size next time she was at the mall.

No big deal, he said. He’d do it.

But she insisted.

Lost the receipt, Justin said.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what he’d done. That was when she cut him off completely. Even the fifty bucks.

Zero cash flow.

He didn’t have any qualms about lifting a few things from the Gap, but he wasn’t about to start robbing banks. A little too risky. Justin needed a way to get money out of his mother and stepfather, because when you were ripping off your family, it wasn’t like you were actually stealing.

But you had to be creative.

Which was when he found Keisha Ceylon online, got her number, and got in touch. Face to face, he made his pitch. It was pretty simple.

“I vanish. They bring you in. You find me. They pay you. We split it.”

Keisha saw a hundred things wrong with the idea. “Suppose they don’t want to hire me. I show up, they slam the door in my face.”

“You’re not going to call them. They’ll call you. Or Dwayne-that’s my mom’s new husband-will. See, my mom, she’s not going to be in a hurry to call the cops, ’cause she’ll figure the reason I haven’t come home is I’ve done something really bad, like stolen a DVD at Best Buy or broken a cop car window or bitten the head off a squirrel. If she calls the cops and they find me, I’ll just be in even more trouble, and when I’m in trouble, that means more aggravation for her.” He grinned. “But Dwayne, he’s totally into the kind of shit you do, no offence intended.”

Keisha said nothing.

Justin continued. “I’ll plant the seed. Next time we’re watching Ghost Whisperer. I’ll tell him, hey, there’s a lady right here in Milford, does this kind of thing all the time. I’ll tell him about when my teacher was talking all about you.”

“Terry Archer.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t exactly have an endorsement from him on my website.” The truth was, all the endorsements on her website had been made up.

“I won’t tell Dwayne that part. But I’ll send him a link to the website, so when I vanish, he’ll know just how to find you. Who knows, he might even call you before we do this thing. Because he says he hears from his dead mother every now and then. He’s a pretty nice guy, but he is a bit of a whack job. Do you believe that stuff? That you can get in touch with the dead and talk to them?”

She knew there wasn’t much point in bullshitting with this kid, but it was hard for her to admit outright that what she did was all a crock. “Well…”

He grinned. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too. Anyway, when I disappear, Dwayne’ll remember that link I sent him.”

Keisha shook her head. “He might not take the bait. He might never call me.”

“Okay, well, I think you’re wrong there, but the worst thing that could happen is I have to come back and think of some other way to get money out of them. But if he goes for it, and he calls you, then you text me, tell me it’s on. No, wait, there’s records of that shit. I’ll check in with you from pay phones.”

She thought about it. “There’s another problem.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s not enough money in it. I usually charge people a thousand. This is a lot of trouble to go to split that much money.”

Justin flashed her a pitying smile. “You aim too low. Dwayne, and my mom, they’ve both got money. They’d be insulted to be ripped off for only a thousand. You could charge them at least five.”

If she went fifty-fifty with the kid, that was a fast twenty-five hundred, tax free, because this was definitely a cash-under-the-table kind of transaction. Not bad for what would be a day’s work, when all was said and done. It was hard to say no to a job this straightforward, even if it did mean taking on a partner. And it wasn’t like there were people going missing every day to whose families she could offer her special talents.

A girl had to make a living. If something didn’t come along soon, she’d be back to cleaning houses, and she did not want to start dealing again with rich, bitchy, mid-cleanse Darien housewives who had coronaries when they came home and found a soggy Cheerio in the drain basket.

Maybe it was the recession, but Keisha’d been seeing fewer clients lately for many of the services she offered. She read palms, told fortunes, organized psychic reunions. She’d throw in a little astrology if that was what floated their boat. The thing was, as long as you had a good imagination, there really was nothing to it. All you had to do was make it up.

Years ago, Keisha cleaned for a woman-not one of those Darien housewife types, but a nice lady-who’d once worked on the copy desk of a newspaper out west. Three weeks of their syndicated astrology column went missing in the mail so she cranked it out herself, off the top of her head. “Take the second bus, not the first. A good day for investing in friendship. A simple act of kindness will reap great rewards.” How hard was it, really? The paper even got a few phone calls, that the horoscopes of late had been really dead-on, good stuff. Keisha figured if this lady could do it, what was to stop her?

At least Keisha had a few regulars, like Penny, the eighty-two-year-old totally batshit lady she went to visit every week so the old woman could talk to the child she aborted when she was seventeen. Handed over a hundred bucks every time because Keisha told her just what she wanted to hear: “Your unborn child forgives you, she’s even grateful. This is not a world she wanted to be brought up in.”

And there was Chad, the gay guy who ran a health-food store in Bridgeport and wanted his palm read whenever he was about to start a new relationship, which was often. Or Gail, one of her most needy, and well-heeled, clients, who believed she was, in an earlier life, either an Egyptian queen, Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, or Joan of Arc. She managed at least a visit every two weeks, and would have been in even more often if husband Jerry hadn’t been clamping down on her nutbar spending.

Still, it was all barely enough to pay the bills, especially when her live-in boyfriend Kirk wasn’t able to do much work since he dropped a cinder block on his foot five months ago when he had that part-time job with Garber Contracting. The foot was close to healed. Kirk wasn’t limping all that much now except when he wanted to get out of doing something, like taking out the trash, or shoveling the driveway when there was enough snow that Keisha was probably going to get stuck.

He hadn’t always been this way.

Okay, she had to admit, he’d never been a genius. He wasn’t the sharpest tooth in the rotary saw. He didn’t get a lot of jokes, unless they involved boobs, and once asked how they got the bones out of boneless chicken wings. But Kirk seemed like a good guy when she met him thirteen months ago. She was coming out of Penny’s house after telling her that her aborted child, had she lived and grown to adulthood, would have ended up in a very unhappy marriage, and saw that her front right tire was flat. She’d never had a flat tire before. She’d had cars stolen before, but never a flat. Keisha didn’t know if there was a spare in the trunk, and even if there was, she didn’t have the first clue how to put it on. She stared at that tire the way she used to stare at formulas scribbled on the blackboard in high school chemistry class.

She didn’t have money to call a tow truck. Well, she had Penny’s hundred, but she needed that for groceries, and the rent, which was overdue. That was probably why she started to cry.

Across the street, a construction company was replacing a rotting porch on one of Milford’s century-old homes. One of the workers cutting some boards for the decking noticed Keisha’s plight, took his finger off the trigger of the saw, and strolled over.

Introduced himself as Kirk Nicholson.

Kirk looked in the trunk and found no spare. But there was a jack, which he used to get the flat off the car. He said his boss, a nice guy named Glen, would probably let him take his lunch break early. He’d take the flat over to the nearby Firestone store in his 2003 Ford F-150-how he kept it so immaculate when it was a working vehicle amazed Keisha-so she could get a new tire put on the rim. He knew a guy there, could give her a deal, wholesale price. Shouldn’t take that long. Then he’d give her a lift back and put the tire on for her.

That’s the way it happened.

While they were waiting at the Firestone store, Keisha learned that Kirk’s mother, who raised him on her own, had died recently of a heart attack. He had no brothers or sisters. He told her about Glen, the man he was working for, whose wife Sheila had died in a bad car accident, and how he was raising their daughter on his own. Then he talked about his truck, that he’d got a great deal on it, he’d done a number of repairs on it himself, and was saving up to buy some high-end rims for it.

Keisha was more interested in learning whether he was seeing anyone. She asked him something really clever, like “Does your girlfriend like your truck?” At which point he said he wasn’t seeing anybody right now. He was patient, and courteous, and never put a move on her once. When he was done putting the new tire on her car and had the jack stored back in the trunk, Keisha blurted out that he was welcome to come over for dinner.

That very night.

He said yeah, okay.

Kirk even seemed to like Matthew, nine at the time, who sat at the table with them while Keisha served spaghetti and meatballs. Gave the boy a ride in his truck, even let Matthew show how good he was at one of those Mario games. After the boy went to bed at ten, Keisha cracked two beers and she and Kirk sat on the couch and watched that show with Charlie Sheen, the one he was on before he went nuts and got fired.

“He falls asleep real fast,” Keisha said. “And he’s a sound sleeper.”

Kirk wasn’t so slow that he didn’t understand what she was getting at. He started sleeping over that night. Within a month, he’d let his apartment go and had moved in with Keisha and Matthew.

It was perfect. At first. So nice to have a man around the house, reaching over and feeling someone in the bed next to you, bumping into each other in the kitchen, curling up on the couch to watch TV. Keisha kept waiting for him to hand her his share of the rent. She wasn’t even expecting half. After all, she had Matthew. She was looking for just a third.

Finally, after he’d been there a month and a half, she worked up the nerve to ask.

“Work’s kinda slow,” he said. “Glen only needed me two days this week. And didn’t I take us all out to Burger King Friday night? Even let the li’l fucker get a dessert.”

It was the first time he’d ever referred to her son that way.

Keisha arrived home one day, four months after Kirk had moved in and still no contribution toward the rent, and there, in the living room, for God’s sake, was a set of four mag wheels for his Ford F-150. “Winter’s coming,” he explained, “so there’s no sense putting them on the truck now, and you don’t have a garage, so they’ll be okay here till spring. I’m gonna get a shelf from Ikea in New Haven, put them on display right there by the TV.”

Not long after that, he injured his foot.

Even wearing safety boots, when the cinder block landed on his right foot it broke a couple of bones. Kirk had to quit work and keep his weight off it while he recovered. His biggest fault up to now had been how cheap he was, but these last few months he’d become increasingly, well, mean. Keisha didn’t buy him enough beer, he complained. How could she have forgotten to buy him Oreos? How much had she made reading palms and telling fortunes this week, because he wanted his share? And the kid? Could he dial it down a bit? Always yelling and running around and waking me up when I’m trying to have a nap? And if he touches my wheels one more time, I swear to God Keisha, queen of the psychic con, had been flimflammed. Bamboozled. The wool pulled over her eyes. Kirk had her thinking he was her dreamboat, but he turned out be the anchor tied around her neck.

So, the bottom line was, Keisha needed money. If she couldn’t get Kirk out of her house, she was going to need enough cash to move herself and Matthew out. Justin Wilcox’s scam presented an opportunity she was willing to take, even though there was something about that kid that gave her the creeps.

“You sure you can pull this off?” she asked Justin.

“I took drama,” he said. “Piece of cake. I got it all worked out. What I was thinking was, we pull this off, maybe we could do some other things together? I bet lots of times you need a backup person, am I right? Someone to help fool the customer? The mark? Isn’t that what you call them?”

“This thing you want to pull on your parents, it’s the kind of game you can only run once,” Keisha warned him. “Once you’ve spent this money, you’re going to have to find a new way to make more, and it’s not going to involve me.”

“Whatever,” Justin said. “But let me ask you something.”

“What?”

“All the other times when you go see people and tell them you have some vision about what’s happened to a loved one, don’t they get mad when you turn out to be wrong?”

“Who said I’m wrong?”

“Come on. It’s just us.”

“There’s always something in what I tell my clients that connects in some way. I often tap into something that’s very true.”

“Except it’s not something that actually helps them find who they’re looking for,” he countered, grinning.

“What I give everyone, for varying amounts of time, is hope,” Keisha said defensively.

“Yeah, well,” Justin grinned. “You know what’ll be really good about this thing we’re doing? This time, you’ll be right. You’re going to know exactly where I am. It’s gonna look good on your resume.”

The job was behind her now.

It had been a week since Keisha had led Marcia and Dwayne Taggart to Justin’s hiding spot in those deserted offices. Dwayne had, as she’d requested, paid her in cash later that day. She’d taken Justin’s half, put it in a sandwich bag, put that bag of cash into a small Tupperware container, poured some spaghetti sauce around it, and tucked it into the freezer so Kirk wouldn’t find it. He never made the meals, so she wasn’t running any risk. As for her share, she’d lied to Kirk, telling him she’d only made a thousand on this job, half of which he demanded. The remaining two grand she’d hidden in a Tampax box that sat under the sink.

Justin had told her he probably wouldn’t be around for a few days to collect. He knew his mother would want him to see “someone,” and that she wouldn’t be letting him out of her sight for a while. His stealing the sleeping pills, and that note he’d written her, had her scared to death he might hurt himself.

But sooner or later, he’d escape. He was planning to make a speedy recovery, psychologically speaking. He’d tell whatever shrink his mother lined up that it was just a blip, he was right as rain, it was all triggered by his troubled relationship with his mother (lay as much guilt on her as possible, he figured), but they’d patched things up, he couldn’t be better, he was never going to do anything like that again, and while I’m here, have you got any samples of some fun meds I could take with me?

So when the doorbell rang that morning, seven days later, Keisha was not surprised to see Justin on her doorstep.

She’d been making Matthew’s breakfast, the kitchen TV on, the volume down low. Kirk was sleeping in. Last time he’d been awakened too early, he’d come hobbling into the kitchen like a bear with its leg in a trap and thrown a glass up against the wall. He scared the hell out of Matthew.

So Keisha tried to keep things quiet this early, but at the same time, she liked to know what was going on in the world, so the TV was on.

“Hurry up,” she said to Matthew, “or you’re going to be late for school.”

He picked at his breakfast, which was a piece of toast with peanut butter slathered all over it.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asked him.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

Keisha had noticed he’d been particularly mopey these last few days. Quiet, withdrawn, spending a lot of time in his room. She’d asked Kirk, “You got any idea why he’s so down in the dumps?”

Kirk, dusting his mag wheel display in the living room, said, “Beats me what’s wrong with the li’l fucker. He’s just moody.”

But Keisha thought it was something more than that. Now, at breakfast, she said, “Somethin’ on your mind?”

Matthew shook his head.

“Anything going on at school?”

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “Haven’t I been good lately? Have I done anything wrong?”

She didn’t have to think. “You’ve been good.”

“So I don’t see what the big deal is,” he said.

“I was thinking,” she said, “maybe after school today, we could go to the Post Mall, get you some new shoes.” She could spare a little of that cash she had tucked away.

“I don’t care about new shoes,” Matthew said. “I just want to be able to stay here with you.”

“You want to hang around the house after school today?”

“No, I mean, all I want is to be able to keep living here.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Keisha said. “You’re losing your tiny mind.”

“We never have a vacation,” Matthew said. “We should go someplace. Just me and you. We could go visit your cousin in San Francisco.”

“Yeah, well, Caroline may think the world of you, but she hasn’t got much use for me,” Keisha said. “You need to get moving. Go brush your teeth.”

The boy took one last bite of toast and bolted from the kitchen. Keisha sighed and turned her eyes toward the television.

“We got off kind of easy with winter so far, not too cold, but that’s going to change starting tomorrow and continuing through the weekend as temperatures dip below freezing. And we’ve got a warning that even though it’s getting colder, people should stay off ponds and small lakes, that the ice hasn’t gotten all that thick yet and-”

The doorbell rang.

Keisha left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Standing there, one hand shoved in his pocket, the other texting on a phone, was Justin. His stepfather, Dwayne, was parked at the curb in his Range Rover, engine running to keep the heater on. He waved.

“I told Dwayne I wanted to come by and say thank you,” Justin said, ending his text conversation and devoting all his attention to Keisha.

“Come on in,” Keisha said, and motioned for him to follow her into the kitchen. “And keep your voice down. My boyfriend’s asleep.”

Justin nodded, glanced around the living room as he stepped in, his eyes stopping briefly on the four oversized mag wheels on the rickety-looking shelves. He walked over to examine them, ran his finger over one, checking for dust and finding none. The shelf wobbled slightly.

“We have books on our shelves,” he said.

Keisha said, “Come on into the kitchen.”

“Police are investigating two liquor store robberies in Bridgeport last night. For a report, let’s go to…”

“So,” she asked, “how’s it going?”

“Good,” he said, nodding. “Like I figured, they got me seeing a shrink. Mom wants me to see her a couple of times a week for like a month. But I can ride that out. Great thing is, Mom’s being so nice to me. Buying me stuff, some video games, DVDs. I just got the whole original Star Trek on Blu-ray.” He nodded and smiled, impressed with himself. “Things are good. But she’s still kinda tight with the cash.”

Keisha swung open the freezer and took out the Tupperware box. “Here’s your share.”

“Huh?” he said, looking at the frozen container. “What’s in here? Lasagna?”

She ran the tap until it was hot, took the lid off the container, and ran hot water on the bottom. The sauce came out in one solid chunk. Keisha kept it under the hot tap until the sauce melted away, revealing the sandwich bag stuffed with cash.

“Man, you’re like a spy or something.”

Keisha opened the bag, took out the cash and handed it to Justin.

“In other news, a Milford area woman who went missing Thursday night is still unaccounted for.”

“Awesome,” Justin said, pocketing it just as Matthew walked into the kitchen.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Justin,” he said.

“How many apps you have on that?” the boy asked, seeing the phone in his hand.

“A whole bunch.” He held the phone so the kid could see the screen. “I got lots of games.”

“Take my picture,” Matthew said. “My mom says she doesn’t have any good pictures of me.”

“Matthew, please, the man-”

“It’s okay,” Justin said. He opened the camera app, took a shot of Matthew. Then he asked Keisha for her email address and sent the picture to her, the phone making a barely audible “whoosh.”

Keisha handed the boy a paper sack that held his lunch. Matthew threw on his coat, ignored his mother’s pleas to zip it up or put on his mitts and hat, and went out the front door.

The kid gone, Justin said, “You remember what I was saying to you before? That we could try something else? You and me? I mean, we did good together, right? It was fun. I should have job-shadowed you on careers day back in high school.”

“I told you, this is it with us,” Keisha said. “You had a good idea, it paid off, and now we’re done.”

She didn’t want anything else to do with him. Something was wrong with the wiring in his head.

“Yeah, well, okay.”

On the television, a man, his arm around a young woman, was talking about his wife. How he wanted her to come home. That if anyone was watching, who knew anything at all about what had happened “So, anyway, thanks. I better go. I keep Dwayne waiting any longer-”

“Shh,” Keisha said, watching the report. The words at the bottom of the screen read: Wendell and Melissa Garfield: “Mom, come home.”

“Whoa,” Justin said, watching the TV. “You got a prospect?”

“Don’t keep your stepdad waiting,” she said, and ushered him out.

By the time she got back to the kitchen, they’d moved on to the next story.