Clouded Vision by Linwood Barclay Page B

power – an ability to see things that no one else could see. It drove Keisha nuts. What’s more, because Winona really believed it was her mission to help people in their time of need, she always charged less than Keisha for her work.
    ‘I’m not in this to make money,’ she’d once told Keisha. It was when they’d both had their sights set on a couple whose two-year-old daughter had wandered away and was believed to have drowned in a creek a year and a half ago. ‘I want to help these people. All I ask is that they cover my expenses, which are minimal.’
    ‘You must be joking,’ Keisha’d told her.
    Keisha had lost out that time, because Winona had already spoken to the parents. She told them where she believed the child was. However, before they could get to the location, a father and son playing with a radio-controlled boat found the child’s body lodged under a bridge. It was exactly where Winona had said it would be.
    Keisha wondered how the hell she did it. She didn’t want to believe that Winona really had the gift, but some things were very hard to explain. Keisha was pretty sure Winona had not beaten her this time around.
    The missing woman’s name was Eleanor Garfield. She was, according to the news reports, white, forty-one years old and five foot three. She weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds and had short black hair and brown eyes.
    Everyone called her Ellie.
    She was last seen, according to her husband Wendell, on Thursday evening, at about seven o’clock. She got in her car, a silver Nissan, with the intention of going to the grocery store to pick up the things they needed for the week. Ellie Garfield had a job in the offices of the local board of education, and she didn’t like to leave all her chores to the weekend. She wanted Saturday and Sunday to be without such jobs. To her way of thinking, the weekend actually began on Friday night.
    So Thursday night was for running errands.
    That way, come Friday, she could have a long soak in a hot bath. After that, she’d slip into her pyjamas and pink bathrobe and park herself in front of the television. It was mostly for background noise, because she rarely had her eyes on it. Her main focus was her knitting.
    Knitting had always been a hobby for her, although she hadn’t shown much interest in it over the last few years. According to a newspaper reporter who had tried to capture the essence of this missing woman, Ellie had gone back to it when she learned she was going to become a grandmother. She had been making baby booties and socks and a couple of sweaters. ‘I’m knitting away as if my life depended on it,’ she’d told one of her friends.
    But this particular week, Ellie Garfield did not make it to Friday night.
    Nor did she, by all accounts, make it to the store on Thursday. None of the grocery store staff, who knew Ellie Garfield by sight, if not by name, recalled seeing her. There was no record that her credit card, which she preferred to using cash, had been used that evening. Her card had not been used since. Her car was not picked up on the closed-circuit cameras that kept watch over the grocery store car park.
    Keisha had read the news stories on the woman’s disappearance and had seen reports on television. It looked to her as if the police didn’t know what to make of it. Had Ellie met with foul play? Did she begin by intending to go to the grocery store and decide instead to just keep on driving? Had she wanted to leave her old life behind and start a new one?
    That seemed unlikely, especially as she was about to have her first grandchild. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?
    Police floated the theory that she was the victim of a car-jacking. There had been three incidents in the last year where a female driver, who had come to a stop at a traffic light, had been pulled from the car. The car-jacker – believed to be the same man in all three cases – had then driven off in the car. The women had