Read Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) for Free Online Page B

television. It was mostly for background noise, because she rarely had her eyes on it. Her primary focus was her knitting.
    Knitting had always been a hobby for her, though she hadn’t been as devoted to it the last few years. But according to one newspaper backgrounder that had tried to capture the essence of the woman, Ellie had picked up the needles again 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 up a storm,” 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, could remember her coming in that night. Nor was there any record that her credit card, which she preferred to cash (she collected points), had been used at that store or any other that evening. Nor had it been used since. Her car was not picked up on the surveillance cameras that kept watch over the grocery store lot.
    From what Keisha could glean, the police didn’t know what to make of it. Had Ellie met with foul play? Did she start off intending to go to the grocery store but someone prevented her from getting there? Or was it possible she had vanished of her own accord? The news reports didn’t pose all the questions running through Keisha’s mind. Was the woman having an affair? Had she gone to meet a lover? Did she wake up that morning and decide she’d had enough of married life? Got in the car and just kept on going, not caring where she ended up?
    She certainly wouldn’t have been the first.
    But the woman had no history of that kind of behavior. She’d never run off, not even for half a day. The marriage, from all appearances, was sound. And there was the matter of the grandchild. Ellie Garfield was about to have her first, and had already knitted the kid a full wardrobe. What woman disappears on the eve of something like that?
    Police considered the theory that she was the victim of a carjacking gone horribly wrong. There’d been three incidents in the last year where a female driver stopped at a traffic light had been pulled from her vehicle. The perpetrator—believed to be the same man in all three cases—had then made off with the car. But none of the women, while shaken up, had been seriously hurt.
    Maybe Ellie Garfield had run into the same man. But this time things had turned violent.
    On Sunday, Wendell Garfield went before the cameras, his pregnant daughter at his side. The girl was crying too much to say anything, but Wendell held back his tears long enough to make his plea.
    “I just want to say, honey, if you’re watching, please, please come home. We love you and we miss you and we just want you back. And . . . and, if something has happened to . . . if someone has done something to you, then I make this appeal to whoever has done this . . . I’m asking you, please let us know what’s happened to Ellie. Please let us know where she is, that she’s okay . . . just tell us something . . . I . . . I . . .”
    At that point he turned away from the camera, overcome.
    Keisha almost shed a tear herself when she rewatched the clip on the TV station’s website. It was time to make her move.
    So that morning, about an hour after Justin had left, she looked up the address for the Garfield home, which she found set back from the street in a heavily wooded neighborhood just off the road that led up to Derby. The lots were large, and the houses spaced well apart, some not even within view of each other. Keisha wanted to see whether the place was surrounded with cop cars, marked or unmarked.
    There was a decade-old Buick in the drive, dusted white from a light overnight snowfall. Nothing else. This looked like as good a time as any.
    She’d done enough of these that she didn’t have to think about strategy. In many