Hear No Evil (10 page)

Gingerly, playing for time, she turned over the next card, the eight of swords, which augured the unforeseen.

“Why, your luck just goes stretching on and on,” Eden said with a false air of confidence. “You’re talking to the right person. In fact, I believe the spirits have led you to me, so I can be your friend.”

She held her breath. The woman did not answer.

“You can trust me,” Eden said. “Please. Trust me.”

A long silence. Eden thought of the child sleeping in the living room, and her heartbeat rocked in her ribs.

Eden leaned her elbow on the table and cradled her brow in her hand. She closed her eyes against the evil little ache being born in her forehead. Still the woman did not answer.

“Are you in trouble?” Eden asked. “Tell me. I’ll help you.”

“You already have. Th-thank you.” A soft click tickled Eden’s ear. The woman had hung up.

Troubled, Eden stared at the file card and reread what Jessie had written. A suspicion was forming in her mind, but it was too terrible to utter, to put even into silent words.

Mechanically she started to add her own note to the bottom of the card, but the phone rang again.
Double
damn!
Eden thought and threw down the pen in frustration.

She straightened her back, cleared her throat, and got into character again. She lifted the receiver and said, “Sister Jessie, God’s gifted seer.”

She stared at the crystal ball, which seemed to mock her, telling her she was not a seer at all.

The woman in the motel room took a drag from her cigarette and ran her hand through the dark tangle of her hair. She put the tattered scrap of newsprint on the night table beside her tickets, and her eyes blurred with tears.

I shouldn’t have called
, she thought, lowering her head. She wiped her wet eyes with the back of her hand.
I had to call. I shouldn’t have called. Oh, shit
.

She exhaled and raised her eyes, watching the blue smoke rise upward, disperse, fade like a ghost.

Like me
, she thought.
Like me
.

She was registered in the motel room as Constance Caine, a name she’d made up when she was a small girl. It was the name she’d meant to take when she grew up to be a famous country-and-western singer. The beautiful and talented Miss Constance Caine and her fabulous voice.

Now her voice was shot to hell, and Constance was just a name like any of the others she’d used over the years—Christ, she couldn’t even remember them all. What did it matter, anyway? It was almost over.

She had the bottle of wine and a carton of cigarettes, and she’d bought cheap tickets to nearly every show in town. She was a real Rhinestone Cowgirl, all right. And this was it, her star-spangled rodeo.

She turned her gaze listlessly to the television screen.
Since yesterday the Cable News Network had been running the explosion of Nassau-Air Flight 217. Every hour they reran the story. It was starting again now.

The explosion was “mysterious,” the news kept saying, its cause not yet known. All thirteen people aboard had died, including the pilot and copilot.

She sat hunched on the edge of the bed, watching the screen as if hypnotized. She was stunned and sickened, and she felt impaled by guilt, as if it were a great hook and she were a worm twisting on it.

Drace, the fucker, had succeeded. He’d really done it. The bombing had really happened, there was a body count, and it was thirteen, surely a terrible omen. She was done now, no way out.

The last report said the FBI had been called in to help investigate the explosion—my God, the FBI, my God, my God, my God.

She choked back a small, angry sob. Her eyes were red with weeping.

Numbly she rose and unscrewed the cap of the second bottle of cheap wine she had bought. She knew she was never supposed to drink again, but what the hell difference did it make? She’d sleep it off, then hit the bricks and take in a show, come back and get really blind, blackout drunk.

Half a dozen candy bars lay strewn along the top of the dresser. She hadn’t touched them since she’d bought them, but now she picked up a Hershey’s bar. She had not eaten since yesterday.

She went back to the bed and poured the wine into a plastic water glass, peeled the silver foil from the candy bar.

She took a long sip of the wine, then another. It did not help, it did not ease her. She thought of the thirteen
people dead in Miami.
What have we gotten into? How did it happen? How?

The fear had gnawed at her for weeks. It had eaten at her waking thoughts, it had diseased her dreams.
What have we gotten into? And how, in God’s name, do we get out?

It would take a miracle to free them, she had thought.

And the miracle had come, at least in part. It had been revealed to her through a humble and unexpected means—the small ad in the back of a supermarket tabloid.

She didn’t even know who had bought the tabloid or why; Drace usually frowned on such trash. “The media,” he was always saying, “is the new opiate of the masses.”

She had been reading it, sitting alone in the kitchen of the farmhouse, and the men had been out playing in the quarry with their everlasting explosives. The sun had been shining through the small window. Dust motes had danced in the air.

Then she saw the ad. It said:

She read these words, and it was as if the heavens had parted and instead of sending mere morning sunshine through the window, the light blazed down with a pure blue-white radiance. She had bent over the cheap newsprint page and wept.

Jessie was still alive. She was still in Endor.

It was a sign: Jessie would take in Peyton, she would have to—Peyton was blood.

So she’d waited, plotting, for the next time Drace granted her permission to take out the old Mercury, that rusting bucket of bolts. And when he had, she’d driven to the Nitehawk Diner out on the highway and phoned Jessie from the pay phone. She’d stolen one of the privacy toll cards of which Drace was so fond.

When the old woman answered, she sounded full of life and strong—indestructibly strong. At that moment, Mimi had known what to do. Somehow she had to get the child to Jessie.

She hadn’t told Jessie who she really was. How could she? In her ruined voice she croaked out, “My name is Constance.”

But Jessie’s voice had hardly changed, and Mimi found the familiar sound of it so comforting, she’d let the old woman read the cards for her, foolish as it was, just to keep hearing her.

After that, she’d called again, on the flimsiest of pretexts, but only a few times. She’d wanted to listen only to the sound of the old woman’s words, not the sense of them, just their resonance.

Once Mimi had hated Jessie’s voice and rebelled against all that it had stood for. Now it seemed to her that same voice, full of mystery and solace, symbolized the only security she had ever known.

She could not go home to it again. That was impossible now. But she had sent Peyton.

And Peyton had arrived—hadn’t she? Hadn’t Jessie said so?

Peyton, Peyton, are you safe? Tell Jessie I loved her, I just didn’t know. Tell her this time I’m going to do what’s right
.

T
HE CALLER, A WIDOW FROM
P
EORIA, SAID SHE WAS
corresponding with the loveliest gentleman and that he wanted to marry her.

The only problem was that he was unjustly behind bars in Joliet State Prison for fraud and embezzlement, although he was innocent as a newborn babe. What did the stars advise about such a union?

Firmly, but tactfully, Eden said that the stars not merely advised against it, they advised very strongly against it.

The widow, obviously displeased, began to argue. Eden sighed and tried to say good-bye. “If you don’t believe me, call somebody else,” she said.

It was at that moment that Peyton, in the living room, began to scream.

Eden banged the receiver back into place and sprinted down the hall toward Peyton’s cries. Her heart hammered crazily in her throat.

Peyton sat before the television set, her head thrown back, howling like a little wolf. “Where are yo-o-ou?” she wailed. “Where are yo-o-ou? Help me! Bad dreams!”

Eden flung herself down on her knees beside the child and pulled her into her arms. “I’m here, I’m here,” she said against the child’s hair, hugging her tightly.

Peyton’s little body was warm and damp, her curls tangled. She clung to Eden and dissolved into wracking sobs.

“There, there,” Eden said ineffectually. “What’s the matter? Nightmares?”

Peyton’s tears were hot against Eden’s shoulder. “Bad dreams,” she said in a choked voice. “Bad dreams, bad dreams, bad dreams.”

Eden patted the child’s back, rocked her. “Dreams aren’t real,” she said in her most soothing voice. “Shh. Shh. The dream’s all gone.”

“Mama said they’d shoot me,” Peyton wept. “I don’t want to get shot.”

Eden was struck momentarily speechless. She could not imagine Mimi telling the child such a terrible thing.

“I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you—ever,” Eden insisted. “And who would shoot you? Who?”

“I—can’t—tell,” Peyton gasped between sobs. “They’ll—
get
me.”

“No,” Eden said fiercely, pressing her cheek to Peyton’s round, wet one. “Nobody’s going to get you. I’m here. You’re safe.”

She held the child and rocked her until the sobs dwindled to pained gulps and sniffles. She was shocked
by her intense desire to comfort Peyton, by the tide of feeling that welled within her for this strange child.

Peyton sniffed and thrust her thumb into her mouth. “You left me,” she accused.

Eden smoothed the tousled black curls. “No. I was right here. In Granny’s room. I didn’t leave you.”

Peyton leaned moodily against Eden’s shoulder, sucking her thumb. “Everybody leaves me. Where’s Granny?”

Eden embraced the child still more tightly. “Your granny’s in the hospital. The doctors are helping Granny.”

“Nobody wants me.”

Guilt twinged through Eden. She
didn’t
want the girl, the thought of having a child repelled her, but she could not say so. She drew back, took the little girl by the shoulders. “I’m here right now. And I’ll stay till Granny comes home from the hospital.”

But no longer. I’ll provide for you if I have to. But I can’t be caught any deeper in this. I can’t stay with you. I don’t stay with anybody. It’s not my style
.

Louise Brodnik, a widow of fifty-two, lived in a small blue house on six hilly acres of dogwood and scrub pine, a dozen miles north of Sedonia, Missouri.

A woman of average height and weight, Louise had short mouse-brown hair that was dry and frizzled by a bad home permanent. Her broad-jawed face had once been pleasant, but was now coarsened and furrowed by care, and on bad days, she looked thoroughly harsh.

Today she looked harsh. She sat at the kitchen table, drinking black coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes, staring
at the telephone on the counter. And wondering what she should do, or if it was too late now to do anything.

She had been back only a few hours, and had thought that being home would bring her peace. Instead she felt guilty for dumping the little girl, without warning or apology, onto the old woman—even though the old woman struck her as tough as nails.

Louise had driven the last long miles to Jessie Buddress’s house with her nerves steeled, her resolve implacable, and her heart hardened. Something about the child—and her mother—had touched Louise from the first, but frightened her, too. She wanted it to be done, over, finished.

In Louise’s front lawn was a hand-lettered sign:
BABY-SITTING HOME CARE
4
YOUR CHILD
, along with her phone number. She had similar signs up on bulletin boards all over town, at the Wal-Mart, the IGA grocery store, the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket, Harv’s Stop’n’Shop, the Gas ’n’ Go, and the three Baptist churches.

Louise had no trade. She sewed a bit and had a talent for growing vegetables in her big one-acre plot. She could sell quilts and vegetables and care for children. She had raised four of her own and baby-sat for her sister’s three all the years her sister had worked at Tripmann’s Restaurant.

Now all those children were grown and gone from Sedonia, and Louise’s house was too far off the beaten track to draw customers. When Mimi Storey had appeared, proposing her strange bargain, Louise needed the money.

Last week, Mimi had wheeled into the dusty drive in a rusted-out Mercury hatchback. She wore dirty jeans, out at the knee, army boots, and a tight, sleeveless white T-shirt that had ketchup stains on it. Louise had recognized
her and the child, too, for they had stopped at her house from time to time to buy summer vegetables.

Mimi was small and thin, but her bare arms were stringy with muscle, and she had an American flag, upside down, tattooed on one hard little bicep. Her dark brown hair was long, kinky, and untamed.