Hear No Evil (19 page)

“I will. Look at this one, will you? It’s the mother. Do you recognize her?”

The gaunt man scrutinized the photo and shook his head. He grunted and went back to geometrically perfecting the hole in the soil.

Owen thrust the pictures back into his shirt pocket. “This mail carrier, Freefoot, did he know Brodnik well?”

“No. She was on his route, that’s all.”

“Who did know her, then?”

“Nobody much. Her kids are all grown and gone. She had a sister, dead two years now.”

“Neighbors?”

“None close. Brodnik wasn’t sociable. She didn’t mix with people.”

“When did she stop picking up her mail?”

“The thirteenth. She’d left no notice to stop it. She must have got back sometime yesterday.”

“Where’d she gone? Have you checked?”

Mulcahy gave another negative grunt, interred another tulip bulb.

Owen set his jaw. “Her death. Your department thinks it was accidental?”

Mulcahy slipped him a cold sea-green squint. “Until we have reason to think otherwise.”

“Her body’s at the medical examiner’s?”

Mulcahy slid him another glance that said,
Of course, you asshole
.

Owen nodded. “When do you expect the report?”

Mulcahy shrugged. “It could be a day or so. The office is shorthanded right now.” He paused and smiled bitterly to himself. “The medical examiner died. Found him on the floor of his garage, maybe a heart attack. Got to autopsy him.”

A nice graveyard joke, that, thought Owen. But he wasn’t interested in the late medical examiner. “Did Louise Brodnik have any enemies, anyone who would want her dead?”

“No enemies, no friends,” Mulcahy said. “She was a family person whose family all left. She kept to herself. I told you that.”

Owen ignored the rebuke. “What caused the fire?”

“We don’t know. The ashes have hardly cooled down.”

“What’s the likeliest explanation at this point?”

Mulcahy evened the sides of another hole. “Fire department
says
the water heater exploded. They shouldn’t say anything. Investigation’s still in progress.”

“Who are Louise Brodnik’s closest survivors? Who might she have talked to about this kid?”

“Two daughters and two sons, all out of state. Couple of nieces and nephews, nobody near. Talk to the undertaker who’ll handle her—Hastings.”

Mulcahy sat back, his bony rear resting on his heels. He stared at Owen almost hostilely. “Wherever she was, she shouldn’t have come back. That place blazed. It was an inferno.”

“Yeah,” Owen said. “Too bad.”

“You got kids?” Mulcahy asked. He asked it like a challenge.

“No,” said Owen. “I don’t.”

“You should,” Mulcahy snapped. “I got three. They live with their mother. Nothing more important than kids.”

“Yeah,” Owen said, rising. “Well, thanks.”

“You go to the department, tell them what you told me,” the man said, standing. He peeled off his dirty gloves and offered Owen his hand. “We’ll find that kid’s mother for you. Women—such bitches. They can break you in two, can’t they?”

Owen nodded wordlessly. He shook the skeletal hand, then released it.

He walked back to his car, the old, familiar emptiness stirring inside him, bitter and sickening.
Yeah
, he thought.
They can break you right in two
.

W
HEN THE WOMAN HUNG UP
, E
DEN HAD BEEN SWEPT BY
a dismal sense of failure.
God, God, I screwed it up. I scared her. She’ll never call back
.

She put her face in her hands. With all her heart she did not want to believe the desperate caller with the slurred speech and ruined voice was her sister. But she feared that it was.

She sensed Peyton in the doorway behind her and straightened. She turned to her, forcing herself to smile, worried the girl was still upset by Jessie’s vision of fire. But Peyton didn’t seem distressed, only restless with boredom.

“Can we go to the park? Henry wants to ride the fish. I want to ride the elephant.”

Tell me what you know
, Eden thought, studying the
child.
What sort of trouble is your mother in? How can I help her?

Yet she dared not push Peyton, not after seeing how upset she could become. She wondered about the best way to win the girl’s confidence. Then she unplugged the psychic line, stood, and offered Peyton her hand. “To the park,” she said and smiled again.

Shyly Peyton smiled back, and trustingly she took Eden’s hand, adoration shining out of her dark eyes.

They went to Owen’s house for the dog, but the creature grew tired halfway down the path and had to be carried. Now it slept in the sun-warmed leaves, curled up into a fragile, ratty knot.

Eden turned on the swing so that the chains twisted, and her heart twisted with them guiltily. She didn’t want the child’s love. She wanted only her information.

Peyton dismounted the bobbing elephant and ran to Eden. She put her hands on Eden’s thighs and looked up at her entreatingly. “Can we really go shopping? Can we have pizza again for supper? Will you really buy me an ice-cream sundae?”

“Yes,” Eden said, cupping the child’s chin in her hand. “We’ll do all those things.”

Peyton’s chin was not rounded like Mimi’s, but pointed like her own. The set of the girl’s eyes, the angle of her brows, the way her hair waved instead of curled, all were more like Eden than Mimi. Once again Eden had the unsettling sensation that she was gazing at an exotic alternate self.

Peyton gave her a hesitant grin that showed her chipped tooth. Eden touched one of Peyton’s big earrings. “We’ll buy you different earrings, too. These are too big for you.”

Peyton climbed, wriggling, onto her lap. She reached
up and touched the diamond stud in Eden’s ear. “I want earrings like you got. I want to be just like you. Swing me, Eden?”

An unwanted frisson trembled through Eden’s insides, making her feel slightly sick.
You already are like me, too much
, she thought.
You can’t count on your mother, you don’t know your father, and nobody wants you but Jessie. You’re different, you don’t fit in, you’re not like other people
.

But holding Peyton tightly, she kicked the dirt beneath them and, with skill long forgotten, launched the swing into its first high arc. Peyton squealed with delight.

The old dog did not seem to hear; he lay in the leaves, dozing in the beautiful light that was starting to die.

Eden took Peyton to Little Caesar’s for supper, to Wal-Mart to shop, to the Dairy Queen for an ice-cream sundae.

I have wooed this child with franchises and discounts
, she thought.
I am a cheap and shoddy cheeseball
.

Now Peyton lay asleep in their room, her thumb in her mouth. Her hair had been washed and trimmed and styled. She wore fresh, clean pajamas, and her big earrings had been replaced with small ones with studs of cubic zirconia.

Half of Eden’s mind said,
Cubic zirconia: I am indeed a cheap and shoddy cheeseball
. The other half said,
Grow up to buy your own diamonds, Peyton—they’re the only ones worth having
.

Eden had talked to Jessie, but she still hadn’t told her about her suspicion that the woman calling herself Constance
might be Mimi. She didn’t even want to think about it.

She’d walked the dog, straightened the house. Her friend Sandy Fogleman had phoned from California with the names of two highly recommended psychologists, one in Little Rock, one in Tulsa. The quickest appointment Eden could get was in Little Rock and not for five days.

If Owen had phoned, she’d missed him, and she would not let herself call him. Her refusal was partly from simple stiff-necked pride, but partly from emotional exhaustion.

The exhaustion had been whipped nearly to the breaking point when she’d discovered that among Peyton’s few possessions was a book that had once belonged to herself and Mimi. It was a volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen.

Years ago, Jessie had given them the book for Christmas. The longest and most complex story was “The Snow Queen,” and Eden had forgotten how strange and disturbing the illustrations were.

The fat, naked devils of “The Snow Queen” sat in almost mastubatory positions as they propped up their cold and mocking mirror of humanity.
Love, love, love
, said the sentimental story,
love is what matters
.

Nothing matters
, leered the devils.
Nothing
.

She heard a car pull up in the drive and stop. Owen, she thought. A moment of silence pulsed, then a knock rapped at the door. She rose and answered it.

His jaw was shadowed and his silver hair rumpled. The ice-blue eyes seemed to pierce through her. “I tried to call. Nobody answered.”

She felt awkward and almost schoolgirlish under that steady gaze. She turned from him and set the book on
the arm of the couch. “We were out a lot. We had to eat and shop and do—girl things.”

“Girl things,” he said without expression.

“Get her hair fixed, get some decent clothes, replace those awful earrings.”

“Did she tell you anything?”

Eden shook her head and made a helpless gesture. “No. I’m sorry. Can—can I make you some coffee?”

“No, thanks. Jessie’s got a bottle of brandy in the kitchen. I’ll take a shot of that.”

“Certainly,” she said. She let him lead the way. He opened a cupboard door, took down the bottle and a small glass.

“What about the woman who says she’s Constance?” he asked. “Did you hear from her?”

Reluctantly she told him of her conversation. “I don’t know what to think. Yet part of me seems to
know
it’s Mimi, though there’s no logical reason.”

“Life’s not always logical,” he said.

“Anyway I think I blew it,” she said in self-disgust. “She won’t call back.”

“I think she will,” he said. “She’s getting addicted to the sound of Jessie’s voice.”

She shook her head in doubt. “How about you? What did you find out in Sedonia? Anything?”

“Not enough,” he said with an unhappy frown. He leaned against the counter, nursed his drink, and told her about Louise Brodnik.

“Her house burned early this morning,” he finished. “She was in it.”

A cold, empty sickness hovered in her stomach. She turned away. “Oh, my God. How horrible.”

“And it’s just like Jessie said.” He took a sip of brandy. “About the fire and the woman and the house.”

She could feel him looking at her, his cool, steady gaze. He said, “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

She raised her chin defiantly. “I never much believed in the paranormal.”

“You don’t think she has any special power?”

Eden shrugged. “Sometimes she gets lucky, that’s all.” Slowly she turned and looked at him again, her expression dubious. “But you think she does?”

His gaze held hers. “Yeah. I do.”

She gave a small, nervous laugh. “But you were with the police. You’re supposed to be cynical.”

“I am cynical. But I think your grandmother does have some kind of—power. She’s not a hundred percent accurate. But she knows things other people can’t.”

Eden crossed her arms and shook her head. “She’s wrong more often than she’s right. A lot more.”

“You’re bitter,” he said.

“I’m a realist.” She took a deep breath. “I know she helps some people. I’m glad she helped your—your wife.”

He leaned nearer. “It was more than that. Jessie had a soft spot for me because I was the one who pulled Mimi out of that wreck all those years ago.”

For a moment, her expression softened. “That was you? You’re the one? It was you who stopped the bleeding till the ambulance came?”

“That was me, that was my job. And I was the one who came to tell Jessie. I drove her to the hospital. She was too shaken to do it herself. I stayed with her till we knew Mimi was out of the woods.”

Regret and perhaps shame shadowed Eden’s eyes. “I didn’t know it was you. I—I wasn’t here then. I’d left for California, and Jessie hadn’t wanted me to go. She was hardly talking to me.”

“I know,” he said. “But there’s more to this story. Four years later, Jessie called me up, out of the blue. She told me she had a powerful feeling that I needed to be careful that night, that something could happen.”

“And?” asked Eden.

“And I thought she was crazy. I laughed it off. But that night we were called to a trailer court between Endor and Fort Smith. We’d been tipped that a guy who’d kidnapped his two kids was holed up there. We had a warrant. We didn’t expect too much trouble.”

He paused, as if trying to find the right words. His dark brows knit together in a frown. “Another pair of detectives went around to the back door. My partner and I took the front. I was in the lead, just at the top stair. Then I heard—I swore I heard a voice. My wife’s voice.”

He spread his empty hands in incomprehension. “I heard her say ‘Take care. Take care.’ Her voice was so clear I turned, expecting to see her. And just then, a rifle blast came through the window.”

Eden stared at him as if she did not believe him. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt.