Hear No Evil (21 page)

Owen’s nerve ends prickled. “Strange how?”

“She wasn’t supposed to actually keep the kid. She was supposed to transport her to her grandmother’s.”

Bingo
, thought Owen.
A bull’s-eye at last
. “Did she say anything about the kid’s mother?”

“The daughter said Brodnik felt ‘kind of sorry’ for the mother. But she can’t remember anything else. She’s not too coherent, she’s still in shock,” Mulcahy said. “We haven’t found anybody else yet who knows anything. We’ll keep checking it out at this end, but it may not lead anywhere. Wanted to let you know, that’s all.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

He hung up, surprised that Mulcahy had been kind enough to call. The information wasn’t great, it was only a confirmation of what he’d believed, but he should tell Eden. He looked out the window. Jessie’s kitchen light was on. Eden must be awake.

His mood grim, he crossed the yard to Jessie’s house and knocked at the door. He heard someone moving about in the kitchen, and he smelled the scent of coffee.

She swung open the back door, hardly looking up from a piece of toast she held on a saucer. She was dressed in jeans and a pale green sweater. The color made her eyes, with their catlike tilt, look green.

Her hair was wet and brushed simply into place. She
wore no makeup and no ornament other than her earrings. She managed to look remarkably untouchable and desirable at the same time.

“I saw you walking your dog,” she said. “Peyton’s still asleep. Do you want some coffee?”

Her voice was neutral, impersonal. He went to the cupboard, took out a mug, and poured it full. Her coffee looked dark and strong enough to float a horseshoe.

He said, “I just got a call from Sedonia. From an officer with the state police. Louise Brodnik’s daughter’s arrived there. From Maine.”

Her eyes met his again. They looked full of wariness. “Yes?” she breathed.

He told her Mulcahy’s news as briefly as the man himself had conveyed it.

“So she
was
the one,” Eden said, putting aside the saucer, the toast untouched.

She paused and shook her head. “Peyton had another bad dream early this morning. About fire. Fire seems to be a recurrent fear.”

She crossed her arms and stared out the window, her back straight. “Whatever she’s gone through, I know it’s not—normal. It’s probably going to affect her for the rest of her life. When I think about her, the present and the future get all caught up with the past. I thought I’d left the past behind.”

“I don’t think anybody leaves it behind,” he said quietly. “The dead maybe.”
If they’re lucky
, he thought.

She shook her head. “I need the name of a pediatrician. I don’t even know if she’s ever had a physical. And I have to find a dentist who’s good with children. She’s got that chipped tooth.”

“I’ll ask around. I’ll find the best for you.”

She did not look at him. She moved one shoulder
restlessly. “I called the hospital. Jessie’s the same. I called the police, too. Nobody knows any more than they did before. Why, for God’s sake, can’t they do something as simple as find out about a six-year-old child?”

“They need time. And luck.”

“Luck,” she said, “is something this family seems fresh out of.”

“Luck can be like that.”

She said nothing. She didn’t seem to want to meet his eyes.

“About last night,” he began, “I’m sorry. I was kind of an—” The word he’d intended to say was “asshole,” but he realized he’d make a bigger asshole of himself by saying it.

She acted as if she hadn’t heard him. “Peyton crawled in bed with me again last night. She’s a restless sleeper.”

You’re saying it’s a good thing you weren’t in bed with me
, he thought.
And you’ll keep it that way, won’t you?

He turned and saw Peyton standing barefoot in the doorway. She sucked her thumb and stared at Owen with her usual hostility. Her hair had been cut like Eden’s, and her big earrings had been replaced by small, sparkling ones. For the first time he saw the resemblance between the adult woman and the girl.

“Good morning!” Eden said brightly. “Want some Froot Loops?”

Peyton nodded and climbed up onto a kitchen chair. She tossed Owen an aloof glance. “You should go away,” she said. “We don’t want you. And we don’t need you.”

Eden looked horrified, but Owen crossed his arms and regarded the child coolly. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said.

•  •  •

Owen went to the hospital to see Jessie, but Eden stayed behind with Peyton. She watched as the girl colored a picture of the Little Mermaid in her new coloring book. Quiet, her head bowed, Peyton looked so normal, so pretty and well-behaved, that it twisted at Eden’s heart.

She profoundly wished that she could exorcise whatever possessed Peyton so that the child could take her place in the world like a normal human being. It hurt deeply to be different. Eden knew.

Other children had been cruel to her and Mimi.

Hey, Eden, your mother was a drunk!

Hey, Mimi, I know why your father ran off—he took one look at your face!

Yah, yah! Your grandma’s a witch! You belong to the devil! You belong to the devil!

Your grandma dances naked and fucks Satan! She sucks the devil’s dick! So do you!

Eden always pretended to ignore such gibes; she’d sealed herself up in an aura of cool privacy. As if addicted, she watched old movies on television and pretended she too was an actress, a beautiful being in a beautiful world full of happy endings.

In town, in school, she perfected a role of her own: she held herself aloof from people. If she cared for none of them, none of them could hurt her, no matter what they said or thought. Someday she meant to leave them all behind, and she would never look back. Never.

But Mimi, of course, took things harder. Mimi always did. As a child, Mimi would pitch into anyone who tormented her, hitting and kicking and scratching. As an adolescent, she specialized in rebellion and escape: she drank, she took drugs, she discovered the power of sex.

Eden survived by becoming a model of discipline. Mimi survived, or tried to, by throwing all discipline
aside. Now here was Peyton, another child carrying the burden of difference and a difficult past, and the old cycle was starting over again, like a wheel doomed to turn forever yet go nowhere.

Suddenly Jessie’s psychic line rang from the office, a shrill summons. Eden, startled, rose from the couch, grateful for anything that drew her away from her thoughts.

She sprinted down the hall and snatched up the receiver on the third ring. “Sister Jessie, God’s gifted seer,” she said in a voice that tolled like a bell.

“Jessie, it’s Constance,” came the whispery, damaged voice.

Mimi? Is it you?
Eden’s heart ratcheted faster and harder, her breath caught in her lungs.

“I need to talk to you again,” the woman said. “I—I shouldn’t, but I—got to.”

Eden was determined, this time, to keep her on the line. “Honey, what do you mean ‘shouldn’t’? The spirits
want
you to talk to me. They want to help you. Indeed they do.”

The other woman paused and laughed ironically. “Help me? Why? And how?”

Eden marshaled all her concentration. “They want to reach out to you. But I only see them as through a glass darkly. Help me. Help me understand what it is they want to say.”

The caller was silent for a long moment. At last she said, “You talked about a blond woman with her hand full of fire.”

“That vision came to me, yes,” Eden said as mysteriously as she could. “Her with her blond hair and flames dancing in her hand.”

“Somebody told you that, didn’t they? What else do you know about her?”

“Nobody told me nothing,” Eden lied. “You got reason to fear fire, honeyduck? You can tell me. Help me see what I’m supposed to see.”

“Don’t talk about it,” the woman said, sounding fatalistic. “There’re things that shouldn’t be talked about. Not by me. Not by anybody.”

Eden’s elbow was on the desk, and she clenched at her bangs in nervous frustration. “You can talk to me. Let me help you.”

“Then read the cards to me, that’s all.”

“You want to know about that child again? That child that needs her mother?”

“She’s better off without her. She shouldn’t even talk about her. If she talks, people shouldn’t listen. You understand me? The cards?”

Eden swore under her breath, but picked up the tarot cards and dealt the cards. “Do you have a question for them?”

Eden took a deep breath and waited.

“Yes.” The voice was tremulous. “I’m thinking it. I don’t want to say it.”

“Hmm,” Eden said, pretending to study the first card, the eight of staves. As bait, she offered its traditional meaning. “I see things in motion. I see the arrows of desire. Love? Hate? Dispute? Discord? Does this mean anything to you?”

Again the caller paused. “Yeah,” she said hesitantly. “Yeah. It might mean something. I guess.”

Eden turned over the next card. “The two of swords,” she breathed. “Reversed. Oh, me. Oh, dear.”

“What—wha’s that mean?”

Eden studied the card and decided to follow the lead
of its symbolism. “I see a young woman blindfolded. Two swords frame her face, and the rocky sea stretches out behind her. But her world is upside down. Oh, me. Oh, dear. It’s a good thing you called me. A good thing, indeed.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eden pondered what it meant. Today the caller sounded even less like Mimi than before, the voice more ragged and scratchy, but more truculent, too, and on edge.

Eden squared her shoulders. “You must do nothing reckless, nothing that will hurt you.”

Another long silence. Then, in a bitter whisper, “It’s a little late for that.”

“You must take care, protect yourself,” Eden insisted. “Now listen to me. I’m turning over the next card.”

The five of pentacles revealed itself.

“I see a child, needy in the snow,” she improvised. “A black-haired child, a girl. This child’s mother must do the right thing—”

“The right thing is going to be done,” the caller said. “The wrong things were a mistake. Mistakes, that’s all.”

“Don’t hang up,” Eden said urgently. “The spirits have something important to tell you. It’s on the edge of coming to me. It’s vital. I’m here to help you. You must tell me—”

“No,” the voice said sharply.

“What do you need? Ask your kin. They’ll help you—”

“No. They can’t.”

“You’d be surprised, you—”

But the click of a disconnecting phone cut her off. The woman had hung up.

“Damn!” muttered Eden. She slammed the phone
down, and tears of exasperation welled in her eyes. She’d lost her again. Once again, she’d pushed too hard and too far.

She gnawed at her injured lip. The caller seemed to be in deep trouble—but was it Mimi? Eden still was not certain of it. She was no longer certain of anything.

Drace and Raylene had been in Branson almost twenty-four hours, but had found no trace of Mimi Storey.

This put Drace in a foul mood, as did Branson itself. He hated the town, he hated the godawful traffic, he hated the gaudy-looking country-western theaters and the cheap souvenir stores, and all the hillbilly and hick humor the signs tried to convey.

“I’d like to come back here someday and destroy this fucking place,” he said. “And all its fucking flag-waving tourists.”

He sat on the edge of the bed in the motel, eating a tuna-salad sandwich from a grocery-store deli and drinking a glass of milk.

Raylene sat at his feet, daintily picking baked corn chips from a bag. A desultory rain tapped at the window.

They ate in their room rather than at a restaurant because Drace hated restaurants, suspecting their kitchens were filthy and roach-ridden and that the cooks spit in the food and did other disgusting things.

“Shit,” he said. “She’s here somewhere. I know it.”

“We’ll find her,” Raylene said soothingly. She leaned against his knee, rubbing her cheek against the denim of his jeans. “She can’t have gone far.”

Raylene figured that Mimi had stolen one thousand and ninety-eight dollars from the general fund. Before
Louise Brodnik died, she’d confessed that Mimi had given her six hundred dollars.

That left Mimi with almost five hundred dollars herself, and Drace believed what the Brodnik woman had said about Mimi, that she was going to stay around Branson and she was going to drink. It sounded exactly like the sort of stupid, low-rent thing Mimi would do, her and her stupid country music.

But Raylene was worried about Peyton. Where was the child and who had her? Mimi had always claimed she’d had no family, and she’d had few friends; that was one reason it had been easy for Drace to convert her to their communal life.

“She’s holed up drinking someplace, I know it,” Drace said. “Christ, I tried to save her from all that. She was headed for a life in the gutter.”

“I know that, sweety,” Raylene said, and ate the last of her chips. Personally, she would have preferred that Drace had let Mimi fall into the gutter in the first place, but she didn’t say so, his disposition was dark enough already.

She opened the telephone book to the Yellow Pages again, the section on motels.

“We just have to be persistent,” she told him, “that’s all.”

“Persistent,” he said contemptuously. He finished his sandwich, drained his milk, and flopped back on the bed to glower at the ceiling. “She’s probably spending all our money on booze and that goddamn bourgeois hillbilly shit music. Christ. I never should have took her in.”

Raylene suppressed a sigh and studied the Yellow Pages. Motels had sprouted all over Branson, covering the place like mold, and half of them, it seemed, had the word “Inn” in their names.

She had underlined each neatly, and she and Drace had spent all yesterday evening and this morning checking them, asking about Mimi, showing her snapshot.

If the person at the motel office was male, Raylene talked to him. Drace handled the women. They painted a picture of Mimi as a family member, a disturbed runaway, and they charmed most people into cooperating with them.