Hear No Evil (26 page)

Naked they’d been, he thought with a caustic ruefulness, but only in body. Emotions they’d kept covered as if the obscene parts of humans were the emotions; don’t show
that
, keep
that
hidden.

He rose and found his Jockey shorts under Jessie’s rocking chair, one sock beneath the window, one in the closet doorway. His jeans were at the foot of the bed, his shirt beside its head. One boot lay in the farthest corner, the other stood next to the bedroom door like a lonely sentinel.

He dressed, moved quietly down the hall, and eased open the door to Eden’s room. She lay still and slender under the coverlet, her boyishly cut hair neat even in sleep.

The kid had climbed into bed with her again, a little black-haired bundle half curled, half sprawled next to her, looking anything but tidy.

Peyton sighed noisily and snuggled more deeply into her pillow. He shut the door and left the house, locking the door behind him.

He crossed the yard and unlocked his own house, which seemed to echo with emptiness. It held no homeyness for him and never would.

The beautiful old white farmhouse where he and Laurie had lived was sold. He never visited it, he never drove past it if he could avoid it. He’d sent the furniture off to auction.

Since then he’d moved from one of his family’s rental properties to another, rebuilding, restoring. He always brought as little with him as possible, wanting nothing that was burdened by memories. Now he switched on his overhead light and walked into the kitchen.

One of the few things Owen had brought from the old house was the dog’s bed. It was an ancient cushion covered in red and green plaid, and it always smelled like the dog, rank and sick.

The dog hadn’t heard him come in; it was deaf as a stone. It lay curled up, nose beneath its scraggly plume of a tail.

As soon as he touched it, he knew it was dead. Its small body was cold and immobile with the terrible fixity of death. Its fur seemed to have lost what poor luster it had, its bones to have grown smaller and more fragile.

He had never much liked the dog, it was a fancy, fuzzy, yapping thing, but Laurie had loved it with all her sentimental heart.

Now that it was dead, a peculiar hollowness settled in his chest, tightened his throat. He picked up the little body. It seemed to weigh no more than a toy made of cloth and rags.

Hell, he thought bleakly, he should have saved one of Laurie’s sweaters or blouses to wrap the old boy in, but he had none. What did the dog care? he asked himself
coldly. The dog could never fucking care about anything again.

Still, he stripped off his own shirt and wrapped it around the still body. It was an irrational act, but Laurie had always insisted the dog was comforted by the scents of its loved ones.

Owen went to the basement and got a pick and shovel. He carried the dog to a spot among the oaks with their yellowing leaves.

He laid the dog among the fallen leaves and began to dig. The ground was hard; the Arkansas earth was more rock and root than dirt. He wanted the hole deep so that no animal would disturb the corpse.

The morning sun was starting to beat down with unseasonable heat. He was sweating by the time the hole was large enough to suit him. He layered dead leaves on the bottom and laid the dog on them. Then he covered it with dirt, and after that a large rock to protect the raw earth.

It would be sentimental and foolish to say words over a worn-out old dog, even to think them, and there was nothing to say, nothing to think.

Eden had awakened before Peyton and carefully crept from the bed. She put on her robe and went barefoot into the kitchen to start the coffee. She wanted a taste that was black and scalding and strong enough to burn away any misgivings she had about last night.

While the coffee brewed, she would take a shower and wash the memory of Owen from her body. A faint, ghostly tingle of excitement still ran over her flesh, and she resented it.

She had used Owen, he had used her. Neither of
them wanted to be involved; they’d gotten involved anyway. And, oh, he’d been sweet and exciting and athletic in bed; he had been just
fine
in bed, thank you. It was afterward, he’d turned cool. Let him, she thought. She knew a thing or two about coolness herself.

But she glanced out the kitchen window and saw him, bare chested, heading toward the edge of the woods, carrying a bundle wrapped in blue as well as a pick and a shovel. When she saw him lay down the bundle, she realized that at last the old dog had died.

A pang of sympathy wrenched through her. She knew the dog had belonged to his late wife. He didn’t seem fond of the animal, but it must have been a strong and intimate connection to the memory of the woman he’d loved. Another link gone.

She saw him strain to push the stone atop the dog’s grave, then pick up his tools and walk back toward Jessie’s. His tall body was lean and fit and strong, and the silver of his hair seemed at odds with it.

She forgot about her shower. She poured two mugs of coffee, and when she heard him enter the front door, she stood waiting for him, feeling almost tremulous.

When he came into the kitchen, his face was expressionless, his blue eyes steady. He carried Jessie’s morning paper and handed it to her without remark.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve got coffee made.”

He shrugged. The sweat on his shoulders gleamed, and she could see the bullet scar across his breastbone.

“I don’t need anything,” he said. A long smear of dirt marred his flat stomach, crumbs of dirt and broken leaf clung to his jeans.

“Please sit down for a minute with me,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

He frowned. “I want to talk to you, too. John Mulcahy called from Sedonia.”

An odd little shock of foreboding ran through her. She looked at him expectantly. “The detective? Yes?”

Owen told her what Louise Brodnik’s daughter had said about Mimi living at a farmhouse and her suspicions about the people she’d lived with.

“My God, Owen, paramilitary? Or a cult?” Eden clutched her robe more tightly shut, as if chilled by the news.

“You’re going to have to try to ask Peyton some more questions.”

He turned from her, went to the sink. She watched him as he leaned on the counter, staring out the window toward the dog’s grave.

“Before you talk to her,” he said, “let me see if I can find out anything more about this Mrs. Stangblood. The more we know, the less the kid’ll have to say.”

He washed his hands at the sink and dried them. She watched the intricate play of muscles in his back and arms. He turned to face her again.

New, confused emotions roiled within her. “Sit down,” she said, in order to say anything. “Your coffee’ll get cold.”

He sat down opposite from her, and they studied each other almost warily, like two opponents unsure about negotiating.

“Try not to worry,” he said at last. “We’ll unravel it. I promise you.”

She gazed down at the black liquid in her cup but did not drink. “I—I saw you from the window,” she said. “The dog died, didn’t he?”

“It was for the best. He was worn out.”

“I know,” she said, with a helpless gesture. “But I’m sorry. It was your wife’s dog, wasn’t it?”

He nodded, said nothing, took a drink of coffee. He didn’t want to talk about it, she knew.

She said, “I’m sorry I asked you about her last night. It’s none of my business.”

“No,” he said. “I was the one out of line. I’m sorry.”

She stared at him in surprise.

“You were right,” he said. “We both needed somebody. That was all.”

She traced the flowered pattern on her coffee mug with her fingertip.
That was all. That was all it meant. Only that, no more
.

“Sometimes these things happen,” she said. “People just have to be adult about it.”

She hoped to God she sounded adult.

Then Peyton appeared in the kitchen doorway, and Eden knew all adult conversation would have to be postponed until later.

At eight o’clock, Endor time, Owen went into Jessie’s bedroom with his cell phone and began to dial the numbers remaining on his list of Stangbloods.

He was shaved, showered, dressed in clean jeans and a T-shirt, but a faint, maddening perfume of sex still hung in the air of the bedroom. He tried to ignore it.

Eden was in the living room now, keeping Peyton occupied by coloring with her in a coloring book. The child was still quiet with sleepiness, but the woman seemed upbeat, cheery, completely confident and at ease. “Seemed” was the operative word, for he knew under her smooth façade she dreaded the coming ordeal for Peyton.

Maybe, he thought, teeth set as he dialed, the fates
would send him a Detroit Stangblood who could answer all the questions, solve all the riddles, put everything to rights.

Instead, the fates gave him Yvonne Wannebacker. She was the tenth and last name on his list.

When he asked to speak to Yvonne Stangblood, she sounded put-upon and waspish. “This is Yvonne Wannebacker, formerly Stangblood. What do you want?”

“Ms. Wannebacker, my name is Owen Charteris. I’m calling from Endor, Arkansas. A six-year-old girl named Peyton Storey was abandoned here, and we need background information so we can locate her mother, Miriam Storey. We believe that recently the child and her mother lived in Detroit and knew a Mrs. Stangblood. Any information would be welcome.”

“I’m not a Mrs. Stangblood any longer,” the woman said acidly. “Thank God.”

Owen gritted his teeth. “I’m sorry. Still, we have this child. Any information you could—”

“I don’t know anything about a child,” she said brusquely.

“The child mentioned a friend named Mrs. Stangblood. It’s one of the few facts we can get out of her.”

“I don’t know anything about a child,” Yvonne Wannebacker repeated. “I do know Stangbloods shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. There ought to be a law against it. They should send ’em all to the planet Mars.”

Owen kept his voice calm, reasonable. “There’s no reason to think the child’s an actual relative. The Mrs. Stangblood might have been a neighbor, a family friend, a baby-sitter or caregiver of some kind.”

“The only one that ever baby-sat was my ex-mother-in-law. It wasn’t enough for her to screw up her own
kids. Oh, no, she had to screw up other people’s, too. Jeez, what a piece of work
she
was.”

Owen’s nerve ends prickled. “What’s this woman’s name?”

“Filumena, can you believe that? Filumena, with an
f
. As in ‘fathead.’ ”

Owen frowned. Nobody he’d spoken to had mentioned such a woman. “Information didn’t give me a listing for a Filumena Stangblood. Would she be unlisted? Or in the book under her husband’s name?”

The Wannebacker woman laughed. “Her husband had the good sense to die off years ago. But you won’t find Filumena, either, unless you got a hot line to hell. That woman was such a slob it was criminal.”

“You mean she’s dead?”

“That’s what I mean,” she answered with obvious satisfaction. “Maybe she looked in the mirror and scared herself to death. Fat? We’re talking boxcar here.”

Owen tried to nudge her back to the subject. “Ms. Wannebacker, do you remember if your mother-in-law ever baby-sat for a little black-haired girl named Peyton? Likes to draw, a picky eater—”

“She better not be picky if she stayed with Filumena. The woman could do about two things in the kitchen, and one was to boil water. When I was going with Ronald he took me over there for Christmas dinner. You know what she had? Pizza! Can you imagine it? We’re sitting there, surrounded by Little Caesar’s boxes, eating off TV trays, watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
. Christ, I shoulda known then they were all crazy as coots.”

Owen’s pulses quickened. “This child is very striking. Extremely dark hair and eyes. May have worn large gold earrings—”

“I told you, I don’t know. I had as little to do with
the woman as possible. The place was bad enough with just her in it. You think I’d go there with rugrats screaming and running all over? Christ, I saw a cockroach there the size of a rottweiler.”

“What about her neighbors? Friends? Other relatives?”

“The person she was thickest with was her daughter. There was a prize pair, let me tell you—you get ’em together, they looked like two cans of lard.”

“Could you give me the daughter’s name, Ms. Wannebacker? It’s important. Is she in Detroit?”

“She’s in Detroit, all right,” the woman said. “You know how I can tell? Every so often, I feel the ground shaking, so I know she’s out there, walking around like Godzilla. Wham.
Wham
.”

Owen gritted his teeth. “Her name?”

“Her name’s Theresa Bigby. Theresa Big-Butt is what it should be. I don’t know her phone number; I’ve, like, erased it from my memory. Her husband’s name is Warren. Warren the Moron.”

Owen scribbled down “Theresa Warren-Bigby, Detroit.” He said, “Thank you, Ms. Wannebacker. I think this may be just what we need.”

“Is there money at stake here?” she asked suspiciously. “Is there a reward?”

“The only reward is helping a fellow human being,” Owen said, almost managing to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. He said good-bye and hung up.

He called Information, got the phone number of Warren Bigby, and dialed it, hoping like hell that Theresa Bigby was at home.

She was.

She had a sweet, shy, hesitant voice that had little trace of education in it. She sounded blandly languid, but
as soon as he told her of the abandoned child and began to describe Peyton, she grew excited.

“I remember her!” Theresa Bigby said. “I know her!”

Owen’s heart clenched like a fist in his chest. “Yes?”

“Mama
kept
her,” Theresa said. “A long time. Months. Maybe even a year. She lived at Mama’s.”

Bingo!
Owen thought with a heady sense of triumph. “Tell me everything you can remember, Mrs. Bigby.”

“Well …” she said, rather breathlessly. “This woman said somebody told her about Mama, and so she come to Mama and said she’s gotta work nights and sleep days, so could Mama take care of Peyton.”

“You’re talking about Peyton’s mother,” Owen said carefully. “About Mimi. Miriam Storey.”