Hear No Evil (5 page)

Tentatively, almost against her will, Eden touched the little girl’s face, brushing an errant curl from her cheek. “You need a haircut, kid,” she whispered softly.

She was startled by the slow, almost surreptitious opening of the bedroom door. Turning from Peyton, she looked up in alarm at the lean face of Owen Charteris.

A lock of pewter-colored hair fell across his forehead. With his right hand he tucked his blue work shirt into the front of his jeans, as if he had just thrown on his clothes.

His hair might have turned gray, but his body still
looked hard and tautly muscled, and under his dark brows, his eyes were ice-blue. His wide shoulders seemed to fill the doorway.

“Your grandmother’s phoned twice,” he said quietly.

Eden suppressed a groan, rose higher on her elbow, and held up her wrist to see her watch. It was nearly ten.

“Oh, rats,” she muttered inelegantly. “She’s probably wondering where I am.”

“Yes,” he said. “She is.” He gave her a measuring look, his eyes lingering without expression on her breasts.

Eden glanced sleepily down at herself and was shocked to see that she hadn’t bothered to button her nightshirt; her breasts were half-exposed.

She clutched the shirt’s front together, rebelliously thinking,
So he got an eyeful—he couldn’t have enjoyed it. I must look like a Gorgon. He should have turned into stone
.

“You could have knocked,” she said coolly.

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to wake you. Or the kid. Get dressed and I’ll take you to the hospital. Jessie wants me to bring her some things. My sister can baby-sit, but she has to leave by afternoon.”

She clutched her nightshirt together more tightly. “How’s Jessie?”

“The same,” he said with no emotion.

Eden forced her gaze to fall back to Peyton, who frowned more worriedly in her sleep. The child was warm and pink-cheeked, her upper lip slightly sweaty. She stirred drowsily and snuggled nearer to Eden, sucking her thumb harder.

She smoothed the child’s tumbled hair again. “What am I going to do with you?” she breathed.

•  •  •

The rain hadn’t ceased. It drizzled down from a gray sky
so
bleak that it seemed designed to mock the brightness of the yellowing leaves.

Thank God for Shannon
, Owen thought as he drove Eden to the hospital. This morning his sister had bustled quietly around Jessie’s house, putting things in order, brewing coffee, and packing a suitcase for Jessie. Most important, she had made comforting small talk with Eden Storey.

Owen had lost any talent he’d ever had for small talk. His ability to comfort a stranger had long ago dried up like a dead thing, turned to dust, and blown away.

Shannon knew this. She had kept up a stream of chatter that was amiable, practical, and just sympathetic enough. She was as smart as she was tactful and had avoided the most difficult subjects facing the Storey woman.

The most difficult, damn it, was the question Eden had whispered to Peyton in the bedroom, the question he didn’t know how to answer:
What am I going to do with you?

He could tell by the expression on Eden’s face that she was deeply troubled. She stared numbly at the windshield wipers as they carved their glassy portal into the rain.

When he stopped at a red light, Eden gave an almost imperceptible sigh. He rubbed the cleft in his chin and stole a sideways glance at her.

He wished like hell he hadn’t caught that lovely chance glimpse of her breasts this morning. The sight had given him an unexpected twitch of hardness in the groin.

She had a good body: long-legged with flaring hips, a trim waist, and flat stomach. Her breasts were well
shaped and firm, and her white sweater clung subtly to their thrust.

She was simply dressed in the sweater and a pair of gray slacks and black low-heeled shoes. Her only jewelry was a pair of diamond ear studs, and she wore little makeup. Her lower lip was still slightly swollen and looked tender.

He felt an unbidden and unwelcome stirring of desire and, almost simultaneously, a sick wave of guilt. He was trying to get through the anniversary of his wife’s death. Goddamn and double goddamn and triple goddamn the stirring of any hard-on for this anxious stranger.

He allowed himself a grim moment of self-loathing. Then he forced away all thought of Eden Storey’s disturbing breasts and her tender mouth.

He pushed away any sympathy for her, as well. Sympathy was for people who had emotion to spare. He had none. But he would warn her of some unpleasant facts before they caught her off guard. He could do that much.

He said, “I filed a missing person’s report on Mimi. Jessie asked me to. The police haven’t found her but they’ve found out things about her. She’s got a record.”

Eden turned to face him with an abrupt jerk. He read dismay in her eyes. “A record?”

He kept his voice harsh, as noncommittal as he could. “Hot checks, petty theft, passing stolen goods. Jessie doesn’t know all this yet.”

Eden stared at him, her lips parted as if she wanted to speak but had no words.

He set his jaw and squinted through the rain. He’d been around long enough to know some people were born to trouble, and Mimi was one. He said, “She did a
stint in prison, too. Two years in Michigan. Jessie doesn’t know that, either.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Eden flinch as if she’d been struck. “Prison?” she asked tightly. “What for?”

“She got mixed up with a guy who dealt in stolen guns. And drugs. She apparently did a pretty good job of frying her brains.”

“Oh, hell,” Eden said miserably and dragged her hand through her bangs. Mimi had once had intelligence and talent to burn, and she had burned it. Eden stared at the windshield wipers as if they might hypnotize her into a better, more sensible world.

Slowly she said, “If she was locked up for two years, where was Peyton?”

“A foster home. Some people in Holland, Michigan, named DeBeck.”

“But when was this? How old was Peyton?”

“Six weeks when the DeBecks took her. She was a little over two when Mimi got out. Mimi took care of her awhile, then gave her up to another foster family. Named Murdoch.”

Eden’s face tautened. He thought he saw a tear rise and glitter like a shard of glass, but she blinked it back. “Why did she give her up again? Didn’t she want to be tied down?”

“She claimed a welfare counselor pressured her into doing it. Within the year, she wanted Peyton back.”

Eden muttered something under her breath.

He shrugged. “It seemed to be her pattern. She wanted the kid. She didn’t want her. Different excuses. Once a bad car accident.”

“Had she been drinking?” Eden asked, her jaw
tensed. Mimi’s addictions had finally driven the splitting wedge between them.

He nodded. “Then one day, two years ago, she said she and Peyton were going to Wisconsin, for the weekend. They never came back. Nobody knows where they went.”

“How hard did they try to find out?” Eden challenged.

“Probably not too hard. That’s how it goes.”

“That’s how it goes,” she echoed bitterly.

He adjusted the windshield wipers to their highest speed. It was raining like a very bastard now.

Eden’s body looked as tense as a tautly drawn bow. “So now what happens?”

“The police keep trying. But they won’t try hard. The case isn’t urgent. It’ll get swept under the rug.”

She turned to face him. “How do you know so much about what the police think?”

“I used to be with them,” he said tonelessly. “Detective. State police.”

“Oh.” Then she brightened. “What about Peyton? What does she say? Didn’t you ask her about Mimi? About the woman who brought her here?”

“Of course I asked her. She won’t answer any questions about her mother. Or the past.”

“Not at all? But why?”

He didn’t like telling her this part, so he said it bluntly, with nothing to soften the blow. “She says she’s not supposed to talk. She says if she does, somebody will come hurt her, kill her.”

“
What?
” Eden demanded, clearly horrified. “Why would she even think such a thing?”

He pulled into the lot of the hospital, put the car into park, and pocketed the keys. He gave her a level look,
taking in her pale face, her bewildered blue-green eyes, her swollen, very, very tender-looking lip.

“She’s probably saying what your sister told her to.”

She looked more stricken than before. “My God, what was Mimi mixed up in? She couldn’t believe that—could she?”

He said, “I’ve got no idea what was going on in your sister’s life or in her mind. And neither does your grandmother. None.”

When Eden had been a child, Dr. Dennis Vandeering had seemed impossibly ancient to her, a white-haired old man on the brink of senility or death.

But neither death nor dementia had yet claimed him. Small, wizened, troll-like, his dark eyes were magnified by his thick glasses until they looked like toy, oversized eyes. His white hair was sparse, his face carved by wrinkles, but his teeth, which were large, perfect, and artificial, gleamed almost luminously.

He took Eden’s hand in his own, which was small and monkeylike. “So,” he said, his magnified eyes widening, “little Eden Storey. All grown-up. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

Eden could not even try to force a smile. “Yes,” she said. “I remember you.”

His leathery little fingers curled around hers. His huge teeth gleamed. “I took your little appendix out. Ha.”

“What about my grandmother?” she said tightly.

The smile slowly died. “Her leg’s badly broken. At her age, that’s serious. Also, her blood pressure’s high.”

Eden’s composure fluttered unsteadily for a moment.

“Now,” Vandeering said, his fingers playing over hers. “Are you ready to see her?”

Eden drew back her hand, squared her shoulders. “Yes.”

“You don’t need to steel yourself, my dear. She’s her old self completely. Ha.”

Ha, indeed
, thought Eden.
Her old self is what worries me. Her old self is hell on wheels. With fuel injection
.

“I know this is difficult,” Vandeering said. “Would you like someone to go with you? Me? Mr. Charteris?”

The doctor’s tiny hand was on her shoulder now, massaging and plucking at the fabric of her sweater. Owen stood discreetly apart, leafing through an old copy of
People
. Now his blue eyes met hers and held them.

“I—I—” Eden stammered. She meant to say she’d go alone, but the words would not come out.

Owen set down the magazine and came to her side. He put his hand on the small of her back. Her skin prickled strangely, as if in warning.

“I’ll take you to the room,” Owen said.

Together they walked down the hall, breathing its antiseptic air. Eden had forgotten how much she hated hospitals, their quiet, nervous atmosphere. Memories of Jessie and Mimi swarmed through her mind with almost supernatural clarity.

She remembered Mimi, six years old, lying in the dirt under the chinaberry bush, crying because she had just learned their mother had died. She remembered herself crawling in after her, holding her in her arms, trying to comfort her, but crying, too.

She remembered Jessie coming for them, taking them from Little Rock by bus, clear up to the north of the state and the strange town of Endor. Mimi burst into tears the first time she saw Jessie’s run-down, rusting trailer house. “
I can’t live here!
” she’d wailed. “
Don’t make me live here!
”

So many memories—Mimi laughing, giggling, smiling, crying. Mimi singing her heart out, off-key, to a pretend microphone, imagining she was a country-western star. Mimi and Jessie, clashing like Titans, over and over again.

Eden’s knees began to feel shaky, insubstantial. A hard knot formed in her throat, threatening to choke off her breath. And then she found herself standing outside Jessie’s hospital room.

“Go in without me,” Owen said. “I’ll join you after you’ve had time to talk.”

He dropped his hand from her back and stepped away from her. With a pang, she realized she didn’t want him to leave. He handed her the valise his sister had packed.

As she took it from him, nervousness teased through her system, stinging and unpleasant. She hadn’t seen Jessie face-to-face for fifteen years.

She took a deep breath, rapped at the frame of the open door for the sake of politeness, then entered. She said, “Hello, Jessie. I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I got in late last night.”

Jessie sat propped up in bed watching a soap opera on television. Her leg was elevated and in a white cast. Slowly, like a queen, she turned her head to look at Eden. She had bandages over her nose and on both cheekbones and stitches in her forehead, but they did not make her look pathetic or silly. She seemed somehow more formidable.

Jessie was a large woman, five foot seven and weighing almost two hundred pounds. She wore a hearing aid in her left ear. Her iron-gray hair was swept up in an elaborate crown of braids, and she had a broad, strong face, unremarkable except for her eyes.

Jessie had raised Eden, but to this day Eden couldn’t say what color the woman’s eyes were. They were not blue or gray or green or hazel or violet or amber. Mimi had said it best when she called them “ghost-colored.”

Jessie wore a ring on every finger, each with a mystic stone or an occult symbol. Silver Gypsy bracelets circled her thick wrists, and she had one earring shaped like a cross and one shaped like the Star of David. Around her neck was a chain with a silver figure of a dancing Hindu goddess.

She did not smile at Eden or open her arms to her. She simply looked her up and down, a critical glint in her eye.

“Well,” she said. “You decided to come home at last.”

I will not feel guilty
, Eden vowed silently. But she did feel guilty, just as Jessie had intended.
God, God, why’d I ever come back?

Eden kept her head high. “I was told you said you needed me.”

Jessie’s battered face grew even more haughty. “Your little sissie’s baby needs you,” she said. “It’s good of you to come from high-and-mighty Beverly Hills.”