Hear No Evil (14 page)

She gritted her teeth and looked at the carved box of file cards on the desk. “I should ask Jessie about these repeat callers today, the steady customers. I’m flying almost blind.”

“She’ll call,” he said. “Right now let’s order the kid’s pizza.”

Eden squared her shoulders stoically. “I suppose we should use the other phone.”

He nodded.

She moved to the doorway, wishing she did not so strongly sense his presence behind her.

“I don’t know what to do about Peyton,” she said, glancing up at him. “Her manners are terrible. But I hate to discipline her when her mother’s disappeared and her whole world’s topsy-turvy. I don’t know the right thing—”

From Jessie’s office the telephone rang shrilly. Eden stopped, her body tensing. “No,” she said in utter disgust. “Not yet. Not so soon.”

The ring summoned her again. Owen’s angular face was almost sympathetic. “Go on,” he said.

She sighed and crossed the room to the desk. Owen stayed in the doorway. She picked up the receiver as gingerly as if she were taking up a snake that might be poisonous.

She reached deep within herself to find the right personality,
the right voice, the right cadence. “Sister Jessie, God’s gifted seer,” she said.

“Jessie, this is Floyd S. Copley in Las Vegas. Remember me? Somebody in Phoenix offered me a sweet little real-estate deal that sounds too good to be true. Lay down those cards for me, will you? Tell me yes or no.”

Eden put her fingertips to her head, which had started to ache again. “How much money we talking here, Floyd?”

“Couple million, Jessie, honey. Come on. You always been lucky for me. Lay those babies down.”

Eden’s sense of inadequacy pinched her like an evil elf.
Floyd
, she thought bleakly,
you’re asking the blind to lead the blind
. But she took a deep breath and began to deal out the cards.

Twenty minutes later, Owen heard Jessie’s phone ring again—yet another call coming in—and walked down the hall to check on Eden. He knocked, opened the door, and leaned against the door frame, one eyebrow cocked in question.

She darted him a brief look and shook her head to say no. None of her callers had been out of the ordinary.

She turned back to the receiver and unleashed a line of occult chatter, sounding more like Jessie than Jessie herself. He found it eerie to hear the old woman’s deep and ominous voice coming from Eden’s pretty lips.

He stood in the doorway, watching her. Intense concentration marked her smooth brow, and she held her body rigidly, but nothing in the voice sounded forced or false. Still, he could see she was not merely uncomfortable doing Jessie’s job, she hated it.

But she was good. Owen allowed himself a small,
cynical smile. As she expertly shuffled the cards, she threw him a short, eloquent look that said,
Go away. I don’t like being watched
.

Mirthless smile still in place, he turned from her, but her image lingered, haunting him. For the first time he allowed himself to imagine undressing her, of undoing her buttons, sliding away her clothing, piece by whispering piece. He envisioned her body beneath his own, bare and opening to him.

No, he told himself in cold common sense. No. She was too different from him, and she was his friend’s granddaughter. All he wanted was a lay. That he could always find.

In the living room, Peyton lay, as usual, before the television, her crayons scattered around her. The news was on, the serious-faced anchorman droning about the explosion of the Naussau-Air plane in Miami.

The child stared at the screen, her crayon motionless against the paper and, for once, her thumb not in her mouth. Her expression was dazed, almost drugged, and her face pallid. Did Owen see tears rising in her eyes, or did he only imagine it?

In concern he gazed down at her. “Hey,” he said gruffly, “are you all right?”

She did not answer. Her gaze, unblinking, remained fastened on the screen as if she were hypnotized by it. Her breathing had become shallow and somewhat raspy.

The anchorman spoke in the solemn tones of a funeral director. “Several terrorist groups have claimed credit for the explosion, but FBI officials say the investigation is still open. The bomb may have been in the luggage hold—”

Peyton squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears with her hands.

Owen’s concern turned to alarm. Was the kid having a fit, a tantrum—what? He knelt beside her, gripping her by her shoulders. “Peyton?” he said. “Peyton?”

“The plane burned up,” she said in a quavering voice. “They burned it all up.”

Owen’s hands tightened on her shoulders, and he drew her up to a sitting position. She was limp as a kitten, but she sat, her eyes still shut, tears streaking her cheeks. She grimaced, showing her broken tooth.

“Peyton,” he said earnestly, “it’s all right. What happened to the plane happened a long way off.”

She tried to struggle from his grasp. “I want Eden.”

“Eden’s right down the hall,” he said. “She’ll be here in a minute, I promise.”

“I want Eden
now
,” Peyton said, her voice a small wail.

Owen wondered if he should try to take the child into his arms, but he could not bring himself to do it.

He tried to take her by the hand. Peyton’s eyes flew open, and although they still had a glazed, otherworldly look, she wrenched away from him with surprising strength. “Don’t!” she cried.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said, holding his hand toward her, but she wouldn’t touch it.

What should he do? Owen wondered bleakly. Call a doctor, an ambulance, a psychiatrist, an exorcist?

The doorbell buzzed, a harsh, unexpected sound that made the child jump. Owen, startled, turned toward the front door.

He heard Peyton take a large, gasping breath, like someone preparing to dive into an enormous deep. He hoped she wasn’t going to scream.

“It’s okay,” he said, not looking at her. “It’s probably just the pizza delivery man.”

He went to the door, glanced through the spyhole. A skinny kid in a yellow shirt stood holding a large, flat box with a grease stain on it.

“It’s just the pizza man,” Owen reassured her. “I’m opening the door, okay?”

She was blessedly silent as he took the pizza, paid for it, and gave the skinny kid a tip. If the boy noticed anything strange about Peyton, if he saw her at all, he gave no indication.

Owen turned, shutting the door. The living room was empty. The back door to the kitchen stood open, swaying in the cool evening breeze.

Peyton was gone. She had run away, vanished into the thickening dark.

T
HEY FOUND HER IN THE WOODS, HIDING AMONG AN
outcropping of huge stone ledges. She lay in the dirt, huddled under a shelf of limestone that was mottled with moss and lichen.

She had knotted herself into the smallest size possible, like an animal that hides because it fears for its life. It was Owen who discovered her, the beam of his flashlight illuminating her terrified, staring face.

The child had been missing almost twenty minutes, an interminable time, an eternity. Eden wept in relief. She managed to half draw, half haul Peyton out of the shallow crevice. Then she buried her face in the girl’s neck and sat weakly on the shelf, unable to stand.

Peyton sobbed against her chest, a crying that Eden found rending because the child fought so hard to keep it
silent. “It’s all right,” she kept repeating to the trembling girl. “It’s all right.”

Below them, the wooded hill fell gently away, and the forest thinned into the tamed lawn of the park’s playground clearing. The moon glittered silver on the chains of the swings, and the plastic animals on their springs seemed to sleep, enchanted, under the stars.

At last Peyton fell into an uneasy sleep, from exhaustion, perhaps. Owen took her from Eden’s arms and hoisted her to his shoulder. He held her easily in place with one arm, and with his free hand used his flashlight to find their way back to the path.

Eden’s bones ached with fatigue, her hands and face and clothing were dirty, and she felt bedraggled and emotionally spent. She trudged at Owen’s side, the leaves crackling beneath their feet. Somewhere a mockingbird sang ecstatically at the moon. Eden barely noticed.

She shook her head in weary wonder. “How’d she ever find such a place? Off the beaten path?”

“It’s not that far off,” Owen said in a low voice. “The rock’s pale—it stands out in the moonlight. Instinct must have told her not to go for the clearing.”

She glanced up at him, the stern angles of his face shifting in the changing light and shadow. “How’d
you
ever find it? How’d you know where to look?”

“My nephews found it. My sister Rita’s kids. They pretended it was a fort.”

“But how did you guess?” she demanded. She gestured at the forest surrounding them, trees like dark pillars.

He shrugged his free shoulder. “She couldn’t run forever. It’s a good place to lie low. I guessed lucky, that’s all.”

You guessed smart
, Eden thought, but she said nothing.

“The doorbell threw her into a panic,” he said, his voice moody. “Like she thought somebody’d come after her. But she was scared before that. I went into the living room, and she was staring at the TV screen like it was a snake. It was a news story. Then she freaked out.”

Eden frowned helplessly. “A news story?”

He nodded curtly. “About the plane burning in Miami. Didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to hear it.”

“The plane in Miami?” Eden asked. “That woman—Constance—mentioned that same plane. Do you think it means something?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s in the news. Maybe it’s a coincidence.”

Peyton stirred restlessly in his arms. He thrust his flashlight toward Eden. “Here. Take this, will you?”

She did and watched uneasily as he shifted the girl in his arms, cradled the back of her head with his lean hand. Peyton sighed and nestled limply against his shoulder. The child looked safe in his arms, taken care of.

It occurred to Eden that Owen Charteris’s arms might be a very wonderful place, indeed, in which to rest, to renew her own strength. Shamed, she pushed away the thought with almost savage force.

“What do you think?” he asked quietly. “We put her straight to bed? Clean her up, feed her first? What do you do in a case like this?”

“I have no idea,” Eden said.

They rounded one of the path’s many twisting curves. Through the dark, autumnal forest, she could see the first sign of light from Jessie’s house.

Almost home
, she thought, then her mind recoiled from the word.

This was not home and never would be again, never. They would find Mimi and give back her child, and then Eden could truly go home, a place as distant from this one as possible.

In the house, Owen carried Peyton into the bedroom, then transferred her to Eden’s arms. Gingerly she lowered the girl to the bed. She unlaced her muddy shoes and drew them off. Leaving the bedroom light on, she carried the shoes into the kitchen and set them down beside the back door to dry. Owen followed her.

As she rose, he gave her a meaningful look. “Listen. We need to talk about that kid.”

Eden’s muscles were taut, and her ears buzzed as if phantom phone voices still teased them. The pizza, cold and still unopened on the table, smelled vile to her. All she wanted was coffee, hot and black and bracing.

She said, “We’ve been a lot of trouble to you. I’m sorry. You’ve been very kind.”

A deep line appeared between his brows. “Frankly, right before she ran away, it was like she had some kind of—spell or something. I think there’s something wrong with her.”

Eden’s heart lurched sickly. “A spell?”

“She shook, her eyes were a million miles off—you should probably take her to a psychologist. And a doctor. Whatever’s happening to her, this kid is
not
normal.”

Not normal, not normal, not normal
. The words rang like an evil knell in Eden’s head. It was what she had always feared. Given the family history, if she or Mimi ever had a child, it would, in all likelihood, not be
normal
.

“Don’t look so stricken,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

But somehow it did seem like her fault, or at least her inevitable heritage, some unclean thing that she, like Mimi, carried in her genes.

“She’s such a pretty little girl in her way,” she said softly. “She seems smart and creative. It’s such a shame—” She could not finish the sentence. “It’s such a shame,” she whispered.

She set about making coffee simply to have something to do. She didn’t want to meet Owen’s ice-blue eyes.

He moved to her side. “What I said, I didn’t mean it the way it probably sounded. I meant her situation isn’t normal, that’s all. And it’s affecting her.”

“Yes, well. It’d affect anyone, wouldn’t it?” she said briskly. “And my family has its little peculiarities, I’ll be the first to admit.”

“I said it wrong,” he returned. “I don’t know about things like this, and I said it wrong.”

She busied herself with measuring out the coffee. She wondered, in a dim, harried way, if he was actually apologizing.