Hear No Evil (34 page)

“All right, ma’am. Now I’m going to switch your call, keep you on the line with someone. Help you wait this out.”

“I need someone who knows first aid,” she said. “There’s a child hurt here. Badly hurt. Nobody says anything but ‘Don’t move her.’ ”

“I’m going to switch you to another officer. He’ll keep talking to you.”

“This child is pinned. Her leg is pinned. She’s unconscious.”

“I’m switching you now, ma’am. Stay calm.”

In the distance, she heard the sirens. For a moment she was blinded by her own tears of relief. But they seemed far away, so far.

•  •  •

Although Peyton had a broken ankle and a concussion, Owen was still more seriously hurt.

The shot had hit the edge of his spleen, then exited between his eighth and ninth ribs next to his spine, nicking it badly. Eden was terrified because at first he could not move his legs.

But by his third day in the hospital, he could walk again, although rather unsteadily and not far. But Eden had not been able truly to celebrate his recovery. She was still stunned, in shock at her sister’s death.

It was as if Mimi, absent so long in life, had become ever present to her in death, a close and faithful ghost. A host of shifting memories took possession of Eden, yet she still did not know what had happened to bring Mimi to such a violent death.

She hardly had time to grieve, only to be haunted. She stayed with Peyton as much as she could. The child had not yet been told Mimi was dead, and Eden dreaded telling her.

She herself was numbed. Alone she made the decision to have Mimi’s body cremated, alone she had gone to the mortuary to pick up the paper box of ashes. Not knowing what else to do, she put the box in a safe-deposit drawer at the bank, thinking,
Someday we’ll have a ceremony. Not now
.

Eden could console herself only by vowing that life would treat Peyton better than it had her mother; she herself would fight to make it so.

On the third day after the shootings, she was sitting beside Peyton’s bed, trying to amuse the child with paper dolls. The telephone rang.

“Eden? It’s Owen. Can you come to my room? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

She kissed Peyton’s cheek, promised to be back shortly, and went to the second floor to Owen’s room. It seemed she had spent the last three days moving from room to room to room in this hospital, from Peyton to Jessie to Owen. She was punchy from it, feeling in an unreal daze.

As she entered Owen’s room, she was surprised to see two men in suits at his bedside. One was a tall, thin, dour-looking man with a balding head and sea-green eyes. The other was shorter, younger, and more squarely built, with a serious face and conservatively barbered dark hair.

Owen sat propped up in bed. He looked drawn, and although his eyes were alert, his expression seemed troubled. She tried her best to smile, but was not sure she’d succeeded. He reached for her hand and drew her to his bedside. “This is her,” he said to the men. “Eden Storey.”

They regarded her as solemnly as undertakers.

The balding man said, “Miss Storey, I’m Lieutenant John Mulcahy of the Missouri State Police. This is Agent Dennis Robey of the FBI.”

Eden’s nerves tautened. She had already talked to the police, she had already talked to other men from the FBI. In addition, both agencies had been all over Owen, badgering him with questions from the moment he could talk.

“I—I already gave my statement,” she said.

“We know, ma’am,” said Mulcahy. “I’m sorry about your experience the other night. How’s the child?”

She could not shake off a deep anxiety, but she kept her voice level and controlled. “She’s doing well. I’m taking her home tomorrow.”

“No complications from the concussion?” Mulcahy asked.

Eden shook her head. “None they can see. They’ve been keeping her under observation, mostly. A headache at first, of course, but it’s gone.”

“No dizziness? No double vision?” Mulcahy asked. Despite his sour face, he seemed sincerely concerned.

“No. She’s been very—” She started to say “lucky,” but the word seemed ill-chosen. Peyton’s luck, in her short life, had run about as badly as it could. “She’s been recovering well,” she amended.

“Her ankle injury?” asked Mulcahy.

“She’s proud to have a cast like her granny’s.”

“Does she remember the car crashing? Or the aftermath?”

“No. The last thing she remembers is talking to her granny in the hospital.”

Mulcahy nodded sympathetically. “That’s a blessing.”

“Yes. It is,” said Eden, but she thought,
I’ll remember. To my grave I’ll remember
.

“You’re taking her back to your grandmother’s house?” she asked.

“No,” she said. “Not yet. I have another place for right now.”

Eden swallowed. Men were at work on Jessie’s house today, cleaning it, replacing the ruined kitchen floor, patching the walls. She was staying in a furnished apartment that Owen had untenanted.

She and Jessie had argued over the house. Jessie wanted to go back to it, and she wanted Eden and Peyton to be with her. Eden had not thought she could bear to return, but Jessie was so adamant that at last, reluctantly, she’d agreed.

Mulcahy dropped his gaze. Dennis Robey, the FBI agent, looked less than comfortable. He cleared his throat.

“Miss Storey, we have some news for you,” he said. “A man named Yount has talked. We know your sister’s history now. And the people that she was involved with, we know about them, too.”

R
OBEY’S WORDS FILLED
E
DEN WITH APPREHENSION
. “Yes?” she said.

Robey said, “Your sister met Drace Johansen in an outpatient group, a sort of counseling session in Detroit. They’d been ordered there separately, each as part of probation.”

Owen gripped her hand more tightly.

“Mimi’d been in court for an incident in a bar,” said Robey. “It started with a political quarrel, ended with her resisting arrest, making a lot of wild threats.”

Eden stared at him, unable to speak.

Robey squared his shoulders, set his big jaw. “Drace Johansen had made threats, too, to a black liberal city council member. He’d been ordered to attend the same sessions.”

Robey paused, his expression blankly stoic. “Your sister was rebellious and a little militant. This guy was rebellious and
very
militant. He had a whole ideology, even followers—a few. A kind of family or commune. He looked at Mimi and saw a potential convert. He could be a spellbinder when he chose to. He wanted Mimi and he got her.”

Mulcahy spoke, his mouth twisted. “Our friend James Yount came into some property in Missouri. Drace Johansen decided they’d all go there. By that time he was going only by the name Drace. It means ‘dragon,’ as in the dragon of the Apocalypse.”

Eden’s heart constricted. She held on to Owen’s hand tightly and tried to keep her expression severely controlled.

Robey shook his head. “Yount said at first your sister knew very little. She thought Drace was some kind of demigod, that he had all the answers. But after the move to Missouri, he and his cousin—the woman—Raylene Johansen—decided on less rhetoric and more action. They planned a series of antigovernment bombings, beginning with the Bahamian plane. In the beginning, Mimi thought it was just talk. By the time she knew it wasn’t, she felt that she was implicated up to her neck. She protested. She became the group’s black sheep, its scapegoat. Raylene in particular had always resented her.”

“B-but,” Eden stammered in frustration, “who were these people? Where did they come from? Why did they hate the government? I don’t understand.”

Mulcahy spoke again, his thin face harsh. “As a child, Drace was sent to live with Raylene’s family. His father had been an army officer, killed in Vietnam. Raylene’s father was career army, too, and a sort of petty tyrant.
They moved a lot, didn’t put down roots. Raylene and Drace—became close.”

Robey said, “The family had money. It also had a long tradition with the military. Drace went to military school, but got expelled. Raylene’s older brother went to the Gulf War, died of leukemia a few years later. They believed it was Gulf War syndrome.

“They both resented the father. They came to resent the army, the government itself. They fed each other’s suspicions and created new ones. They began seeing cover-ups and collusions and conspiracies everywhere. So they decided to strike back. And they did.”

Eden listened with a sort of sickened fascination.

Owen said, “But why the Bahamian airline? Why not a U.S. target?”

Robey opened his empty hand, a gesture of futility. “Yount says Drace and Raylene claimed Bahamian banks were laundering money for illegal CIA schemes. But Yount thinks it was partly because security on that particular airline was so lax they thought they could pull it off. It was vulnerable, so they hit it.”

Mulcahy’s green eyes searched Eden’s face. “For what it’s worth, Miss Storey, Yount says Mimi opposed the plan. But by then she knew too much for them to let her go. She was close to being their prisoner. The child, too.”

Robey nodded. “Your sister did the best she could to get herself and the kid out. But Yount says she was scared, and he also says, to put it kindly, ma’am, her thinking wasn’t always … clear.”

Owen said, “She had the courage to defy them, Eden. She was trying to free Peyton. But she couldn’t come with her. By that time she was guilty of conspiracy.”

“Your sister stopped in Branson,” Robey said. “From
what we can piece together, she meant to have a kind of last fling, then die on her own terms.”

“Die?” Eden repeated, stunned. “You mean to kill herself?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Robey said gruffly. “I imagine she thought she was out of options.”

All this information seemed to fall on Eden like a tangled net. She could not speak.

“I’m sorry,” Robey said.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Mulcahy and stared out the window.

Owen drew her nearer. “Peyton’s yours,” he said.

She’s both Mimi’s and mine
, thought Eden. She drew away from him, put her face in her hands, and wept at the complexity of her own emotions.

Jessie had taken Mimi’s death hard. For the first time in Eden’s life, she had seen her grandmother openly weep.

She saw Jessie weep again, just as hard, when she learned of Mimi’s flight from Drace and Raylene. The old woman’s shoulders shook, and she covered her eyes.

At last she dropped her hand, clenching her handkerchief, into her lap and raised her head. “Peyton still doesn’t know that Mimi’s—still doesn’t know?”

Eden swallowed hard and shook her head. “She only knows she isn’t coming back. The rest, I think, she should be told little by little. I want professional help with this.”

“Mimi,” Jessie said brokenly. To Eden the name seemed to reverberate with an infinite sense of loss.

Jessie bowed her head and cried again. Then she wiped her eyes, squared her jaw, and said, “Tears never
cured nothing. We got to get on with things. We got to take care of our own.”

“I’m taking Peyton to California with me,” Eden said. “I—I’ll adopt her.”

Jessie moved her shoulders as if irritated. “Don’t keep her all to yourself. I’ll be wanting to see her, you know. But I ain’t getting on no airplane to do it, nosirree bob. And I ain’t riding a bus all the way out there, neither. I truly despise a bus ride.”

“I’ll bring her back to see you,” Eden said. “And we’ll talk on the phone more. I promise. We’re all the family she’s got, Jessie. She’ll need you, as well as me.”

Jessie crossed her arms. “Hmmph. Us—a family. I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

Neither did I
, thought Eden.
But we are, aren’t we?

Owen was the last out of the hospital. He knew Eden’s hands were not simply full, but crammed, running over with responsibilities. But when the day of his release came, he asked her to leave Peyton and Jessie for an hour and drive him home. They were all back in Jessie’s house again, and he knew Eden had to pretend it didn’t bother her.

She showed up at his door, brisk and cheerful and businesslike. Her hair slanted rakishly over her forehead, and the diamonds glittered at her ears. She looked like a million dollars.

Once inside the car, Eden arched one brow, and gave him a rueful smile. “You look moody for somebody homeward bound. What’s the matter? Fall in love with hospital food?”

He shifted stiffly in his seat. He still had bandages
around his midsection and it was like being encased in armor.

Her smile faded. “Still in pain?”

He shook his head. He could stand the pain.

“Then what’s wrong?” she asked. She pretended to concentrate on maneuvering out of the parking lot, but he could see she was concerned, troubled, even.

“We haven’t had much chance to talk,” he said.

“I know,” she said, keeping her eyes on the traffic.

He leaned back against the seat, his body rigid. Whenever he’d get a minute alone with Eden, they’d kiss almost shyly, then seem at a loss for words. They were complex people for whom it was often difficult to show even simple emotion, and Owen’s emotions were far from simple.