Hear No Evil (8 page)

She could not think about it and would not think about it. She turned away and snatched up the bulging bag. She took it to the bathroom and stuffed Jessie’s three vials of prescription drugs into it.

Her heart would not stop beating at too swift a pace. The knot lodged in her throat refused to diminish.

Damn!
she thought.
Damn! I don’t want to remember all this. I won’t
.

She went back into the living room and thrust the
bulging bag at Owen. She was careful not to touch him. He seemed equally careful not to touch her.

“Yes,” he said, looking her up and down. “Well. You’re on your own now.”

She managed a brittle smile. “Just us girls. We’ll be fine. Fine.”

He looked her up and down again. “I’ll drop by when I get back. To check on the two of you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said brightly, perhaps too brightly.

I know
, his expression said.
I don’t the hell want to. But I will
.

When he shut the door behind him, she was relieved. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.

She exhaled between clenched teeth.
Find out about this child
.

She settled down beside Peyton, cross-legged. “You’re a very good artist,” Eden said in the same enthusiastic voice she used in commercials to sell children breakfast cereal and plastic toys.

“Umph,” said Peyton, uninterested in flattery.

“So,” said Eden companionably, “is that your house you draw? The house with the red door?”

“Umph,” Peyton muttered. “You had a cat. I know.”

“Yes,” Eden agreed. “Except he was my friend’s cat. Where is the house with the red door? Can you tell me?”

Peyton withdrew her thumb from her mouth and examined it solemnly. “The cat’s name,” she said, “is Po-lo-ni-us. Po-lo-ni-us the cat. Henry told me.” She put her thumb back into her mouth.

Eden stared at the child, startled. “Who’s Henry?”

“My friend.”

Carefully, hoping for a clue, Eden said, “Where’s Henry? Can you tell me?”

Peyton pointed her crayon at an empty chair. “There,” she said. “He’s watching you.”

An imaginary friend
, Eden thought.
Solace of the lonely child
. She sat back, drawing up her knees and locking her arms around them. “Oh. I see. Did Henry come all the way to Arkansas with you?”

Peyton gave Eden a shy glance and quickly looked away. She nodded. “His hair is blue. He can fly.”

Eden tried another approach. “I’m from California. But I grew up here, with your mama. We were sisters. My last name is Storey, just like yours. Is hers still Storey, too?”

“I’m hungry,” Peyton said. She gave Eden another shy look, this time hopeful. “Will you buy me some ice cream?”

“Later,” Eden said craftily. “First I want you to tell me where you came from.”

Peyton’s face became apprehensive and she turned away again. “My mama told me not to.” She bore down harder on the turquoise crayon. “My mama went away. She always goes away.”

Eden leaned forward, putting her hand on the child’s shoulder. “Peyton, listen. I’m trying to help you get your mother back. You can talk to me—I’m your mother’s sister.”

Peyton flinched at the touch, as if she’d expected to be hurt.

“If your mother was here,” Eden persisted, “she’d say it’s all right to talk to
me
. She’d want you to.”

Peyton’s lower lip quivered, her chin thrust out, and she clapped her hands over her ears. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

Eden stared at the child in concern and frustration. The telephone jangled, startling her. She reached out to
ruffle Peyton’s hair but the girl dodged her hand, as if fearing to be touched.

The ring shrilled again, and Eden rose from the floor to answer it. It sat on a small table next to the statue of a dancing Hindu god with an elephant’s head and six arms.

Eden picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“I tried my psychic phone line,” Jessie snapped. “It rang and rang with no answer. Ain’t you hooked it up yet?”

Eden restrained a sigh of frustration. “I barely got here, Jessie. Shannon and Owen just left. And I’m trying to get acquainted with Peyton.”

“Well, get acquainted while the phone’s plugged in. Can’t you walk and whistle at the same time?”

“I
forgot
, that’s all. The child seemed more important.”

“Of course she’s important. I didn’t say she wasn’t.”

“There are questions we need answered.”

“Well, she don’t answer them. She’s like me. She can’t be pushed. No sir.”

“I’m not pushing. And in the meantime—”

“In the meantime, you’ve already missed Miz Eberhart’s call. She calls every day, one o’clock, from Miami Beach, so’s I can read her tarot cards.”

“Every day?” Eden asked in disbelief.

“She’s an old widow woman,” Jessie said. “She likes to hear about herself. She’ll be concerned about her arthritis. Tell her it’ll get better.”

“Will it get better?” Eden challenged. She hated lying.

“No, but what good would it do to say that?” Jessie retorted. “She might give up hope altogether.”

Eden rolled her eyes heavenward. Jessie said, “Besides
that, I want you to be there if that Constance calls. If she does, you play her, pump her. Be careful not to lose her. But first you need to plug in that phone line. Now.”

“All right.” Eden surrendered. “All right.”

“Is Owen bringing me my apricot-colored rayon nightgown with the lace yoke?” Jessie demanded.

“Yes, he’s on his way.”

“My hearing-aid batteries? My best deck of tarot cards? My prescriptions?”

“Yes, yes, all of it,” Eden said impatiently. “What’s the story on you and this man, anyway? He certainly dances attendance on you above and beyond the call of duty.”

“I didn’t think,” said Jessie, frost in her voice, “that you knew so all-fired much about the call of duty.”

Irritation crackled through Eden’s system. What did Jessie want from her? Heart’s blood? She took a deep breath. “I came back, didn’t I?” she said.

“It took you fifteen years,” said Jessie in an accusatory tone.

Eden thought,
All right, Jessie, all right. Let’s get it out in the open and have it over with
. She said, “You still haven’t forgiven me for going to California, have you? And you’re not going to.”

“You ran off. You was the only one I could depend on, and you upped and ran off.”

“I was eighteen,” Eden countered. “I had the right to go, and I went. I
told
you I was going.”

“You and me could have worked together,” Jessie said. “I trained you up. I taught you everything I know. We could have had a good business.”

Eden closed her eyes. Her temples pounded. “I had no gift for it. I’m not psychic.”

“You thought fast. You could read people. You was creative. You say that’s not a gift?”

“I felt like a fraud. It wasn’t what I wanted.”

Jessie snorted. “No. You wanted to be a
actress
. What kind of life is that? You got no security at all.”

“Jessie, I make a good living—very good. I don’t worry about money. And you don’t have to, either. I’m doing fine, and I can help—”

“Pah,” Jessie said in disgust. “For now, maybe. How about down the road? You’re like the grasshopper in the story. You play your fiddle now, but when winter comes, what you got? Show business is fickle.”

Everything Jessie knew about show business, Eden thought ruefully, was a cliché, and the old woman knew absolutely nothing about the voice-talent business and didn’t want to learn. It was futile to argue with her.

“Jessie,” she said, “this is the same argument we had fifteen years ago. Let’s drop it, shall we?”

“You run off to Hollywood with nary a dime in your pocket and left me alone with your little sister. You was the one I’d always depended on.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Eden said firmly. “There’s a little girl here to take care of. That’s all that matters.”

“Finding Mimi also matters,” Jessie shot back. “All you’re thinking about is running back to California. You plug in that phone, hear me? You got
responsibilities
.”

Click. Eden winced. Jessie had hung up on her, loudly and with vehemence.

Peyton sat in front of the television, crayons abandoned, legs crossed, thumb in her mouth. She stared at the animated animals on the screen, but did not seem to really see them; she looked drugged with sleepiness.

Wait. Now is not the time to push her
, thought Eden.
But she was too tired herself to fight impulse. Against her better judgment, she said, “Peyton, do you know a woman named Constance? Does your mother know a woman named Constance?”

Peyton would not meet her eyes. She kept her thumb in her mouth, the angle of her arm rigid. “Henry and I have a secret song,” she said. “It keeps us safe. La, la, la.”

And then she would say no more.

G
RUDGINGLY
, E
DEN WENT TO PLUG IN THE PSYCHIC
phone line. The office was new to her, but, with a stab of remembrance, she saw objects familiar to her from childhood.

Jessie’s desk was cluttered with statuettes and figurines and occult paraphernalia, including the crystal ball resting on the back of a bronze tortoise. The small kachina doll with a bear mask stood next to the aloof-faced Chinese goddess made of white porcelain.

Eden shook her head at the confusion of fetishes and talismans and charms. She reconnected the phone, then found she was trying to spank her hands clean, as if she’d handled something dirty.

But only seconds after the phone was connected, it rang. Eden flinched. It rang again. She sat at the big desk
and glowered at the crystal ball, glared at the tarot cards. She picked up the receiver.

“Sister Jessie,” she intoned in a voice as oracular as Jessie’s. “God’s gifted seer.”
I feel like God’s ungifted jackass
, she thought.
He ought to strike me dead
.

But she knew Jessie’s routine. She set her jaw and reached for the box that held the file cards on clients. The box was carved with stars and suns and moons and comets.

“Have we talked before?” Eden asked.

“No,” a woman said timorously. “I never made a call like this before. What do I do?”

“First, give me your birthday,” Eden said in Jessie’s deep voice. “Law says I can’t talk to you ’less you’re at least eighteen.”

The woman seemed hesitant. “M-May second, 1956.”

Eden wrote the date down on a fresh note card. “Ah, a Taurus,” she said. “This is a year of change for Taureans. Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you your lucky number. Tell me and spell it.”

“Lily,” the woman said with a swallow. “Lillian Marlowe.” She spelled it.

Eden wrote the name on the note card, counted the letters, and did a simple calculation. “Your lucky number is four,” she said with an air of pronouncement. “Use it wisely. Now, what’s your first question for Sister Jessie?”

“I—I want a lottery number,” said Lillian Marlowe. “I need a winning number. I need it bad.”

Eden’s heart sank. She hated questions about gambling in general and the lottery in particular. But she said, “All right. How many digits you got to have in that number?”

“Four,” the woman said firmly. “I need four.”

“Hmmm,” Eden answered, making the sound vibrate like a mantra. “All right. But you got to help, or it won’t work. I want you to concentrate on winning that money. You
visualize
winning it. See that money with your spiritual eye and touch it with your spiritual hand. Are you ready?”

“I—I’ve never done this before,” the woman said.

“Squeeze shut your eyes and call forth a vision of that nice, green money,” Eden ordered. “Can you see it?”

A moment of uncomfortable silence stretched between them. Then, with awe in her voice, the woman said, “Why, I can! I see it sitting all around me in pretty stacks …”

“Good. Now I’m going into a trance, and I’ll read your numeric aura.”

Eden took up a tiny mallet and struck a silvery set of Indian chimes that hung beside the phone. They jingled and jangled with a sweet, eerie otherworldliness. In the meantime, Eden racked her head for a number, any number.

As the fairylike resonance of the chimes died, she decided, rather desperately, to opt for the first four numbers of Jessie’s zip code.

“I’m seeing it,” she said importantly. “Seven-two-seven-six. I’m getting that very clearly. Write it down: seven-two-seven-six.”

“Oh, thank you, Sister, thank you,” the woman said excitedly. “You don’t know how bad I got to have this money—my son needs an operation.”

Eden’s heart guiltily shriveled to the size of a raisin. She was helping this woman waste her money when medical help was needed? “An operation?” she echoed.

“He wants to be an Elvis Presley impersonator,” the
woman said proudly. “But he’s got to get his nose fixed. He got it broke bad in a bar fight.”

Eden’s guilt vanished, replaced by astonishment. “Oh.”

“We go to Graceland twice a year. It’s like a pilgrimage,” said the woman. “I got all the T-shirts, the videos, everything, even the phone shaped like him.”