Hear No Evil (17 page)

He wrapped his arms around her, rested his chin
atop her head moodily. “She didn’t answer half our questions.”

“She answered some,” Raylene consoled him.

Before she had died, Louise Brodnik had stammered that she’d let Mimi out alone in Branson at a motel with a name she was too frightened to remember, maybe it had the word “inn” in it. Mimi had wanted something to drink but couldn’t find it. She’d told the child she had to stay in Branson for a while. Then the Brodnik woman had taken Peyton on, she’d said.

Drace had slapped her and shaken her roughly, demanding to know where the child was. The woman had babbled out something barely comprehensible about somebody named Jessie in Endor, Arkansas.

Then, suddenly, Louise Brodnik had lurched in Drace’s grasp like a dog having a fit. She’d vomited something curdled all over herself and him, too.

He had let her go, and she sank to the floor like a broken puppet tottering into a puddle of filth. For a moment Raylene had stared down at her, flooded by distaste and something like terrified doubt.

They had planned for this woman to die—but only after they interrogated her. The death was to be a clean military strike, a bold act of guerrilla warfare. How could their operation fail, be aborted in such a messy, muddled way?

Then, as they stood over the body and the vomit, enlightenment came washing over Raylene in a radiant wave. They’d intended for Louise Brodnik to die, and a higher power had carried out the execution. It was as if destiny itself exalted Drace’s judgment, bowed to it and served it. It had not given them all the answers, but it had given them enough. They would find Mimi and Peyton. It was decreed.

They burned the Brodnik woman’s house, although Stanek, foolishly, had dared to object. Raylene had no doubt whatever about Drace’s orders, and she was certain that the death was not a botch or a slovenly accident; it was a sign, a message, a lesson.

Now Raylene closed her eyes and kissed Drace on the chest, over his heart. She felt its steady beat beneath her mouth, felt his warmth. “You think Mimi’s still in Branson?” she murmured.

“If she started drinking, she is,” he said. “I’ll find her—one way or another.”

“I know you will,” Raylene said, kissing him again in the same place, letting her lips linger.

“I want you to go with me,” he said, surprising her.

She drew back, her joy mingling with disbelief. She stared up at him, smiling tremulously. “Me? Really?”

“You.” He nodded, putting his hands on her shoulders.

“I thought—I thought you’d take Stanek.”

“I may need a woman,” he said.

“To help you ask about her?”

“Yes.” He gave her a boyish half-smile, squeezed her shoulders. “Besides, you’re a better shot. Let Stanek stay and play nursemaid to Yount.”

She clasped her hands behind his neck, kissed him on his chin. “Thank you,” she whispered with fervor. “Thank you.”

His face grew serious again. “Will it bother you? Killing her?”

She looked at his perfect face. Drace was freedom’s chosen instrument—she was growing more certain of this each day, and she loved him all the more for it. She had once thought it not possible, that she could love him more.

Mimi had been a rival and Mimi had tried to betray him and, with him, the divine force of freedom. For this last, she had to die, and so, of course, must her daughter. And Raylene would be glad to kill them both.

“No,” she said honestly. “It won’t. I never liked her.”

“You were jealous,” he said. “You didn’t have to be.”

“But I was,” she said, clinging more tightly to him.

“What about the kid?” he asked. “That won’t bother you, either?”

She did not hesitate. “Not at all. I’d love to do it. For you.”

He searched her eyes. “You’re sure?”

“Oh, Drace,” she said breathlessly, “for a minute in Miami, after the explosion, I thought the old-fashioned way. I thought ‘I’m damned.’ But I’m not. I wasn’t. With you I’m saved.”

He touched her face tenderly. “What a girl you are,” he said.

Peyton, clean and smelling of Jessie’s lavender bath salts, had gone shy.

She stood in Jessie’s hospital room, dressed in her freshest clothes, her hair brushed and gleaming. She shifted her weight from one foot to another. She sucked her thumb. She tried to hide behind Eden.

“Aren’t you the prettiest little thing?” gushed Jessie. “Don’t you hide from me. You come out where I can see how pretty you are.”

Peyton hung back even more. She tugged at the back of Eden’s aqua-blue shirt. “I got to go pee-pee,” she said.

“Then go,” Eden said, pointing to the bathroom. “And wash your hands afterward.”

Peyton slipped away and off into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

“Little darling,” chuckled Jessie.

“The little darling needs a million things,” Eden said. “After we leave here, I’ve got to take her shopping. Her clothes are rags.”

“Don’t you go running all over creation. You need to get home and tend that phone.”

“I need to get home and
use
that phone. I have to make a dentist’s appointment for her. And a doctor. And a psychologist.”

“A psychologist?” Jessie bristled. “I
beg
your pardon.”

“There’s no shame in seeing a psychologist,” Eden said. “This child’s been traumatized. She won’t talk about the past.”

She paused, wondering how much to tell Jessie. “And she draws odd pictures,” she said, “extremely odd.”

“Like what?” challenged Jessie.

Again Eden hesitated before she spoke. “Jessie, did you tell Peyton about your dream? About the blond woman with her hand full of fire?”

“Of course not,” Jessie said with a snort. “I only had it yesterday afternoon. I never talked to her at all yesterday. Thanks to somebody here I won’t name.”

A worried frown line etched itself between Eden’s brows. “Well, somehow she drew the same thing—a picture of a blond woman with fire in her hand. How could she do such a thing?”

“Oh,” Jessie said and shrugged. “That’s easy.”

“Easy?”

“Well, can’t you figure it out?” Jessie demanded. “She’s flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. My powers saw inside her head. It’s simple as that.”

Eden was extremely skeptical, but she forced herself to say nothing. She pressed her lips together in a tight line.

Jessie shook her head. “As for that blond-headed gal, she won’t get out of my dreams. She come again last night. She’s got a pocketbook full of faces, and she wears a blue ring.”

“What?” Eden asked, putting a hand on her hip. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means she can change how she looks. Like one of them lizards. And a blue ring means a blue ring. A blue stone in it. Like your shirt.”

Eden glanced down at her T-shirt. “Turquoise?” she asked dubiously.

“Yes,” Jessie said and folded her arms. “That’s a true fact, or I’ll eat my own head.”

Peyton pushed open the bathroom door and eased out. She tried to slip into the far corner, but Jessie pointed at her. “You—Miss Peyton Honeyduck. You come here, honey, sit on Granny’s bed.”

Peyton stopped, the expression on her face both guilty and reluctant.

“She shouldn’t sit up there. You’ve got a broken leg.”

“Pish, poot, and tush,” said Jessie. “You set my little lamb right here beside me.”

Eden sighed, swept up the hapless Peyton, and set her on the edge of Jessie’s bed. “Don’t bounce,” she warned. “Don’t even wiggle.”

Peyton wiggled her shoulders and screwed up her face, but then sat still, not looking at Jessie, but staring instead at the tarot deck on Jessie’s beside tray.

“I want to know about Owen Charteris,” Eden said. “We went over to his place this morning to take out his
dog. He lives like some sort of hermit. Why? And why’s he so protective of you?”

“He don’t have much truck with worldly things,” Jessie said with an air of pronouncement. “Because what meant most to him in the world, he lost.”

Eden felt an odd sense of inadequacy that she didn’t understand, almost a sense of loss. “His wife, you mean.”

“His wife. A sweeter woman never lived, and that’s God’s truth. She loved everybody, it was her nature to love, and you couldn’t help but love her back. Everybody did. And he protects. Because it’s his karma.”

Eden tried to look cool, disinterested. “His karma?”

“Yes, ma’am. He thought life’d take him one way. It took him the other. That’s karma for you.”

“How so?”

“He went off to Texas, on one of them athletic scholarships,” Jessie said. “Basketball. He was going to be big time, he was. But in a game, he got knocked down, broke his shoulder. Couldn’t throw overhand no more. Most folks, that’d make no difference. For him, it changed all. Karma.”

Eden watched as Peyton picked up Jessie’s deck of tarot cards. “And then?” Eden asked casually. “He came back here?”

“Indeed. He went to the police work. He got married. And he was happy for a time. But things went wrong all to once. His father died, his wife took sick. His mother, she started to fail—”

Jessie tapped her temple significantly. “The Allsimmer’s,” she said.

“Alzheimer’s,” Eden said.

Jessie shrugged. “His two sisters, they’re nice enough, but when it came to choosing men, them girls was behind the door when they passed out the brains.
They’s both single again, both got children. They live on the family money. He sees to it. He sees to all of them.”

Eden lifted an eyebrow. Self-sacrifice hadn’t made him happy. Far from it. “That’s all very noble, I suppose. But it doesn’t explain why he’s so concerned about you.”

Jessie had begun laying the tarot cards out on her sheet in the form of a cross. Peyton, sitting still as a little statue, watched her.

“Shall we see what the cards say, honeyduck?” asked Jessie.

She turned over the center card. It was a card of the major arcana, the thirteenth. On a pale horse rode a knight in black armor, his face a grinning skull.

The death card
, Eden thought with a chill.

Jessie stared at it, obviously shaken by the sight. “My God,” she whispered. “All of a sudden, I sense a fire. A little blue house turned to ashes. I sense a woman undone—dead—everything gone.”

Peyton looked up, her face pale, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears.

“Jessie, don’t,” Eden cautioned. “You’re scaring her.”

“I can’t help it,” Jessie said, putting her hands to her temples. “Blue house and woman, all done gone by fire.”

Peyton hid her face in her hands. “The house, the lady?” she said in a tiny voice. “They burned it up? They burned her, too?”

Eden seized the child by the shoulders. “Granny didn’t mean to scare you. Talk to me. Tell me what you mean.”

But Peyton wouldn’t answer. She wept into her hands in silence and a despair that seemed far too old for her years.

Eden was alarmed. She scooped up Peyton and cradled
her against her shoulder. “Jessie, be careful,” she warned. “You shouldn’t say such things in front of her.”

Jessie’s face paled. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I had me a vision. A strong one.” A forked vein leaped in her temple. She reached toward the child, but her ringed hand was unsteady.

“And you—you need to calm down,” Eden told her. “I’m buzzing for a nurse.”

“I don’t want a nurse,” Jessie said stubbornly, but Eden had already pressed the button to summon one. She hugged Peyton closer. The child burrowed her face against Eden’s neck and cried silently.

The tarot cards lay scattered across the bed and on the floor now. “Give me my cards,” Jessie ordered. “I want to see what they tell me.”

Eden couldn’t, she was holding Peyton in both arms. Besides, she didn’t want to touch the cards, didn’t want even to look at them. She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

A small brunette nurse appeared, her expression annoyingly perky. Eden hastily said her good-byes and made her escape. Stepping over the fallen cards, she carried Peyton away, holding her tight.

M
IMI HAD GONE TO A BREAKFAST SHOW CALLED
“J
EMMA
in the Morning.” The singer, Jemma, had a good voice, almost as good as Mimi’s had once been, and the comedian was funny. Breakfast was coffee and a sausage roll and a pear that wasn’t quite ripe.

For almost ninety minutes, Mimi was close to happy, but when the blue velvet curtain finally came down on the stage, her happiness dissipated. There wasn’t another show until two o’clock.

She walked back to her motel room, stopping at a liquor store to buy another bottle of wine. She sat in the room, smoking and thinking of Peyton.

She thought of Jessie and of Eden. She’d been jealous of Eden all these years. But now she missed her, deeply so.

She drank wine from the plastic glass. When the glass was empty, she poured it full again.

Owen’s score was exactly zero.

He’d spent the morning asking questions, but getting no satisfactory answers.

He’d gone to Ness Chevrolet Sales and Service, but they were the biggest dealership in three counties. They had hundreds of customers, and dozens of those customers could fit Jessie’s description of the woman who’d left Peyton.