Hear No Evil (27 page)

“That’s the name. That’s her.”

He took a deep breath, like a man preparing for a steep dive. “Mrs. Bigby, do you recall anything unusual about Mimi Storey’s voice? Anything at all?”

“Why, yes. She was all hoarse and creaky. She had a scar across her neck. From a car wreck, she said. If it hadn’t been for that car wreck, she mighta been a singer, she said. She was, like, bitter about it.”

He exhaled between gritted teeth.
Eden, you were right. You knew
.

“Mama loved that child,” Theresa Bigby said, a tremor in her voice. “That child needed a lot of love, and Mama gave it to her.”

“What do you mean, she needed a lot of love?”

“I mean she was—what’s the word?—unsecure. Unsecure is what she was. She wetted the bed a lot, and always she was sucking on her thumb.”

That’s our girl
, thought Owen. He said, “Did she ever talk about the past?”

“She said she wanted to go back somewhere. Maybe
it was Deerborn. Or Flint. She was homesick for the longest time.”

“Could it have been Holland?”

“Maybe. Anyway, she’d climb up on Mama’s lap to watch television. And Mama would just hold her and sit and watch the cartoons and things with her. Mama had a big, soft lap.”

“And Mimi would take the girl on weekends?”

Theresa Bigby paused again. “She did at
first
. And then she didn’t do it so much. And then she didn’t do it at all. She didn’t take her for Thanksgiving or Christmas or nothing. It got so the little girl didn’t even ask if she was coming.”

“What was the problem? Do you know?”

“Well, Mama was a sweet person, and Mama, she didn’t like gossip, but she got the feeling that there was a man mixed up in it, is what. That this man, he didn’t like the little girl, and she didn’t like him, neither.”

“Do you know who he was?”

“He come with Mimi once to pick up Peyton for the weekend. I never saw him. Mama said he looked like that Cuban person. Not Ricky Ricardo, the other one, that Castro. He was dressed in army-colored clothes and he had a scraggy old beard.”

“Did Peyton ever talk about him?”

“She
wouldn’t
talk about him. Only once. The first time she come back from with them, she said he wouldn’t give her nothing to eat. Just chicken and mashed potatoes and stuff she don’t like. And he got mean about it.”

“Mean? How?”

“Just mean,” she said vaguely. “Mama always give Peyton what she liked to eat. She wouldn’t make her eat
things she didn’t like, she was too tenderhearted. Mama was always tenderhearted.”

“I’m sure she was,” Owen said.

“A lotta times Mimi owed her money. Mama should’ve called her up and said ‘Come get this child,’ but she wouldn’t do that. Mama loved that child, and she was a very easygoing person besides.”

“I see. This man she was involved with—did you ever hear his name?”

“Not that I remember. Anyway, late last spring Mimi—that’s her name?—shows up with an altogether different man and said she and Peyton are going off with
him
now. It like to broke Mama’s heart. But she was sick by that time anyhow. Her heart, you know.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“She couldn’t get around. She couldn’t wash dishes or make the beds or nothing. Peyton was the only child she was keeping because she couldn’t bear to give her up. The kitchen bugs was about to run off with the place.”

Owen winced in spite of himself. He had a vision of Peyton in the lap of an obese and dying woman, in a place strewn with filth and overrun with cockroaches.

“This new man,” he said, “what do you know about him?”

“Well, him I saw with my own two eyes,” Theresa said proudly. “I went over to straighten Mama’s house. I tried to do it every two weeks or so, but she was clear cross town, and me with three children of my own, it wears me out. I got bad asthma, you know.”

“Sorry to hear it. But the man, Mrs. Bigby?”

“He seemed like a very nice man, very polite, and he was very handsome, blond and almost pretty like a girl. And he paid Mama everything she was owed and ten
dollars besides. And they took Peyton off with them, and we never saw her again. Mama nearly cried herself to death after that child walked out the door.”

“This blond man, did Mimi introduce him? Do you remember a name?”

“No. Except it was a funny first name, different. But I’ll tell you something about him,” Theresa said.

“Yes?”

“When he smiled, he looked so good, I forgot for a minute I was a married woman. He smiled like an angel or a movie star or somebody, you know? I thought, Why, I’d follow
him
anywhere. And I said to myself ‘That Mimi is one lucky woman.’ I guess it was too good to be true, eh? Too good to last.”

Owen said, “I guess maybe it was.”

For the sake of politeness, he chatted with her a few moments longer, lied about how well Peyton was doing, then thanked her and hung up.

He rose and, leaving the phone behind him, walked down the hall. Eden was still on the floor before the television set, coloring with Peyton.

She looked up at him, hope and apprehension mixing in her eyes.

“Come into the office a minute,” he said.

She nodded and led the way. She closed the door, then stood, shoulders squared, looking at him warily.

When he told her about Mrs. Stangblood, tears rose in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But there’s something else. The woman on the phone—with the hoarse voice. You’re right. It’s your sister.

Eden listened, horror in her eyes, to what Theresa Bigby had said about the accident. “My God, poor
Mimi,” she said tightly. “Oh, Owen, what kind of trouble is she in? I’m scared.”

He took her in his arms, and she didn’t resist. Instead her arms went around his neck as if she actually needed him. He held her.

T
WICE DURING THE NIGHT
, M
IMI HAD SEEMED CLOSE TO
death. She kept fainting from pain, and when she revived, she couldn’t talk and seemed half-delirious. But she hung on.

The skinny little bitch was tough, Drace thought. She might be dying, but she was dying hard.

At nine o’clock, Drace had left the van parked near Endor’s small city library. Raylene stayed, watching over Mimi’s suffering with a cold air of satisfaction.

Drace went into the library in search of a pay phone and found one in the lobby. Calls from the cell phone could be intercepted, and he didn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. Inserting one of his anonymous phone credit cards, he dialed the number of Sister Jessie Buddress’s psychic phone line.

On the third ring, she answered. “Sister Jessie,” said a woman’s deep and resonant voice. “God’s gifted seer. What can I do for you this morning?”

Drace hung up. All he’d wanted to do was establish she was there. He smiled tightly to himself and headed out the library doors, past all the colorful children’s drawings pinned to the bulletin boards and the poster of the Cat in the Hat.

He made his way to the main street of Endor, cloaking himself with invisibility. He had once read of a great and famous actor who could appear, undisguised, on the street and no one would recognize him. The actor made himself seem so ordinary, so inconspicous, that no one noticed him; in essence, he became invisible. Drace willed himself to do the same.

He had looked earlier in the local phone book for Jessie Buddress’s name and home phone number and address, but she was unlisted. Still, he knew with godlike certainty that he would find her, and he knew how.

Just off Main Street, on Pecan Street, was a row of shops. He and Raylene had seen them early this morning. The buildings were small and narrow, made of weathered redbrick. Each store had an identical old-fashioned green awning.

In the midst of these shops was one with a publike sign over the door. A yellow crescent moon with a human profile smiled fatuously over letters that spelled out
MOONGLOW GIFTS
. They had seen a lone woman unlocking the front door.

Now he opened that same door, which set off the mellow ringing of chimes. The air was thick with the churchlike scent of incense.

The shop was cluttered with every sort of New Age trapping and trinket—candles, scented oils, crystals,
bells, beads, charms, packets of strange powders, A tape of eerie, tuneless music played.

Besides Drace, the only other person in the shop was the woman, who was thirtyish, plain, and had long dull-blond hair.

She wore a long, shapeless dress with an Indian print, beat-up Birkenstock sandals, and a lot of cheap bracelets and necklaces. She looked half-stoned and had a delicate silver ring piercing her nose.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

Drace stopped being invisible and unleashed his charm. He gave her his most beguiling smile, boyish and shy. “Actually you might,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Aren’t we all?” said the woman.

Drace’s smile widened into a grin that was both bashful and seductive. “I’ve talked to this woman a bunch of times,” he said. “She’s a psychic. I thought maybe somebody in here might know her. Sister Jessie Buddress?”

“Hey—synchronicity!” exclaimed the woman. “Sister Jessie? Yeah. I know her well.”

“Really?” he said with pleasure. He was looking deep into her eyes and would continue to do so.

“Really,” said the clerk. “I’ve known her for years. She’s a very spiritual woman. I took this job on her advice. She says my aura’s really purified since I been here.”

“She’s amazing,” Drace said in his soft voice.

“Yeah, she is. You’re one of her phone clients?”

Drace nodded. “I’m from Oklahoma City. I had to drive over this way on business.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a business card. He collected such cards, for at times like this they were valuable. It read “L. Robert ‘Bob’ Dinsmore”
and identified him as the owner of Dinsmore’s Rare Books and Documents, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

He handed her the card. She read it and looked impressed. “Rare books,” she said. “Gee. I
love
books.”

“I do, too,” Drace said, turning more solemn. “But I was ready to give up on it. I just wasn’t making a living.”

She cocked her head sympathetically.

He said, “I’d been calling Sister Jessie, and she said to be patient, that things would turn around in September. But by the first of October, nothing had happened.”

The woman made a sound like
tsk-tsk
.

“So now,” Drace said earnestly, “comes the
strange
part. I called her on the second of October for another reading. I said the first one hadn’t come true, and I was desperate.”

The woman nodded, obviously enthralled.

Drace dropped his voice in awe. “But she said, ‘It’s come true. You just don’t know it yet.’ ”

The woman’s eyes widened.

“The week before I’d bought some books at an estate auction. There were a couple of boxes, and nobody was bidding, so I’d bought them blind, without even looking at them. I put them in my trunk and forgot about them.”

“Oh, my God,” the woman said, shaking her head. “I
know
what you’re going to say.”

Drace grinned again and nodded. “There were some newer novels on top, Book-of-the-Month stuff. But underneath, I found
five
novels by Ernest Hemingway. All first editions. All autographed. And a sort of album. In it were eleven
letters
from Hemingway.”

“Oh, my Ga-awd,” she said, putting a hand to her cheek.

“It was like striking gold. I sold the whole collection for over twenty thousand dollars—can you believe it?”

“That’s incredible, it gives me
chills
,” the woman said in awe. “I have goose bumps, I really do.”

“I was going to phone her, but I was driving this way, and I decided to thank her in person. And bring her a present. I’ve got a beautiful leather-bound copy of the prophecies of Nostradamus I want to give her.”

“Look at me,” the woman said, pointing to her eyes. “Tears. I got tears. This is all too beautiful.”

Drace smiled as if he were deeply touched. “The problem is, I don’t know where she lives. I got her business number but not her home one. She’s not in the phone book.”

“Oh, I know where she lives,” the woman said. “Out Churchyard Road. You go west, toward Huntsville, then take County Road Seventy-six. It’s the next-to-last house before the parkland starts. You can’t miss it. Little white house. I’ll draw you a map.”

“That’d be
great
,” Drace said, beaming.

He watched as she drew on pale blue paper decorated with silver stars. “Do me a favor and don’t mention this to anyone for a couple of days, will you?” he said. “I want to make sure I surprise her. If I don’t catch her at home today, I’ll try again tomorrow on my way back.”

The woman stopped drawing her map. An odd expression, like doubt or guilt, crossed her face.

“I mean, I just want to surprise her,” Drace said, watching her carefully. “So if I don’t get there until tomorrow …”

“I understand,” she said, still looking somehow crestfallen. “But I forgot. She’s not home, she’s in the hospital.”