Hear No Evil (29 page)

“For yes or no questions, I consult the crystal pendant,”
she said. She opened Jessie’s drawer to find the pendant, a cone of polished quartz fastened to a silver chain.

“Just a second,” she said. “I can’t find the dad-gum thing.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Somebody wants me. I got to get off the phone. I’ll call back.”

He hung up. How odd, thought Eden, he had used up a good three minutes of phone time, at least twelve dollars’ worth, then hadn’t even waited for an answer.

She glanced at the caller ID machine. Its readout window had gone blank again, so she pressed the review button, expecting the usual information, “Number Unavailable.”

But this time a number appeared, with the local area code and an Endor exchange. Beneath it were the words “Pay Phone.”

She frowned in surprise. Why would someone call her from a local pay phone? She hadn’t heard coins drop—had he used a phone credit card? Why? A frisson of mistrust quivered through her.

She pushed the review button on the caller ID. Her first call of the day had also been from a local pay phone, although a different one. That caller had hung up as soon as she’d answered. What did it mean? Or did it mean nothing?

But almost immediately the phone rang again. “Sister Jessie, God’s gifted seer,” Eden said, bone-weary of her deceptions.

It was the demanding Mrs. Eberhart, making her daily call from Miami. Eden sighed and reached for the cards, her other caller forgotten.

•  •  •

Drace stood at the pay phone outside a convenience store, his heart hammering. He opened the phone book, dialed the hospital, and asked to talk to Mrs. Buddress.

The connection was made, a phone rang and was answered by a low, sonorous voice identical to the one he’d just spoken to.

His breathing grew shallow, but he forced warmth and a smile into his voice and kept it steady. “Mrs. Buddress,” he said with neighborly cheer, “this is Bill Phillips of the First Baptist Church. I’m on the Sunshine Committee. We were sorry to hear about your accident.”

“I’m not a Baptist,” said the woman.

“Why, you don’t have to be,” Drace said. “The Sunshine Committee doesn’t care what your particular faith is. We’re just people reaching out to people. We want you to know we’re here if you need us.”

“I never heard of no Sunshine Committee,” she said suspiciously.

“It’s relatively new and completely nondenominational,” lied Drace. “It’s times like now when we want to help any way we can. And I believe I heard you have a little girl to take care of, a granddaughter.”

“A great-granddaughter,” she corrected.

“Peyton?” he asked brightly. “Isn’t that her name?”

“Hmmph. How come you know so much?”

“Several people in our congregation work at the hospital, Mrs. Buddress. Do you have family nearby to care for the child? To visit you, help you out?”

“My granddaughter is here from Los Angeles,” Jessie said rather loftily.

“Just one person?” Drace asked with sympathy.

“And my neighbor,” she retorted. “Company just walked in my door. I can’t talk. Good-bye.”

She hung up, and Drace stood listening to the silence
of a line gone dead. He swore under his breath and slammed the receiver back into place.

He stood by the pay phone, feeling as if his head were full of fire. He wanted to press his forehead against the phone’s cool steel, but knew such an act would call attention to him. The pulses in his temples banged like drums.

Why in God’s name is the granddaughter impersonating the old woman?

Be calm, be calm. The bitch at the store said, “The granddaughter’s staying out there now … they’re trying to find the kid’s mother.”

But why is an ex-cop mixed up in it?

Be calm, be calm. Because the real cops don’t care, they know nothing. Be calm, be calm
.

How much has Peyton told them? How much has Mimi?

Be calm, be calm. They can’t know much. Or you wouldn’t be walking around free, would you?

Yet, like an animal, he sensed a trap, a dangerous one, being set. Like a soldier, a strategist, he knew he must not merely avoid it, but destroy it.

Destroy it. It was that simple. It was a military problem, that was all, a tactician’s job.

He straightened up from the phone. From his shirt pocket he drew out the map the woman at the New Age shop had drawn him. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip.

It was time to reconnoiter the enemy.

B
Y THE TIME
O
WEN RETURNED TO THE HOUSE
, E
DEN’S
heart seemed wizened into something small, self-loathing, and frightened. Filled with self-recrimination, she recounted what Peyton had said.

“I feel awful,” she told him. “If Mimi’s really mixed up in something this bad, what will happen to her? What will it do to Peyton? And Jessie? My God.”

“Let me hear the tape,” he said.

In the office, while he listened, Eden moved to the window and stared out, her face taut and bloodless. The tape went silent at last. He switched it off. A silence that seemed impossibly heavy filled the room.

Eden turned to him. “Owen, if Mimi has something to do with that explosion in Miami, we have to tell the police. I don’t want to, but we have to.”

“They won’t believe it,” he told her. “Don’t borrow trouble. Not yet.”

She put her fingertips to her forehead in frustration. “I hardly believe it myself. But Peyton said these people—”

“Peyton said nothing,” he said sternly. “Nothing but ‘yes’ when you asked questions. She’s six years old and she was getting hysterical. What she said
proves
nothing.”

Eden didn’t understand the legal distinctions; she could see only the moral dilemma. “But Peyton said—Peyton drew—”

He cut her off, making an impatient slicing gesture with his hand. “It won’t hold up. Any attorney worth his salt would say your questions were leading.”

“Leading to what?” she demanded.

“Leading her to answer the way she did. She didn’t volunteer the information. You put it in her mouth. Do you think the police will take that seriously? No.”

“But there’s Mimi, too,” she said almost desperately. “If it
is
Mimi. We have tapes of her. She talked about the plane, too.”

He gripped her shoulders more tightly. “What she said is ambiguous. It’d never hold up in court. So what are you left with? No credible evidence. The bombing is an FBI case. And you’ve got nothing they could use.”

“Then what should we do?” she asked.

“I’m not sure I’m the guy you should ask,” he said. “I’m just a washed-up, small-town ex-cop. I’m nobody.”

“You’re not nobody,” she protested with passion. “You’re an honorable man, an intelligent man—”

I could love you
, she almost said and was appalled and fascinated by the thought.
My God, isn’t that the cream of the jest? I think I could love you
.

He searched her face. “If you want, I’ll tell Mulcahy. Maybe he can use it. Maybe not. Will that satisfy you?”

He kissed her. She kissed him back.

But then they heard Peyton stirring in the bedroom and broke apart. They looked at each other with wariness, guilt, and amazement.

Owen gathered up the phone-psychic tapes of Constance to rerecord them on a single cassette. He worked alone in Jessie’s bedroom.

He frowned as he listened. The desperation in the woman’s hoarse, breathy voice troubled him. Was this frightened woman with her slurred words actually connected to the terrorism in Miami? Or was she bound to its violence only by a sick fantasy?

He listened to Eden, impersonating Jessie, telling about the blond woman with fire in her hand and “a flag burning inside her.”

“
Oh, my God—oh, my God
,” the woman had said in her broken voice.

“
Miami
,” she had said. “
You know about Miami?
”

Owen cracked his knuckles in frustration. This woman sounded frightened, she sounded guilty, but what she said was proof of nothing.

He spread Peyton’s drawings across Jessie’s bed and studied the primitive figures, the jarring colors. There was the crude house with the red door standing in the middle of nowhere, radiating anger. There were the planes shaped like burning crosses.

Hell, he thought, shaking his head in disgust, nobody would believe this as evidence. They’d think he’d lost his mind. He had a few taped conversations with a hoarse,
breathy, irrational woman, a couple of creepy drawings, and a few ominous words uttered by a six-year-old.

Only a damned fool would carry such a flimsy story to the FBI or the police. He shrugged and thought,
All right. I’ll play the fool
. He reached for the cell phone and hoped he wasn’t waking up the insomniac John Mulcahy.

With luck Mulcahy would not think Owen completely mad.

As Owen dialed, he glanced out Jessie’s bedroom window and could see Eden and Peyton collecting colored leaves. He’d told her, just to be on the safe side, not to leave the yard without him.

Peyton seemed to have forgiven Eden, even if Eden hadn’t forgiven herself. The child crouched on the ground beneath the yard’s one sugar maple, sorting through the red leaves, looking for the prettiest.

Eden knelt beside her, smiling and holding a cardboard box. The afternoon sun glinted on their hair, Peyton’s ebony dark, Eden’s brown and highlighted with gold.

As he listened to Mulcahy’s phone ring, he kept his eyes on the two figures like a watchman. It did him good to have them in view, to see their faces gilded by the fragile sunlight.

The park was serene with autumn, and the van was alone, parked near the play area with its slides and swings and brightly colored plastic animals.

Drace, his face tense, was dressing in his camouflage. Raylene watched him, frightened and dismayed by the news he’d brought.

Mimi lay on one of the bunks, her chest rattling as she fought for air. They’d had to take the gag off so that
she could breathe. Her mouth was blackened by sores and crusted with blisters. Her eyes were rolled up so that the whites showed.

She’d been unable, of course, to tell them anything about the old woman being in the hospital or her sister being at the house. She’d reacted only to Peyton’s name, which had torn a raw, incoherent groan from her.

Raylene had no pity for her, only abhorrence. She didn’t even look at Mimi, but kept her eyes fastened on Drace, whom Mimi had so endangered. “Oh, be careful,” she said to him, breathing the words like a prayer.

A black watch cap hid his silky blond hair. He expertly daubed camouflage paint on his face. “I’ll stick to the woods, stay out of sight,” he said. “I’ve got to check the layout of the place, that’s all.”

“If somebody sees you?”

“I’ll take the twenty-two, say I’m hunting.”

Her heart beat so hard that it rattled her ribs. “And then? After you’ve checked it?”

“Then I’ll decide the best way to take them.”

He’s smart, he’s brilliant, he can do it
, she told herself. But the idea that Peyton was with a lawman of any kind, even a former lawman, terrified her.

“You have a plan?” she asked.

“A tentative one,” he said. “Get me the twenty-two, will you?”

She knelt obediently, lifted the strip of carpeting that hid the panel of plywood.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. “I’d like to ambush them. They’ll go out sooner or later to see the old lady. When they come back, we surprise them.”

She nodded numbly as she shifted aside the wooden panel. “What about her? The old lady?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Old
ladies aren’t hard to kill. They practically kill themselves. Remember Brodnik?”

On the cot, Mimi twisted and groaned.

Drace glanced at her, exhaling smoke. “Oh, shut the fuck up,” he said, almost absently.

Raylene picked up the twenty-two with both hands and lifted it toward him like an offering. “Be careful,” she said, pleading in her voice.

He clasped the rifle, but for a moment he didn’t take it, he merely held it, his hands touching hers. He looked into her eyes, and her pulses leaped with love and fear for him.

He smiled mischievously. “I’d kiss you for luck, but I’d get makeup on you.”

“That’s usually my line,” she said and gave him a shaky smile.

“Ray,” he said with affection. He took the rifle in one hand, touched her face with the other.

From the cot, Mimi whimpered, but Raylene and Drace kept staring into each other’s eyes and paid her no heed.

Owen could not reach Mulcahy, so he called Swinnerton again at GuardLok Security Systems. “Alvin,” he said, “this is Owen Charteris again. What’s it take to get you out to Jessie Buddress’s house? A frigging court order?”

Swinnerton’s voice was full of apology. “Owen, we’re shorthanded this week
and
busy as the devil. I feel awful we ain’t got to you yet.”

“I’m worried about this woman and kid out here. You said you’d be here Wednesday. You weren’t. You said you’d be here yesterday. You weren’t. If you can’t make it today, forget it. I’m calling AlarmTronic.”