Hear No Evil (9 page)

“Umm,” murmured Eden.

“Thank you, Sister. I’ll say a prayer for you next time I’m at Graceland. Good-bye.”

Eden replaced the receiver and put her face in her hands. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she muttered. “Elvis has left the building.”

She forced herself to scribble a quick note about Lily on the card. Then she rose from the desk to check on Peyton. The television set still blared, and the cartoon show was now
Fearless Fran
, which Eden had worked on, years ago.

Peyton lay in front of the set, her body a relaxed sprawl, the crayon fallen from her hand. She had fallen asleep. Eden leaned against the door frame, uncertain whether to wake her. The child needed sleep, but if she napped now, would she again be awake all night long?

The psychic line rang, and Eden was spared the decision. She moved back to the desk, lifted the receiver. She nudged her voice down an octave and prepared to imitate Jessie’s grammar and phrasing.

“Sister Jessie,” she said. “God’s gifted seer.”

It was a Lionel Bevans, phoning from New York. Hurriedly Eden located his card and was surprised to see that he was a stockbroker who regularly called for tips.

“Jessie—I couldn’t get you this morning,” Bevans said heartily. “I want to ask you about a few commodities.”

“Ask away,” said Eden, who knew no more about commodities than she knew about rings of Saturn.

From the other end of the line, she heard the rattle of papers. “I hope you’ve got that crystal ball polished up.”

“To a high gloss,” Eden lied with an admirable imitation of confidence.

“Good. Now tell me about Hammer Amalgamated.”

Eden gritted her teeth. “What about it?”

“Should I hold it or sell it?”

Eden scribbled the words “Hold” and “Sell” on a scrap of paper, shut her eyes, and jabbed the paper with her pen point. She opened one eye warily. “Sell,” she instructed.

“Absolutely?”

“Absolutely.”
This is how the economy gets run?
Eden thought with horror.

“I love it when you’re that certain,” he chortled. “Always a good sign for me. Now, how about Amondale? Research company. Gene splicing. Buy it? Or pass?”

Eden scrawled “Buy” and “Pass” on the other side of the paper, squeezed her eyes shut and stabbed again. She examined her handiwork. “Pass,” she ordered him.

He sounded disappointed. “You surprise me on that one. You sense something negative? Can you tell me what?”

“The stars is wrong for it,” Eden said shortly. “And you don’t argue with the stars.”

“You’re the psychic,” he sighed. “Okay, this one’s got me stymied. Pass or buy? Polar-Nilsen, Limited. They’ve got a new development in asynchronous communications protocol, maybe the biggest thing since duplexing.”

Jesus, he’s not even speaking English
, Eden fretted, but she played her senseless game with the penpoint again.
She took a deep breath. “Buy it,” she ordered with the authority of an empress.

“Jessie,” he said with a smile in his voice, “you’re a wonder. That one could be a real coup. If it works out I’ll send you a box of those chocolates you like.”

By the time he said good-bye, her hands were trembling at her own boldness. “What the hell,” she muttered as she set down the phone. “It’s only money.
His
money.”

Almost immediately, the phone jangled again. It was a woman from Peoria, who wanted a horoscope cast for the newborn kittens of her cat.

Owen had been in Jessie’s room only a few minutes, but he saw that she was growing tired. Her pale skin looked parchmentlike, and her spine, usually ramrod straight, was slumped into a curve.

But she toyed with the tarot deck, expertly shuffling and reshuffling. Autumn sunshine spilled through the window, twinkling on her myriad rings and bracelets.

“I’m sorry for all this trouble,” she muttered. “You wanted to go hunting, I know.”

Owen put his hand on her bare arm and was surprised by the coldness of her flesh. “It’s no problem,” he said. “You need rest.”

“I’m fine,” Jessie insisted, dealing the cards out in the form of a cross.

She frowned. “
Damn
, but I didn’t want that moon card popping up. Ain’t that a fine cup of tea?”

Owen knew better than to argue with her. “I should go,” he said and patted her arm. He thought of bow-hunting in the woods. He thought of Cosette’s in Tulsa.

She looked up at him, fixing him with her extraordinary eyes. “No—wait. You said you’d watch out for Peyton. Can I hold you to that?”

His stomach knotted with distaste. But he said, “I’ll keep looking in on her. You can hold me to it.”

“I worry about Mimi. There’s a man mixed up in it, I can feel it. I don’t want him turning up
here
.” She laid down another card and shook her head. “Speak of the devil, and here he is. Hello, goatface. Stay out of my grandbaby’s life.”

Owen suppressed a wry smile. It was Jessie’s style to talk back, even to the devil.

She didn’t smile in return. “There’s something I ain’t told you. I ain’t told nobody.”

A presentiment of trouble crept over him, and he said nothing, but waited for her to go on.

Her face somber, she said, “If something happens to Mimi,” she said somberly, “and something happens to me, too—Eden’s got to take that child. She’s got to. It’s her duty. You got to make her understand that.”

Owen’s muscles went taut. “Jessie, you’re going to be fine. And we’ll find Mimi.”

She leaned against the pillows tiredly. “Tell Eden I said that. Please.”

“That’s between you and her, it’s not my place to—”

“When has she ever listened to me?” Jessie said bitterly. “Please just tell her. Please.”

Jesus Christ, what am I getting into?
he rebuked himself. But Jessie suddenly looked so wan and weary that she frightened him. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I’ll mention it to her. Is that good enough?”

“It’ll do,” she said.

“Jessie, you’re tired. I’ll go. You can rest.”

She waved her hand weakly, a gesture for him to stay.
“Not yet,” she said. “There’s one more thing. That woman yesterday, in that car. I told you I couldn’t remember much about her. She was so
middling
—middling in her age, her size, everything.”

“She had brown hair going gray, you said.”

“Middling brown,” said Jessie. “Going middling gray. But I remember one thing about her.”

“Good. It may help.”

“She was wearing a T-shirt,” Jessie said. “It was faded and had a picture of a car or truck on it. It said ‘Ness Ford,’ or ‘Ness Chevrolet.’ ”

“You’re sure?”

“I remember because of the Loch Ness monster. Maybe it was ‘Ness Hudson.’ ”

“Jessie, they don’t make Hudsons anymore.”

“Anyway,” Jessie said, “it was Ness. Or it could have been Loch.” Her eyes fluttered shut.

Shitfire, Jessie
, he thought,
you’re worn out. I never would have believed it. Life has worn you out
.

He swung the bed tray with its half-dealt cards out of her way. “Rest, it’s an order,” he said softly. He decided that while she was in the hospital, he’d call Alvin Swinnerton at GuardLok and have a security system put in her house, an improvement she’d always refused.

He turned and left the room. The hallway smelled of lotion and antiseptic and the stringent odor of well-scrubbed loneliness.

He didn’t relish going back to Jessie’s house. He felt repelled by the child and attracted by the woman, and disliked both reactions.

He decided to take the stairs rather than the elevator, then wished he hadn’t. He had to pass the room in which Laurie had died.

Against his will, he glanced inside. In the room a
woman lay motionless upon the bed, her face lifeless. To Owen, she looked as young and thin and wasted as Laurie had. He had to turn away.

Eden rose from the desk. She needed a cup of coffee, strong and black, to send a jolt of energy through her veins. The casting of horoscopes, even cat horoscopes, was taxing. Just as she reached the door, the telephone shrilled again.

Damn
, she thought. But she steeled herself, turned back, and picked up the receiver. “Sister Jessie,” she said, her voice deep and sonorous. “God’s gifted seer.”

For the space of three heartbeats, nothing but silence answered her. Then a woman said, “Sister Jessie, it’s me. Connie. Constance. I got to talk to you.”

My God
, Eden thought with a chilling shock.
My God
. She had almost forgotten about Constance. The woman had a hoarse voice, whispery and breathy.

“Well, Constance,” Eden said. “Hello, honey. How
are
you?” She sorted swiftly through the files in the carved box. She pulled a card covered with Jessie’s spiky handwriting.

“I’m worried, Sister Jessie,” Constance said. “I got … questions.”

If the woman was worried, she sounded oddly calm, almost detached. There was a slight slur to her croaking voice. Either she was drinking, or the slur was part of her speech impairment.

“You want me to deal out the tarot, honey?” Eden asked.

“Yeah.”

Eden sat down again at the desk and picked up the deck of cards. With nervous fingers she began to shuffle. “What’s your question, child? You ask Sister Jessie.”

“I want to ask about death,” said the woman.

The words jolted Eden, and she tensed. “Yes?”

“When people die quickly, without—expectation—do they suffer much?”

“It depends on what you mean,” Eden hedged.

“Like those people on that plane,” the woman said. “All those people on that plane that exploded in Miami. They didn’t suffer—not really, did they?”

Eden mentally rifled through Jessie’s stock answers for dealing with tragedy. “Their suffering’s over now. Everything happens for a purpose. Some souls are supposed to leave life quick. There’s a lesson in it for them.”

“I—don’t understand.” The voice rustled like dead leaves and broken sticks.

I don’t, either
, Eden thought.
I never did and I never will
. She tried not to think of her own mother, who had died without warning, hit by a car as she jaywalked across a dark and wintry street.

Instead she found herself echoing Jessie’s weary truisms, in which she had no faith. “Death teaches you, just like life does. It ain’t ours to question.”

Again the caller hesitated before answering. “Most of the time anymore I’m not afraid to die,” she said in her coarse, breathy voice. “But—but—sometimes I still am.”

Just what is your problem, Constance? Are you sick, dying? Is that why you sound the way you do?

“There’s nothing to fear,” Eden recited. “You go into a tunnel of light. No suffering. No hurt, no fear.”

I make Death sound like a painless dentist. That didn’t hurt, did it? Now, rinse. Please floss between incarnations
.

“You understand?” Eden asked.

There was a long pause that she found somehow ominous. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“You have other questions?”

“Yeah.”

“About what?” Eden said uneasily.

“About a kid,” the woman said in her hoarse, halting voice. “This kid went on a journey. Was it safe? Did she arrive okay?”

A child. Peyton
. Eden stiffened as if she’d been struck.
Jessie’s right
, she thought.
Oh, God, Jessie’s right for once
.

“I—I,” she stammered, “who is this child?”

“Just tell me,” said the woman, her breathing ragged. “Did she get there okay?”

Eden’s mind whirled giddily. She did not know how to answer. “This child,” she said carefully, “does her name begin with a
p
?”

The woman made a broken little wheeze like a sob or a gasp. “Yes. Tell me—is she safe?”

Eden’s grip tightened around the cards, and she bit her wounded lip. She did not even feel the pain.

“Sister Jessie?” the woman said. “Did you hear me?”

Eden took a long, shuddering breath. “The child is safe.”

“Read her cards,” the rasping voice said plaintively. “Tell me if she’ll be lucky. I got to know.”

Eden had a desperate, jittery feeling that the woman’s mood was shifting and vulnerable, that she might hang up at any moment and that she shouldn’t be pushed.

“If she’ll be lucky?” Eden asked carefully. “Anything else? I’m dealing the cards now.”

Constance hesitated. “That,” she breathed, “and when should I leave here? I think I know. What do the cards say?”

Deftly Eden laid the cards into place until they formed the Celtic cross. She tried not to wince when the center card was a symbol of ill omen, the nine of swords.

“Ah,” she said with false cheer, “the child’s looking very lucky, indeed.”

She turned over the first card. It was the hanged man, reversed, another inauspicious sign.

“You couldn’t be luckier yourself,” she lied. “Where
are you right now, honey? Where you thinking of leaving from?”

“Umm.”

“Constance, where are you?”

“Umm. I can’t say,” she answered in her harsh, whispery way.

Eden gritted her teeth. Something—something almost indefinable in that ravaged voice nagged at her and made her nervous.