Hear No Evil (24 page)

“That’s all. In the meantime, I’ve been on the phone to Detroit information.”

Her shoulders sagged slightly. Of course he had been on the phone; he was not a man to sit back waiting for others to do the work.

“Asking about listings for Stangbloods?” she asked, throat tight. She studied the crocheted pattern in the doilie, one loop knotting into the next and the next.

“Yeah,” he said without emotion.

“This isn’t even your problem, you know.”

“I know. I made the calls on my cell phone. Don’t worry. Jessie won’t have to pay.”

She turned to face him. “I’ll pay you back.”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I insist.”

The air between them seemed to leap with an electrical charge that had nothing to do with phone bills or who paid them. He could feel it, too, she could tell.

He moved across the room, as if purposely putting
more distance between them. His eyes were no longer on her, for which she was grateful.

He glanced at the list, one dark brow crooked in a frown. “There are more Stangbloods in Detroit than you’d think. Seven listed. I reached four. They didn’t know anything.”

She clenched the back of Jessie’s armchair. “The other three?”

“They don’t answer. Yet. I’ll try again tomorrow. It’s after ten in Detroit now. I need to call Alvin Swinnerton about that security system, too.”

“You worry about us too much.”

He glanced up. As always, the blueness of his eyes jolted her. “I could use a drink.”

She said, “Brandy?”

He nodded, went into the kitchen, and she trailed behind him. He opened the kitchen cupboard beside the sink and drew out the bottle of brandy. “You want any?”

“No,” she said. “Thanks.”

She glanced down at the kitchen table and saw Peyton’s open tablet. The child had drawn a picture of a burning plane. Quickly Eden turned it facedown, went to the counter, and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Owen took down a glass and half filled it with brandy. “You’d be better off with this than that damned coffee.”

“I don’t drink,” Eden said stubbornly. “Not with my family history. I’ll stick to coffee.”

He shrugged and leaned against the counter again, glass in hand. He took an economical sip, savored it. “So who drank?” he asked. “Besides Mimi?”

Eden shrugged ruefully. “Who didn’t? Well, Jessie didn’t. But her husband did, my grandfather. She married him when she was fifteen to get out of the delta
country. She didn’t know he was, in her words, ‘a no-good sot.’ ”

Owen gazed at her over the edge of his glass. “He died young, right? When she was pregnant with your mother. I know that much. And that’s about all. She never talks about your mother.”

He gazed at her over the edge of his glass, something like challenge in his eyes.

“My mother—” Eden still struggled for the right words, after all these years. “My mother—started drinking when she was very young. She was a lovable person—but not stable. She and Jessie were estranged early on.”

He made no reply, waiting for her to go on. His gaze was unwavering and thoughtful.

Eden swallowed hard. “She married somebody too much like herself. Charming, but, well, unbalanced. It’s a miracle the marriage lasted as long as it did—five years, off and on. Then he disappeared. Just disappeared.”

Owen frowned. “You don’t know what happened to him?”

She shook her head and stared down at her ringless hands. She had her mother’s hands, slender, fine-boned. “We never saw him again. And our mother was killed when I was ten and Mimi was six. She was hit by a car. Outside a bar. It was night, she was jaywalking. She wasn’t—quite—sober. We lived in Little Rock. I didn’t even know I had a grandmother. Our mother never told us about her. But suddenly, there was Jessie. And she brought us here. Now Mimi’s sent Peyton here. And the same old twisted story just keeps going on and on.”

Something fragile, something stretched too thin, broke in Eden. She curled her hand into a fist and pressed it against her forehead. She gave a small, stifled
hiccough of a sob, and tears, unbidden, flowed down her cheeks.

Owen was at her side, his hands on her arms, raising her to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” she said fiercely. “Usually I never cry.
Never
.”

He pulled her close and put his arms around her. “Stop apologizing and just cry, will you?”

“I’m
afraid
for my sister,” she choked out, furious at herself for weeping. “I’m terrified for her. And what about Peyton? She’s been through so much—maybe her life’s already hopelessly screwed up.”

“Eden,” he said, lacing a hand through her hair. “Don’t—”

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” she insisted, her voice shaking. “It’s her. It’s not fair. Why should she—she didn’t ask to be born into a mess like this—she didn’t ask to be born at all—she—”

He drew back slightly, tipped her face up to his. Then he bent nearer, his eyes severe, his mouth twisted at the corner. His voice was a growl, deep and harsh in his throat. “I said ‘Don’t.’ ”

Then his lips were on hers. She tasted brandy and something like despair in his kiss, and she clung to him, kissing him back, desperate herself.

There was nothing studied, nothing artful in the way he kissed her. Everything in his touch was filled with immediacy and undisguised hunger.

His body arched against hers, taut as a bow. He pressed her to him even more tightly, and his chest was hard against her breasts.

Eden thrust herself against him recklessly, her hands gripping his shoulders, fingers avid for the feel of his strength. She felt like someone being hauled from a dark,
depthless space toward a life-giving force. She wanted that force from him, she needed it, she gave herself up to it.

This is quite insane
, she told herself, then let the thought fall away into the emptiness she was escaping. The world was cold, but he was warm.

It was intoxicating to give in to desire, to become lost in it. His hands were under her sweater, exploring the curves and angles of her bare back. When he touched her naked flesh, rationality returned to her with a chilling swoop.

She tried to draw away, turn her face, but he pressed his lips against the pulse of her throat. “What if Peyton sees us?” she whispered, her breath uneven.

“We’ll go into the bedroom,” he said, mouth warm against her skin.

“She could—walk in on us,” she gasped. He was undoing the complex fastening of her bra.

“We’ll lock the door.” The bra came loose, and beneath her sweater, he touched her bare breasts. She shuddered with the pleasure of it.

“We—we shouldn’t do this with a child in the place.”

“Married people do it all the time.”

This logic seemed infallible to Eden. Then his lips were on her breast, and logic ceased to matter.

He lay on his back, staring up at the darkness, heart pounding, body damp with sweat, one arm around her cool shoulders. She was curled motionless against him, her head on his chest. Her hair felt silky against his flesh and it tickled. He could feel her diamond earring like a pinprick over his drumming heart.

He ran his hand down her arm and back again. She stirred softly and nestled closer to him, and he brushed his lips against her hair. She laid her hand on his stomach, just above the navel. Her touch went through him like a sweet, desired knife.

“I should go to the other bedroom,” she said. “In case Peyton wakes up.”

“Not yet,” he said. He drew her closer, kissed her hair again.

She sighed, her breath warm against his skin.

He was silent, glad simply to hold her, touch her. He had not had such a compulsion to touch a woman since Laurie. He didn’t understand the urge, he had only followed it.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “We did it in my grandmother’s bed.”

“Believe it,” he said.

She drew her hand away, and he felt her body subtly tense. “I suppose this had to happen,” she said. “I mean, we’re two healthy, unattached adults. We’re cooped up together. Things have been intense. It’s—only natural.”

She edged away from him minutely, moved her head from his chest to the pillow. He realized that the subtle distance she put between them was more than physical. It snaked between them like a crack that would widen until it yawned into an unbridgeable abyss.

“I mean,” she said, turning so she lay facing away from him, “I suppose it’s something we had to get out of the way.”

Something we had to get out of the way. That puts me in my place, doesn’t it?

“I suppose,” he said.

“I don’t want you to think I expect anything from
you,” she said. “I don’t. We probably won’t see each other when this is over.”

“No,” he said. “You’ll go. I’ll stay.”

“Yes,” she said.

He withdrew his arm, stared up into the darkness again. “Tell me something,” he said. “What you said about your family. Is that why you never married, had kids?”

“My gene pool is mined,” she said. “Eccentrics and drunks. I don’t think I should reproduce. The odds are bad.”

“You don’t get close to anyone, do you?”

“Not really.”

She paused. “You don’t, either.”

“No.”

They were both silent. At last she said, “You don’t like Peyton, do you?”

“No.”

“Is it because she’s different?”

He sighed harshly. “Don’t harp on that. I don’t like kids. Period.”

“Why?”

“My wife wanted kids,” he said. “She couldn’t have them. And then she died of—what all went wrong.”

She sat up, drew the sheet up over her breasts. He closed his eyes in sudden weariness. The words had explained nothing. They never did.

She said, “I guess ‘I’m sorry’ is too easy to say.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

“But I am sorry.”

“So am I.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? I don’t.”

“I didn’t mean …” her voice trailed off. She was
silent for a long moment. Then, quietly she said, “I should go.”

“Yeah. You should.”

She stood. He heard her gather up her clothes, slip into them with a whisper-soft rustling. He felt her sit on the edge of the bed again. She leaned over, lightly kissed him on the cheekbone. “I think both of us just needed someone tonight,” she said. “Thank you.”

He wanted to turn to her, haul her down into the bed again, strip her clothes off, make love with her until the sun rose. Instead, he said, “You’re welcome. Anytime. Send your friends.”

He felt her stiffen in resentment. She rose and quietly left the room, shutting the door behind her.

You’re a prince, Charteris
, he told himself.
A goddamn prince
.

He pulled up the sheet around his body, settled bitterly into the bed. What did he care about her? Soon enough she would be gone for good, and with luck she’d take that troubling kid with her. He would be safely solitary again, with only his private ghosts and his dying dog and one old fortune-teller for company.

It was forty minutes past midnight in Branson.

Outside the motel office, the neon sign flickered fitfully. It was supposed to say “Pleasant Inn—Vacancies,” but several letters had burned out, so that instead it read “P easant Inn—Vacanc es.”

The motel was off the main highway, in a trashy lakeside section near the edge of town. It looked right, it felt right, and Drace had a sense of certainty so mystically strong his heart hammered with it.

Yes
, he thought.
Yes, yes, yes
.

“Yeah,” said the night clerk, nodding at the snapshot of Mimi in Raylene’s hand. “We got somebody like that. In unit ten.”

He pushed the register toward them. Immediately Drace recognized Mimi’s spiky, nervous handwriting, even though the name she’d signed was “Constance Caine” and not her own.

“You’re sure?” Raylene asked, still holding the picture out for the man’s inspection.

“I remember the frizzy hair.”

The clerk was a rummy-looking older man with a bad shave, a worse haircut, and nothing but a scar where his left ear should have been.

He was slightly wall-eyed, but his crooked gaze was no longer on the photo. He kept it hungrily fixed on the shadowy cleft of Raylene’s cleavage, which was just visible at the V-neck outline of her pink sweater.

Drace’s heart galloped in triumph, but he said nothing, he let Raylene handle it. She leaned forward a little, so the clerk could see farther down her sweater.

She touched the sleeve of his grimy shirt, and she had tears in her eyes, God love her.

“She’s our cousin,” she said in a choked, vulnerable little voice. “She’s not very stable, and if she stops taking her medication, well, she can get very depressed.”

She leaned farther toward him still, and Drace could see the old man wanted to climb right down her neckline and gobble her tits whole.

“She drinks,” Raylene confessed. “She goes off like this, and we worry that she’ll drink herself to
death
. That someday a maid in some place like this is going to unlock the door and find her dead.”

Raylene drew back her hands and pressed them together prayerlike to her chest, so that her breasts thrust
out on either side. “We don’t want to make any trouble for you, honest,” she said earnestly. “We don’t want to bring the law into it, either.”

She nodded at Drace. “My brother here is with the police himself.”

Drace flashed the old man the badge in its official wallet. It was a U.S. Air Force Security Police badge, and he had ordered both badge and wallet out of a mail-order catalog.

But the old man wasn’t nearly as interested in the badge as he was Raylene. He licked his dry lips. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

Raylene licked her lips, too. The tears rose, shimmering in her blue eyes, and her voice quavered. “We just want to keep it quiet, take her home. No scandal, no report. Her father’s a minister, you know?”

She took a deep breath. She kept one hand clenched between her breasts and put the other over the clerk’s gnarled hand resting on the counter.

“We’ve handled this before,” she said. “Just let us in. And let us take her home where she belongs. Please.”

“I can’t do that,” he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing.