Hear No Evil by Bethany Campbell Page A

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. “Whereare 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.
    Gingerly, playing for time, she turned over the next card, the eight of swords, which augured the unforeseen.
    “Why, your luck just goes stretching on and on,” Eden said with a false air of confidence. “You’re talking to the right person. In fact, I believe the spirits have led you to me, so I can be your friend.”
    She held her breath. The woman did not answer.
    “You can trust me,” Eden said. “Please. Trust me.”
    A long silence. Eden thought of the child sleeping in the living room, and her heartbeat rocked in her ribs.
    Eden leaned her elbow on the table and cradled her brow in her hand. She closed her eyes against the evil little ache being born in her forehead. Still the woman did not answer.
    “Are you in trouble?” Eden asked. “Tell me. I’ll help you.”
    “You already have. Th-thank you.” A soft click tickled Eden’s ear. The woman had hung up.
    Troubled, Eden stared at the file card and reread what Jessie had written. A suspicion was forming in her mind, but it was too terrible to utter, to put even into silent words.
    Mechanically she started to add her own note to the bottom of the card, but the phone rang again.
Double
damn!
Eden thought and threw down the pen in frustration.
    She straightened her back, cleared her throat, and got into character again. She lifted the receiver and said, “Sister Jessie, God’s gifted seer.”
    She