Hear No Evil by Bethany Campbell Page B

stared at the crystal ball, which seemed to mock her, telling her she was not a seer at all.
    The woman in the motel room took a drag from her cigarette and ran her hand through the dark tangle of her hair. She put the tattered scrap of newsprint on the night table beside her tickets, and her eyes blurred with tears.
    I shouldn’t have called
, she thought, lowering her head. She wiped her wet eyes with the back of her hand.
I had to call. I shouldn’t have called. Oh, shit
.
    She exhaled and raised her eyes, watching the blue smoke rise upward, disperse, fade like a ghost.
    Like me
, she thought.
Like me
.
    She was registered in the motel room as Constance Caine, a name she’d made up when she was a small girl. It was the name she’d meant to take when she grew up to be a famous country-and-western singer. The beautiful and talented Miss Constance Caine and her fabulous voice.
    Now her voice was shot to hell, and Constance was just a name like any of the others she’d used over the years—Christ, she couldn’t even remember them all. What did it matter, anyway? It was almost over.
    She had the bottle of wine and a carton of cigarettes, and she’d bought cheap tickets to nearly every show in town. She was a real Rhinestone Cowgirl, all right. And this was it, her star-spangled rodeo.
    She turned her gaze listlessly to the television screen.Since yesterday the Cable News Network had been running the explosion of Nassau-Air Flight 217. Every hour they reran the story. It was starting again now.
    The explosion was “mysterious,” the news kept saying, its cause not yet known. All thirteen people aboard had died, including the pilot and copilot.
    She sat hunched on the edge of the bed, watching the screen as if hypnotized. She was stunned and sickened, and she felt impaled by guilt, as if it were a great hook and she were a worm twisting on it.
    Drace, the fucker, had succeeded. He’d really done it. The bombing had really happened, there was a body count, and it was thirteen, surely a terrible omen. She was done now, no way out.
    The last report said the FBI had been called in to help investigate the explosion—my God, the FBI, my God, my God, my God.
    She choked back a small, angry sob. Her eyes were red with weeping.
    Numbly she rose and unscrewed the cap of the second bottle of cheap wine she had bought. She knew she was never supposed to drink again, but what the hell difference did it make? She’d sleep it off, then hit the bricks and take in a show, come back and get really blind, blackout drunk.
    Half a dozen candy bars lay strewn along the top of the dresser. She hadn’t touched them since she’d bought them, but now she picked up a Hershey’s bar. She had not eaten since yesterday.
    She went back to the bed and poured the wine into a plastic water glass, peeled the silver foil from the candy bar.
    She took a long sip of the wine, then another. It did not help, it did not ease her. She thought of the thirteenpeople dead in Miami.
What have we gotten into? How did it happen? How?
    The fear had gnawed at her for weeks. It had eaten at her waking thoughts, it had diseased her dreams.
What have we gotten into? And how, in God’s name, do we get out?
    It would take a miracle to free them, she had thought.
    And the miracle had come, at least in part. It had been revealed to her through a humble and unexpected means—the small ad in the back of a supermarket tabloid.
    She didn’t even know who had bought the tabloid or why; Drace usually frowned on such trash. “The media,” he was always saying, “is the new opiate of the masses.”
    She had been reading it, sitting alone in the kitchen of the farmhouse, and the men had been out playing in the quarry with their everlasting explosives. The sun had been shining through the small window. Dust motes had danced in the air.
    Then she saw the ad. It said:
    YOUR PERSONAL PSYCHIC ! The real thing! Sister Jessie Buddress, God’s Gifted Seer and Healer. Clairvoyant,