Free Hear No Evil by Bethany Campbell

song,” she said. “It keeps us safe. La, la, la.”
    And then she would say no more.

FIVE

    G RUDGINGLY , E DEN WENT TO PLUG IN THE PSYCHIC phone line. The office was new to her, but, with a stab of remembrance, she saw objects familiar to her from childhood.
    Jessie’s desk was cluttered with statuettes and figurines and occult paraphernalia, including the crystal ball resting on the back of a bronze tortoise. The small kachina doll with a bear mask stood next to the aloof-faced Chinese goddess made of white porcelain.
    Eden shook her head at the confusion of fetishes and talismans and charms. She reconnected the phone, then found she was trying to spank her hands clean, as if she’d handled something dirty.
    But only seconds after the phone was connected, it rang. Eden flinched. It rang again. She sat at the big deskand glowered at the crystal ball, glared at the tarot cards. She picked up the receiver.
    “Sister Jessie,” she intoned in a voice as oracular as Jessie’s. “God’s gifted seer.”
I feel like God’s ungifted jackass
, she thought.
He ought to strike me dead
.
    But she knew Jessie’s routine. She set her jaw and reached for the box that held the file cards on clients. The box was carved with stars and suns and moons and comets.
    “Have we talked before?” Eden asked.
    “No,” a woman said timorously. “I never made a call like this before. What do I do?”
    “First, give me your birthday,” Eden said in Jessie’s deep voice. “Law says I can’t talk to you ’less you’re at least eighteen.”
    The woman seemed hesitant. “M-May second, 1956.”
    Eden wrote the date down on a fresh note card. “Ah, a Taurus,” she said. “This is a year of change for Taureans. Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you your lucky number. Tell me and spell it.”
    “Lily,” the woman said with a swallow. “Lillian Marlowe.” She spelled it.
    Eden wrote the name on the note card, counted the letters, and did a simple calculation. “Your lucky number is four,” she said with an air of pronouncement. “Use it wisely. Now, what’s your first question for Sister Jessie?”
    “I—I want a lottery number,” said Lillian Marlowe. “I need a winning number. I need it bad.”
    Eden’s heart sank. She hated questions about gambling in general and the lottery in particular. But she said, “All right. How many digits you got to have in that number?”
    “Four,” the woman said firmly. “I need four.”
    “Hmmm,” Eden answered, making the sound vibrate like a mantra. “All right. But you got to help, or it won’t work. I want you to concentrate on winning that money. You
visualize
winning it. See that money with your spiritual eye and touch it with your spiritual hand. Are you ready?”
    “I—I’ve never done this before,” the woman said.
    “Squeeze shut your eyes and call forth a vision of that nice, green money,” Eden ordered. “Can you see it?”
    A moment of uncomfortable silence stretched between them. Then, with awe in her voice, the woman said, “Why, I can! I see it sitting all around me in pretty stacks …”
    “Good. Now I’m going into a trance, and I’ll read your numeric aura.”
    Eden took up a tiny mallet and struck a silvery set of Indian chimes that hung beside the phone. They jingled and jangled with a sweet, eerie otherworldliness. In the meantime, Eden racked her head for a number, any number.
    As the fairylike resonance of the chimes died, she decided, rather desperately, to opt for the first four numbers of Jessie’s zip code.
    “I’m seeing it,” she said importantly. “Seven-two-seven-six. I’m getting that very clearly. Write it down: seven-two-seven-six.”
    “Oh, thank you, Sister, thank you,” the woman said excitedly. “You don’t know how bad I got to have this money—my son needs an operation.”
    Eden’s heart guiltily shriveled to the size of a raisin. She was helping this woman waste her money when medical help was needed? “An