Her voice was soft but direct when she spoke. 'Can I help you?'
Eve could not help but feel it was not a sincere offer. She held out the small card she still had in her hand. 'I'm looking for this person,' she said. 'Ms Lili Peel.'
Those lovely but somehow brittle green eyes went to the card. That's old.' She looked up at Eve again. 'It's out of date.'
'I know,' Eve replied. 'It's been in a shop window for the past two years.'
She noticed that the woman at the desk wore wide wristbands of small different-coloured beads on both wrists, the sleeves of the soft-knit top she wore only reaching her elbows.
'Are you Lili Peel?' Eve asked.
The green eyes hardened. 'I don't do psychic readings any more.'
Eve felt the disappointment drag at her. 'I'm willing to pay more than your usual fee,' she tried.
'No. I mean it. I don't do readings.' Lili Peel picked up the crystal necklace and resumed threading it as if Eve had already gone.
But Eve knew the blonde woman was still conscious of her; her hands shook a little as she drew the thread through its link. 'Ms Peel, I really need your help. Something is happening and I have nobody else to turn to.'
Still not looking up, Lili Peel said, 'Try the local weekend newspaper, you'll find small ads for spiritualists, clairvoyants, whatever you need.'
'This can't wait 'til the weekend. I have to do something now. Won't you at least listen to me and then decide?'
Lili laid the necklace down and regarded Eve, the hardness still there in her eyes, a lack of compassion that seemed so wrong for such a pretty girl.
'I'm sorry, but I can't do anything for you.'
'You're no longer psychic?' Eve only asked the question because she wanted at least to engage Lili Peel in conversation, take it past the stranger-on-stranger stage.
'You don't choose to be psychic,' Lili said, her voice softening only a little. 'Neither do you choose not to be.'
'But if you can help people…?' Eve let the question hang.
'It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes it does more harm than good. Please, I don't mean to be rude, but there really isn't anything I can assist you with.'
'Hear me out, that's all I ask. If you still can't help me—if you don't want to help me—then fine, I'll leave your shop and won't bother you again.' Tears blurred Eve's eyes and she tried to control the tremble in her voice. 'I'm so… I'm so desperate. Perhaps it will help me just to talk about it.'
She couldn't stop them. Eve had tried to stay in control, but the tears just came unbidden. She had put too much hope into something that might only have been a dream or illusion. She dug into her pocket for a handkerchief.
'I'm sorry,' she said, at least containing her sobs. 'I didn't mean to…'
Lili Peel still eyed her coolly, but said: 'There's a chair by the wall. Why don't you bring it over to the desk.'
•
Gabe didn't want to frighten Cally; he kept his tone light. 'Hey, how y'doing, Sparky?'
''Lo Daddy.' She went on positioning her little plastic people around the little plastic house. A yellow Bart Simpson was somewhere among them.
She seems calm enough, thought Gabe. But then, nothing seemed to faze Cally much. Surely he must have imagined the lights? Or it was a trick of the light, the sun shining through remaining raindrops on the window. But then, why had the lights disappeared almost as soon as he laid eyes on them?
He went over to his daughter and squatted by her. 'You having a good time there, honey? Is ol' Bart in trouble again?'
'He's bin good.'
Gabe watched her as she manoeuvred the teeny plastic people around the miniature house whose whole front wall was swung open.
'Who were you talking to, Cally?' he ventured cautiously. To these guys?' He motioned towards the plastic Lilliputian figures.
'Nowah.' The negative had two syllables, rising at the end as though she was impatient with his dumb question.
'Really? Oh, who then?'
She shrugged. 'My friends.'
'Your friends? The ones you make up?'
'Nowah.' Two impatient syllables again, now uttered with disinterest.
'Well, who then? I can't see anybody.'
'They've gone now. Gone away.'
'Who are they?'
'You know—the children.'
He studied her bowed head for a moment.
'Why can't I see them?' he asked.
She became even more impatient with him. ''Cos you can't, Daddy. I told you, they've gone away.'
'But why didn't I see them before they went, you know, when I came into the room?'
'I 'unno.'
Bart Simpson was becoming a regular pain. 'Tell me properly, Squirt. Why didn't I see the kids?'
''Cos they're a secret,' she answered, finally looking up at him.
'I think I saw the lights, those little floating lights. But they went away as soon as I came in. Is that what you mean, are the lights the children?'
'Children are jus' children, Daddy,' she explained as if he were the child and she the adult.
'Uh, do you see them a lot? The children, I mean.'
She shook her head.
'What d'you do when they come?'
'We play.'
He rose to his feet, knowing he was not going to get any more from her. What is it about this goddamn place? he asked himself. 'Okay, Sparky—' he began to say, but whirled towards the door when a great banging started up outside on the landing.
Cally stared after him in alarm as he rushed through the doorway.
28: CAM
'My son Cameron disappeared a year ago,' Eve began to tell Lili Peel. 'Almost a year ago'—she corrected herself. 'I'd taken Cam, as we always called him, and his sister, Cally—she was four years old then, a year younger than my son—I'd taken them to a local park. Our home is in London, but we're here in Devon while my husband conducts some business with a Devon-based company.' She didn't feel details were necessary at this stage, but the psychic asked a question.
'Where are you living while you're here?'
Eve dabbed at her eyes, the tears all but dried out now, while the misery lingered as always; there was no relief in tears for her.
'Near Hollow Bay. Do you know it?'
'I've visited once or twice.' Lili Peel didn't add that she had never liked the place, even though the harbour village was pretty enough. It was the atmosphere she didn't care for, the unsettling gloom that somehow shadowed the place. She supposed that, as a sensitive, she picked up vibes more easily than other 'normal' people. 'Two years ago I left my card in the shop there.'
'Yes. Of course you know Hollow Bay.' Eve crumpled the handkerchief into a ball in her fist. 'You have no Devon accent, though. You're not from the county.'
'No, I come from Surrey. I moved here seven years ago.' She'd answered curtly as if reluctant to talk about herself.
Lili Peel must have come to Devon in her early twenties—she could be no more than twenty-eight, twenty-nine.
'Have you always had the gift?' Eve nevertheless enquired.
'If you can call it that,' the psychic replied. 'I realized I was different, that I seemed to know things I shouldn't, from the age of seven. If my parents ever mislaid something—anything from a sewing needle to the car keys—I always knew where it was.' She said no more, expecting Eve to continue.