Sleep No More

by Greg Iles

  “When did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  “She called from Dallas six weeks later. I can’t even describe how I felt, the talks we had, but the bottom line was, I told her I couldn’t marry her. It would have been insane after all we’d been through. And she’d told me she was on the pill, for God’s sake, though I admit I was stupid to believe her.”

  “Take it easy, John.”

  “She agreed to have the abortion, but only if I would go out to Dallas and be with her. This will show you the real Mallory, Penn. She had no car out there, right? No way to get around, make arrangements. So what does she do? She sleeps with some poor college kid, then tells him he got her pregnant.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “God’s truth. She told me this herself. So this kid hauls her around the city, doing whatever she needs done. Then she tells him he’s finished, that her brother is coming into town to be with her during the procedure.”

  Penn took a Mont Blanc from a drawer and made a note on his desk pad. “I’m starting to understand your fear of her. Was that experience like the time in Memphis?”

  “No. It wasn’t corporate sterile with five doctors and fifty girls waiting. It was a little house with two nurses and one old doctor. They brought me into the examining room as soon as the procedure was over, and they left me there. Mallory’s lying on a table, crying and shivering. I held her hand, but she wouldn’t look at me. So I look to my right, and there’s this damn stainless-steel machine. And inside that machine is what’s left of our baby. I know it without anybody telling me. That’s where the vacuum hose hooks up. There’s the vent for the motor. It was the most unnatural feeling I’d ever had in my life. That metal machine was absolutely against nature, created in opposition to nature. I’m not religious or anything, but I felt like the hose that had sucked up that fetus could suck up the entire world, that the whole universe could be sucked into the black maw of that vacuum pump. And when I realized that thing had been inside Mallory two times…I started to understand her insanity. And I started to cry. The whole situation was beyond belief. I feel like an asshole telling it to you now.”

  Penn nodded. “Try to keep yourself in the present. Sum up the rest, if you can. From then until Mallory’s death.”

  “She never got over it. Any of it. Ever. And I never got free of her. She dated other people, but it was all an act. Even after she got married and had kids, she never stopped trying to contact me. I eventually had to get a restraining order. She still found ways to threaten me. I would walk out of a store when I thought she was two hundred miles away, and there she’d be, waiting for me, looking at me with this haunted face.”

  “What did she want from you?”

  “I think she never really gave up on us having a child together. But the way she put it, she just wanted to be together, any way that I would. She tried to use sex that way. ‘Let’s go somewhere. I know you want me. We can do it in the car.’ I was in San Francisco once for a meeting, and she turned up there. How the hell did she know I’d be there? She must have been paying detectives to tell her everything about my life. All the time.”

  “She may well have been. How much of this did you tell Lily?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “She knew Mallory was dangerous, though?”

  “Yes. I told her it was a Fatal Attraction kind of thing. Everybody thinks they’ve had a similar experience, so it made Lily take it seriously, but not too seriously. You know? I told her that if Mallory ever suddenly appeared at the house, or came around her anywhere, she should call the police and get the hell away from her.”

  Penn stretched his arms, then reached into a cooler and brought out two bottles of water. He handed one across the desk to Waters.

  “I know it took a lot out of you to tell me all this.”

  “It’s a relief to tell some of it, honestly.”

  Penn took a long sip of water, then set his bottle aside. “John, do you think it was the abortion that caused all Mallory’s problems? Or was it something from much farther back?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  “Remember when I told you she’d shown me the darkest corners of her personality? That’s not completely true. I don’t think I ever saw the darkest corner. There was something buried so deep in there I could never get to it. And I don’t think she could either. What it was…I don’t know.”

  “Sexual abuse, maybe?”

  Waters thought about it. “Maybe. Once, during a really bad spell, she told me her father had sexually abused her.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “Do you know what a ‘cutter’ is, Penn?”

  “You’re not talking about a surgeon?”

  “No. I’m talking about people who cut themselves in secret. Girls, mostly.”

  Penn’s eyes went wide. “You mean self-mutilators?”

  Waters nodded.

  “Caitlin told me about them. It’s somehow related to bulimia and anorexia, isn’t it?”

  “It can be. I know a lot about it now, but twenty years ago I knew nothing.”

  “Mallory cut herself?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know for a long time. Cutters cut places where they can see the blood but others can’t. But eventually I caught her. After that, she did it in front of me.”

  “Is self-mutilation caused by sexual abuse?”

  “It can be. The immediate pain of the cutting is used to distract the victim from chronic inner pain that she can’t escape. That could be sexual abuse. Mallory sometimes scratched and cut herself during sex. Sometimes she wanted me to do it.”

  Penn shook his head. “So, did you believe her when she told you she was sexually abused?”

  “No. I’m not sure why. I just…didn’t feel in my gut that it was true. That could be male stupidity, of course.”

  “If her real problem wasn’t sexual abuse, then what?”

  “I think Mallory had undiagnosed clinical depression. And no one really knows what causes that. I had a class under Willie Morris at Ole Miss. He had William Styron speak to our class. I read Lie Down in Darkness for that, and I remember thinking Mallory was a bit like Peyton Loftis, when she went mad in New York. Peyton wound up killing herself, I think.”

  Penn nodded. “She did.”

  “Styron himself was later a victim of suicidal depression, though he managed not to kill himself. I think Mallory may have been bipolar. Manic depressive. Not like Styron or my wife, who both had major depressive disorder. Nowadays this stuff is no big deal. I mean, half the people we know are on Zoloft or Paxil. There are ninth-grade girls taking it out at St. Stephens, for Christ’s sake. But back in 1980, there was still a heavy stigma. And you knew the Candler family. You think they’d send their little princess to a shrink?”

  “Not in a million years,” Penn agreed.

  “I feel like I’ve told you nothing but bad things about Mallory.”

  “I remember the good things,” Penn assured him. “What she did for the Children’s Hospital when she was Miss Mississippi. And the Protestant Home, and the Women’s Shelter. I remember when her father tried to use her crown to get himself reelected to the legislature. Mallory wouldn’t have any of it. Ben Candler damn near disowned her over that. I also know that her mother’s a first-class bitch hiding behind a smiley face she paints on for the world. It’s a miracle Mallory turned out as well as she did.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Penn said, getting to his feet. “I’m tired of being under a roof.”

  Waters stood too. His muscles felt tight, his joints creaky, and he was glad to follow Penn through the door to the backyard. Washington Street was one of Natchez’s most beautiful thoroughfares, and Penn’s yard was a showplace. There were dogwood and crape myrtle trees, azaleas, rafts of ivy, and perfect circles of monkey grass around the trees. Oddly, there was no division of any kind between Penn’s backyard and the one next door. Together they formed a huge garden wit
h several play areas, and it seemed as though Penn and his neighbor had collaborated to make a fantasyland for children.

  “Who lives over there?” Waters asked, pointing at the three-story town house next door.

  “That’s Caitlin’s house. I had to live somewhere, so I picked the most convenient place.”

  Waters started to smile but didn’t. Caitlin Masters was not only Penn’s girlfriend, but also the publisher of the local newspaper.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Penn said. “Don’t worry. Caitlin and I won’t be exchanging information. Not from me to her, at any rate. We had to deal with this situation on the Del Payton case. It wasn’t a problem.”

  “You didn’t have to say that. But thanks.”

  Penn walked over to a flower bed, knelt, and started pulling up weeds.

  “So,” Waters said, “are you going to tell me about this theory you mentioned?”

  Penn continued to pull weeds. “Do you know why I asked for all the details about you and Mallory?”

  “No.”

  “I wanted to know why you were so susceptible to the things Eve told you.”

  “And now you know?”

  “Yes. I have a lot of thoughts about you and Mallory, actually, but we’ll save those for another time. The bottom line is that Eve didn’t have to try very hard to resurrect Mallory Candler for you, because for you, Mallory never died.”

  Waters didn’t know what to say.

  “Oscar Wilde was firmly convinced that men are the more sentimental sex, and I think he was right. Don’t feel bad. It would probably be easy to do something like this to me, if Lynne Merrill had been murdered ten years ago.”

  “Something like what?”

  Penn looked up from his work like a doctor about to give a terminal diagnosis. “John, someone is trying to drive you crazy. Probably someone very close to you.”

  “What?”

  “They may even be trying to frame you for murder. I saw something like this in Houston once. A man married a woman for her money. Not surprisingly, he grew to hate her. He didn’t think he could murder her and get away with her money, so he tried to convince her family that she was insane. And it almost worked.”

  “Who would want to drive me crazy?”

  Penn shrugged. “That shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Who would benefit by your being declared incompetent?”

  An image of Cole Smith came into Waters’s mind.

  “I know that’s an unpleasant line of thought, but you’re in real danger. We have to go to the wall on this. We have to ask everything of everyone. Who’s in a position to blackmail you? Besides Eve Sumner, I mean, since she’s dead. Would anyone benefit if you were to go to prison for murder? And finally, does anyone hate you enough to destroy you simply for revenge?”

  “Jesus.”

  Penn went back to pulling his weeds. “I think we both know who we’re talking about. But let’s follow the logic before we name names. Who could possibly know all the facts that Eve used to convince you she was Mallory?”

  “No one. I’ve been thinking about that for three weeks.”

  “Could two people have pooled what they knew and put together the information Eve had?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about a diary?”

  “What?”

  “Did Mallory keep a diary? A journal? Something like that?”

  “My God,” Waters thought aloud. “She did keep a diary. She had several, going way back. After the craziness started, I don’t remember seeing them as much. But she could have been writing a lot of that stuff down.”

  “That may be our answer. You need to find out who has those diaries. I’d start with Mallory’s mother.”

  “She won’t talk to me. Certainly not about that.”

  “I might be able to help with that.” Penn yanked out a stubborn weed and tossed it on the ground. “Now, let’s get to the ugly stuff. I hear your partner’s in financial trouble.”

  Waters nodded. “That’s what I hear too.”

  “But not from Cole?”

  “He hasn’t exactly been forthcoming.” Waters told Penn about the pumping unit Cole had apparently sold without permission.

  “You’ve got real problems, John.” Penn looked up and smiled. “But they’re worldly problems, okay? Not supernatural ones. That ought to make you feel a little better.”

  Waters felt light-headed. “It does, actually.”

  “Let’s go back to Eve for a second. The way you told it to me, you were unconscious when she died.”

  “As best I can remember.”

  “It’s hard to imagine Cole slipping in and killing her to frame his best friend.”

  “It is.”

  “But he might not be above paying someone to kill Eve, and then framing you. We don’t know what problems he has. How much danger he’s in. I’ve seen things done between lifelong friends that you wouldn’t believe. There is literally no depth to which human beings cannot sink.”

  Waters crouched beside Penn and spoke softly. “Cole offered to give me an alibi for the time of the murder.”

  Penn’s head snapped toward him. “Did you ask him to do that?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Okay. You told me you didn’t use a condom with Eve that night, right?”

  “No.”

  Penn expelled a lungful of air, then stood and wiped his hands on his pants. “You screwed two people when you did that, John. Eve and yourself. Only you’re going to stay screwed. If they put you in that hotel room using DNA, it’ll take the archangel Gabriel to keep the D.A. from nailing you. They could say anything. Eve seduced you, then tried to blackmail you, and you killed her. Or you promised to leave your wife and then reneged. Eve threatened to tell, and you killed her. The scenarios are endless.”

  Waters got to his feet. “You’re a real optimist, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a lawyer. You have two choices. One: Turn yourself in to the authorities, which I don’t recommend at this juncture.”

  Waters closed his eyes and sighed with relief.

  “Two: Find out who’s trying to turn your life inside out, and nail them before they—or the police—nail you.”

  Penn’s theory, combined with the prospect of action, gave Waters his first real hope since waking up next to Eve’s corpse. “How would you start?”

  “Confront Cole about the pumping unit. Be aggressive. See how he reacts. I’ll do what I can to find out about Mallory’s diaries. We’ll talk again tonight.”

  “What about Tom Jackson? Should I just avoid him? I have no idea what he’s going to ask me.”

  “You went to school with Tom. What do you think about him?”

  “The old cliché. Tough but fair. He’d hate to bust me for murder, but he’d do it.”

  “Do you have your cell phone with you?”

  Waters nodded.

  “Call him right now. If he asks something you’re not sure how to answer, tell him you’re out in the county checking a well, and you’re getting a dropped signal. You’ll call him back when you get in.”

  Penn’s deviousness brought a smile to Waters’s face. He took his phone from his pocket, called the police department, identified himself, and asked for Detective Jackson. After about a minute, Jackson came on the line, his voice deep and seemingly casual.

  “Thanks for calling, John.”

  “Glad to, Tom. What’s up?”

  “I’m running down some leads on this Eve Sumner thing. She was a pretty complicated lady, I’m finding out. Anyway, I was down at her office, and they told me you stormed in there a couple of weeks ago and read her the riot act. What was that about?”

  Waters was about to evade the question when Eve’s own lie came back to him. “She was trying to sell my house out from under me. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but she was kind of a pushy lady. She called me at the office and said she’d told some couple they could look through our house, when she knew it wasn’t for sale. That pissed
me off.”

  “I can see how it would,” Jackson said. “She pissed off a lot of people doing that kind of thing. Anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “No. You guys got any suspects?”

  A long silence. “We’re working it hard. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  Waters felt himself sweating. “Well, good luck, Tom. Call me if I can do anything else for you.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  As Waters hung up, Penn said, “You handled that smoothly. Maybe a little too smoothly.”

  “Shit, what was I supposed to say?”

  “I’m just kidding. Hey, remember you told me you felt like the senator in The Godfather Part II? He went to bed with a laughing girl and woke up with a dead whore?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The senator didn’t kill that girl. He was framed by the Corleones, who later gave him his alibi.”

  Waters felt a chill as he thought again of Cole. “You’re right. I didn’t think it through that far.”

  “It’s hard to think when you believe you just committed murder.”

  Waters nodded.

  Penn brushed off his hands. “It’s time to start thinking again, paisan.”

  chapter 13

  Driving south on Highway 61, Waters was nearly to the Saragossa Country Club when his cell phone rang. What would be a normal occurrence for most people sent a spasm of shock along his body. Eve might be dead, but the sound of his cell phone instantly resurrected her. He checked the LCD, half expecting it to read PAY PHONE, but instead he saw his wife’s cell phone number.