by Greg Iles
“Political career? Shit, he was only a state representative.”
“Ben Candler took that very seriously, as you know.”
“Oh, do I. He liked to give you the impression that if the country went to DEF CON Three, he would be making the critical decisions about launching nuclear missiles.”
“You got it. And he held that job for six terms.”
“Old Ben knew how to kiss ass.”
“Yes, he did.”
“I’ll tell you this,” Waters said. “When I visited Mallory’s grave after the soccer game, I noticed two things I didn’t tell you. They didn’t seem important then. Her father is buried next to her. He has a small, cheap gravestone. And it was defaced, like someone had taken a crowbar to it.”
“Ben Candler only died about a year ago,” Penn said. “So Mallory couldn’t have defaced the stone. It could be his wife, I suppose. Or someone else he sexually harassed.”
Waters nodded, but that wasn’t what he was thinking. “I’ll tell you something else. It stunk by his grave.”
“What do you mean, stunk? Like what?”
“Urine. Like an animal came there every day and pissed on his grave.”
Penn looked incredulous. “I can’t see prim old Margaret Candler driving to the cemetery to piss on her husband’s grave every day.” He shook his head and laughed. “Maybe once a week, though.”
“Mallory would,” Waters said quietly.
“Mallory would what?”
“Go there every day and piss on his grave. She’d do it rain or shine for ten years. That’s the way she was.”
“Was,” Penn echoed. “That’s the operative word there, John. Focus on the present, all right?”
“Something’s been bothering me, Penn.”
“Jesus. Are you starting with the supernatural stuff again?”
“You tell me. One of the things that convinced me Eve was really Mallory was her scars. I didn’t tell you that before for fear you’d think I was crazy. Eve Sumner had cutting scars beneath her watch, and also on her inner thighs, just the way Mallory used to. And they weren’t all new. She’d been doing it for a long time.”
Penn was staring at him with worry in his eyes.
“And the night she died,” Waters went on, “she asked me to cut her during sex. She was really upset, and she wanted to be cut, just like Mallory did sometimes.”
Penn took hold of his wrist. “John, listen to me. They got those details from Mallory’s diaries. They had to.”
“You’re telling me Eve Sumner mutilated herself to convince me she was Mallory? And for a long period of time? Do you really think that’s possible?”
“People are quite capable of maiming themselves in pursuit of a goal, John. In the nineteen-fifties, inmates at Angola Prison slashed their Achilles tendons to draw attention to their plight. They permanently crippled themselves. What’s a few cuts on the surface of the skin compared to the money involved in this case? And we know from the break-in at the Candler house that they were planning this scam for at least a year.”
Waters pondered this in silence. He wanted to believe Penn, but his memory of Eve’s desolate face as she begged him to cut her was too vivid to call a lie.
“Stick to realities,” Penn urged him. “Things still look good for you. If the police had something concrete, they would already have brought you in for questioning. If they do call about questioning you, refer them to me. I’ll try to arrange for it to take place in a law office downtown. I don’t have one, but I can borrow a friend’s.” He squeezed Waters’s knee. “You just keep cool.”
Waters nodded.
“Get some sleep if you can. Play with your kid. Bring her over to play with Annie.”
“I will.”
He shook hands with Penn and got out. The owner of the music store was standing in the display window, looking right at him. As Penn’s Audi pulled away, Waters waved, then got into the Land Cruiser and drove out of the lot. Home was only a few hundred yards away, but as he neared it, he felt suddenly sure that he would find the police waiting when he arrived. He closed his eyes and thanked God that Annelise was spending the night away from home, and would not have to see him led away in handcuffs.
The driveway was empty.
The house felt empty too. Without Ana clattering around and Rose clanking utensils in the kitchen, Linton Hill seemed like a museum.
“Lily?” he called.
No answer.
He went into the den and sat on the sofa. For once, the remote control was actually on the table beside him. He switched on the TV and clicked up to CNN. The local news out of Jackson always had murders to report, and he didn’t want to see anything about murder. The images on CNN weren’t much better, though, war casualties overseas. Wherever you went, death was news.
“I thought I heard you come in.”
Waters looked over his shoulder, and his mouth fell open. The woman standing in the doorway was his wife, but she looked as though she had stepped out of a time machine. Her shoulder-length blond hair had vanished. Now cut boyishly short, with only a few locks curling around the neck, it looked the way it had when Lily first moved back to Natchez, and was still in her athletic phase. Tight slacks, drop earrings, and a deep V-neck blouse made the transformation complete.
“Wow,” he said. “You cut your hair.”
She smiled. “I had them lighten it a bit too.”
“You look ten years younger.”
“Was I that bad? You look like you’re in shock.”
“Did you run again?”
Lily walked into the room and spun before him like a runway model. “Actually I slept most of the day. I was really tired. But after going to the salon, I felt better. What about you? You look exhausted.”
“Just worried,” he said, searching for some excuse. “The EPA won’t tell us a damn thing.”
“Screw the EPA.” Lily smiled again. “As soon as I start rubbing your shoulders, you’re going to forget all about those tree-hugging fascists.”
Waters couldn’t believe his ears. Lily hadn’t sounded this carefree in ages. She was wearing a little eyeliner and shadow too, he noticed. She hadn’t overdone it, but there was enough to give her an air of mystery.
She walked behind the sofa and said, “Turn off the news and put on some satellite music. Atmospheres or something.”
Waters fiddled with the remote, and soon the soothing sounds of a well-played acoustic guitar filled the room.
Lily laid her hands on his shoulders and began a soothing massage. She started with gentle pressure, but before long her fingers were digging into the muscle fibers of his neck, working out the tension that had been building there ever since he left Eve lying dead in the Eola Hotel.
“God, that feels good.”
“Don’t think,” she said. “Clear your mind.”
Her command was impossible to obey, but he tried. Lily thoroughly massaged his neck and scalp, then moved to his face. She worked the tension out of muscles he never knew he had: below his eyes, over the joint of his jawbone, below his nose, around his mouth. He jumped when her fingers slid into his mouth and began to rub his gums and upper palate, but it felt so good that he laid his head back and gave himself to it. When Lily flattened the pad of her thumb against his back teeth and pushed down, the sensation was amazing.
“Let go, baby,” she murmured. “Don’t fight it.”
The sensuality of her fingers inside his mouth aroused him. After a couple of minutes, she removed her wet fingers and slid them down into his shirt. His nipples constricted at her touch. She played there for a few moments, then leaned over him and slid both hands down to his lap.
“God, Lily….”
“Shhh.”
She unbuttoned his trousers and slid her hands inside, working on him with shocking directness. Then she climbed over the back of the couch and knelt before him.
“Close your eyes.”
He didn’t want to, but he obeyed. What followed was
a selfless application of attention so focused that it pointed up everything Lily had neglected to do for the past four years. Longer, really. Even before losing the baby, this act for Lily had always been a brief stage of foreplay. She would touch and kiss him there, but it was never an end in and of itself, simply a prelude to intercourse. She didn’t seem to understand that what made the act so arousing was the complete focus of effort where it was most needed, with every movement assuring him that contact would never be broken or even lessened in intensity unless it was to heighten his reaction and magnify his final release. But by her actions now, Lily made it clear that she had understood this all along. Had it not felt so wonderful, Waters would have brooded over the fact that his wife had possessed this knowledge and ability all along, yet had not used it.
“Jesus,” he gasped.
She took his right hand in one of hers and squeezed, but she did not break contact.
“Lily, I can’t hold back….”
Suddenly he felt nothing but air on his wet skin.
“Yes, you can.”
She pulled him to his feet and ran back toward the master bedroom, pulling him behind her. “I’m going in the bathroom for a sec,” she said. “Get in bed and wait for me.”
She disappeared behind the bathroom door, leaving him alone in the room where he had known only frustration in the past. He removed his shirt and pants and dropped them to the floor. Lily would normally make a point of picking them up and hanging them in the closet when she came out of the bathroom, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t even notice today, or at least would let it go if she did.
He pulled back the bedcovers and started to get beneath them, but something held him back. He wanted to know what she was doing in the bathroom. Walking up to the half-open door, he leaned slowly to his left.
Lily was standing naked before her mirror, one breast in each hand, as though testing their weight. She smiled to herself, then ran her hands down to her hips, where a pink blemish marred the white skin over her right hipbone. Taking some makeup from a blue container by the sink, she rubbed a bit on her finger and covered the blemish. Then she surveyed herself again, turning her back to the mirror and looking over her shoulder.
Fascinated by this glimpse of his wife alone with her vanity—something he hadn’t seen for far too long—Waters took a half-step backward so that she wouldn’t catch sight of him. As he watched, she turned to face the mirror again, looking quite satisfied with what she saw. He was about to tiptoe back to the bed when Lily raised her right hand to her neck and entwined one of the newly chopped locks around her forefinger and began to twist it into a tight curl.
His skin rippled from his toes to his scalp, and his scrotum withdrew as fear flushed adrenaline into his system. There was hardly enough hair to twist, but Lily twisted it anyway, a childlike look of rapture on her face. She has no idea she’s doing that, he realized. He wanted to run from the room, but that was crazy. How would he explain it? He hurried back to the bed and slid under the covers, a film of sweat already covering his skin. He wanted to wipe the image of Lily twisting that curl from his mind, but he knew he would remember it on his deathbed. Worse, a horrifying movie began to screen itself in fast motion behind his eyes. He saw Eve flailing under him that last night, screaming at the top of her lungs, then himself waking to find her dead, fleeing the hotel like a craven killer. Then he was sitting in his office the following day, trying to puzzle out his strange disorientation, his losses of hours, the long naps. When Sybil came in with coffee, her face bled into Lily’s, red and blotchy from her shattering orgasm, the first in so long….
“Are you ready?” Lily asked, stepping naked from the bathroom.
Waters was so far from ready that he doubted he could perform.
“Last night made me remember what I’ve been missing,” she said, pulling back the covers and sliding in beside him. “I hope you’ve got a lot of stamina tonight.”
Struggling to control his wild thoughts, he tried to keep Penn’s reassurances in his mind. But all Penn’s logic weighed as nothing against the power of his own instinct.
“What’s wrong?” Lily asked, touching him beneath the covers. “A minute ago you were ready to burst.”
“I don’t know,” he said, trying not to recoil from her touch.
Lily looked at him with concern, then kissed his cheek. “Don’t you worry, baby. Mama knows how to make it all better.” She smiled and vanished beneath the covers.
When her lips touched him, his stomach heaved, and despite her efforts he remained soft. Stop! he told himself. This is what you’ve wanted for four years. Yet it wasn’t. Why it wasn’t was another question altogether. The answer his autonomic nervous system was giving him was the kind of thing they sent you to the state hospital at Whitfield for.
Desperate not to reveal his feelings, he shut down his emotions and posed a thought experiment. If I were to accept everything Eve told me as the truth, what conclusion could I draw from the way she died and all that’s happened since? The logic came as easily as stacking blocks did to a toddler. One: Mallory’s soul survived the death of her body. Two: Mallory’s goal is to be with me forever, to live the life we left unlived twenty years ago. One way to accomplish that would be to tempt me to leave my wife for “Eve Sumner.” But what if Mallory decided I would never leave Lily and Annelise for Eve? Then the most logical strategy would be for Mallory to enter Lily and remain inside her forever. And to do that, she would have to move through me first….
As Lily stroked and kissed him beneath the covers, he flashed onto Eve standing nude on the balcony of the Eola. The lightning strobed, briefly illuminating her face, and in that moment he saw total confusion in her eyes, the confusion of an amnesiac or a schizophrenic. Later, in the throes of sexual ecstasy, Eve had begun to scream and flail her arms as if in terror. He saw it much more clearly now than he had at the time, and the possible implications of what he had witnessed in those penultimate moments hit him with a wave of nausea. Had the real Eve Sumner—the “sleeping” Eve—suddenly awakened to the reality of being raped by a man she did not know? Had she literally come to her senses with a total stranger thrashing inside her? Waters shuddered with horror.
He heard a soft plop, then Lily’s voice. “Stop thinking,” she said. “You have to help a little.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
As she went back to her work, he thought, I saw Eve freak out, then I lost consciousness. When I woke up, she was dead. I was the only one in the room. My hands strangled her. But…
“That’s it,” Lily said, squeezing him forcefully.
Waters felt as though a steel band had been removed from his chest. Penn would say he was crazy for thinking this way, but for the first time, he saw a real possibility that he had not killed Eve—
“Now we’re in business,” Lily said, sliding quickly up his chest and climbing astride him. “You just stay like that, and I’ll do all the work.”
Looking up into her eyes, Waters saw a combination of emotions he had never before seen in his wife’s face: pride, triumph, lust, greed. The woman above him now knew exactly what she wanted, and she would do anything to get it. Right now she wanted sexual pleasure. As she began to move, flexing her abdominal muscles with perfect control, he thought, What will she want tomorrow?
Waters lay in the dark with his back to Lily. He was mentally alert but physically spent. Lily had been sleeping for the past hour; he knew by her snoring. For a while he’d feared she didn’t intend to sleep at all. Once aroused to orgasm, she had remained in a heightened state in which any additional stimulation brought yet another climax. Waters survived the first hour without reaching release himself, but when he finally did and thought himself done, Lily went feverishly back to work on him. She used her lips and fingers with ruthless assurance, invading his most intimate spaces with techniques she had not picked up by reading some Cosmo article in a grocery checkout line. Time blurred, and he found himself in
a disturbing dimension where pleasure and pain merged into something beyond both. These sensations were not new to him. He had felt them only days ago, with Eve. And before that…twenty years ago. The effort of concealing his fear while performing sexually left him a quivering wreck, and he felt blessed relief when Lily finally collapsed onto her pillow.
Now, lying in darkness, he began to doubt his sanity. Paranoia might be the subject of endless jokes, but it was a dangerous condition. Once tuned to threatening scenarios, the paranoid mind made ominous connections between patently unrelated events. He’d seen it a thousand times in Mallory. Was the same force now at work in him? Were the fears that had gripped his mind for the past two hours merely fallout from the shock of killing Eve? Were—
Waters went rigid in the bed.
Lily had stopped snoring. He listened for breathing but heard nothing. How could there be no sound? She had to breathe. He listened harder, and the hairs on his back and neck rose to prickly stiffness. She’s watching me, he thought. He felt the pressure of her gaze upon his back like the beam of a laser. He tried to prepare himself for her touch, for the sound of her voice. What are you thinking, Johnny? Or would she go further? I know what you’re thinking…
But she couldn’t know. People couldn’t read other people’s minds. And souls could not move between bodies. Waters didn’t even believe in souls, when it came right down to it. He believed in experience. Of course, part of his experience was waking in the dark to find Mallory staring at him with the lidless gaze of a reptile. The same thing had happened with Eve. If he turned over now and found Lily staring at him like that, he might start screaming—
Turn over, he told himself. You’re not some scared kid.
He steeled himself against the sight of a nightmare made real, then rolled over and looked into Lily’s face.
Her eyes were closed.
Her mouth was open, her head cocked in the mindless gape of sleep. As the fear drained out of him, she began to snore again. Lily was no hyperaware Fury awaiting her moment to strike, but an exhausted wife resting from exertions and ecstasies she had too long denied herself.
