by Greg Iles
“Unless my instincts are wrong, Tom Jackson’s going to arrest you after this visit.”
“But—”
“He doesn’t have a choice, John. Don’t worry. If it happens, I’ll get bail set as fast as is humanly possible. Now get in there.”
Waters shook his lawyer’s hand, opened the door, then froze.
Annelise was sitting on the edge of Lily’s bed, playing with the IV tube running into her arm. Looking around for an explanation, he saw Lily’s mother sitting on the foldout chair against the wall. Evelyn did not look glad to see him.
“Hello?” said Waters.
Lily turned her head toward him, then smiled faintly. Both orbits of her eyes were badly bruised, and her face was abraded near the chin. A splint with pins immobilized her left wrist, which had pins in the bones.
“Daddy!” Ana cried. “Mama’s car fell off the bridge!”
“I know! Your mama’s tough, isn’t she?”
Ana laughed and looked at her mother with pride. With his heart still pounding, he walked to the bed and hugged his daughter, then looked deep into his wife’s eyes.
“They want to put Mom on TV!” Annelise said.
Lily groaned. “I don’t want to be on TV looking like this.”
Waters lifted Ana off the bed, set her on the floor, then knelt before her. “Honey, I need to talk to Mama alone for a minute.”
Ana’s face seemed to go flat. “How come?”
“We have to have a grown-up talk. It’ll just be a minute.”
“But how come? No fair!” Ana was on the verge of tears.
He looked over at his mother-in-law. “Would you take her out for a minute, please?”
Evelyn looked to Lily, who nodded. Glaring at him, Evelyn got up and led Annelise out.
Waters hesitated before rising. He was almost afraid to look Lily in the face with no one else nearby. But when he stood and looked down at her, he saw the same exhausted face he had seen moments ago, the face of the woman he’d married. He felt relief until he remembered Mallory’s tearful performance outside Linton Hill on the day she had possessed Lily. Mallory could easily fool him. She could fool anyone.
He thought of asking Lily how she felt, but the question seemed silly. Instead, he dropped all pretense and asked the question foremost in his mind.
“Who are you?”
Lily looked up at him without blinking. “I’m me.”
“Are you?”
She nodded, then touched his hand. “I went to see Cole, John.”
“In the Stardust Motel?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She looked toward the window and the indifferent sky. “I thought about killing her. You know who I mean.”
“Mallory…But you didn’t. Cole’s downstairs.”
Lily didn’t say anything.
Waters’s throat knotted. “What happened then?”
“We had sex.”
Fear coiled in his belly. “Did he rape you?”
She looked back at him, her eyes free of deceit. “No. I gave myself to him. And Mallory came into me.”
Waters shut his mind against the reality of what had been required for this transition to occur. “Is she inside you now?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Who am I talking to now?”
She squeezed his hand. “I told you. Me. Lily.”
“Where’s Mallory?”
“Submerged. That’s how I think of it. Somewhere under the water of my consciousness.”
He shook his head, trying to follow her meaning. “What happened at the bridge?”
“I did that on purpose, John.” Her eyes fixed his with a startling intensity. “I drove the car off the bridge.”
He could not believe this. “You tried to commit suicide?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought it was the only way I could stop her. The only way I could save you and Annelise.”
“Lily—”
“When it happened I thought it was spontaneous, but I realize now that I’d meant to do it all along. Kill myself, and Mallory with me.”
“You mean you knew you were going to kill yourself before you ever went to see Cole?”
“Yes and no. I knew, but I didn’t let myself know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like…sex when I was in college. I never went out on a date with the intention of having sex. But sometimes I had sex. And later—sometimes—I’d realize that I’d meant to do it all along. But I had to hide the intention from myself. You know? Because deep down, I thought premarital sex was wrong. I’d been conditioned that way.”
She looked at the ceiling as though watching a film being projected there. “The bridge was like that. If I had admitted to myself beforehand what I was going to do, Mallory would have known. She would never have let me drive up on that bridge.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because when I handcuffed myself to the wheel, she—”
Waters went pale. “You handcuffed yourself to the wheel?”
“Yes. With Eve’s handcuffs. When I went through the guardrail and off the bridge, and I knew there was nothing she could do to save herself, I was glad.”
“What happened when you hit the water?”
“I blacked out. When I came to, the car was floating but filling up with water. And then…Mallory tried to save herself. I only remember bits of it. For me it was like being trapped in a room with a strobe light. I could see for a second, then total blackness. I guess when I couldn’t see, she could. For some reason, the separation between us wasn’t as total as it had been before. Anyway, the car was sinking toward the front. Mallory was enraged. She hated me for outthinking her, and her hatred clouded her mind. She practically tore off my hand trying to get out of those cuffs, but she couldn’t do it. If she’d been an animal, she would have gnawed my hand right off. Then the water went over my head.”
Lily told the story as though she had observed the event rather than lived it, but her voice belied the shock in her eyes.
“I saw things, John. Not white light or anything like that. Just things from my life. Images.”
“What images?”
She looked up at him with sudden urgency, her eyes wet. “My father. Our wedding. Annelise…the baby we lost.”
He tried to lean over and hug her, but she shook her head.
“And I knew then,” she said, “that I couldn’t give up my life. My life. Not for you or even for Annelise. I knew people had struggled to bring me to this earth and give me the gifts I have. And I knew I had an obligation to them, and to myself, and to you and Ana, to live as long as I possibly could.” She wiped her eyes and laughed strangely. “So I took that heavy flashlight you put in the glove compartment and broke my thumb with it and got the hell out of there.”
Waters could scarcely imagine his wife doing this, but his awe was displaced by fear that had still not been put to rest.
“What happened to Mallory?”
Lily reached for the remote control that operated the bed, and raised her upper body until her head was only a little below his. Her blue eyes had a provocative glint.
“She’s right here.”
Waters took a step back.
“I told you. She’s still inside me.”
He didn’t know what to say.
Lily’s eyes held something like pity. “I know you’re wondering what to do. That’s what men wonder: what do I do? But there isn’t anything to do. Mallory is between us, John. You put her there. As long as you’ve felt love for her, or obsession, or whatever it is, she’s been between us. But when you slept with Eve, you gave her power over us. It’s like any married couple, when one partner cheats. The third person is always there between them. The memory of that betrayal. And they either live with it and try to move on…or they give up.”
Waters started to speak, but Li
ly cut him off.
“But I’m not giving up. Okay? You and I share the blame for you going to Eve. We have a wonderful child. We love and respect each other. And that’s worth fighting to save.”
He stepped close to the bed and stroked the hair over her ear. “You know I believe that. But what about Mallory? What if I wake up one night and find her looking at me through your eyes?”
“It could happen, John. Tonight. Or five minutes from now.” She took a slow, deep breath like someone testing their lungs, and he suddenly remembered that some of her ribs were broken. “But I don’t think it will,” she said. “When Mallory first came into me, I had no idea she was there. I had no idea my family was at risk. Or my life. Now I do. And after the bridge…and the river…she knows how strong I am. I don’t think she’ll ever control me again. She’ll be like a tumor I carry with me, an inoperable tumor that reminds me just how precious life is.”
Waters leaned down to hug her, but the door opened behind him, and Penn Cage came in.
“I’m afraid your time’s up, John.”
“Can I have just one minute?”
Penn sighed and shook his head. “They’re going to arrest you. I wasn’t going to say anything in front of Lily, but I’ll need her signature on some papers to arrange bail, so…”
Waters closed his eyes and tried to marshal whatever emotional resources he had left. As he looked down at Lily, she smiled with a serenity he had not seen on her face since Mallory was last inside her.
“Go on,” she said, taking his hand. “It’s going to be all right. I know it is.”
Waters hugged her, then followed Penn into the hall. Tom Jackson waited there, his face heavy with the burden of duty.
“John Waters,” he said, “I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Evie Ray Sumner. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney…”
Waters felt Penn’s hand squeeze his shoulder, but the rest of Jackson’s words blurred into nothingness as Barlow walked up and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
chapter 22
SIX WEEKS LATER
John Waters slowed his Land Cruiser, then turned off the gravel onto a dirt road that had not existed a week ago. Lily sat in the passenger seat, wearing blue jeans and a straw hat. Annelise was strapped into the backseat. The river was still half a mile away, but he could smell it already.
“Where’s the oil derrick, Daddy?” Annelise asked, scanning the nearly bare trees and brown fields.
“There’s no derrick yet. Just a stake in the ground. This is a location, baby. A prospective well.”
“That’s no fun.”
“I think it’s pretty fun.”
Lily laughed and rolled down her window, letting in a blast of cold air. “That feels better. The heater was giving me claustrophobia.”
He was glad she could laugh. Waters had not laughed much in the past six weeks. During that time, he had been free on bail, but “free” was a misleading term. The daily routine of life was illusory, a mock reality that could be snatched away by the jury that would be selected in less than a week. Still, he had worked hard to keep his family’s spirits up and his oil company alive.
Two weeks after Lily’s accident, the EPA had determined that the salt water that destroyed the Louisiana rice farm had leaked from another company’s well. The relief this judgment brought was undercut by the effects of Waters’s arrest for murder and the scandal caused by the revelation of his affair with Eve Sumner. The faces he met on the street were cold, and loyal investors stopped taking his calls. Even Cole’s less reputable moneymen seemed to want to steer clear of the company. Waters spent two weeks doing nothing but damage control, but with his shattered reputation, there was little he could do.
He had paid off Cole’s gambling debts to the tune of $658,000. In exchange, Cole signed an agreement by which Waters would recoup his money out of newly discovered oil production. The question was, would there ever be any new Smith-Waters wells? The first issue was personal. Cole had not once mentioned having sex with Lily while Lily was under Mallory’s influence. But he had done it, and done it knowingly. Yet Mallory herself had admitted that she plied Cole with a fifth of Johnnie Walker during the seduction, and it was possible that he had no memory of the event. Beyond this, Waters had some doubt as to whether Cole would have yielded to Lily, had she been herself. God only knew what Mallory had done to draw Cole into having sex with her. Waters had thought long and hard about the situation, and in the end he’d decided that forgiveness was his only option. Cut off from his friendship and aid, Cole would become a shell of himself, and spiral down into depression, possibly even suicide. With the support Waters had shown him, Cole had joined AA and was now thirty-one days sober. Waters had no illusions about his friend’s strength of character, but he did have faith.
The second issue was lack of investor support for the company. After two weeks of total rejection of their latest prospective well, Waters told Cole he was going to drill a well “straight up”—which meant he would fund the cost entirely out of his own pocket. And he was not going to drill the prospect they had been marketing. He was going back to Jackson Point, to the dry hole they had drilled just before he started seeing Eve. If he moved the site six hundred feet to the south, he believed, he would hit the reservoir he had missed on that unlucky night.
“Slow down!” Lily said, as the Land Cruiser bounced over a giant pothole.
“Sorry. My mind’s somewhere else.”
“I know. Remember, one day at a time.”
He blew air from his cheeks and tried not to show his irritation. There were guys in Parchman Prison repeating the same mantra, and they would die behind those walls.
Waters jumped when his cell phone rang. In the current social climate, it didn’t ring often, and the chirp still reminded him of Eve. He took the phone out of a plastic tray under the dash and looked at the ID. PENN CAGE. He pressed SEND and heard a burst of static.
“Hello?” he said. “Hello!”
More static. “John? Can you hear me?”
“Barely! You’re in and out, Penn. What’s going on?”
“I just got a call from the D.A. They got the DNA analysis back.”
Waters wished he hadn’t answered the call. The DNA match of his blood and the semen taken from Eve Sumner would be the final nail that crucified him in court.
“Are you there, John?”
“I wish I wasn’t!”
“The test was negative.”
“Well, we knew that.”
“No! The samples didn’t match. Did you hear me?”
The static was bad, but Waters had heard. “How can that be?”
Lily was looking at him strangely, as though she expected tragic news.
“I don’t know,” Penn yelled through the static. “Maybe Eve slept with someone else that day. But the lab says it wasn’t”—static drowned the lawyer’s words—“didn’t show genetic evidence of two different men. And neither sample was corrupted either. Not your blood or the semen…DNA simply didn’t match.”
“You’re breaking up!”
“…exact words? They said, ‘Close but no cigar.’ You believe that?”
Penn’s last words had come through clearly, so Waters stopped the Land Cruiser in the middle of the dirt road. “What does this mean for the trial?”
“Are you kidding? To convict you, the D.A. has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His own DNA test proves that an unknown man had sex with Eve on the night she died! That’s reasonable doubt right there. I’ll be surprised if the D.A. even goes to trial now. I really will.”
Lily took hold of his hand, and Waters realized he was shaking. “But…” He wanted to continue but could not.
“Who cares how it happened?” Penn exulted. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. This is the second miracle you’ve got in a very short time. Take it and run, buddy. Hug your wife and daughter.
Live your life.”
Waters put a quivering hand to his face and tried to hold the tears of relief in his eyes. He couldn’t do it. “I have to go, Penn. I’ll talk to you soon.”
He clicked off.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?” Ana asked.
“Nothing, punkin. I just got some good news.”
“What is it?” Lily whispered.
“The DNA didn’t match. Penn says there’s no way I’ll be convicted without it. There may not even be a trial.”
Lily closed her good hand into a fist and brought it to her mouth, then shut her eyes in what appeared to be a prayer of thanks. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it would work out.”
“I didn’t. Not like this. This is impossible.”
Lily shook her head. “After what we went through, how can you say anything is impossible? Let’s go to the well, John. Drive on and don’t look back.”
He glanced back at Annelise, who looked more than a little afraid. “It’s all right, baby,” he assured her, putting the Land Cruiser back in gear. “Everything’s okay.”
As the Land Cruiser trundled over the last few hundred yards to the location, Waters pondered Penn’s news. He was a scientist, and he was not prepared to accept what he had heard on faith. The DNA match should have been automatic. A formality. The semen taken from Eve had come from him—of that he had no doubt. How would it not match the blood he’d given at the pathology lab? Barring gross error on the part of the lab, there was only one conclusion he could see. Something had genetically altered either his blood or his semen in the time that separated the taking of those two samples.
That “something” could only be Mallory Candler.
Mallory had passed from Eve’s body into him during the moment of his climax with Eve. His semen had obviously been produced prior to Mallory entering him. The vast majority of blood cells taken from his arm four days later would also have been produced before Mallory entered him, but with one difference. They had remained in his body during the roughly twenty-four hours that Mallory had possessed him.
That’s got to be it, Waters thought. I’m genetically different now, and I have been ever since Mallory entered me. The semen I left in Eve had my old DNA signature. The blood they took from my arm had the new one. The same alteration must have happened to Lily—and to Cole and Eve and Danny Buckles and all the rest.
