Sleep No More m-4

by Greg Iles

  His phone buzzed, and he snapped out of his reverie.

  “Your wife on line one,” Sybil informed him.

  “I’ve got it.” He hit the button. “Hey, Lil.”

  “Have you heard about Eve Sumner?”

  “I heard.”

  “Isn’t it just unbelievable?”

  No…. “It is.”

  The open line hissed in his right ear.

  “John, I’ve been thinking.”

  He waited.

  “The rumor is, Eve was meeting someone at the hotel, and whoever it was killed her.”

  “I haven’t heard that.”

  “Oh, you know she was. Having an affair, I mean. That was what Eve did. She couldn’t find the love she needed, so she just kept looking. And ever since I heard about it, all I can think about is us.”

  “Us? Why?”

  “Because…I know you were gone last night.”

  His chest tightened so suddenly that he found it hard to breathe.

  “I know you were probably just taking a ride like you do sometimes. But think if you had been doing something. I couldn’t blame you if you were. Not with the way things have been between us. And what happened to Eve…that kind of thing could happen to anybody. When you’re desperate, and you go looking in the wrong places for something you should have at home-”

  “Lily, don’t,” he said, surprised by the hysteria in her voice.

  She sobbed, then choked it back. “I’m so stupid. It makes me so angry to know something is wrong with me and not be able to change it. I know I’ve said that before, but now…I just have to, John. I have to change. Life’s too short.”

  Why hadn’t Lily said these things two weeks ago? Maybe he could have resisted Eve’s siren song. “It’s all right, babe. Everything’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. And I want to stop pretending that it is. I don’t want to lose you, John.”

  And I don’t want to lose you and Annelise. “We’ll talk about it when I get home. Why don’t you go for a swim? That always helps you feel better.”

  “I might. Are you coming straight home after work?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.” She paused, but he sensed that she wanted to say more. “I want to put Annelise to bed early tonight,” she added. “And I…I want to make love with you. The way I used to.”

  “Lily-”

  “I love you, John.”

  “I love you too.”

  After a few moments, she hung up, and he set the phone in its cradle.

  Her call almost pushed him into a manic state. How could things unfold this way? How could the death of a near-stranger change his wife’s attitude about sex when all his most patient efforts could not? And how could that stranger be the woman he had turned to for succor in his need? He felt trapped in some crazy Greek tragedy where only the Fates and Furies knew their roles well enough to carry them off.

  He wanted to leave the office, but for appearance’s sake, he felt he should stick it out until five. He soon found himself pondering morbid ironies, like the fact that Eve’s body almost certainly now lay on the same embalming table that Mallory’s had lain upon ten years ago. Natchez had come a long way in race relations, but it was still segregated in death. If you died white in this town, or were to be buried here, there was only one funeral home to go to. Of course, her body might not be there yet. There would have to be an autopsy. He had no idea where that would be carried out. Would a Natchez pathologist do it? Or would the body be shipped to the state capital, Jackson?

  What would the autopsy reveal? Was he right about strangulation? Or was there some other possibility? He had seen marks on her throat and petechiae around her eyes. But what if those marks had been made during the last minutes of their lovemaking, when he held her down on the mattress? What if something else had killed her? A heart attack? Or a stroke? Natchez was a small town, and Waters knew two women in their forties who had died of strokes in the past few years. Lily thought it had something to do with birth control pills. Eve wasn’t on the pill. She’d had her tubes tied. She was also in her early thirties. On the other hand, she’d led a wild life. Who knew what was possible? Eve might have been taking drugs the whole time he’d known her, which was only two weeks, after all. Cocaine caused heart attacks all the time. Strange as it seemed, these thoughts lifted his spirits. The alternative was to face the fact that he had strangled a woman for whom he had cared a great deal.

  He went to a small refrigerator under his wet bar and took out a bottle of water, then returned to his desk. That brief activity exhausted him. He was puzzled until he remembered that he hadn’t slept last night. Laying his head on the desk, he tried to resist the worries that had been eating at him all day.

  “John? Hey, John!”

  Waters started and looked up into Sybil’s concerned face.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s five-thirty. Do you want me to stay?”

  He looked at his watch. He’d slept for two hours. “No, no. You go home. I’m sorry. Is Cole still here?”

  “No, he left around four. He didn’t say where he was going.”

  Sybil sounded put out by this, but it could have been Waters’s imagination. “Let’s shut it down and go home,” he said. “I want to see my daughter.”

  Sybil smiled, but her eyes were sad. “Ana’s a lucky little girl. One day she’ll know that.”

  I hope she stays lucky, he thought.

  Turning into his drive, Waters stopped at the mailbox from habit. Junk mail and a couple of party invitations were stuffed between copies of the U.S. Geological Review and USA Today. As he laid the mail on the passenger seat, a four-door diesel pickup pulled in behind him. Its sudden appearance startled him, but when a leather-faced man of sixty got out, Waters calmed down and got out to shake hands.

  Will Hinson was a well-checker. He monitored the daily operations of oil wells all over the county for a monthly fee. Though he checked about a dozen Smith-Waters wells, most communication was handled by telephone.

  “How do, John?” Hinson said.

  “Fine, Will. How’re you doing?”

  “Not bad. Don’t want to bother you, but I saw you pull in.”

  “I’m glad you stopped. Everything going okay?”

  “Oh, fair. Always something to fix, but you know. You get the bills for it. Reason I stopped, I saw ’em hauling off the pumping unit at your Madam X well.”

  Waters blinked in confusion. “You what?”

  “I thought you might be replacing it, but then I remembered it was a three-twenty. Didn’t figure you wanted to push any more fluid than that.”

  Waters wondered if Hinson was getting what Rose called “old-timer’s disease.” “Are you sure this was on our lease?”

  “Yessir. I don’t check that well, but I stopped and asked the crew what they thought they was doing. They said you boys had sold the unit to a Texas outfit. That’s where that rig’s bound right now. Oil City, Texas.”

  This news was shocking enough to bring Waters out of his haze. “I’d better make some calls. Somebody made a mistake somewhere.”

  The older man nodded, but it was clear he had more to say.

  “What is it, Will?”

  “It was me? I’d call my partner first.”

  Waters went still. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I’m not one to talk behind anybody’s back. But you’re a pretty trusting fella, John. Just like your dad.”

  “Come on. Out with it.”

  “Word is, your boy Cole’s in a bind. A bad one. I heard all kinds of things he’s trying, but I don’t know what’s true, so I ain’t repeatin’ nothing. But you better look to your business. People get in money trouble, they do things they might not normally do. Like selling a pumping unit out from under a partner when they need cash.”

  Waters nodded slowly, not believing his ears. “I appreciate you stopping, Will.”

  “I hope I did the right thing.”
r />   “You did. You take it easy, now.”

  “Nope. I never do. I’ll die in the saddle. Only way to go.”

  They shook hands again, and the older man got into his truck and backed out of the driveway. Waters climbed into his Land Cruiser and drove slowly up to the house. The unreality of his situation was growing by the minute. The Madam X well was currently down, and due for a workover in two weeks. Cole was in charge of that. If someone like Will Hinson had not stopped out of the blue, Waters might not have known the pumping unit was gone for three weeks or more. Maybe longer, if Cole planned to lie about production runs. A used 320 pumping unit would bring about thirty thousand dollars on the open market. Would Cole betray his trust for thirty thousand dollars? He didn’t want to think so. But…how much trouble was Cole really in?

  When he opened the front door of the house, his exhausted mind and body told him to go straight to bed. That wasn’t an option tonight. He walked into the kitchen and hugged Lily, who looked like she would have broken into tears, were not Annelise sitting at the table doing her homework.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Supper’s ready.”

  He sat, and she brought him a plate of shrimp and pasta that Rose had cooked during the afternoon. He had no appetite, but he made a show of picking at his food. His mind was on Cole and the pumping unit. After serving Annelise, Lily laid her hands on his shoulders and massaged them as Ana told a story about a new music program at school. When Ana finished, Lily got a plate for herself and sat opposite Waters. As she ate, she watched her husband and daughter as though she had never really seen them before. Under the circumstances, it made him uncomfortable.

  Waters had a feeling that something about her had changed. It wasn’t her hair, which was the same dark blond it had always been and still fell to her shoulders. She might have on a touch more makeup, but not enough to give him an odd feeling.

  “You look different,” he said.

  “I ran today. Maybe that’s it.”

  “You ran?”

  “Mom, that’s cool,” Ana said. “I want to go next time.”

  Lily had been a long-distance runner in high school. As a tenth-grader she’d won the state championship in the two-mile run. She had kept up her running well into their marriage, staying almost obsessively in shape. But after the first miscarriage, she couldn’t seem to find the energy to get outside. She gained weight, and that intensified her depression. Today was probably the first time in four years that she had “hit the road,” as she used to call it.

  “I’m tired of being fat,” Lily said.

  “You’re not fat, Mom.”

  “Definitely not,” Waters agreed, though he knew that by Lily’s once rigid standards, she was overweight. She probably weighed a hundred and thirty-five or forty now; in the old days that would have driven her crazy.

  “Just three miles,” Lily said. “Seven-minute miles, at that. Embarrassing, but it’s a start. In a week I want to be down to six minutes.”

  “Don’t overdo it, babe. You haven’t run in a long time.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I haven’t done a lot of things for a long time.”

  Waters smiled, but he was worried. Changes this sudden could signal deep discord. “Anything else happen at home today?”

  Lily shook her head. “Oh, Tom Jackson called a little while ago. The detective. He wants you to call him.”

  Waters’s throat constricted. “Did he say what it was about?”

  “Rose talked to him. Just the same old thing, I’m sure.” She cut her eyes at Annelise, who was looking at her plate. Probably the Danny Buckles business, she was telling him.

  Jackson had called a couple of times over the past two weeks to keep Waters abreast of the Buckles prosecution, but that was pretty much on track. This might be something else. Like Eve Sumner’s murder. Tom Jackson worked all homicides for the Natchez Police Department.

  “I’d better call Tom before it gets late.”

  Lily gave him a soft look. “Why don’t you wait until tomorrow? I don’t want to think about that stuff right now, and I don’t want you to either.”

  “What stuff?” asked Annelise, looking up.

  “Taxes,” Lily replied, which was their catchall euphemism for anything Ana didn’t need to hear about.

  “Oh. Do you know what Fletcher did today? You won’t believe it.”

  Waters tried to clear his mind to listen to the story of a playground standoff, but a hundred thoughts nibbled like fish at the edges of his consciousness. As he tried to hide his anxiety from his daughter, he felt Lily’s foot touch his ankle beneath the table. She had removed her shoe, and was now rubbing his calf with her toe. She never did this kind of thing. He didn’t know how to respond. When Ana finished her story, he got up and rinsed his plate.

  “You want to watch some TV together?” he asked Annelise. “I got a new DVD from Amazon yesterday.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Princess Diaries.”

  Annelise jumped up, grabbed his arm, and dragged him toward the den. While Waters started the movie, he heard Lily cleaning up the kitchen. Normally, she would now retire to her alcove or go to work on a project around the house: stripping paint, making curtains, whatever. But tonight she came into the den, sat beside him on the sofa, and halfway through the film intertwined her hand in his. Her obvious intention to make good on her promise of the afternoon surprised and worried him. His experience in the Eola was still fresh in his mind, and he didn’t want any flashbacks while he made love to his wife.

  As the movie wore on, he felt himself zoning out, his mind on Tom Jackson’s phone call. Lily went upstairs and got Annelise’s pajamas, and Ana changed while they watched the conclusion. When the credits rolled, Waters snapped out of his trance and carried Annelise upstairs, Lily close behind him. They tucked her in beside her stuffed rabbit, Albert, then walked back down, Lily in front. Reversing their usual ritual, she waited at the foot of the stairs, and when he reached the bottom step, she reached out and pulled him to her. He tried not to stiffen, but given the stress he was under, it was all he could do to remain still.

  “Hug me like you mean it, John.”

  He tightened his arms around her.

  “That’s better.”

  She pulled him off the step and climbed up onto it herself, putting them eye to eye. Then she kissed him on the mouth. Her lips were closed, but just as he expected her to pull away, she brushed her tongue against his teeth. He froze in surprise. Her tongue pressed insistently until he opened his mouth. She slipped it inside, then took his hand and placed it over her breast.

  Moments like these were painfully awkward for him. He still remembered the first time she had come to him after losing the baby. She was sleeping fifteen hours a day, eating nothing. He sensed a fearsome anger buried under her depression, but she held it in, the way a bed-wetting child threatened with a beating holds his urine. Clenching, repressing, paralyzed by fear. Waters had gently broached the subject of adoption and earned himself a white-knuckled dinner without a word. Four months had passed without any sex at all. Yet Lily was not blind to his suffering. One day, without telling him, she dropped Annelise off at her parents’ house for the night. Then she followed the old psychological map she had laid out years ago, the one that relaxed her enough to respond fully. She locked the doors, washed the dishes, paid the household bills, fed the cat, turned off the phones. He almost wept when he saw her standing by the bed removing her gown. The first few minutes went well enough, but at the moment of penetration, Lily snapped back to that ultrasound room, and her body went as rigid as that of a catatonic, her eyes draining tears. Waters got off her as fast as he could and gave her the sedative her doctor had prescribed.

  Months passed before she tried again. But gradually, when she sensed Waters grinding his teeth from animal frustration, she would roll over in the dark and use her hands on him, or pull him onto her for a quick mechanical release, during which her face remained painfully tight,
her eyes glassy. Sex performed out of duty was almost worse than no sex at all, but how could he tell her that? Occasionally the quality of those experiences improved slightly, but never did they last more than a few minutes, and afterward Lily always looked like a lost and embittered child.

  Tonight’s kiss at the foot of the stairs, her placing his hand over her breast: these were not part of her repertoire of marital duty. If it had been any night other than this one, he would have been filled with joy.

  “Lily-”

  She put a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  “I don’t really need to right now.”

  “It’s not for you,” she said. “For me.” She pressed his hand hard against her breast, and he was shocked to feel her nipple stiffen.

  “Are you serious?”

  She nodded. “Let’s don’t talk about it, okay? Let’s just do it.” She took his wrist and pulled him toward the master bedroom.

  By the time they reached the door, she had undone her blouse and pants enough to slip out of them in seconds. She turned and knelt before him, undid his belt, and roughly pulled down his khakis. Then she slid down the comforter and pulled him into bed.

  “Lily?” He took hold of her shoulders. “What’s going on? What’s changed?”

  “I don’t know.” Urgency filled her eyes. “I just want you. I know I can feel good right now. Let’s don’t talk anymore.”

  She kissed him again, deeply this time. He felt trapped in a dream, his movements clumsy and unreal. Instinct told him to get the act over with quickly, lest he do something to trigger one of Lily’s depressive episodes. He slid gently over on top of her, but when he moved to kiss her mouth, she pushed down on his shoulders, something she had not done for years.

  “Down there,” she whispered. “Hurry.”

  He closed his eyes, then slid down her belly, kissing as he went. She responded forcefully, startling him with her moans. He had not heard such sounds from her in so long that he felt he was with a stranger. On the verge of climax, Lily dug her nails into his shoulders and pulled him up to her mouth. He kissed her and went inside, stunned by the intensity of his own arousal. The woman beneath him now he had thought gone forever. It was as though four years of self-imposed deprivation were being exorcised in minutes. Her face was flushed, her skin blotchy and covered with perspiration, her breaths quick and labored. As he shut his eyes and went with her movements, her cries became so loud that he put his hand over her mouth. The last time sounds like that had come from this room, Annelise was four years old. She would panic if she heard them now.