by Greg Iles
“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 fi
rst 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.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “This is out of hand.”
Chapter 14
“John? Is this John Waters?”
Waters blinked himself awake and found the phone in his hand. Lily was gone, the bed was a wreck, and daylight shone around the edges of the drapes.
“This is Waters,” he mumbled. “Who’s this?”
“It’s Tom Jackson, John.”
He instantly came to full alertness. “What can I do for you, Tom?”
“Sounds like I woke you up.”
Lily’s clock radio read 9:15 A.M. Waters was usually in his office by 8:30. “I had a headache last night. Guess I overslept.”
“Sorry. Look, I have another question for you.”
“Shoot,” said Waters, remembering Penn’s warning: The police have another lead. Caitlin’s source thought he heard your name come up…
“We got a lady says she saw you and Eve Sumner going into the driveway of Bienville two days in a row the week before the murder.”
Waters waited for more details, but Jackson offered none. He swallowed hard.
“That’s right,” he said, as the skin of his face seemed to tighten around his skull. “Is that a problem?”
“Well,” said Jackson, “last time I talked to you, you didn’t seem like a big fan of Ms. Sumner. You went down to her office to give her an earful after she tried to sell your house out from under you. That’s what you said.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m sort of confused, John. What were you doing with her at Bienville a few days after that? And not once but twice?”
“She was showing me the house. Simple as that.”
Silence. “You in the market for a new house? You already got a pretty nice one.”
“Bienville has a lot of architectural significance.”
“I don’t know too much about that kind of thing. Is Lily interested in it too?”
A flash of the knife. Tom Jackson was quicker than he liked people to think. “Here’s the thing, Tom. I’ve been thinking about buying it as a surprise for Lily. She thinks it’s too expensive. And it is expensive. But I’ve had a good couple of years, even though the oil business as a whole is in the toilet. And I knew if I just went ahead and did it, she’d love it. You know what I mean?”
“I can’t really say I do, John. That’s thirty years of my salary.”
Jackson had already checked the price of the house. “Well, that’s why I kept quiet about it, anyway. I didn’t want anyone knowing I was looking at the place. You know how this town is. People hear I’m looking for an antebellum home, every realtor in town is calling me, and my wife knows about it by dinnertime.”
“Now that I understand,” Jackson said. “But why’d you pick Eve Sumner to show you the place? She’s not the realtor for the Historic Society.”
Waters thought fast. “To be honest, I felt bad about raising hell at her office. She was nice that day, and I felt guilty later. I figured a commission like that would more than make up for it.”
“I see.” The detective covered his phone and said something unintelligible to someone else. “What did you think about Eve as a person?”
“Very professional.”
“People say she could get a little unprofessional with certain male clients.”
“Cole told me something like that. But she was totally professional with me. I did notice she had the equipment for what you’re talking about, though.”
“That’s the damn truth,” Jackson said in an unguarded moment. “In the right outfit, she was something to see.”
Any outfit, Waters thought, recalling how Eve had looked dancing gloriously naked in the parlor of Bienville.
“John,” Tom said in a quieter voice, “this is you and me, right?”
“Right.”
“Did you tap that stuff out on one of those afternoons? I wouldn’t blame you a bit, if you did. I just need to know.”
“Hell no. I’m married, man.”
“So were a lot of guys who spent time with Eve. That doesn’t seem to stop too many people these days, men or women.”
“You’re right. But it does me.”
More silence. “John, I’m going to ask what I asked you the other day. And I want you to think before you answer, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Did you have any other contact with Eve Sumner that I should know about?”
Waters let some time pass, as if he were thinking. “No,” he said at length. “Nothing I can think of.”
“Okay, then. I appreciate your time.”
“Sure. Still no prime suspect?”
“With this gal, it’s more a process of elimination than a search. You know what I mean?”
“I hear you. Good luck, Tom.”
“Yeah.”
Waters hit the disconnect button with a shaking finger. Then he pulled Penn Cage’s phone number from his memory and punched it into the keypad.
Penn gave Waters a cup of coffee and led him out to the backyard. Today he did not pull weeds from his flower beds. He sat on a wrought-iron bench, crossed his legs, and sipped his coffee.
“If the police were going to call you in for questioning over this,” he said, “Tom wouldn’t have questioned you on the phone.”
Waters paced the grass in front of the bench. “I’m not sure he bought my explanation.”
“He may not have. He may think you were screwing her, in which case he won’t let this drop. But unless they find something else to support this, you’ve probably got at least a few days’ g
race. I’ll tell you something else encouraging. They must not have found anything in Eve’s house that incriminates you. If they had, they would already have searched your house and office.”
Waters stopped pacing, relief washing over him like a cool balm.
“So,” Penn said. “You told me you needed to talk about something else. Something disturbing.”
“Yes.” Waters sat on an iron chair opposite Penn and set his coffee mug on the ground. “Lily wasn’t herself last night.”
Penn drew back his head as if he sensed where Waters was going. “What do you mean?”
“I mean in bed. She was totally out of character. She was very aggressive, and she did things she’d never done before.”
Penn shrugged. “Sometimes women do that. Didn’t you tell me that Eve’s death had made Lily more aware of your marital problems?”
“Yes. She said she was going to make an effort.”
“There you go. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“You know women don’t go from sexual dysfunction to supreme confidence overnight. But that wasn’t all. When Lily was in the bathroom before we made love, I walked over to look at her. She couldn’t see me. She was looking into the mirror like she hardly recognized herself. And then she twisted a lock of hair tight around one finger and pulled it out into a curl.”
Penn shook his head. “This is nuts. You think because Mallory twisted her hair, and because you saw Eve do it a few times, that Mallory’s soul is now in your wife?”
“I know you’re not open to-”
“I’ve seen Caitlin twist her hair a hundred times.”
Waters waited a moment before continuing, in the hope that Penn would really listen. “I’m sure you have. It’s a basic human gesture, okay? But in Mallory, it was a precursor to her cutting behavior. It’s called trichotillomania. She pulled it very hard. So did Eve. And now Lily.”
“Even in this fantasy universe of yours where the laws of physics are suspended, how could Mallory’s soul be inside Lily?”
“I told you how Eve said it worked. Through sex. Eve died while we were having sex, Penn. Or soon after. And the next day I was totally disoriented. I had blackouts I remember absolutely nothing about.”
