by Greg Iles
“What’s the matter, Mom?”
“What did you do this morning?” Waters asked. “Did you run again?”
Lily squinted at her watch. “I’m not sure. What day is it?”
Annelise laughed, but the sound rode an undercurrent of fear.
“Wednesday.”
Lily shook her head, then covered her eyes. Waters feared she would begin crying in front of Annelise.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Ana asked.
“I’ve got a headache, honey. You keep reading.”
“I’m tired of reading.”
“Well…turn on the TV, then.”
“I don’t want to watch TV.”
Waters got up, switched on the television, and set it on the Disney Channel. Annelise sighed in frustration, but she began watching all the same. Waters did not sit again, but walked behind the sofa and massaged Lily’s shoulders. As he worked his way up to her neck and scalp, she moaned and leaned forward. He gave her about fifteen minutes of that treatment, and then Ana’s program ended.
“Time for bed,” he said.
“Why?” Ana asked, looking ready to throw a fit. “It’s not time yet.”
“Mom doesn’t feel good, and I have some work to do.”
“I can just stay in here and watch TV. I’ll be quiet.”
Waters shook his head and held out his hand. Ana hesitated, then got up and closed her hand around two of his fingers.
Lily said, “Is it all right if I don’t go up to tuck you in, baby?”
Annelise gave her a hug. “It’s okay. You better take a pill or something.”
Waters went upstairs and helped his daughter into her pajamas. He kissed her and stroked her hair for a minute, but he left without reading a story. He was anxious to get back downstairs before Lily nodded off again. With Mallory so unstable, he could not afford to wait another night. There was also the chance that Tom Jackson would turn up more evidence linking him to Eve, and that might be all it took for Jackson to arrest him.
Lily was back in the bedroom, sitting in her chaise with her feet propped on the ottoman. She still wore the old housecoat, and in the brighter light of the bedroom, he saw black rings beneath her eyes.
“Is Ana all right?” she asked.
“She’s fine.”
Lily squinted up at him. “You look worried.”
He walked over and sat on the ottoman, then laid his hand on her knee. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I don’t mean for it to. But this is serious. You’ve been having trouble with your memory for the past couple of days, haven’t you?”
Lily looked strangely at him. “How did you know?”
“Have you noticed anything else out of the ordinary?”
She looked away, deep in thought. “I don’t really feel like myself,” she said in a careful voice. “I’ve noticed some…physical things.”
“Like what?”
She looked embarrassed. “I’m bruised, John.”
“Where?”
She opened her housecoat at the waist, revealing her left hip, which was mottled with dark blue spots. “Both hips are like this. Bruises like hand marks.”
He swallowed. “I did that.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
Confusion clouded her eyes. “I don’t remember. But at least it explains some things.”
“Like what?”
“This morning when I woke up and went to the bathroom, I felt like…no, I knew that I’d had sex. And it frightened me.”
“And you don’t remember it at all?”
“No. And the same thing happened this afternoon. Did we make love this morning?”
Waters closed his eyes in anguish. “No.”
“But…did you do this?” She pulled open her housecoat at the chest, and Waters saw two purple suck marks above her breasts. “No,” he whispered. “I didn’t.”
She stiffened. “Then how did they get there?”
He took her hand and squeezed it. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. This is going to be the hardest conversation of our lives.”
“You’re scaring me, John.”
“I know. We’re in trouble, Lily. And we won’t get out of it unless we do it together.”
“Tell me. Don’t make me wait like this!”
He was still unsure how to start. “What I’m going to say will sound crazy to you. But I want you to promise to keep an open mind and hear me out until the end. All right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that day at the soccer field when I asked you about Eve Sumner? I didn’t know who she was.”
“Of course. And then we saw her at the Mardi Gras party. She asked about selling our house.” Lily’s long-term memory was clearly still up to the mark. “What is it? Do you know something about Eve’s death?”
“Yes.”
Just as with Penn, he started his story at the soccer field, but this time he did not end at the Eola Hotel. He told it all the way up to the agreement he’d made with Mallory about finding a new host. He did not break his narrative with apologies or pleas for forgiveness; it would not alter what he had done or Lily’s perception of it. He thought she would interrupt long before he got to the end, but she didn’t. She sat like a woman forced to watch the execution of her family, pale and blank-faced, until he described Lily dangling the butcher knife over Annelise’s head. Tears poured from her eyes, and she began to shake so badly that Waters finally stopped speaking.
“Tell me the first thing that comes into your head,” he said. “Anything. I don’t care what. Tell me you think I’m insane.”
Lily closed her eyes and wiped away her tears. “Were you in love with Eve?”
“No. I thought she was Mallory.”
A hysterical laugh burst from her lips. “I guess I asked the wrong question, didn’t I? Were you still in love with Mallory?”
“I don’t think so. I think I was just lonely in a way that hadn’t been dealt with in a very long time.”
“And you thought that Mallory could relate to that part of you?”
He felt like he might throw up, and they hadn’t even begun to deal with the true horror of the situation.
“I suppose so.”
She shut her eyes again, and more tears flowed.
“I know you think I’m crazy with this talk of possession. I only risked telling you because I know enough has happened to you in the past couple of days that you might believe it.”
“There’s more you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”
“Lily…last night we put Annelise to bed, and then we had sex.”
She flinched as though he had slapped her. “So you and Mallory ‘make love,’ but we ‘have sex’?”
“What we did last night wasn’t making love. Lily, there’s no way you’ll believe what I’m about to tell you unless I show you something. Can you stand to watch something painful?”
“How could it get any worse?”
“If you watch, you’ll know.”
“Is it a tape of you and Eve?”
“No. You and me.”
She wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “Show me.”
He went to his dresser drawer and removed the Sony video camera and remote. One cord was all it took to connect the small camera to the bedroom television. Then he removed the Mini-DV tape from his back pocket, loaded it into the camera, and went to sit beside Lily.
A ghostly green bedroom scene lit the television screen, much like news footage shot at night during Desert Storm and the Afghanistan war. The infrared beam from the Sony was not very powerful, but sufficient to illuminate the two naked bodies kneeling on the bed.
“I can’t see her face,” Lily said. “Is that me?”
Waters took her hand. It was as limp as a coma patient’s. “You tell me.”
Onscreen, Waters turned to face the camera and mouthed, Lily, I’m sorry.
“What did you just say?”
“‘Lily, I’m sorry.’”
She stared as though hypnotized at the haunting green image. When her husband took hold of the hips of the woman kneeling in front of him and went into her, the woman turned toward the camera in a caricature of startled pleasure. Waters felt Lily’s body jerk when she recognized herself. In tomblike silence they watched Lily perform acts she had never spoken of in her life, and probably had not even known were possible. First in handcuffs, then freed from them, she copulated with a manic energy and abandon that the man onscreen looked hard put to match. As the tape spooled across the heads, Lily’s hand remained motionless in his. Waters had known this experience would traumatize his wife, but he saw no other way to shock her into belief.
“Is there sound?” Lily whispered.
“I didn’t want to put you through that. I thought the picture would be enough.”
“Turn it up.”
“Lily-”
“Turn it up!”
He picked up the remote and raised the sound to an audible level. Guttural grunts that had never before issued from Lily’s throat filled the bedroom, but the most shocking was Waters’s voice crying Mallory! as he urged his partner to greater depravity. When Lily pulled her hand out of his and began rocking slowly back and forth, Waters switched off the camera.
Lily looked dazed, like the victim of a violent crime. Which was exactly what she was. Only no law had ever been written to cover the crime she had suffered, except perhaps in some medieval manuscript.
“Those things on the tape,” she murmured. “Have you been wanting me to do those things all these years?”
“No.” Waters realized he wasn’t telling the complete truth, and he didn’t want to lie to Lily ever again. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “It’s not that I want you to do those things…but to try new things. I want you to want to please me the way I want to please you. But it’s been so long since we’ve had even a basic-”
“I know that. I was trying to change when…”
“When this happened. I know.”
At last she looked him in the face, and the abject fear in her eyes shook him in a way that nothing in his life ever had. “I don’t remember doing that,” she said in a monotone. “Any of it.”
“I know.”
“Did you give me drugs or something?”
“No.”
“Then why…” The whites of her eyes grew as the implications of Waters’s story of possession broke through her last defense mechanisms.
“Oh God,” she whispered.
Waters reached out to her, but she jerked away from his hand.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t.”
Lily jumped to her feet and looked around as if to find somewhere to run, but there was nowhere. In her own home there was no sanctuary.
“Why did you tell me this?” she screamed. “You’re trying to drive me crazy! That’s what this is!”
He tried to keep his voice calm. “Why would I do that, Lily?”
“I don’t know. You want to leave me.”
“No. If I wanted that, I’d just leave.”
“Maybe you want to keep all your money! How do I know? Maybe you have another girlfriend somewhere!”
He held up his hands in supplication. “I made this tape to show you-Lily Waters-what had happened to you. To us. That’s not you on the tape, Lily. You know that.”
She splayed her shaking hands in front of her and stared at them like a mental patient on the verge of collapse.
Waters ran to the kitchen and poured a shot of vodka from a bottle in the freezer. When he got back, Lily lay panting on the floor, close to hyperventilating.
“Drink this,” he pleaded, kneeling over her.
She obeyed like a sick child, then squeezed her eyes shut against the burn of the alcohol.
“That’s it.”
“Oh no-” She scrabbled to her feet and ran into the bathroom, where she dropped over the commode and began to retch. Waters knelt beside her and held her convulsing body.
“Take it easy. Get your breath back.”
She planted both elbows on the toilet seat and raised her head. Her face was wet and blotchy red. When Waters took her arms to lift her, she didn’t resist, and when she got her feet beneath her, she went to the bed and sat on her side of it.
“What can I do?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes hollow and exhausted. “Am I myself now?”
“Yes.”
“But if what you told me is true-if Mallory is inside me-where is she now?”
Relief cascaded through him with the force of a religious epiphany. After days of isolation and ridicule, someone else believed. “She’s inside Cole now.”
“Cole Smith?”
“Yes.”
“And she was in me before that?”
He nodded.
“But that means…” Lily closed her eyes, then went deathly white.
“Don’t think about it, Lily.”
“Cole and me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She raised a quivering hand to her face. “I can’t take this, John. I can’t listen to this.”
“I won’t say any more.”
“Did I really threaten Annelise with a butcher knife?”
“That wasn’t you. It was Mallory.”
“This is madness!”
“I know it seems that way.” Desperate to pull her back to the present, he followed a perverse instinct. He got to his knees before her and spoke softly. “Lily, tell me something. I promise I won’t get upset by your answer. Did you sleep with Cole during college?”
Her eyes instantly locked onto his, and he saw a different kind of fear in them.
“It’s all right if you did,” he assured her. “I just…Mallory told me that you did, and I wanted to know if she was making it up.”
Lily’s chin started to quiver. She bit her lip and looked away from him. “I did. I slept with Cole at Ole Miss.”
The stark admission from her own lips hurt him more than he had expected, but it had the intended effect. By putting Lily in a position where she felt momentary guilt, he knew her desire to console him would overpower the shock of the situation.
“I know you must have imagined all kinds of terrible things about why I didn’t tell you,” she said. “The truth is, I hardly remember being with him. I certainly don’t remember what it felt like.”
He shook his head. “It’s all right. You don’t have to make excuses.”
“But I want you to know why I kept it from you. When I came back to Natchez after SMU, and you and I went out on our first date, I really fell for you. I mean, I knew then-right then-that you were the man I’d been searching for all my life. On that same night, I found out Cole was your partner. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t about to bring up something like that on our first date, and by the time we were close enough to talk about it, I felt too awkward to do it. I was afraid you’d be so disappointed that you’d leave me. I was petrified Cole would say something to you. You know how guys are. But one day I came by your office when you weren’t there, and he brought it up. He was a real gentleman about it. He said, ‘Look, John’s my buddy, he’s a great guy, and he really cares about you. As far as I’m concerned, what happened between us never happened.’ I almost cried, I was so relieved. Neither of us ever wanted you to think it had been more than it was, which was nothing.”
“I understand,” he said. “Really.”
Lily slid down off the bed and hugged him, and he felt tears soaking his shirt.
“Listen,” he said, holding her to him. “Do you really believe the things I told you? Do you believe Mallory is alive?”
Her reply was a warm vibration against his chest. “If you hadn’t shown me that tape, I wouldn’t have. But yes, I believe it.” She looked up at him, her eyes alive with terror. “She wants you, John. And I don’t see a way to stop her.”
“I do. I’ve thought ab
out nothing else from the moment she went into you.”
“How? It seems impossible.”
He took Lily by the shoulders and held her away from him. “We have to kill her.”
Lily blinked. “But…you said she can’t be killed without killing whoever she’s inside. Didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
He could see the thoughts spinning behind her bloodshot eyes. “You mean commit murder,” she said. “Cold-blooded murder. Kill someone like…”
“Cole,” Waters finished.
Her lips parted slightly. “Do you mean that?”
“Yes.”
She looked into his eyes for a long time, then walked back to the bed. “There have to be other options.”
“I don’t think you’ll like them.”
“What are they?”
“We could run. Mallory actually suggested that, but for a different reason. To escape the murder charge.”
“Run where?”
“Central America, maybe. Costa Rica. Find a place without U.S. extradition. We’d have to leave everything behind. Change our names. I’d be a fugitive because of Eve’s murder. Running would make me look guilty, and the DNA match would prove it.”
Lily’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged for several moments. “So…even if we manage to get rid of Mallory, that DNA test could put you in prison for life.”
“Don’t think about that right now. We have to focus on one problem at a time. Do you want to take Annelise and leave the country forever? She might never see your mother again. You’d never be Lily Waters again.”
Lily looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time. “Before today, I’d have told you those weren’t the important things. Things like names and where we live. What job you have. What school Annelise goes to. But they are important. Those details are what make up our lives. I think if we throw all that away to run like criminals, then we’ll lose part of ourselves.”
“I think so too.”
“What other option is there?”
“I could plead guilty to Eve’s murder. You and Annelise would be safe then. And maybe Mallory would get tired of waiting for me.”
“That’s not an option,” Lily said forcefully. “You are not going to prison.”
Waters sighed. “I don’t think it would stop Mallory anyway. She’s already been in prison once. She’d find some way to get in and get close to me.” He sat beside Lily on the bed. “I honestly don’t think there’s any option but to destroy her. And to do that, we have to kill an innocent person.”
