Sleep No More (20 page)

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.

Suddenly Lily locked her legs around him and screamed, her cry breaking through his fingers, her arms locking around his neck, cutting off his air. Still he pressed down with his back muscles, trying to intensify her climax if he could. Dimly, he realized that he could not breathe, but that was a small price to pay for the emotional transformation he was witnessing. Mallory used to let her head hang off the bed to deprive her brain of oxygen during orgasm. Something similar was happening to him now. He was torn between jerking his head free of Lily’s grasp or remaining still while she finished. In seconds, his will no longer mattered. He began to peak with her, and her arm came loose from his neck, flooding his brain with oxygen.

“Jesus,” he gasped, rolling off of her. “Lily…”

“I know,” she panted. “It’s been so long. I honestly forgot what that felt like.”

She started to speak again, but her words disappeared into a sob. Turning, he saw her cover her face with her hands. Tears ran from beneath them.

“I’m so sorry…I don’t know why I’ve been like I have.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lily. Don’t think about it. You just broke through a wall. Let your feelings out and try to sleep. Thinking doesn’t help with things like this.”

She reached out and took his hand. “I’m so glad I haven’t lost you.”

“Don’t worry,” he said softly. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

From nowhere, the specter of Tom Jackson rose in his mind. What could the detective want with him? Waters felt a sudden compulsion to go out to the slave quarters and get a zero-gauge Rapidograph in his hand. Make a list. Do an analysis of his situation. Vulnerabilities. Options. Possible solutions. He’d have to burn it after he made it, of course.

And what about Cole? The pumping unit? Should he drive over to his partner’s house and confront him? Or make a few discreet calls and try to discover if the rumors Will Hinson had mentioned were true? When Lily’s breathing deepened, he started to slide out of the bed, but she caught him by the arm.

“Don’t go,” she said sleepily. “Stay with me.”

“I need to brush my teeth. And call Tom Jack—”

“No. No worrying about anything tonight. Stay close to me. I feel so good right now.”

He sighed and lay back down, so hyperalert that he felt like running three miles himself. Lily’s breathing continued to deepen, but her hand did not release his arm. As he lay there, anxiety building to a crescendo in his chest, he heard the den phone ring. If the volume was up on the machine, he could sometimes hear the outgoing and incoming messages from the bedroom.

“You’ve reached the Waters house,” said Lily’s perky recorded voice. “Leave a message at the beep, and we’ll call you back as soon as we can.”

The machine beeped.

“John? Tom Jackson here. I hate to bother you at home, but I’m trying to run down some leads in this Eve Sumner mess. Just routine stuff, really, but I need to talk to you when you get a minute. Thanks, bud. See you.”

This Eve Sumner mess?
Waters felt sweat beading on his brow. If it were really routine, why would Jackson be calling after ten at night? And why the hell would he be calling John Waters, unless the police had found something incriminating? Evidence Waters knew nothing about. Something from Eve’s house, for example. A scrap of paper. A photograph. God only knew what she had kept there. Or maybe someone had told them something. A witness Waters hadn’t seen. Someone drinking in one of the bars near the Eola. Or the man holding the umbrella over the pissing dog. It could be anyone. Anything. A million variables came into play when you started leading a secret life. The things you feared most were often no threat at all, while those you never thought about could tip the balance and bring your life crashing around your ears.

“Shit,”
he whispered, listening to Lily’s steady breathing. “I need help.”

“And when I woke up,” Waters said, “Eve was dead.”

Penn Cage did not speak or even blink. He looked exactly like what he was, a former lawyer who had heard almost everything in his time.

“And now Detective Tom Jackson is trying to reach me,” Waters added. “He says it’s about Eve, but that it’s routine. That’s all I know.”

“Do you think you killed her?” Penn asked.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t think I did, but as far as I know there was no one else in the room.”

Penn sighed and focused somewhere in the middle distance. Waters had made his choice of confessor in the depths of the night, after long reflection. He had no desire to talk to a psychiatrist. For one thing he didn’t know any. For another, a shrink couldn’t give him legal advice. He had known Penn Cage since he was a child, and though Penn no longer practiced law, he had served for years as a prosecutor in Houston, Texas, where he’d sent more than a dozen killers to death row. Penn Cage knew about murder.

He also knew about human frailty. After writing several successful legal thrillers, he had given up the law. Then his wife died of cancer, and his writing stalled. When he returned to Natchez with his young daughter to try to make sense of his life, a widow’s emotional appeal had caught him up in an old civil rights murder. Penn had ultimately turned those experiences into a novel called
The Quiet Game,
the book that the Hollywood producers staying in Bienville this week had come to Natchez to explore filming.

Some people might see Penn as a straight arrow, but those same people probably saw Waters as one too. Waters had read
The Quiet Game
very closely, and it was clear to him that its author was haunted by the past in a way not unlike the way he was haunted. This, combined with their childhood friendship, had finally convinced him that Penn Cage was the best possible confidant under the circumstances.

When he arrived at Penn’s home that morning, a stately town house on Washington Street, a maid had shown him to a spacious office at the back of the ground floor. Penn seemed pleased by the surprise visit, but he resisted any talk of legal representation.

“John, you know I don’t practice law anymore.”

“You took the Del Payton case,” Waters pointed out. On the bookshelves behind Cage, he saw studies of criminology and law, but also an extensive collection of psychology and philosophy.

“That was different. I was essentially defending myself.”

“Penn, I need help.”

“Is it the EPA thing?”

“Compared to why I’m here, the EPA investigation is nothing.”

“Something that could wipe you out financially is nothing?”

“Yes. You don’t have to represent me. I just need the benefit of your experience. And I need…”

“What?”

“Your confidentiality. And to absolutely ensure that, I need to hire you.”

“I could take that as an insult.”

“Please don’t. If you’re put on the stand one day and asked questions about me, I don’t want you to be held in contempt for trying to protect me. You can plead client privilege.”

“Jesus, John. What the hell have you got into?”

“Real trouble.”

A deep stillness settled over Cage. “Give me a dollar.”

Waters took out his wallet and slid a bill across the desk. Penn took it and slipped it into a drawer.

“Talk to me.”

Waters began at the soccer field and went on from there. The Dunleith party, Eve’s warning about danger at the school, the kiss at the cemetery, the matching handwriting, all of it, omitting nothing. Penn listened with absolute concentration, rarely interrupting except to ask for clarification.
And you told Cole about this? She actually stated that she was Mallory Candler?
Waters concluded with his blackout and waking up to find Eve dead, but the expression of shock he expected did not come.

“And you don’t remember strangling her,” Penn said.

“No.”

“Not even as erotic play?”

“No.”

“You say you passed out during your orgasm?”

“As best I remember.”

“Had you ever done that before?”

“Never.”

“Were you taking drugs of any kind? Cocaine? Amyl nitrate? X?”

“X?”

“Ecstasy. MDMA.”

“God, no.”

“This isn’t the time to hold anything back, John.”

“No drugs.”

“Not even a prescription drug?”

“No.”

“Was Eve using cocaine? Any other drugs?”

“I have no idea. I never saw any.”

“But you drank some wine.”

“One long swallow. Half a glass, maybe.”

“There could have been something in the wine.”

“I suppose so. But I never felt drugged with her before. What do you think?”

Penn moved back in his chair and picked up a blue Nerf basketball from the floor. “I don’t know yet. I’m processing what you’ve told me. Obviously, you could be in very serious trouble soon.”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“This is why you asked me about Lynne Merrill. Whether you ever get over a relationship like that. You were talking about Mallory.”

“Yes.”

“She was only a year ahead of me at St. Stephens. I thought I knew a fair bit about her. I see now that I didn’t. I didn’t see much of her at Ole Miss. Obviously, you did.”

Waters nodded.

“John, you’ve referred to Mallory’s psychosis, to terrible things that happened, evil things she did. But you haven’t said what those things were. You did say that Eve had started to display the kind of behavior Mallory did when she started to lose her mind.”

“She did.”

“Then you had better tell me about Mallory. What started her slide into madness, as you called it?”

Waters looked to his left, where a large window gave a view of the backyard. There was a nice play set made of treated lumber; he’d built one like it for Annelise. “I don’t know if that’s possible, Penn. I mean we’re two guys sitting here in the light of day, twenty years after the fact. I’m not sure I can communicate the reality of what went on then. Not with the impact that it had.”

Penn smiled. “I’m a writer. I wrestle with that every day. If words could convey human emotion with sufficient force, we wouldn’t need to shed tears, hug, or kill someone. Because I know that, I listen in a different way than most people.”

Waters felt encouraged, but still he hesitated. “When I graduated from South Natchez, I weighed one hundred eighty-five pounds. During my freshman year at Ole Miss, I gained another fifteen. After one year with Mallory, I weighed one hundred sixty-five. I looked like a skeleton.”

“I’m going to ask some questions,” Penn said, “but don’t feel bound to answer them in a narrow way. Say whatever comes to mind.”

“Okay.”

“If you had to give me one word that summed up the root of Mallory’s mental problems, what would it be?”

“Jealousy.”

“Elaborate.”

“Mallory was pathologically jealous. You wouldn’t think she would be, as beautiful as she was, but that didn’t seem to matter where I was concerned.”

“Was she jealous in her previous relationships?”

“I don’t know. She only slept with two guys before me. One was a football player from St. Stephens, older than she was.”

“Wade Anders, probably. I remember them dating for a while. He was an asshole.”

“Then she was with a guy at Ole Miss, before I really knew her. Her freshman year. When I asked who it was, she told me he was older and already gone. I assumed she meant he was a senior who had graduated. I was curious, because she told me they’d done a lot of sexual experimentation. And I believed her, because there was nothing she didn’t know or do.”

“And?”

“I found out later that the older guy had been an English professor, thirty-eight years old. He lost his job over it. Resigned or was fired, I’m not sure which. He basically flipped out when Mallory dumped him. He stalked her, the whole nine yards. I also later learned she was lying about the sex. They hadn’t done all that experimentation. She’d got him to tell her all the exotic things he wanted to do to her, and what he wanted her to do for him, but she didn’t
do
those things with him. She basically tortured the guy, I think.”

“But she did those things with you.”

“Yes. And that’s where the problem began. I was the first person she ever really took off her mask for. She gave herself to me totally. Showed me the darkest corners of her personality…and there were some dark ones. And once you do that with somebody, and they reject you…”

“What happens?” asked Penn.

An image of Mallory’s face, desolate and cold, filled Waters’s mind. “I once saw an Oprah show where these distraught parents were talking about their college kids, kids who couldn’t get over a romantic relationship. Some had committed suicide, others simply couldn’t move forward with their lives. Their parents couldn’t help or even reach them. And they couldn’t understand why parental love couldn’t alleviate some of the suffering of these kids. These are healthy families I’m talking about.”

“That made you think of Mallory?”

“Some of those parents were describing Mallory perfectly. But I already knew the answer they couldn’t seem to see. Not even the shrink on the show. When a young woman gives herself completely to a man—sexually and every other way—she shows him parts of her personality that her parents have never seen and never will. The guy knows everything about her, things she may have seen as shameful for her whole life, but he loves her in spite of these things. Or maybe because of them. But if he then
leaves
her, if he stops loving her, the rejection is absolute. You know? There’s no way parental love can console the girl, because
her parents don’t really know her.
‘If they really knew me like he does,’ she thinks, ‘they wouldn’t love me either.’ That’s what takes her to the brink of suicide.”

Penn seemed intrigued by this theory. “And you rejected Mallory?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“She got pregnant.”

“When?”

“My sophomore year. She was a junior.”

“How long had you been together?”

“Six months.”

“She terminated the pregnancy?”

Waters nodded.

“Jackson? Memphis?”

“Memphis.”

“Did she want the abortion?”

“I don’t think any woman really wants an abortion.”

“Point taken. But she agreed to its necessity?”

“She went through with it.”

Penn mulled this over. “You talked her into it.”

“I don’t like thinking about it, and maybe I didn’t admit it to myself for a long time. But yes, I basically made her do it.”

Penn nodded with understanding, if not sympathy. “You went with her for the procedure? Stayed through it, before and after, all that?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it. What do you remember most?”

Waters didn’t have to think. “You couldn’t just go get it and be done. You had to go for counseling first. This huge impersonal building on Union Avenue, like an office building. The waiting room was full of girls. We could hear them talking. Some were there for second or third abortions. We couldn’t believe it. We felt so stupid for letting ourselves get into that situation even
once.
These women were talking like it was an alternative form of birth control. Mallory felt sleazy just being there. She hated it.”

“Go on.”

“They show us into this room with an older woman in a wheelchair. She starts questioning us. Why were we having sex? Did we understand the implications of having sex? It was surreal. Then she starts asking why we want to abort the baby. Why can’t we get married and have it?”

“Is that what Mallory wanted?”

“Penn, do you remember what Ole Miss was like when we were there?”

“Sure. Reagan in the White House. Young Republicans on campus. Conformity was the school religion. The de rigueur uniform was Izod shirt, Levi’s rolled at the ankles, and white canvas Nikes with the baby-blue stripe. I think of the early eighties at Ole Miss as a sort of superrich version of the nineteen-fifties.”

“Exactly. We grew up in the seventies, with dope and sex and rock and roll, but all the old double standards were still very much in force in Oxford. Especially for the girls. The good-girl/slut dichotomy still applied.”

“Sorority girls didn’t have babies and stay in school.”

“No,” Waters agreed. “Not Chi Os anyway.”

“Did Mallory want the baby, but know deep down that she couldn’t keep it?”

“That’s pretty close, I think. I don’t think she could have handled disappointing her parents to that degree, even though she hated her father at some level. But she wanted
me
to want the baby. You know?”

“Yes.”

“So the counselor starts in on adoption. Mallory didn’t want to do that, and neither did I. We couldn’t deal with the idea that part of us would exist in the world, and we wouldn’t know where. I’m sure that’s a callous, selfish way to think, but that was the only thing we agreed on.”

“And after the counseling?”

“They made you wait seven days to have the procedure. Agonizing reappraisal time. Those seven days were hell. Mallory stopped going to class. Her face showed nothing, but she was barely keeping it together. One day she wanted the abortion, the next she wanted us to run off to Canada, have the baby, and live like Bohemians.”

“Why did she finally agree to the procedure?”

Waters looked back at the window, wishing he did not have to speak this truth. “I made a devil’s bargain. She made me promise her—in the dark of the night, parked on Sorority Row—she made me promise that if she got rid of that baby, I would never leave her. Ever. And she meant it.”

“And you promised that?”

“Yes.”

Penn sighed heavily. “Go on.”

“A week later, we were back in Memphis. Mallory was so tense, I didn’t think she could handle it. This was all supposed to be secret, right? But when she checked in, they asked for her parents’ phone numbers, everything. They said if anything went wrong, if she started to hemorrhage or something, they had to notify next of kin.” Waters could still smell the hotel-like scent of the place. “Mallory gave the numbers. They checked her in and told me it would be a minimum of two hours before I saw her again.”