Sleep No More (29 page)

Cole’s lower lip quivered, and the hurt in his eyes dwarfed the pain Waters had seen at the country club the previous day.

“You don’t understand!” he cried, taking Waters by the arms. “You’ve got to listen to me.”

Waters tried to pull free, but alcohol and dissipation had not completely sapped the strength of the old athlete in Cole.

“Let go, goddamn it!”

He was about to slam his knee into his partner’s groin when Cole sobbed and drove him back against the office wall like an offensive lineman. Waters’s head hit the painted bricks hard enough to blind him. The first thing he saw when the stars cleared was Cole staring at him like a madman begging for understanding.

“You don’t know anything about Lily!” Cole shouted. “You think you know her, Johnny, but you don’t!”

Johnny?
Waters tried to think through the blur in his brain, but Cole kept talking, his face wet with tears and mucus, his right arm across Waters’s chest, pinning him to the wall. “
Listen
to me, Johnny. I’m trying to do what you told me to. But you don’t even care!”

Waters remained frozen.

“You lied!” Cole screamed. “You said you’d give up Lily and come to me if I went into another woman. But you were lying!”

Waters’s heart stuttered, then kicked off again with an arrhythmic beat that he feared would not sustain consciousness. He shut his eyes against confusion so profound that it felt like psychological whiplash.

“Say something!” Cole demanded. “Look at me!”

Waters opened his eyes. His partner’s face, livid a moment ago, was now pale, and his mouth worked in a silent struggle between rage and despair. Even as Waters’s emotions tried to convince him that Cole was only playing another scene in a drama written to deprive him of his sanity, cold reason forced him toward the awful truth. Cole was not that good an actor. He could dissemble in front of husbands whom he had cuckolded, but the pain and confusion in his face now were utterly foreign to the man Waters had known all his life. Cole Smith simply did not panic, and to mimic it like this was beyond him.

“Oh God,” Waters breathed. “No…”

A strange light suddenly shone out of Cole’s eyes, and his lips curled into something like a smile. Horror unlike anything Waters had known in his life turned his bowels to water. This morning, while he was talking to Penn or giving blood to the police, Mallory had followed his order of last night in a way that must have given her savage pleasure. As Lily, she had seduced Cole, and by this single act had both violated the wife Waters loved and robbed his best friend of his mind. The image of Cole thrusting inside his wife drove Waters to a point of fury that bordered on madness. He rammed his knee into Cole’s testicles, then slammed an uppercut into the soft area under his jaw. The big man fell back, gasping for air, and Waters retreated behind the desk. Two blows wouldn’t stop a man of Cole’s size for long, so he reached into Cole’s drawer and brought out the Magnum .357.

“Tell me what you did!” he shouted, aiming the gun at Cole. “You made Lily sleep with Cole, didn’t you?”

Cole tried to straighten up but could not. The blow to his groin had effectively crippled him. But he did raise his face, and when he did, Waters saw the light of triumph in his eyes.

“It wasn’t”—Cole gasped—“wasn’t like it was the first time they’d done it. It didn’t take much convincing to get your partner over to your house, Johnny. It took even less to get him to provide service in the bedroom. Lily bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker to warm him up. Then she fluttered her eyelashes and shed a few tears, and he was on her like a hound dog.”

“Lily never cheated on me with Cole!”

“Not after you were married. But Cole has
very
fond memories of Lily as a college freshman. Mostly because she’s your wife, I think. Lily wasn’t anything special in the sack, but she was young and firm. A nice diversion on a Friday night.”

Waters hoped this was one of Mallory’s lies, but the sick feeling in his stomach told him it probably wasn’t. He choked back a response and cocked the pistol’s plowshare hammer.

“And neither one of them ever told you about it,” Cole said. “The whole time you were falling in love with her, showing her off, telling Cole how great she was, he was thinking about the times he did her. That’s friendship, isn’t it?”

A strange sense of relief rolled through Waters. By trying so hard to damn Lily and Cole, Mallory had made him realize that both were innocent of anything beyond a college fling. There was no scam, no conspiracy. Both were pawns in Mallory’s twisted plan. Lily probably wouldn’t even remember having sex with Cole. Unless…like Eve, she had “awakened” to find herself naked and under Cole—

“Where’s Lily?” he asked. “Right now? Did you hurt her?”

“Why would I hurt her?” Cole asked. “What happens to Lily later doesn’t interest me, but I don’t want you to feel any guiltier than you have to when you come to me.”

“You swear she’s all right?”

“I don’t want to talk about her!” Cole snapped. “You told me you’d leave her, but she’s all you care about! You
lied.
”

“I wasn’t lying,” Waters replied calmly, trying to get his thoughts back on track. He let down the hammer and set the pistol on the desk. “What did you expect me to do? You’d blotted out my wife’s mind. You threatened my daughter’s life—”

“You threatened me first! You said you’d act like I was dead!”

You should be dead,
Waters thought. “This is just like twenty years ago, Mallory. You don’t trust me to love you. You think you have to
make
me love you. But you can’t make anyone feel love. Love doesn’t work that way.”

“I know how love works!” Cole screamed. “I know how you felt with me when I was in Eve. You were lost inside me! You loved me then. And you will again.”

Waters wasn’t about to argue. If Mallory decided to hurt Lily and Annelise, he had no way to stop her. Certainly the police could do nothing to prevent it. He slid the .357 back in the drawer, closed his mind to the male face across the desk, and spoke as tenderly as he could.

“I always loved you, Mallory. And you always sabotaged us with your paranoia. But now…now I see that you’re doing what you promised. You left Lily alone, and you’re going to go into someone else. And I intend to keep my part of the bargain.”

Cole wiped his eyes and walked toward the desk. “But how long is it going to take? Who am I going to go into?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to find a woman I think I can live with.”

“What about Sybil?” Cole said, his eyes suddenly bright. “Cole already sleeps with her. Or he did until a month ago, anyway. She’s pretty, she’s only twenty-eight, she’s got a wonderful body…and no husband or kids to worry about. Nobody to ask questions. She’s perfect. I even know she’s fertile.”

“How do you know that?”

Cole’s face articulated pure sadness in a way that Waters had not seen since Cole was a child. “She got pregnant when she was in high school,” he said. “Her parents made her get rid of the baby.”

Waters didn’t want Mallory thinking about abortion. “Sybil could be the one,” he said. “But I don’t know yet.”

“I don’t want you to take too long. You know me, Johnny. I need intimacy.” Cole was coming around the desk now, and nothing about his bodily movement was familiar. He was like 250 pounds of graceful woman stuffed into khakis and a button-down shirt. “You know,” he said, “having experienced sex as both male and female, I have to say I like being the man better. I was always more of an aggressor in sex. But…I couldn’t ask that of you.”

Ask what?
Waters wondered, realizing the answer even as he asked the question.

“Unless,” Cole said softly, “you don’t mind the idea.”

Cole took hold of his hand, and before Waters could overcome his shock, Cole kissed his wrist, then slid his tongue along Waters’s inner forearm.

Waters jerked his arm free with a cry.

Cole laughed. “I knew you’d be like that. Oh, well. Men can’t bear children, anyway.”

Waters’s stomach churned with fear and revulsion. “Tell me one thing before I go. When you told me how you moved from person to person, you said it took you a while to control people’s minds. How are you doing it now? To people you just entered?”

Cole smiled cagily. “I learned a lot in ten years, Johnny. And some people just aren’t very challenging. Lily is depressed. She still blames herself for her miscarriages. Basically, she’s just
weak.
Cole is a burnout case. Eaten up with guilt about his debts, insecure about sex with his young conquests. His mind is a nest of snakes drowning in scotch. He takes Viagra to cheat on his wife, for God’s sake. There’s not enough of the original Cole left to resist me.”

Waters shook his head. The parallels to virus transmission kept hitting him; when a person’s resistance was down, the virus gained a foothold and grew exponentially.

“The people in your life are empty,” Cole said. “They could never make you truly happy. But I can. You know I can.”

Cole pressed a button on his desk phone. After a moment, Sybil said, “Yes?”

“Could you come in for a minute, Sybil?”

“I’m pretty busy.” Her voice was clipped and cold.

Cole chuckled and whispered, “She’s pouting.” He raised his voice. “Come on, Syb. It’ll only take a sec.”

He turned off the intercom. “Take a good look, Johnny. I like her.”

Waters stood mute as Sybil walked in wearing a classy skirt suit. Her hair was pinned up, showing her long neck to advantage, and her smoldering Cajun eyes settled on Cole with open resentment.

“What is it?” she asked. “Hey, John.”

Waters only nodded, knowing he could never make his voice sound normal under such stress.

“Damn, I forgot what I called you in for,” Cole told her. “My mistake. I’ll remember what it was in a minute.”

Sybil expelled air from her lips with obvious anger, then turned and marched out. Cole’s eyes followed her tiny waist and shapely hips as she went through the door.

“What do you think about her?” he asked. “Cole may be a mess, but he does have an eye for beauty.”

“She’s beautiful,” Waters replied. “But I’m going now. Tell me, will Lily remember having sex with Cole?”

“Probably not. Of course, she’ll always remember the first times they did it. Nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid.”

Waters bit off his reply and turned to go.

“What about Sybil?” Cole called after him.

Waters paused in the door but did not turn.

“Maybe. I have to think about it. Right now I have a date with the police.”

“A lot of clocks are ticking, Johnny. Don’t take too long.”

The police grilled Waters for sixty-four minutes. They would have gone on longer, but as the questions became aggressively repetitive, Penn protested that the interrogation was bordering on harassment of a model citizen who had cooperated from the beginning. If there were new questions, Penn told them, he would get the answers from Waters and relay them to police headquarters.

Tom Jackson handled the interrogation, flanked by a silent partner with a pockmarked face who glared at Waters as though he held some personal grudge against him. Waters decided it was class resentment. Both detectives seemed uncomfortable in the upscale law office of Penn Cage’s friend. Most of the questions were about Eve Sumner, the rest intended to uncover the current state of Waters’s marriage. Where Eve was concerned, Waters mostly lied. He denied ever having had sex with her. As for the videotape of his Land Cruiser by the Eola Hotel just prior to the murder, he explained that the EPA investigation of his company had been giving him sleep problems, and that he had recently done a lot of late-night driving. Tom Jackson was forced to admit that he’d stopped Waters late one night in the act of doing just that. On the night of the murder, Waters told them, he’d driven downtown with the idea of having a gin and tonic at one of the bars near the Eola, but the rainstorm made him reluctant to get out. He’d turned onto Pearl Street with the intent of going home via Franklin Street. At that point he saw the crowded accident scene, and decided to back up and take a different route home. He couldn’t tell what Jackson thought of his explanation, but it was clear that Jackson’s partner thought he was lying. Still, no one placed him under arrest.

After the police left the law office, Waters gave Penn an inquiring glance. Penn shook his head, as if to say, “Not until we’re outside.”

Once they were in the Audi, Penn started the engine and turned to Waters with curiosity on his face.

“You’re a hell of a liar, John. I think you could have passed a polygraph if you’d been hooked to one during those questions.”

“My family’s at stake,” Waters said quietly. “It’s really that simple. I’ll do whatever I have to do to save them. You’d do the same.”

Penn looked as though he was recalling something troubling, and Waters suddenly remembered that the lawyer in Cage’s novel had lied to the police about several important events.

“You
have
done the same.”

“Lying to police is tricky business,” Penn said. “They tend to get pissed off when they find out you did it.”

“But you said—”

“Nothing,” Penn finished. “Nothing at all.”

He pulled into the street and headed toward Waters’s office. “When the DNA match comes in and you recant your statements, I presume your position will be that you concealed adultery to save your marriage?”

“Does it matter? At this point, I don’t really care.”

“That worries me, John.”

“Don’t give it another thought.”

Penn stared but said nothing else as he drove down Main Street. In the parking lot of Waters’s building, Waters shook his lawyer’s hand, then got into his Land Cruiser and headed for home, his mind on the videotape that now rested in the glove box. The next few hours would be the most difficult of his life.

Waters found Lily asleep in the master bedroom and Rose sitting on the back steps, watching Annelise ride her motorized scooter on the patio. He sat beside Rose and watched his daughter make circle after circle on the stones, waving and smiling each time she passed them.

“Something ain’t right with Lily,” Rose said. “She usually goin’ like a top from the time she wake up till she lay down at night. You know that.”

Waters nodded soberly. “I think she’s been a little depressed lately.”

“Depressed? That girl been depressed since she lost them babies. You knows that too. What’s really going on, Mr. John? You playing around on that poor girl?”

“No.”

“You’d best not be. You need to get Lily to Dr. Cage. He’ll fix her up quick, or else get her to a specialist who can.”

“I may do that, Rose.”

“You promise?”

Rose’s words reminded him of the promise he had made Mallory so long ago. “I think I know what’s wrong, Rose. And I don’t think a doctor can fix it. I have to fix it.”

The black woman turned and looked deep into his eyes. “You sure you ain’t been goin’ in the street with somebody?”

“I’m sure.”

She shook her head in surrender, as if to say, “White people’s problems,” then grunted and stood and waved at Annelise. “I’m going on, girl. Your daddy got you now.”

“Bye, Rose!” Ana yelled. “See you tomorrow!”

“Mmm-hmm.” Rose waddled up the steps and into the house.

Waters let Annelise make a few more circuits of the patio, then took her inside and fed her the supper Rose had left in the oven. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, and salad. Ana skipped the salad, but she put away two chicken legs and three helpings of potatoes and gravy. Waters wondered where the food went; his daughter still weighed only fifty pounds.

When he finished rinsing the dishes, Lily had still not appeared, so he took Ana into the den and listened to her read aloud from J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Two Towers.
She had quickly graduated from the Harry Potter series, and now loved nothing more than hobbits and elves. As the struggle of good versus evil played out in his ears, Waters realized he had rarely looked at his own life in those terms.

Despite all Mallory had done in his distant past, he had never attributed the word “evil” to her. But now…an image of Lily dangling the butcher knife over Annelise’s head flashed into his mind, and he knew in his bones that Mallory would not stop until Lily and Annelise had been wiped from the earth. He could see only one solution: Mallory had to be destroyed. And yet…she could not be killed without killing the innocent person who contained her—

“John?”

Waters got to his feet as Lily walked into the den in an old blue housecoat. Her eyes were puffy from sleep, and her newly cut blond hair was pressed flat against the left side of her face. Annelise looked up from her book, and her eyes went wide.

“Mom?”

“Sit down, babe,” Waters said, leading Lily to the sofa. “Do you feel all right?”

“Not really. I’m exhausted. I have been all afternoon.” She looked at Annelise, whose eyes were filled with confusion. “Hey, baby.”

“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.