Sleep No More (35 page)

Jackson seemed unable to process what Penn had told him. Even Barlow had nothing to say.

“Ben Candler took those pictures of his own daughter?” Jackson asked finally.

“Benjamin Candler was a sexual deviant,” Penn said. “I think minimal investigation into that will bear out all I’ve told you. The point is, your suspicion that my client is somehow involved in the distribution of pornography is ridiculous.”

Jackson turned to Waters, who was staring in shock at his attorney. “Did Eve try to blackmail you with these pictures?”

“No.”

“Did Mallory’s father really take them?”

“Yes. I didn’t even know Mallory when she was that age.”

Jackson rubbed his eyes in frustration. “Tell me this. Did your wife know you were having an affair with Eve?”

“No. She does now.”

“When did she find out? Before Eve’s death?”

An alarm bell sounded in Waters’s head. “What are you suggesting?”

Jackson looked apologetic. “It happens, John. A wife gets suspicious, starts following her husband. What if Lily saw you having sex with Eve in your slave quarters that day? What if she knew about the suite at the Eola? She might have followed Eve back to it and—”

“That’s crazy. That would never happen.”

“Jealousy’s a powerful motive, John. Where’s Lily now?”

“I don’t know.”

Jackson turned to Barlow. “Let’s find out.”

Lily came awake in room eleven at the Stardust Motel and sat up in bed. Cole lay naked on his back beside her, his mouth open, his eyes shut, and breathing so deeply that he might have been drugged. Shivering in her nakedness, she got out of bed, went to the bathroom mirror, and stared at her reflection.

“I’m
me,
” she said to the face in the mirror. “But I know you’re there. I’m the first person who’s ever
known
you were there.”

She rubbed her eyes and looked over at Cole again, then grabbed her clothes and dressed as quickly as she could. She found her keys on the dirty carpet by the door, picked them up, and started to leave. With her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned back to Cole.

She had to be sure.

Walking over to him, she reached down for his shoulder. The sight of his pale flesh filled her with revulsion, but she had to wake him. What did one touch matter after having sex with him? She grabbed the big shoulder and shook it. Cole groaned and pulled the covers up to his neck.

She shook him again. “Wake up!”

“Unnhh.”

“It’s Lily.
Wake up.
”

Cole opened one eye, then squinted until it was nearly shut. “What the hell? Did I sleep over at your house?”

She looked into the bleary eyes, searching for deception.

“Where’s John?” Cole mumbled. “Jesus. Is it morning?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Cole blinked, still more asleep than awake. “I don’t know…the office? Sybil said something about meeting me. Shit—I don’t know.” He drew his knees up into a fetal position and pulled the covers over his head.

Hurry,
Lily told herself.
You may not have any time at all….

She turned away from the bed and went toward the door. Her sense of balance left her, and she nearly stumbled. As she reached for the doorknob to steady herself, the room went dim. Pure terror flushed through her. That dimness wasn’t in the room—it was in her mind. That dimness was Mallory.

“No,”
she whispered.

She slapped the door hard and focused on the pain in her palm. “I know you’re there. You’re inside me, but it doesn’t matter. I’m Lily Ann Waters, born June twelfth, nineteen sixty-three.” She opened the door and struggled toward her car. “My daughter is…Annelise. Born June fourteenth, nineteen ninety-five.”

The dimness vanished and returned, flickering like electric lights during a brownout. “I feel you,” Lily said, clicking the unlock button on her key ring. “Damn you, you can’t…” She tried to cling to her identity by thinking about John and the threat of the murder case, but it wasn’t working. The simplest facts became her mantra, her only shield against the force she felt growing inside her.
“Lily Ann Waters,”
she gasped.
“June twelfth, nineteen…Lilyannwaters…daughterborn…daughter June…fourteenth…Annelise born…lilyann…waters—”

She opened her car door and dropped into the driver’s seat. She tried to fit the ignition key into the slot on the steering wheel, but this simple task was beyond her, like trying to thread a needle in the dark. The fourth time she missed the slot, she began to weep, and darkness began closing around her.

She suddenly remembered her father, dying of cancer. At the end he had been afraid to go to sleep. If he did, he believed, he would never wake up. Superstition, she’d thought at the time. Now she knew his fear as a palpable reality. If she succumbed to the darkness now, darkness was all she would ever know.

“No!”
she screamed, hammering the steering wheel with both hands. “Mallory is dead! You’re
dead!
Your body’s rotting in the
dirt!
”

A sudden flash of light drove back the shadows. She slid the key into the slot and cranked the Acura’s engine.

“John hates you!” she screamed. “He
hates
you! He never wanted your children…. That’s why he made you kill them. And he wanted to kill you last night!”

Agony knifed through her chest. She gasped but managed to get the car into gear and back away from the motel door.

“You’re dead,” she repeated. “You’re rotting in the ground on Cemetery Road. You’re a lost soul…fading into nothing. You’re
nothing.
”

Light bathed Lily’s mind like cool water.

She put the Acura into drive and pulled onto the highway. The bridge loomed in the distance. She wanted to blow past every car and truck between her and the bridge, but the police were aggressive about ticketing on this side of the river. Though she held the car to forty, the superstructure of the bridge neared rapidly. Soon she would ramp up onto it.

Thirty yards ahead, a pickup truck moved into the left lane, making room for her to pass on the right. A girl about Annelise’s age sat in a wicker chair in the back of the truck, facing Lily. Her face was dirty and her arms bare in the cold, but her eyes shone as she waved at Lily. Pure sadness filled Lily’s chest. At seven years old, Annelise was already remarkably independent, with a distinct personality that would only become stronger with the passing years. But she still needed help. She was so fragile in some ways—

The front of the Acura lifted onto the bridge and started up the grade toward the center of the span. Lily gripped the wheel, her mind filled with love for her daughter. That love warmed her whole body, so it was all the more terrifying when the rear of the pickup truck ahead wavered in the air like a mirage, and the sunlight went dim. With the dimness came a rush of malice from deep within her, like a tumor metastasizing at a fantastic rate, amorphous but swift, swallowing her spirit.

“No!” she shouted, battering the wheel with her hands.
“Stop it!”
The pain in her hands momentarily anchored her, yet still the darkness grew.
“You can’t do this! You can’t—”

She could barely hold herself in the proper lane. At the limit of desperation, her mind searched back to childhood for some weapon to protect her. She had stopped going to church after losing her baby, but now words poured from her mouth in a flood, as though of their own accord:

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…He…yea…yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…I will fear no evil…no evil…He restoreth my soul…He restoreth my soul!”

As tears flowed freely from her eyes, blue sky burst into her vision, and the road and bridge appeared before her. Every physical detail burned itself into her brain: the cement surface of the road, the dirty face of the girl in the back of the pickup, the rivet heads holding the silver superstructure of the bridge together, a workman hanging suspended from the girders on the right side. He wore a red bandanna beneath his hard hat, and he looked directly into Lily’s eyes, his expression timeless and kind. As Lily looked back, time seemed to slow, then stop, and in that timeless space began the only epiphany of her life.

She understood now, why she had done all she had since calling Mallory that morning. So simple and profound. She looked from the workman to the road, and as she did, the little girl sitting in the back of the pickup raised her hand and waved.

Lily raised her hand and waved back.
Farewell, little one.

She reached beneath the seat, grabbed the handcuffs, and quickly cuffed her left wrist to the steering wheel. Then she yanked the wheel to the right and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

At sixty miles per hour, the Acura smashed through the makeshift guardrail and hurtled into space. The air bag deployed on impact, blowing into Lily’s face and blinding her for the duration of the fall. Her stomach flew into her throat, her inner ear lost all orientation, and she floated through space like an astronaut in a ship without windows, her mind filled with bliss, a sweet peace that asked nothing of the world but to bid it good-bye.

The world snatched her back with an explosive impact, driving her head like a cannonball into the headrest behind her. She could neither breathe nor see, but only feel the strange weightlessness of the car bobbing in water. Then she heard a sloshing sound.

My feet are wet….

The Acura had righted itself. High above her hung the underside of the bridge, getting slowly smaller as the powerful current carried her southward, spinning the car as it slowly filled with water. She looked down at her handcuffed wrist with detachment. It seemed to be the wrist of someone else. As she stared, she heard a scream of rage and terror, and she looked outside the car for its source. When it came again, she realized it had burst from her own mouth.

Her arms suddenly began to flail, and the cuffed wrist jerked the steel chain taut, trying to break free. Lily felt as though someone had wired her to a computer and begun operating her limbs with a joystick. The scream came again, and then the malignant force she’d felt on the bridge returned. She tried to resist, but resistance was futile. This time the light did not merely dim but disappeared altogether. She felt like a woman in a coma who hears people speaking around her but cannot speak herself. And the person she heard now was shrieking like someone being stabbed to death.

The interior of the car flashed white, then vanished again, as though illuminated by lightning during a storm. Only the storm was in her mind. She saw a black flashlight in her free hand, the heavy Maglite John had put in her glove compartment. It rose to the roof, then hammered down against the handcuffs. The Maglite rose again, but this time when it hit the steel cuff, the head of the light flew off. Lily heard a scream of fury, and on the next upstroke, batteries sprayed into the air.

The nose of the Acura tilted forward, and brown water rose to her waist. Her body heat leached out at a terrifying rate, causing her to shiver violently.
Let it be over,
she thought.
Dear God, let it be done.
But it wasn’t. Blood poured from her wrist as the water rose over it, yet still her arm thrashed against the metal, utterly beyond her control. Another scream exploded from her throat.

“You gutless bitch! You can’t take him from me like this!”

The Acura wallowed onto its left side. The water rushed over Lily’s left shoulder and into her ear, then her mouth.

“Please God…forgive me,” she gasped. “I did this for my family.”

And then the water covered her.

John Waters stood bolt upright and gripped his left arm like a man having a heart attack. He was leaning over the sink in the bathroom of the police station when the pain hit. Now he staggered against the wall, unable to breathe.

Lily,
he thought, and inexplicable terror filled his mind.

With soapy hands he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed his wife’s cell number. After five rings, an automated message saying the subscriber was out of the service area began to play. He hung up and dialed Linton Hill, but all he got was the machine.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

He dialed Lily’s mother’s house, but no one answered there either, and Evelyn did not carry a cell phone.

Someone knocked on the door of the rest room.

“John? You okay?”

Tom Jackson wasn’t going to let him out of his sight for more than a minute.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled. “Stomach trouble.”

“You need some Pepto-Bismol?”

Waters put his cell phone back in his pocket, rinsed the soap off his hands, then opened the door.

“Shit, John, you look bad.”

“I’m worried about my wife and daughter. I know this thing with Eve is going to be public now, and…Jesus, if I hurt those two, I don’t know if I can stand it.”

Jackson could have said, “You should have thought about that before you screwed Eve Sumner,” but he didn’t. He took Waters’s arm and gently walked him back toward the interrogation room, where Barlow and Penn waited. As they reached the door, Waters glanced down the hall at a fire exit. With Lily and Annelise unaccounted for, he felt an almost irresistible urge to flee.

“Don’t think about it,” Jackson said kindly. “That’s no answer.”

Waters nodded dully and took his seat.

Lily Waters sat in church between her mother and her grandmother, running her hand over her mother’s treasured mink coat. Lily was six years old, and she never listened to the preacher. She watched the people and caressed the coat, the softest thing she had ever felt against her skin. She only stopped when it was time to sing. Her father sang out of tune, and he sang louder than anyone else. Sometimes people stared, but Lily was proud of him, because he loved to sing so much.

The church faded like a dream, and she found herself on horseback, her arms around her father’s waist as the saddle bounced up and down beneath her. She smelled the sweat of the horse and the sweat of her father, mixed with the acrid odor of cigarettes and old leather. The leather smell faded into the scent of newly mown grass, and then she was running, her chest burning, a stitch in her side that screamed
Stop!
But she didn’t stop. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, more distance between herself and the girl in second place. Only a tenth-grader, she was leading the two-mile run at the State Championship in Jackson. She heard the wind whipping the paper number against her chest and a distant roar, the roar of people shouting her name:
Lil-lee, Lil-lee…
She ran still harder, and then the athletic field morphed into another church, and she was running through its doors in a white gown as rice flew around her head. John helped her up into a horse-drawn carriage that waited to take them to Stanton Hall for their reception. Her mother and father waved, and John gripped her hand as though he would never let go. Strangely, the street led into a bedroom, where with shining eyes John watched her lay the gown across a chair and climb into their wedding bed. She lay back on the down mattress, as fulfilled as she had ever felt, and terrible pain ripped through her. Annelise was coming, and the nurse was screaming at her not to push, and then to
Push! Push!
She heard a slap and then a cry, the sound of life from her own body. Ineffable joy filled her heart, and then the nurse took Annelise away, and the doctor looked at her, his face changing from happiness to concern, his voice grave:
The fetus is already in hydrops, Lily. He can’t live inside you, but he can’t live outside either….
And then the terrible sound of the heartbeat decelerating, like a little boy trying his hardest to beat a drum but wearing out in spite of his desire to play on, while Lily screamed and her mother talked to her as though she were a baby herself and still the drumbeat slowed, faded, down into silence so black and deep that nothing ever returned from it. That was where she was going now, into that silence. Without color, without echoes, without warmth, without love—

From the inmost chamber of her heart, a force beyond anything Lily had ever known burst forth, suffusing her mind and body with a will to live. She screamed, an explosion of bubbles that burst into blue light with a white sun shining in the midst of it.

The Acura had bobbed from its side onto its tail, and the waters had receded. She sucked in a lungful of air and looked down at her handcuffed wrist. Soon she would sink beneath the surface, lost to the world.

Mallory had tried to free herself, tried and failed. An image of a butcher knife came to Lily, but the knife was back in the motel room with Cole.
I couldn’t cut off my hand anyway,
she thought.
I’d pass out.
She tugged again on the handcuff.
The real problem is my thumb,
she realized. She yanked open the glove compartment, spilling papers everywhere. There was a plastic ice scraper, but no knife. Panic ballooned in her chest, cutting off her air. As she stared at the thumb, swollen from Mallory’s efforts to free herself, she saw the broken Maglite in her lap.

She grabbed the black tube with her free hand. There was only one battery inside. She wedged the tube between her legs and groped blindly on the floor of the car. Her hand closed around a battery. She picked it up and shoved it down the tube, then grasped the open end and slammed the makeshift club with all her strength against the base of her thumb.

Pain exploded through her body, searing and infinite. Tears poured from her eyes as she gasped for breath. She could not bear to do that again. But not to meant death. The car listed to the left, and water sloshed around her waist. Again she drove the Maglite downward, and her left arm went numb to the elbow. She yanked against the handcuffs, but still her hand would not come free. With a scream of animal rage, she drove the club down yet again, and this time bone snapped.

Her stomach heaved as the car settled deeper in the water.
“No!”
she screamed.
“Not yet!”

As the car slid beneath the surface, she yanked her shattered hand through the steel cuff and hammered the Maglite against her window. The glass cracked, then gave way, and a flood of brown water poured over her face. She coiled her legs beneath her and sprang through the opening, driving herself upward and away from the metal coffin, following the bubbles that rose to the surface.

When she burst into the light, she felt the vast river pulling her downstream like the hand of God. You couldn’t swim against that current, she knew. You had to go with the flow and work your way slowly toward the bank, far downstream. As the pain in her left hand curled her body into a ball, she pulled off her boots with her right, then forced herself to tread water and looked toward the nearest bank. It seemed impossibly distant, but she had conquered distance before. She imagined that she saw Annelise standing among the trees on the bank, waving her in.

She began to swim.

Waters had just returned to his seat in the interrogation room when a patrolman threw open the door.

“Dispatch just took a call from some construction guys working on the bridge. A car went over the side. All the way to the water.”

Jackson looked irritated at the interruption. “What bridge are you talking about?”

“The Mississippi River Bridge!”

All four men looked at one another with disbelief.

“We’re calling the sheriff’s office,” the patrolman said. “They’ve got the only rescue boat.”

“Not much point,” Barlow said. “That’s a hundred-foot drop.”

“Depends on the fall,” said Jackson. “If it was a new car, it has air bags.”

“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” said the patrolman. “Just thought you’d like to know.”

He closed the door.

Penn said, “I don’t think that’s ever happened before.”

As they stared at one another, Waters’s cell phone rang. He looked at Jackson. “That’s probably my wife. I told her I’d call her.”

“Go ahead and take it.”

Waters removed the phone from his pocket. The ID read
COLE SMITH
. He started not to answer, but when it rang again, something made him click
SEND
.

“Hello?”

“John! It’s Cole!”

Mallory,
he thought.

“Rock? Are you there?”

Waters knew he should not trust his ears, but something told him the panicked voice in the receiver truly belonged to his old friend. “I’m listening.”

“Get hold of yourself. I was driving across the Mississippi River Bridge, and all of a sudden the guys working on the bridge stopped traffic. Somebody went through the rail.”

“I just heard that.”

“John…it was Lily’s Acura.”

Waters felt himself going into free fall.

“I’m stuck on the bridge now. The car floated for a while, but then it went under and…Jesus, she got out, John.
I saw her.
She made it to the bank south of the mat field. They just loaded her into an ambulance!”

“My God. Where would they be taking her?”

“Has to be St. Catherine’s in Natchez.”

Waters hung up and got to his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Jackson asked. “John?”

“That car that went off the bridge was my wife’s.”

Penn jumped up and gripped his arm. “Are you sure? Who told you that?”

“Cole. He saw her make it to the bank. He saw the car sink. I’ve got to get to the hospital!”

Penn looked at Jackson. “Tom, I realize you may intend to arrest John today, but this is an emergency. You need to let him go deal with it.”

The unexpected turn of events left Jackson unsure what to do. Waters started to leave without permission, but Barlow laid a hand on the gun at his belt.

“I’ll stay with him,” Penn promised.

“Now look, Penn,” Jackson said. “I don’t know what—”

“For God’s sake!” Penn cried. “The man’s wife could be dying. Come with us if you have to!”

Jackson hesitated another moment, then threw up his hands. “Shit, we’ll meet you there.”

The emergency room of St. Catherine’s Hospital was abuzz with conversation about the freak accident. Over the years, several cars had gone into the river, but all from the banks, and most from boat ramps. Only the extensive repairs in progress had made the bridge accident even possible, and some nurses wondered aloud about the odds that someone would go off the road in the exact area that the steel was missing. More than once, Waters heard the words “suicide attempt” from behind a curtain down the hall.

He and Penn had beaten the ambulance to the hospital, but so had Tom Jackson. The big detective stood at Waters’s side during Lily’s transit to the ER, but it didn’t matter, because she was unconscious. As the ER staff worked to stabilize her, Jackson escorted Waters and Penn to the waiting room.

Penn’s father was Lily’s doctor, and his office was only a hundred yards from the hospital. While Lily was in X-ray, Tom Cage came out to the waiting room and told them he didn’t think Lily had suffered internal injuries—thanks to the air bag—but that she was still unconscious. Until they completed a CAT scan, they wouldn’t know about the condition of her brain. She also had a shattered wrist and thumb and some broken ribs.

Seeing Dr. Cage in the St. Catherine’s ER took Waters back to his father’s death. The doctor’s hair and beard had been black then. Now both were silver, but his strong hand on Waters’s arm combined with his deep, reassuring voice kept Waters from giving in to the fear and guilt that were eating their way through him.

They waited one hour, then two. Dr. Cage came out twice: once to tell them that an orthopedic surgeon was repairing Lily’s wrist, then again to say that he’d sent Lily’s brain scans via computer to the office of a neurologist in Jackson. Two local radiologists felt there had been only a slight concussion, but Tom Cage wanted to be sure. Lily had regained consciousness, but she seemed disoriented and confused about her identity.

This revelation chilled Waters’s soul. He wanted to ask more, but Tom Jackson was standing beside him, so he took Penn’s arm and pulled him over to a corner.

“Did you hear that? About Lily’s identity?”

“Don’t talk about what you’re thinking,” Penn advised. “Lily’s had a terrible accident. Anything could cause that confusion. All that matters right now is that she’s alive.”

“You’re wrong, Penn. You don’t know how wrong you are.”

Penn sat him down in one of the plastic chairs bolted to the wall. “I just found out Cole is outside. He’s been out there for an hour, but the police won’t let him in.”

Waters wasn’t sure if he was angry or glad. “Why not?”

“Tom Jackson knows Cole slept with Eve. He’ll want to question him separately about the safe deposit box evidence and so on. I just wanted you to know Cole’s here. Let’s get Lily out of the woods. Then we’ll go back to your legal problems.”

“John? Penn?”

Dr. Cage walked into the waiting room. “I just talked to the neurologist in Jackson. He says Lily’s brain looks good. No intracranial bleeds. No severe injury.”

Waters sagged with relief. Penn braced him.

“She’s much more alert now,” Dr. Cage said. “I’m going to admit her for observation. You can see her briefly.”

Waters nodded, but suddenly Tom Jackson stepped forward. “Could you give us a minute, Doc?”

Penn nodded, and his father went back to the treatment area.

“Listen, guys,” Jackson said. “I’m ecstatic that Lily is okay. It’s a goddamn miracle. But I can’t let John go back there and talk to her.”

Penn drew himself erect. “You can’t stop him unless you arrest him.”

Jackson sighed. “I’ll arrest him if I have to.”

“Damn it, Tom, would you
think
for one minute?”