Sleep No More

Chapter 13

Driving south on Highway 61, Waters was nearly to the Saragossa Country Club when his cell phone rang. What would be a normal occurrence for most people sent a spasm of shock along his body. Eve might be dead, but the sound of his cell phone instantly resurrected her. He checked the LCD, half expecting it to read PAY PHONE, but instead he saw his wife’s cell phone number.

“Hey.”

“Where are you?” Lily asked.

“On my way to Saragossa for lunch. I’m going to meet Cole out there.” Actually Cole had no idea he was coming. “How’s your day?”

“Fine. Ana’s staying over at Lindsey’s tonight.”

Lindsey was a classmate who lived in one of the white-flight neighborhoods that had sprung up around the country club. “On a school night?”

“Tomorrow’s Lindsey’s birthday, so I said it was all right.”

“Okay.”

“Besides, that gives us some more time together.”

Waters had thought last night’s lovemaking an anomaly, despite Lily’s professed commitment to change. “That’s true,” he said neutrally.

“Have you checked your voice mail?”

“No.”

“You should. I haven’t left a message like that in a while. I’ll see you later on. Or call me, if you like the mail.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I love you.”

“You too,” he said, nonplussed by her forwardness.

He clicked off and punched in the code for his voice mail.

“It’s just me,” said Lily. “I’m not calling to ask you to pick up something at the store or bug you about some household junk. I’m calling to tell you I wish you were inside me right now.”

Waters swallowed. Lily had not done anything like this for years.

“I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. What we did last night. And I’m touching myself. I wish you could do this for me. Mmm. If you were, you’d know I’m telling the truth. Well…I hope you get home soon.”

He hung up and made the turn into Saragossa. As the clubhouse came into sight, he decided not to call Lily back. He was glad she was making an effort to close the distance that had separated them for so long, but he simply didn’t know how to respond.

He parked the Land Cruiser and walked through the front doors, then headed to the card room. Cole didn’t play golf anymore; he played gin or Bouree.

Waters found him sitting at a table with three men ranging in age from thirty to sixty. All four had stiff drinks in front of them. On any given day you could find the same crew here, talking, drinking, and gambling. If there was a game on TV, there would be money riding on that as well. Waters couldn’t imagine wasting his life this way, but he knew that men like Cole didn’t really have a choice. They followed their appetites, their appetites led them this way, and that was that.

“Rock!” Cole called. “You come out to play a few hands with us?”

“No. I need to talk to you for a minute. We’ve got some problems with a flow line in Jefferson County.”

“Flow line? What are you talking about?”

Waters jerked his head to the side, leaving no doubt that he wanted privacy. Cole stared at him for a few moments, then said, “Deal me out for a hand, guys. Duty calls.”

The other players grunted, and Cole got up and followed Waters through a side door that opened near the putting green. A retired surgeon was practicing there, so Waters walked out of earshot, Cole wheezing along behind him. They had taken walks like this many times, but always as brothers in arms, discussing strategy on deals they were putting together. Now events had divided them. Waters could feel it in his bones. Cole might not be his enemy, but a chasm had opened between them. When he stopped and turned by an iron bench, Cole squinted against the sunlight, then raised his right hand to protect his eyes.

“You wouldn’t drive out here over any damn flow line,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Didn’t you tell me it’s not a good idea to keep things from your partner?”

Cole’s neck tensed with the effort of remaining expressionless. “That’s right.”

“I hear we sold our three-twenty pumping unit off the Madam X well.”

Cole’s mouth opened slightly; then he drew back his head as if expressing shock at a gross misunderstanding. “Rock, we’ve talked a half dozen times about replacing that old three-twenty.”

“In a couple of years, maybe.”

Cole tilted his head to the side and pooched out his bottom lip. “Well, that’s a difference of opinion.”

“One I wasn’t aware of.”

“Look, am I in charge of that workover or not?”

“You were until today. But if you don’t give me some straight answers, you’re not going to be in charge of jack shit.”

His face reddening, Cole stepped forward like he meant to deck Waters. Instead, he looked at the ground and shook his head.

“Look, goddamn it. I just needed a few thousand to tide me over. I was going to replace the unit in a couple of weeks.”

This was a ludicrous statement, but it served as an admission of guilt. “Jesus, Cole, what about the fifty I lent you the other day?”

“I told you I needed seventy-five!”

“What the hell are you into? Is this gambling debt or what?”

Cole stared off over the eighteenth fairway. “Yeah.”

“Football? What?”

“Mostly football. Some high-stakes poker from the last trip Jenny and I took to Vegas. The vig on that is pretty tough. You know how it is. I tried to make back what I owed by going for broke.” Momentary excitement flashed in Cole’s eyes. “I had a sure thing, Rock. The Tulane-Ole Miss game. I had the inside poop from the team doctor. A guy in New Orleans clues me in-”

“But he was wrong, right?”

Cole shrugged. “I just didn’t catch the right spread.”

“Would you listen to yourself? You’ll never get out of the hole like that.”

“Shit, I know. I’m like a drunk with the gambling.”

“You’re like a drunk with the scotch too.”

Cole whipped up his arm. “Get off me, okay! You were screwing the local slut because she told you she was your dead girlfriend. That’s necrophilia, man.”

Waters felt his hands go cold. He wanted to scream back that he knew it was all a scam, that Cole and Eve were behind the whole thing, but he would not let his partner sidetrack him. He needed to get all the information he could. After today, the only communication he had with his partner might be through attorneys.

“What else have you done? Is this why you didn’t pay the liability premium? You used that money to pay debts?”

“No.”

“Am I going to have to audit every goddamn line of our books? Tell me the truth.”

Cole distended his cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and expelled air in a repentant rush. “Okay…I was in a bind then too. Not as bad as now, but bad enough. I slid the premium money into a different account and cashed it out.”

Waters felt like the earth had opened beneath his feet. “Do you realize that I could lose everything because of that? My retirement? Ana’s college money?”

“Uh-huh,” Cole said in a dead voice. “I’ve agonized over it ever since they found the leak. But goddamn it, John, you put all that at risk yourself when you started screwing Eve. What’s going to happen to them if you go down for murder?”

“Why would I go down for her murder?”

Cole’s eyes glinted. “You can’t fool your partner, Rock. I know you were with her that night.”

“You’re full of shit. What do you think you know?”

Something like satisfaction crossed Cole’s face. “I know what I know.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“No? Maybe I got curious about why you’d given up your true-blue work ethic after seventeen years. Maybe I followed you for a couple of days. Maybe I saw you go into the Eola to meet Evie. You should have taken me up on that alibi offer.”

“You couldn’t have seen me go into the Eola that night, because I wasn’t there.”

“Whatever you say, Rock. Just don’t push me, okay? Don’t even dream about going to the cops over this pumping unit thing.”

Waters shook his head in disbelief. “Is that what you think I’d do? Turn you in to the police? I’m trying to help you, man.”

Cole looked uncertain.

“You know what this tells me? You wouldn’t hesitate to turn me in for something. Is that what you’re doing? Threatening to turn me in if I don’t pay off your debts?”

“Have I done that?” Cole snapped. “Have you heard me say that?”

“It sure sounded like you were leading up to it.”

“Goddamn it, Rock, everything’s just gotten fucked up. And I can’t see how to unfuck it.”

“This is a sad day, partner. We’ve known each other almost forty years. And this is how it ends up?”

Cole suddenly looked close to tears. “You don’t understand, John. This isn’t just about money. I don’t pay these guys? They take it out of my hide. And maybe they don’t stop there, you know? There’s no way Jenny can make it if something happens to me. I gotta find a way to pay this off.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. I been doing stuff like selling that pumping unit just to keep up the interest on the debt. I mean, what the hell? If the EPA thing goes against us, we’re going to lose it all anyway.”

This was true enough. And given his present difficulties, Waters could care less about the dollar value of a pumping unit. “Listen to me,” he said. “Think about when we were kids together. Those summers by St. Catherine’s Creek. The forts we built…the stuff we did together. You at my father’s funeral.”

Cole nodded. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not for me. For me it was yesterday. Now I want you to tell me something. Were you in with Eve on this thing from the start?”

“What thing?”

“Don’t lie, Cole. This is me. Did you feed Eve a bunch of stuff about Mallory and me so she could make me think I was going crazy?”

Cole did a first-rate impression of being shocked. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“You could sell a lot more pumping units with me out of the picture. Maybe even some production, if you forged my signature. And if you did it before the EPA lands on us with both feet, it might just buy your ass out of the hole.”

Cole’s mouth was hanging open. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m stone sober. I’m as sane as I’ve ever been, and I’m not going anywhere. You got it? I’ll be running this company till the EPA chains the door shut. And as of now, you’re making no solo decisions regarding cash flow, production, or anything else.”

“If you’re not drunk, you have gone crazy. You think I’d fuck my best friend like that?”

The hurt in his voice almost made Waters turn away, but this was no time to be soft. “I don’t know what to think anymore, partner. We’ve come to a pretty bad place.”

Cole shook his head, stepped forward, and put his beefy hands on Waters’s shoulders. “Rock,” he said in a cracked voice. “I’m under some real pressure, no lie. All told, I’m over six hundred grand in the hole. But I’d go down with my legs broken and a bullet in my head before I’d do something to hurt you or your family. That’s God’s truth.”

Despite his shock and fury, Waters felt tears sting his eyes. There was no doubt that Cole at least believed what he said. He started to press on with his accusations, as Penn would have wanted him to do, but he simply didn’t have it in him. He squeezed Cole’s arm and said, “I know you would, partner. I know.” Then he gave Cole a hug. He felt the big man shaking, and he knew then that Cole really was in the kind of trouble that some people never walked away from.

“Don’t sweat the little shit,” he said.

“And it’s all little shit,” Cole replied automatically.

They forced a laugh, and then Waters took out his keys.

“What are you going to do?” Cole asked.

“I don’t know. You just stay safe, okay? And don’t worry about that three-twenty.”

Cole took a step toward him. “Listen, John. I don’t know what you did exactly. But my offer for an alibi still stands. If you can’t figure a way out, come see me. We’ve dug ourselves out of holes before. Maybe we can do it again, if we stick together.”

Waters tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. Cole sounded so sincere, yet every word of it could be a lie.

The office was busy that afternoon. Monthly billing was going out to the coowners in all the wells, and Sybil couldn’t handle it alone. Since Cole was busy drinking and playing cards, that left Waters to fill in for him.

The printer jammed halfway through the job, and as he helped Sybil clear it, he felt tempted to ask her some questions. If she was sleeping with Cole, as he suspected, she might know a lot about his financial problems. She might also know if he’d had any recent contact with Eve. But Sybil seemed to be in a down mood, and he didn’t want her to think the company was in more trouble than she knew about already.

At a quarter to five, Sybil headed out to the post office to mail the bills. Cole still hadn’t returned, so Waters locked the office and headed home. He was nearly there when his cell phone rang, and he saw a mobile number he didn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“This is your fellow Eagle Scout,” said a male voice.

Waters almost laughed at Penn Cage’s choice of code. “What’s going on?”

“We’re both on mobile phones. Where are you?”

“State Street, on my way home.”

“We need to talk. Your house?”

“Ah…I’d rather meet elsewhere.”

“Okay. How about the parking lot of Heard’s Music Company?”

The lot was only a few hundred yards from Waters’s driveway. “I’ll see you there.”

Waters hung up and sped past his driveway, then crossed one boulevard and turned into the music store parking lot. Waters had bought his last piano here, a nine-foot concert grand. As a boy, he and his mother could only dream of an instrument like that; now he owned a house that seemed incomplete without one. But for how long? he thought.

As he parked the Land Cruiser, Penn leaned out of a green Audi TT and motioned for him to get in. When Waters climbed into the convertible, Penn shook his hand and smiled.

“What’s up?” Waters asked. “Do you know something?”

“The police have a new lead. They’re keeping quiet about it, but Caitlin has a source inside the department.”

“And?”

Penn grimaced. “The guy thought he heard your name mentioned.”

“Shit.” A wild, unreasoning fear hit Waters in the bowels. “Was he sure?”

“Nothing’s sure yet. I don’t know what they have. Do you have any idea what it could be?”

Waters thought of the week at Bienville, then the nights at the Eola. “I don’t know. Maybe someone saw us, but we didn’t see them?”

“That may be it.”

“I’ve always been worried about Eve’s house. She’s bound to have had stuff about me in there.”

“Well, until we know something for sure, you should sit tight and stay calm. Go back over everything and try to anticipate the situation.”

Waters’s face suddenly felt cold.

“What is it, John?”

“I just talked to Cole, like you said to. Confronted him.”

“And?”

“He told me he knew I was with Eve at the Eola.”

Penn’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How could he know that?”

“He was coy about it. Said he followed me for a few days. But I think that was bullshit. I can’t see him doing that.”

“No. If he knows, it’s because Eve told him you would be there.” Penn tapped the steering wheel. “What if she called him to come up after you passed out, thinking he was going to do something to you? When in reality he was going to kill her all along, and frame you.”

Waters shook his head. “Cole couldn’t do that.”

“Are you so sure? What did he say about selling the pumping unit?”

“He admitted it. He’s up to his eyeballs in debt. To bookies, Vegas casinos, everybody.”

Penn turned up his palms, as if this proved his case.

“Did you find out anything about Mallory’s diaries?” Waters asked, wanting to change the subject.

“As a matter of fact, I did. I talked to Mrs. Candler for quite a while. I told her I was thinking of doing a nonfiction book about Natchez, and naturally I’d want to include a chapter on our second Miss Mississippi. I got a good bit of information out of her before she got suspicious.”

“Such as?”

“About a year ago-sometime around her husband’s death-some of Mallory’s things disappeared from their house.”

Waters felt a strange premonition, but of what, he wasn’t sure. “Like what?”

“Mallory’s diaries, for one thing.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. Also some jewelry, all Mallory’s. And some personal things of Mallory’s that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but her.”

“What do you think?”

“That tells us that someone has been planning this scam on you for over a year. They broke into the Candler house and took personal things that would help authenticate Eve’s story.”

“How could they take things that no one would know were important but Mallory?”

“John, they were taken from her room. Obviously she had saved them for some sentimental reason. My guess is that if you hadn’t swallowed Eve’s story so quickly, those little items would have started making appearances in your life. On Eve’s arm, or in her purse, maybe.”

Waters felt a strange lightness in his limbs. He leaned back in the seat, unable to believe what he was hearing.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me about Mallory cutting herself,” Penn said. “You said you didn’t believe her when she told you that her father had sexually abused her.”

Waters nodded.

“Well, I’ve been asking questions about her family. Nobody could be very specific, but I got the feeling that Ben Candler was a little strange where sex was concerned.”

“How so?”

“A little pervy about young girls. He made inappropriate comments sometimes. He and his wife apparently had a nonsexual relationship. That’s the gist, anyway. The mother had an affair at some point, but when it threatened Ben’s political career, she ended it.”

“Political career? Shit, he was only a state representative.”

“Ben Candler took that very seriously, as you know.”

“Oh, do I. He liked to give you the impression that if the country went to DEF CON Three, he would be making the critical decisions about launching nuclear missiles.”

“You got it. And he held that job for six terms.”

“Old Ben knew how to kiss ass.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I’ll tell you this,” Waters said. “When I visited Mallory’s grave after the soccer game, I noticed two things I didn’t tell you. They didn’t seem important then. Her father is buried next to her. He has a small, cheap gravestone. And it was defaced, like someone had taken a crowbar to it.”

“Ben Candler only died about a year ago,” Penn said. “So Mallory couldn’t have defaced the stone. It could be his wife, I suppose. Or someone else he sexually harassed.”

Waters nodded, but that wasn’t what he was thinking. “I’ll tell you something else. It stunk by his grave.”

“What do you mean, stunk? Like what?”

“Urine. Like an animal came there every day and pissed on his grave.”

Penn looked incredulous. “I can’t see prim old Margaret Candler driving to the cemetery to piss on her husband’s grave every day.” He shook his head and laughed. “Maybe once a week, though.”

“Mallory would,” Waters said quietly.

“Mallory would what?”

“Go there every day and piss on his grave. She’d do it rain or shine for ten years. That’s the way she was.”

“Was,” Penn echoed. “That’s the operative word there, John. Focus on the present, all right?”

“Something’s been bothering me, Penn.”

“Jesus. Are you starting with the supernatural stuff again?”

“You tell me. One of the things that convinced me Eve was really Mallory was her scars. I didn’t tell you that before for fear you’d think I was crazy. Eve Sumner had cutting scars beneath her watch, and also on her inner thighs, just the way Mallory used to. And they weren’t all new. She’d been doing it for a long time.”

Penn was staring at him with worry in his eyes.

“And the night she died,” Waters went on, “she asked me to cut her during sex. She was really upset, and she wanted to be cut, just like Mallory did sometimes.”

Penn took hold of his wrist. “John, listen to me. They got those details from Mallory’s diaries. They had to.”

“You’re telling me Eve Sumner mutilated herself to convince me she was Mallory? And for a long period of time? Do you really think that’s possible?”

“People are quite capable of maiming themselves in pursuit of a goal, John. In the nineteen-fifties, inmates at Angola Prison slashed their Achilles tendons to draw attention to their plight. They permanently crippled themselves. What’s a few cuts on the surface of the skin compared to the money involved in this case? And we know from the break-in at the Candler house that they were planning this scam for at least a year.”

Waters pondered this in silence. He wanted to believe Penn, but his memory of Eve’s desolate face as she begged him to cut her was too vivid to call a lie.

“Stick to realities,” Penn urged him. “Things still look good for you. If the police had something concrete, they would already have brought you in for questioning. If they do call about questioning you, refer them to me. I’ll try to arrange for it to take place in a law office downtown. I don’t have one, but I can borrow a friend’s.” He squeezed Waters’s knee. “You just keep cool.”

Waters nodded.

“Get some sleep if you can. Play with your kid. Bring her over to play with Annie.”

“I will.”

He shook hands with Penn and got out. The owner of the music store was standing in the display window, looking right at him. As Penn’s Audi pulled away, Waters waved, then got into the Land Cruiser and drove out of the lot. Home was only a few hundred yards away, but as he neared it, he felt suddenly sure that he would find the police waiting when he arrived. He closed his eyes and thanked God that Annelise was spending the night away from home, and would not have to see him led away in handcuffs.

The driveway was empty.

The house felt empty too. Without Ana clattering around and Rose clanking utensils in the kitchen, Linton Hill seemed like a museum.

“Lily?” he called.

No answer.

He went into the den and sat on the sofa. For once, the remote control was actually on the table beside him. He switched on the TV and clicked up to CNN. The local news out of Jackson always had murders to report, and he didn’t want to see anything about murder. The images on CNN weren’t much better, though, war casualties overseas. Wherever you went, death was news.

“I thought I heard you come in.”

Waters looked over his shoulder, and his mouth fell open. The woman standing in the doorway was his wife, but she looked as though she had stepped out of a time machine. Her shoulder-length blond hair had vanished. Now cut boyishly short, with only a few locks curling around the neck, it looked the way it had when Lily first moved back to Natchez, and was still in her athletic phase. Tight slacks, drop earrings, and a deep V-neck blouse made the transformation complete.

“Wow,” he said. “You cut your hair.”

She smiled. “I had them lighten it a bit too.”

“You look ten years younger.”

“Was I that bad? You look like you’re in shock.”

“Did you run again?”

Lily walked into the room and spun before him like a runway model. “Actually I slept most of the day. I was really tired. But after going to the salon, I felt better. What about you? You look exhausted.”

“Just worried,” he said, searching for some excuse. “The EPA won’t tell us a damn thing.”

“Screw the EPA.” Lily smiled again. “As soon as I start rubbing your shoulders, you’re going to forget all about those tree-hugging fascists.”

Waters couldn’t believe his ears. Lily hadn’t sounded this carefree in ages. She was wearing a little eyeliner and shadow too, he noticed. She hadn’t overdone it, but there was enough to give her an air of mystery.

She walked behind the sofa and said, “Turn off the news and put on some satellite music. Atmospheres or something.”

Waters fiddled with the remote, and soon the soothing sounds of a well-played acoustic guitar filled the room.

Lily laid her hands on his shoulders and began a soothing massage. She started with gentle pressure, but before long her fingers were digging into the muscle fibers of his neck, working out the tension that had been building there ever since he left Eve lying dead in the Eola Hotel.

“God, that feels good.”

“Don’t think,” she said. “Clear your mind.”

Her command was impossible to obey, but he tried. Lily thoroughly massaged his neck and scalp, then moved to his face. She worked the tension out of muscles he never knew he had: below his eyes, over the joint of his jawbone, below his nose, around his mouth. He jumped when her fingers slid into his mouth and began to rub his gums and upper palate, but it felt so good that he laid his head back and gave himself to it. When Lily flattened the pad of her thumb against his back teeth and pushed down, the sensation was amazing.

“Let go, baby,” she murmured. “Don’t fight it.”

The sensuality of her fingers inside his mouth aroused him. After a couple of minutes, she removed her wet fingers and slid them down into his shirt. His nipples constricted at her touch. She played there for a few moments, then leaned over him and slid both hands down to his lap.

“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 first 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.”