Sleep No More

Chapter 15

Waters ran a red light and accelerated to sixty-five as fear poured like corrosive acid through his veins. He’d missed Annelise at school. One cell phone call to the elementary school office had determined that Rose had picked her up, and Rose’s cell phone wasn’t switched on. Which meant Annelise might already be home with Lily. The implications of this were almost more than he could stand. At the cemetery he’d decided he trusted his wife and his best friend. That meant there was no conspiracy to drive him crazy or frame him for murder. Which meant everything “Eve Sumner” had told him was true. He had never even met the real Eve, except perhaps in the panicked seconds before he lost consciousness in the hotel. Yet while he “slept,” his hands had strangled the life out of her, guided by the twisted soul of Mallory Candler. And now Mallory was alone with Annelise, hidden in Lily’s unsuspecting mind.

Waters turned onto State Street, stomped on the gas pedal, and rawhided the Land Cruiser through two lines of double-parked cars. His fear was not for Annelise alone. Right now, the real danger was to Lily. Penn’s comment about Lily’s resurgent sex drive echoed in his mind: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Some men might think having Lily Waters and Mallory Candler in the same body was a gift from the gods, especially if you got Lily for the day shift and Mallory at night. It was the madonna-whore fantasy brought to life. Only Waters knew that this state of affairs would not last. Now that Mallory was this close to him, she would not be satisfied to coexist peacefully with Lily. Mallory Candler did not share. She would use all her power to control Lily, to dominate her, and finally to exterminate all trace of her from the body Mallory sought to inhabit.

Then the danger would shift to Annelise. For no matter what fantasies Mallory might have of domestic bliss, she would ultimately view Ana as a threat. A living reminder of Lily. And sooner or later, she would act to remove that threat. Just as she had removed Eve Sumner.

“Mallory killed Eve,” Waters said aloud.

He hit the brakes and swerved into his driveway, then tore up toward the house. Rose’s Saturn was still parked out front, and this brought him palpable relief. With Rose still here, he wouldn’t have to wait until Annelise went to bed to see Lily alone. He skidded to a stop by the front porch, shut off the engine, and ran inside.

“Daddy!” Annelise cried from the end of the hall. She was crossing between rooms with Pebbles in her arms.

“Hey, punkin!” he called, running to her and sweeping her up in his arms. “Where’s Rose?”

“Who’s running in my house?” bellowed Rose, coming into the hall. “I should have known. I’m glad you’re here, Mr. John. I need to go early today.”

“Where’s Lily?”

“She sleeping. She been tired most all day.”

Thank God. “Rose, is there any way you can stay an extra hour?”

The maid looked doubtful. “My sister needs me to stop off at the drugstore for her potassium.”

“Is it critical? I really need you, Rose.”

The black woman studied Waters’s face, then said, “I guess I could get my no-count nephew to get them pills. If his car’s running.”

“Thank you, Rose. Can you take Annelise outside and play for a few minutes? I’ll come join you before long.”

Rose nodded, her face creased with suspicion. “Come on, girl,” she said to Annelise. “Put that mangy old cat down and bring my cell phone out to the swing set.”

“Pebbles isn’t mangy,” Ana retorted, knowing Rose’s gibes were all in fun.

“Hmm,” Rose growled.

Ana darted into the kitchen for the cell phone, then ran for the back door. Rose followed slowly, her big hips swinging with patient determination.

As soon as she cleared the door, Waters walked back to the master bedroom and opened the door. Lily lay on her side beneath the covers, breathing deeply.

He walked over and started to touch her shoulder, then drew back his hand. What could he say? How could he know if Mallory or Lily was in control at any given moment? He couldn’t simply ask Lily if she was Mallory. If Lily awakened as herself, his words would confuse and even frighten her. And if she awakened as Mallory, she might simply lie. He closed the bedroom door, but before he could think of a sensible way to learn the truth, Lily rolled over and opened her eyes.

“John?” she said in a sleepy voice. “What are you doing home? What time is it?”

“I’m back from work, babe. It’s suppertime.”

She rubbed her eyes. “God…I must have slept all afternoon.”

He sat beside her on the bed. “Do you feel sick?”

“No, just…out of it. It’s weird, like jet lag or something. Where’s Ana?”

“Outside with Rose. I asked Rose to stay late.”

“Why? I’ll get up.”

“Not yet.” He leaned over her. “Do you remember what you did today?”

Lily nodded. “Yes, I…” She blinked several times, then looked blankly around the room. “I guess I don’t remember.”

Waters looked into his wife’s bewildered eyes. All his instincts told him Lily was herself now. But even if she were, what could he say to her? I think you’re possessed by the soul of my old lover? No, what he needed to do was bring Mallory to the surface. But how to make her reveal herself? Actions speak louder than words, said a voice in his head.

Lily threw aside the bedcovers and started to get up. Waters took hold of her shoulders and gently pushed her back down. “You don’t have to rush,” he said. “Annelise is fine with Rose.”

“I’m okay,” Lily assured him. “Really. I can get up.”

Waters laid the flat of his hand between her breasts and rubbed softly. “What if I don’t want you to get up?”

Her eyes widened in surprise.

“I’ve been thinking about last night,” he said. “All day.”

After staring at him for a moment, Lily reached out and touched his thigh. “That feels good,” she said.

His fingers went to the buttons of her silk nightshirt and opened the top three. As he leaned down to her breasts, he felt her hands entwine in the hair behind his head. He kissed gently at first, but as the pink flesh swelled in his mouth, he withdrew his tongue and bit the nipple.

“Hey,” Lily protested. “Easy, okay?”

Waters murmured his assent, but he knew he would have to go further to awaken Mallory. For a while he caressed Lily’s breasts in the way she had always liked. Then he kissed his way up to her left ear. “I want you now,” he whispered. “Are you ready?”

Lily shifted her thighs, then made a sound low in her throat. “I think so.”

He unbuckled his belt and slipped off his pants. Lily took hold of his shirt and pulled him across her, then kissed his mouth. As she parted her legs, he touched her cheek and said, “I want to be behind you.”

Lily looked uncertain. “I want to see your face.”

“I know.” He shut his heart and focused on what he had to do. “But you know what I like.”

Confusion clouded Lily’s eyes, but after a few moments of reflection, she kissed him, then rolled over and got onto all fours. “Go slow,” she said. “I’m not that ready.”

Waters knelt behind her, rubbing and kissing her lower back. Lily remained still. Mallory would have arched her back, catlike, against his hand. He wasn’t sure exactly what to do next, but he knew in his soul that he was right. Given the right stimulus, Mallory would betray herself. She would be unable to resist. He slapped Lily on the rump, hard enough to sting.

“Ow,” she cried. “What was that for?”

“You know what I like.” He spanked her again. “What do you like?”

“I don’t like that.”

He slapped her once more, and harder. Lily tried to jerk away, but he grabbed her hips, thrust forward, and went between her thighs. She froze. Poised in this odd position, this confusion of desire and resistance, Waters felt something change. The flesh under his hands seemed to shiver, and then, as he watched in fascination, Lily looked back over her shoulder, her eyes glinting with excitement and anticipation.

“Oh, I know what you like,” she said, pressing her hips back against him. “And you know what I like. So do it.”

Waters was paralyzed. The consciousness glittering in those eyes belonged to a woman he had first made love to more than twenty years ago, before he even met his wife.

“Mallory?” he whispered.

She laughed then, a low, throaty sound, and her eyes filled with dark amusement. “When did you know?”

Waters could not find his voice. To look at his wife’s face and see no trace of her in it was more than he could endure. As he knelt with his mouth open, Lily reached between her legs and took hold of him.

Her touch jolted him like a defibrillator jolting a dead heart. He had accomplished part of his goal, but what he needed to do next, he could not do now. He threw himself off the bed, grabbed his pants, and ran for the hallway.

“Johnny!” yelled the voice behind him.

He pulled on his pants by the back door and buttoned his shirt as he ran outside. He saw Annelise and Rose at the swing set, Rose pushing Annelise with the steady rocking motion of an oil-well pump. The moment Rose saw his face, she grabbed the chains of the swing and stopped it.

“What’s the matter, Mr. John? Where’s your shoes?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Lily’s too tired for supper. I’m going to take Ana to her grandmother’s for a while.”

Concern filled the maid’s eyes. “Are you sure everything’s all right? Lily don’t usually sleep like that. Maybe you should give Dr. Cage a call.”

“No, it’s-”

“Mama!” cried Annelise. “Daddy said you were sleeping.”

Waters whirled and saw Lily walking down the back porch steps. He ran toward her with his arms out.

“You need to rest, honey! You said you were dizzy.”

Lily squinted at him and shook her head. “I’m not dizzy. I want to see Annelise.”

“No,” Waters said firmly. “You need to lie down.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s still daylight.”

“Go back inside!”

“Daddy?” called Annelise. “Why are you yelling at Mom?”

Waters turned and saw his daughter walking up behind him. “Mama’s sick, baby. You stay right there.”

“Sick?” Ana’s voice cracked. “Sick how?”

Waters turned and saw Rose staring at him as if he had lost his mind. Have I? he thought. Then he remembered the eyes glinting in the bedroom. “Lily, please go back inside.”

Annelise began to cry.

Lily looked back at him with such a hurt expression that he felt like a Nazi storm trooper. But was she really upset? Or was Mallory reveling in a role she’d been waiting ten years to play?

“Mr. John,” Rose said in an indignant voice, “I think you the one needs to go back inside. Get yourself a drink and sit down for a while.”

Lily’s eyes remained on Waters, pleading for some explanation.

“Go back inside,” he begged. “Please.”

Lily burst into tears, then turned and ran back up the steps. Behind him, Annelise began to wail. Waters turned and saw Rose kneeling with the child in her arms, comforting her with soft words. But over Annelise’s shoulder, the maid glared at him with eyes that could melt steel.

“Keep Ana out here,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”

He ran up the back steps and started down the hall toward the master bedroom. As he walked, he cut his eyes left and right, half expecting some kind of attack from his blind side. Mallory had done such things before, and he sensed danger now.

Finding the bedroom door closed against him, he began to doubt himself. What if Lily had snapped back to herself after he fled the bedroom? He put his ear to the cypress face of the door but heard nothing. Testing the knob, he found it locked.

“Lily?” he called.

No reply.

“Lily!”

Still nothing.

“Lily, open the door,” he called in a reasonable voice. “I need to talk to you.”

The silence mocked him. He looked down at the brass knob. There was a tiny hole at its center. Annelise had picked the lock many times with a paper clip. He was about to go in search of one when he heard a soft click from the knob. When nothing else happened, he grabbed the knob and threw open the door.

Lily sat cross-legged at the center of the bed, her palms upturned in the manner of a Hindu in meditation, her wide-open eyes burning with a light that rooted Waters to the floor.

She smiled serenely. “Close the door.”

“You can’t do this,” Waters told her.

“It’s already done. Come in and close the door, Johnny. I’ll do the talking.”

Waters did as she said.

“I want to tell you how my father died,” Lily said. “Do you remember what I told you about him?”

Waters said nothing. He felt as though someone had injected him with the most powerful hallucinogen on the planet. To hear the voice of his wife speak Mallory’s inmost thoughts-and in Mallory’s diction-pushed him into a realm beyond fear. It inverted his sense of reality, so that the familiar engendered horror rather than affection, and dread replaced love.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

For some reason an image of Penn Cage behind his desk filled Waters’s mind. “That he abused you?”

“Mmm-hmm. You never believed me about that, did you?”

He tried to guess where she was going. “Why do you think that?”

Lily shook her head in reproof. “Because I was inside you, Johnny. I know your thoughts now. Your memories.”

“Did it really happen?”

“Maybe not like you imagine. But it happened. From the time I was about ten, I started to feel uncomfortable around my father. He said things to me he shouldn’t have said. He noticed things about me. It started as compliments, but the older I got…he talked about my beauty, all the time, of course. But then it was my body. And my ‘way,’ he called it. My ‘beguiling’ way. He’d walk into the bathroom when I was using it. Or trick me into coming into the bathroom when he was in there without clothes on.”

“Did he touch you?”

“He wanted to. My friends knew it too. Some of them. He did the same kinds of things to them. Too much time with us instead of with the grown-ups. Touches that lingered too long. It was only lack of nerve that stopped him from doing something physical.”

“If he never touched you, how do you know that’s true?”

“I’ll tell you. About fourteen months ago, when I first got back to Natchez, I wanted desperately to get into my old house. I wanted to remember what it was like, and to get some of my old things, if they were still there. I didn’t want to risk it when I was in Danny. But once I got into Eve, I felt confident enough. I took the key from under the rock in the flower bed where they’d always hidden it, and slipped inside.”

Lily’s eyes glazed with the power of memory. “I had no idea what it would be like. I found my room exactly as I’d left it. It was like a shrine. My old clothes, my posters, my photos. My cheerleading uniform. Everything. It was like going to Graceland and seeing Elvis’s old costumes on mannequins. They actually had my Miss Mississippi gown on a mannequin in the corner.” She shuddered. “I had never felt as dead as I did in that room. Anyway, I took a few small things. Some snapshots. A cross my grandmother had given me. A scarf I’d had when you and I were together. In moments like that, you know which things are important. The things you can’t live without.”

“Your diaries?”

She nodded. “That’s what I really wanted. I expected them to be in my drawer, but they weren’t. I searched the whole house, but I couldn’t find them. Then I went into the attic. We had a walk-in attic on the second floor. Remember? I found the diaries in a glass-topped box by the back wall. There was light up there, so I started reading them.”

Waters thought he saw tears welling in her eyes.

“Reading what I’d written so long ago…it was the opposite of how I’d felt in my room. I felt more alive then-more myself-than I had since the night I was raped in New Orleans. There was my true soul, right there on the page. As I sat reading, I noticed something odd about the wall. The edge of a board was sticking out. But it wasn’t like a warp. The board was propped there. I pulled it away and found a space. There was a book inside it. A big one. It was a photo album.”

“What was in it?”

“When I opened it…I saw pictures of a naked girl. I thought it was just regular pornography at first. Then I saw that the girl was me.” Disgust rippled through Lily’s body. “Me, Johnny. I was about twelve, and I was in the bathroom. My own bathroom. I flipped the pages and saw more pictures of myself, from age eleven to about twenty. I was always naked or partly naked, and always in the bathroom. They were all shot from the same angle. Later, I found the hole in the wall that he’d shot them through. There were pictures of my friends too. Anyone who had come over to spend the night with me. When I saw those pictures…I knew that everything I’d felt when I was a child was true. Things I’d punished myself for thinking about my father…do you understand? I felt raped. By my own father. And I knew what he did with that book. He sneaked up there all those years and…you know what he did. It makes me want to throw up.”

Waters remembered Benjamin Candler’s odd combination of arrogance and smarmy glad-handing.

“Don’t you remember how he took pictures of everything?” Lily asked. “Every football game, every pep rally, every school play. But those weren’t the pictures he really wanted.”

“What did you do with the book?”

“I put it back where I found it.”

“Why?”

“I went back to Eve’s house and thought about it. Let it sink in. And then, three days later, I went back. But that time I took a gun.”

Waters’s stomach tightened. “Why?”

“I knew he’d deny it. I went on my mother’s bridge day. That was his afternoon off. I waited for him in the kitchen. When he walked in, he saw Eve Sumner, realtor, standing there with a gun.”

“What did he do?”

“‘What’s the matter, Ms. Sumner?’” Lily cried in a hysterical voice. “‘Are you in trouble? Is someone chasing you?’ I laughed and said, ‘No, I just want to talk to you.’ He asked what about. ‘Your daughter,’ I told him. ‘My daughter’s dead,’ he said. ‘Are you sure about that?’ I asked. He said that wasn’t appropriate conversation. He asked me to leave his house. I refused. I said, ‘I want to talk to you about why you molested your daughter.’”

“Jesus.”

“He looked stunned, but he didn’t kick me out. He asked what the hell I was talking about. I told him I knew about the pictures he’d been taking all those years. His face went white, Johnny. I was like the ghost of Christmas past. He told me to get the hell out, but you should have seen him staring at me. I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I was one of those other girls who’d come to spend the night. He said he’d call the police if I didn’t get out. I dared him to do it. He told me I couldn’t prove anything about him. Then I opened the drawer next to me and took out the photo album. I’d gotten it from the attic before he came home. That was all it took. He turned gray, like there was no blood going to his face. Then he started to cry. He asked me who I was.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. ‘I’m Mallory,’ I said. He didn’t believe me until I started to talk. I told him things only I could know, like I did with you. I reminded him of things he’d said to me, things no one else could possibly have heard. I’d been talking for about two minutes when he grabbed his left arm. I ripped the phone out of the wall and walked out with the photo album. That night, I heard that he’d died of a heart attack.”

Savage satisfaction entered Lily’s face.

“Why did you tell me this?”

She cocked her head and smiled. “An object lesson. You betrayed me too, Johnny. Not like he did. You looked me in the face when you did it. You tried to ease the pain as much as you could, but in the end you only made it worse.”

“Mallory-”

“Don’t worry. I forgive you. I’m trying to, anyway. I know why you did what you did now. I felt your guilt when I was inside you. You were so young. You couldn’t even imagine being married. It takes men longer to see what the important things are in life. I know that now. We had some bad luck…but now we have a second chance.”

“Mallory, listen-”

“We don’t have time to talk about this now,” Lily said, uncrossing her legs and sliding to the edge of the bed. “We have to take care of Annelise. She’s scared, and she doesn’t understand what she just saw.”

He remembered his daughter’s tear-stained face. “Mallory, you can’t…This is all wrong. You can’t do this to my wife.”

She shook her head as though he were speaking nonsense. “I am your wife now, Johnny.”

“Mama? Where are you?” Annelise’s frightened voice echoed up the hall.

As he turned toward the door, Waters heard Rose call, “Mr. John, this baby’s upset! She got to see her mama!”

“In here, Rose,” Lily called.

Annelise shot through the door like a missile, then froze and looked from father to mother. Lily held out both arms.

“Come here, baby! Mama’s right here!”

Annelise leaped onto the bed and hugged Lily tightly.

“What ya’ll want me to do?” Rose asked from the doorway, her voice strangely suspicious.

Waters sighed in surrender. “Go home, Rose.”

“There’s nothing but cornbread made. The pork chops and macaroni still got to be done.”

“I’ll do that,” Lily said from the bed. “Go on home and rest old Arthur.”

Old Arthur… Rose’s nickname for arthritis. Mallory could access Lily’s memories at will. No one would ever be able to discover the truth by probing her with questions. Only Waters, who saw the differences revealed behind the bedroom door, would know Mallory lay hidden behind Lily’s eyes. Perhaps with time Rose would sense something amiss, but by then it would probably be too late.

“All right, then,” Rose said reluctantly. “I’m going on.” She gave Waters a last look of disapproval and walked down the hall.

“Are you really, okay, Mom?” asked Annelise.

Lily gave her a storybook smile. “Sure I am. You go with Daddy and start the water for the macaroni. I’ll put on some real clothes and then make the pork chops and the salad.”

Ana hugged her again, then climbed down from the bed and came to Waters. “Do I get to cook the macaroni by myself?”

“Do you think you can?”

“Mama said!”

“Okay, then. Come on.”

With a last hard look at Lily, Waters picked Ana up and ran for the kitchen. She giggled all the way there, but Waters’s heart felt like a stone. He wanted to run right out the front door to the Land Cruiser and put as much distance as he could between Annelise and the lost soul dressing in the bedroom.

But running was not an option. Mallory wouldn’t even have to chase him. She could simply call the police and accuse him of kidnapping. He’d be lucky to get a hundred miles from town before he was arrested. And no judge in the state would believe one word of his story.

Twenty minutes later, the pork chops were simmering in a skillet full of gravy, and the macaroni was boiling on the range top set in the marble island. Lily had tried to make preparing the dinner a family affair, but it took all Waters’s will to simply play the role of a sane father.

Lily and Annelise were working on the salad now, and whenever Ana’s attention was diverted, Lily would wink or smile at him. As the charade played on, one question filled his mind: Where is Lily right now? While inside Eve, Mallory had described her host as “sleeping.” What did that mean? The only encouraging thing Waters could recall-as horrible as the memory was-was that Eve seemed to have snapped back to herself before she was murdered. Which meant that her true self had survived, even after a year of possession. Mallory had been inside Lily for only forty-eight hours.

Lily lifted a butcher knife from the block and began to slice tomatoes. Watching her deftly handle the blade, Waters recalled Mallory sitting in a fetal position in an empty bathtub, methodically cutting parallel lines into her wrists. He felt a scream building behind his lips. The only thing that kept it there was his desire to spare Ana the trauma of seeing her father lose control. Yet how long could he spare her? He was trapped in a situation no one would believe: while a murder investigation moved ever closer to him, his daughter lived under threat from the real killer-a woman everyone would perceive as her mother. And if no one believed him, no one would help him. He would have to solve his own problem. There was only one solution that he could see. Mallory had to leave Lily’s body.

“Hey, punkin?” he prompted Annelise. “Time to get the Velveeta ready.”

While Ana worked to tear open the foil packet, he strained the macaroni in the sink, then transferred the noodles to a ceramic dish. “You want to stir the cheese in this time?”

She clapped and grabbed a big spoon from the drawer.

“You know how to do it,” he told her. “I’m going to show Mom something in the dining room. We’ll be back in a second.”

“Okay.” Ana climbed up on a chair and began squeezing Velveeta into the noodle dish.

Waters took hold of Lily’s wrist, pulled her into the dining room, and shut the door behind them.

Lily seemed amused by his action until he grabbed her throat and pushed her up against the wall.

“Listen to me, Mallory,” he hissed. “You cannot do this. You have to get out of my wife.”

She gave a constricted laugh.

Waters squeezed harder, cutting off her air. “You know as well as I do that I can’t kill you. Because I can’t kill you without killing Lily. You’re like AIDS, or cancer. But there are things I can do.”

“Such as?” she croaked, her eyes still bright with laughter.

“You think you felt dead when you saw that room at your parents’ house? If you don’t get out of Lily, this is how it will be. When Annelise is around, I’ll treat you just as I would Lily. But the minute she’s gone, you won’t exist. I won’t look at you. I won’t speak to you. I won’t acknowledge a word you say. I won’t sleep with you. Ever again.”

Lily’s eyes seemed to dilate with fear, but the moment he loosened his hand, she laughed. “You’re so naive, Johnny. I’m going to let this little outburst go, because I know you’re in shock. But you don’t tell me what I’m going to do. You strangled Eve.” She batted his hands away from her neck. “All I have to do is give them your name, and they can match the DNA to the semen you left in her body. Okay?”

Waters’s mouth fell open. “My God. That’s why you killed her.”

Lily’s mouth flattened to a thin line, and her eyes went arctic cold. “You have no idea what you put me through. You gave me two babies, and you made me kill them. Then you walked away. Well, for once you can’t walk away from me.” She reached up and touched his cheek. “Do you know what it’s like to hate someone enough to kill them, but love them too much to do it? I thought of killing you a thousand times. And her. But I’m glad I didn’t. Because now I have you.” She pinched some skin on her arm and pulled it up. “And her too. And that’s all I want, Johnny.”

Fear ate through his bowels like a ravenous worm.

“I know exactly how things are going to work out,” Lily said, “so you may as well accept it all now. Six months from now, you won’t even remember Lily-”

Waters seized her throat again and squeezed with enough force to crush her windpipe. His arms quivered from the strain, and Lily’s face went red, then blue.

“Mama?” Annelise called.

Waters let go the moment the dining room door opened.

“The macaroni’s-Mom? Your face is all red! What’s the matter?”

Lily knelt and hugged Ana. “Nothing, baby. I bent over to look under the table, and the blood just went to my head. It’s nothing. Let’s go eat!”

She smiled at Waters and led Ana back into the kitchen. He waited a moment, then followed, his hands shaking at his sides.

Lily was brushing mushrooms into an empty bowl, which she then handed to Annelise. “Do you remember how to take the stems out, baby?”

“Of course I do. That’s easy.”

“Will you do it for me?”

Annelise nodded and sat on the floor, the bowl between her knees. Lily turned to the cutting board and resumed slicing the tomatoes.

“I hope Pebbles doesn’t come in here and try to eat from this bowl,” Annelise said. “She won’t like mushrooms.” She looked up at Waters. “Will she, Dad?”

Tears stung Waters’s eyes as he looked down at his daughter. “Probably not, punkin.”

A bright reflection suddenly flashed past his eyes. He looked up at Lily, and his heart stopped. She was dangling the butcher knife over Annelise’s head like a miniature sword of Damocles. Its point swung back and forth as Ana patiently picked stems from the mushrooms.

“Your daddy’s in a funny mood today,” Lily said, her eyes mocking Waters. “I think he ought to realize how much he has to be thankful for. Don’t you think so, Ana?”

Annelise pursed her lips as she worked at a thick brown stem. “Daddy knows what to be thankful for.”

“I wonder sometimes.” Lily lowered the knife to within a half-inch of the crown of Annelise’s head. “Do you, John? Do you know what to be thankful for?”

“Yes,” he said in a shaky voice. “I do.”

Lily smiled, then lifted the blade about twelve inches. Waters felt slight relief until she dropped the knife and caught the flashing blade just above Annelise’s head.

“Oh!” Lily cried in an exaggerated voice. “I almost had an accident!”

“Be careful,” said Annelise. “More kids get killed from accidents than from getting sick or anything else. I learned that in school yesterday.”

Lily winked at Waters, then went back to slicing the tomatoes. He fell to his knees and hugged Annelise until she told him to stop. Ninety minutes later, Waters was tucking Annelise into bed upstairs.

“Why isn’t Mama tucking me in too?” she asked.

“Mama still feels tired.”

“She said she was all better.”

Waters nodded. “Mothers fib a little sometimes, so daddies and little girls don’t worry so much. But she’ll be fine. You sleep tight. Hang on to Albert tonight.”

Ana clutched her stuffed rabbit to her chest.

He kissed her forehead, then walked to the stairs.

“’Night! Love ya! See ya in the morning!” Annelise called, and she laughed when he repeated it back to her.

As he descended the stairs, he realized why Mallory had let him put Ana to bed alone. She wanted to emphasize just what was at stake if he didn’t get with her program. For Waters, the stakes did not need emphasis. But as his foot hit the bottom step, he realized that Mallory’s latest object lesson cut two ways. Everyone feared losing someone, and Mallory was no different.

He found Lily in the bedroom, lying across the down comforter in a nearly transparent camisole that she had received as a gag gift at a friend’s bridal shower. She had never worn that piece of lingerie before tonight. He walked to the foot of the bed and spoke in a voice devoid of emotion.

“I want you to listen carefully. You think you hold all the cards, but you don’t. The final card, I hold. And if you don’t do what I tell you to do, I’ll play it.”

She must have heard something new in his voice, for her smile vanished, replaced by a crafty attentiveness. “What card are you talking about?”

“The death card. The ace of spades.”

Lily twined a lock of her short blond hair around her finger and began to twist it. “What do you mean?”

“Before I let you destroy my wife and child, I will blow my fucking head off. And you will never have me.”

She seemed not to have heard his threat. Or perhaps not to have fully understood it.

“You know me, Mallory. If you leave me no choice, I’ll kill myself.”

Lily shook her head. “You won’t. You wouldn’t leave Lily and Annelise without you.”

“You’re right. I’d take Lily with me. A bullet in the head for her. Then me.”

She went still, her eyes wide with fear. At last he had rattled her. “You wouldn’t do it,” she said, sounding not at all sure. “You wouldn’t abandon Annelise.”

“Here’s why you’re wrong,” Waters said. “When I shoot Lily, you die with her. I couldn’t live with myself after killing my wife, so I’d finish the job on me. But Annelise would survive and be safe. She’d go to live with her grandmother. That’s already arranged in our wills.”

Lily’s head moved slowly back and forth. “That will never happen.”

“You don’t think so? Do you know why I survived the hell that was the end of our relationship? Because I’m stronger than you are. How many times did you try to kill yourself? Four? Five? But you couldn’t do it. It was all theater. But I don’t act, Mallory. You know that. The day I decide to do it, consider it done.”

Lily got up and began to pace the bedroom, her mouth working in frustration. She gave off the desperate fury of a wild animal pacing a cage. Suddenly she stopped and met Waters’s eye.

“You said you’d do that if I don’t do what you wanted me to do. Well? What do you want me to do?”

“Leave Lily alone. Get out of her head.”

“If I do that, what will you do for me?”

“Why should I do anything for you?”

Her hand went to her neck and twined another lock of hair around her finger. “Because you love me. But if you can’t face that yet, you should do it because I’m the only thing keeping you out of jail.”

Waters fought back his anger. “I do love you.”

Lily’s eyes softened.

“I just can’t let you destroy my wife. That’s why I want you to go into another woman.”

She watched him in silence, trying to work out his thoughts. “Who?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But you pick this woman, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Someone you like.”

“Whose face and body I like,” he said.

She stared at him for nearly a minute, her eyes growing dark with suspicion. “If I go into this other woman, you’ll kill her. That’s what you’re thinking.”

“You know me better than that. I couldn’t kill an innocent person.”

“If you thought you were saving your family, you might.”

“I’d kill myself, Lily, and Annelise, before I’d kill an innocent person.”

Morbid curiosity flickered in her eyes. “Why?”

“Because I’m responsible for this. For you being like you are. Lily and Annelise are part of me. They’re involved, even though they didn’t ask to be. The sins of the fathers and all that. But I can’t visit this karma on anyone else. If someone has to pay, it should be me and mine.”

She tilted her head, studying his eyes. “You know what, Johnny?”

“What?”

“Lily is too old, anyway. We’re going to have our own babies, and thirty-nine is too old for that.” She lifted the camisole, grabbed a dimple of cellulite from her upper thigh, and pulled. “Yuck. Pick someone under thirty, okay?”

Waters struggled to suppress his rage. “I don’t have any problem with that.”

She walked forward and took hold of his hand. “Just one more thing, Johnny. Pick her soon, okay?”

Lily smiled as though things had arrived at the exact point she’d chosen from the beginning. “Now, get those clothes off and get into bed. I want you to finish what you started this afternoon.”

He pulled his hand free. “That’s not part of the deal. First you move into someone else. Then I come to you.”

She laughed. “Who do you think makes the rules here? I agreed to your idea because of the childbearing issue. But don’t forget that you could be spending the night in jail. I know all this has you freaked out, but I want you, Johnny. Now. And I’m going to have you.”

Waters made no move toward the bed.

“Re-mem-ber,” she said in a singsong voice. “If Mama ain’t happy, no-body’s happy.” Lily walked to the dresser, opened a drawer, and brought out a shining pair of handcuffs.

“Those look like Eve’s,” he observed.

“Of course they are. Your wife doesn’t have anything like this hidden in her underwear drawer. Not even a vibrator.”

Lily pranced toward the bed, dangling the handcuffs as though to provoke him. “These were Eve’s, I should have said. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, right?” She laughed. “Isn’t that what they say, Johnny?”

Waters stared at the handcuffs, a shining little metaphor for his situation. He recalled Eve cuffing him to the bed at the Eola. Thinking of that made him think of Mallory, not as she was now, but when they were together. In those days, Mallory had bound him with scarves, not handcuffs. He saw himself tied to the headboard of her parents’ bed, wondering if Ben Candler and his wife would come home unexpectedly and discover their princess in flagrante delicto. When he thought of Ben Candler, he felt something shift deep in his mind, and he saw what Mallory had described earlier: the local politician who liked to take secret snapshots of little girls. In the dark glow of that image was born his next move in the emotional chess match he would have to play for possession of his life and family.

“Take that slutty rag off and get under the covers,” he said in a harsh voice.

Lily looked curiously at him, trying to read his intent. “You first,” she replied.

“I’ll join you in a second. I have to do something first.”

“Like what?”

“Just get in the bed. And turn off the lights.”

A wary look in her eyes now. “I want the lights on.”

“I can’t do it with the lights on. I can’t look into Lily’s face and make love to her when she’s not there.”

“I thought you’d like the idea.”

“I don’t. You can use your handcuffs or whatever kinky stuff you want. Just turn off the lights.”

“All right. But where are you going?”

“What are you worried about? I can’t hurt you without hurting Lily.”

Pouting with her lips but not her eyes, she went to the bed and slipped off the camisole, then climbed under the covers and switched off the lamp.

Waters walked to the door.

“Tell me where you’re going!”

“For God’s sake, just lie back and enjoy it.”

“I intend to.”

He walked quickly to the den. Inside the cabinet under the TV was the camcorder he had scolded Annelise for using without permission. It was a Sony PC-110, a handheld digital camera with more special-effects functions than he would ever use. But the PC-110 also had one capability that he had found both fun and useful. Called Super Night Shot, it allowed you to shoot video in total darkness, by projecting an infrared beam onto a subject. He and Annelise had used it to film Pebbles hunting in the backyard at night. Tonight he would use it to try to save his life.

He inserted a fresh tape into the slot, then removed the lens cap and switched on the camera. The Super Night Shot switch was on the side. He activated it, then turned off the lights in the den and looked through the viewfinder. A ghostly green image of the room filled the screen, the camera autofocusing wherever he turned it.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Let’s make a movie.”

He took off his shirt and wrapped it partly around the camera, but took care to leave the lens and the infrared beam generator exposed. On his way back to the bedroom, he stopped in the hall bathroom, dug under the sink for a minute, then continued on, the camera and shirt held carefully in his left hand. At the bedroom door, he walked quickly through the darkness to Lily’s low dresser and set his shirt on it, the camera lens facing the bed. Then he walked around to his side of the bed and began removing his pants.

The lamp on Lily’s side flashed on, temporarily blinding him.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She looked at his pants on the floor, then up at him. Then she leaned off the bed and lifted the pants to look under them.

“Looking for a gun?” he asked.

A white plastic bottle of K-Y Silk-E lubricant lay beneath the khakis.

“My mistake,” she said. She lay back on the bed and stared at his nude body. “You still look good, Johnny.”

“Get on all fours and handcuff yourself to the bedpost.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, a mocking smile on her face.

“Teach you a lesson.” He reached over and switched off the lamp.

Her voice came out of the dark. “How are you going to do that?”

Waters climbed onto the bed, looked in the direction of the camera, and silently mouthed three words. I’m sorry, Lily. Then he faced forward, took hold of the familiar hips in front of him, and slapped one cheek. “You know what I like, Mallory,” he said.

He heard a metallic snick as the handcuffs snapped shut.

“Yes, I do,” came Mallory’s low voice. “And you know what I need.”

Waters set to work with a will.

chapter 16

When Waters walked into his office at nine the next morning, he found Penn Cage waiting behind his desk.

“You wouldn’t be here unless there was bad news.”

“It’s not catastrophic,” Penn said, “but it’s serious.”

“Tell me.”

“The police say they have a videotape of your Land Cruiser in front of the Eola Hotel one hour before Eve’s estimated time of death.”

The floor seemed to shudder beneath his feet. “That’s impossible.”

“Maybe not. They say there was a traffic accident at the intersection of Pearl and Franklin streets that night. A car hit an MP amp;L cherry-picker truck. Do you remember that?”

Waters tried to keep his facial muscles still. “Yes.”

“There were lots of squad cars there. Ambulances, a fire truck, and a sheriff’s department cruiser. For some reason, the sheriff’s car had his videocam running-the one they switch on during traffic stops. He was pointed the wrong way up Pearl Street, and the police say his camera recorded your Land Cruiser turning from Main onto Pearl, stopping, then backing onto Main again and disappearing. The tape is date-and time-stamped.”

“Shit. Do they have my license plate on tape?”

“I don’t know yet. But a Land Cruiser is a rare vehicle in this town, and they’ve asked that you give a DNA sample for testing.”

“Oh God.”

“Obviously they’ll want to compare this to the semen taken from Eve Sumner’s corpse.”

“And it will match.” Images of Parchman Prison filled Waters’s mind: endless rows of soybean fields and angry inmates, himself locked in a barred box. “The police called you?” he asked. “How did they know you were my lawyer?”

“Lily told them,” Penn replied. “Tom Jackson called her just as you left the house. She told him I was your lawyer, and that he should call me. I came straight here.”

“Lily didn’t know you were my lawyer.” Fresh fear poured into him.

“Obviously she did,” Penn said.

“She must have been following me.”

“Your wife?”

Not my wife, Waters thought, touching his back pocket, where the Mini-DV videotape he had shot last night rested. He had felt so confident about his plan, but now…

“Am I going to be arrested?”

“I don’t think so. Tom wanted to bring you downtown for questioning today, though.”

“Jesus.” Waters felt inevitability closing around him like a noose.

“I requested that he interview you at the law office of a friend of mine. Since you’ve cooperated so far, Tom agreed. That may not seem like much of a gift, but it’s a lot better than going through this in some interrogation room at the police station. It’s set for three this afternoon.”

“What about the DNA test? What should I do?”

“Comply immediately. That’s what an innocent man would do.”

“But I know my DNA will match.”

“That’s not the point right now. DNA testing takes a long time to complete. Months, sometimes. I’ve seen tests come back in three weeks with the FBI pushing, but this is a local case. By agreeing to the test, you buy yourself three to twelve weeks. Closer to twelve is my bet.”

Waters felt his breath returning. “I can’t be arrested, Penn. I have to stay free.”

“You will.”

“If I’m arrested, will I get bail?”

“Almost certainly. You’re a pillar of the community with no criminal record.”

“But it’s murder.”

“Take it easy, John.”

“What if they trip me up during questioning? What if they arrest me then?”

“I think that’s unlikely. Tom might ask you to take a lie-detector test, though.”

“I can’t do that!”

Penn held up both palms to reassure him. “You won’t have to. I’ll advise you against submitting to a polygraph, and I’ll do that in Tom’s presence. The refusal will look more like my decision than yours. The police here still see me as a big-city prosecutor, and that’s to your advantage right now.”

“He’ll ask me if I had an affair with Eve. What if I deny it, and they have a witness or something?”

Penn answered carefully. “I will never advise you to lie, John. I can’t do that. But I will say this: If, after today’s questioning, the police still believe that you weren’t having an affair with Ms. Sumner, I’d wait until the day before the DNA test was due back, and then I’d tell them the semen found in Eve was probably yours. You were having an extramarital affair with a woman of dubious sexual character, and she happened to get murdered. You knew that getting mixed up in that could destroy your marriage. As an innocent man, you hoped-and even assumed-that the guilty party would be caught before the DNA test came back, which might obviate the need for any ruckus to be made about whose semen it was. The odds of that would be low, considering the nature of this case, but a scared husband will tell himself many things. The police understand reasoning like that. Being guilty of an affair does not make you guilty of murder.”

Waters found it hard to concentrate on his lawyer’s words. He looked around his office as though for an avenue of escape.

“John? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“When do they want the DNA sample?”

“Adams County Path Lab is ready for us as soon as we can get there. I suggest we go immediately. There will be police representatives there. Probably Tom Jackson.”

A bubble of panic ballooned in Waters’s chest, cutting off his air. If he were arrested today, Mallory might abandon her intention to move out of Lily and into another woman, as she had agreed to do last night. He had to let her know what was happening.

“You look like you might faint, John. Sit down.”

“I need to use the bathroom.”

Waters hurried from his office, went to Sybil’s desk, and grabbed her cordless phone from its cradle. She looked up in surprise, and he put his forefinger over his lips. Then he slipped into the conference room and called Linton Hill.

“Waters residence,” Rose said.

“It’s John, Rose. I need to talk to Lily.”

“Lily gone swimming, Mr. John.”

“Okay, thanks.” He clicked off and dialed Lily’s cell phone. It rang five times, and then a recorded message told him “the subscriber” was either unavailable or out of the service area. Desperate now, he hung up and walked down the hall toward Cole’s office. Cole had said to come to him if he needed help, and Waters definitely needed it now. Cole might not believe his story about Mallory being in Lily, but at bottom, that didn’t really matter. Because Cole would do what Waters asked, even if he thought he was crazy. But when he opened the door, he found Cole’s office empty.

“He hasn’t come in today,” Sybil said from behind Waters. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Shit.”

Sybil looked genuinely worried, and not about Cole. “Is there something I can do to help you, John?”

“I wish you could, but no.” He squeezed her arm, then walked back to his office.

Penn was standing at the center of the room, examining a dragonfly trapped in amber and mounted on a black pedestal.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“A little. Penn, we have to talk, and I mean for real.”

The lawyer looked up, concern in his face. “What is it? Have you been holding something back?”

“In a way. Last night, Lily told me she was Mallory. She told me that.”

“What did she tell you? Exactly?”

“That the theory I put to you yesterday is true. That she moved from Eve, through me, into Lily.”

Penn rolled his eyes. “John, we’ve been over this.”

“Please try to listen with an open mind. Last night I secretly videotaped Lily and me in bed. She’s doing things on that tape she’s never done in her life.”

“And you want to show this tape to me?”

“No, because you don’t have any frame of reference to judge it by. You don’t know what she was like before. I’m talking about kinky stuff, though. Bondage, handcuffs.”

Penn cleared his throat. “Handcuffs aren’t that kinky, John.”

“In Lily’s mind, handcuffs belong on felons, nowhere else.”

“As far as you know. Tell me what else happened.”

“Lily threatened Annelise’s life.”

Penn drew back, incredulous. “How?”

“She held a fucking butcher knife over her head!”

“Well…did Annelise see this?”

“No.”

“What else did Lily say to you?”

“Too much to remember. Penn, I know you think I’m psychotic, but it’s her. It’s Mallory! She told me she killed her father!”

“That’s crap. Ben Candler died of a heart attack.”

“Yes, but do you know what caused it? Remember you told me some people had told you Ben was a little strange? What word did you use? Pervy?”

“Pervy. Perverted.”

Waters quickly related Mallory’s tale of the secret photos and the gunpoint confrontation with her father. As Penn listened, his expression changed from skepticism to fascination.

“Jesus,” he said when Waters finished. “It’s hard to imagine Cole Smith making up that story. Maybe Danny Buckles, the child molester, did something like that, and Eve or Lily modified the story to use on you. We know Eve knew Buckles, because she warned you about his abuse at the school.”

“Are you kidding me?” Waters asked. “You’re grasping at straws!”

Penn walked over to Waters’s desk and sat behind it. “I don’t think so. And Ben’s heart attack…maybe Cole and Eve were trying to shake him down the same way they did you. They tried to convince him Mallory was alive, and it killed him.”

“You still see a conspiracy behind all this? Do you really think Lily would threaten her own daughter with a butcher knife?”

“I’m afraid so. By doing something a loving mother would never do, Lily convinces you beyond all doubt of the fantasy they want to sell you. She’s not Lily anymore. It’s like Eve cutting herself. That’s the only rational explanation for the events you’ve described.”

“There’s one other possibility.”

“What?”

“Eve was telling the truth from the start!”

The lawyer slammed his hand down on Waters’s desk. “For God’s sake, wake up! You’re about to be at the center of the biggest murder case this town has seen since I reopened the Del Payton case. You could go to prison for life. You could get the death penalty! And you’re so far down in denial, you can’t see anything. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you do!”

Waters threw up his hands to show he understood the obvious. “I don’t want to go to prison. But compared to a threat to my wife and daughter, prison is nothing. I can’t ignore what all my instincts tell me is true.” Waters put his hands on the front of his desk and leaned toward Penn. “You were a prosecutor, right? What happens when human beings have sex? Biologically. The seventh-grade sex-ed version.”

The lawyer shook his head in exasperation. “The male deposits sperm in the vagina of the female.”

“Exactly. An exchange of bodily fluids.”

“From male to female,” Penn clarified.

“You don’t think anything goes the other way? Forget intercourse. Just think about kissing. That old expression, swapping spit? That’s exactly what you’re doing. And scientists can do DNA tests on cells in saliva.”

“What are you getting at, John?”

“What do we really know about human consciousness? The top neuroscientists in the world can’t tell you what it is. Where in the brain is consciousness located? What if there’s consciousness in every strand of DNA in your body? Or what if your consciousness is at least linked to every strand of DNA in your body?

We know our individual consciousness grows out of our DNA maps. It has to. That’s where our brains come from. Do you dispute any of that?”

Penn waved his hand impatiently. “If we were sitting in a bar or a college seminar, I’d love to bat this around with you. But you’re in real trouble, and you’re proposing as an explanation something that defies all physical laws.”

“Known physical laws. Every Sunday, people go to church and pray for their immortal souls. Is there an immortal soul, Penn? If you believe so, you’re saying it survives past death. If that’s the case, who’s to say that in certain situations-extreme situations of violence or desire for survival-that the soul can’t move into another person the way Mallory said hers did?”

Penn sighed but did not argue.

“Mallory said the transfer can happen only during sex. And not just any sex, but during orgasm, when the individual self is blanked out. That creates a window of opportunity for the incoming soul-or consciousness-to gain a foothold. Do you deny that your conscious self, your identity even, basically blanks out during orgasm? Isn’t that how it feels to you?”

“In a way, yes. But this idea of soul transfer…it’s like some crazy blend of New Age science and Eastern mysticism.”

“That’s what quantum physics sounds like too, if you read much of it. Penn, have you ever slept with two women at the same time?”

“What? No.”

“I don’t mean in the same bed. I mean, have you slept with two women concurrently? Both for a long period of time?”

The lawyer shifted in his chair, obviously uncomfortable with some memory. “I was in that situation once. For a couple of months.”

“Two months isn’t really long enough. I was in that situation for five months one time. And something happened that I remember to this day. When I started sleeping with the second woman, her periods were three weeks off from those of the first woman. But by the third month, their periods had synchronized. And they stayed synchronized.”

Penn nodded thoughtfully. “I think it’s well known that women who live together-roommates, or girls living in the same dorm hall-sometimes get synchronized periods.”

“Yes, but something mental could be operating there. What I’m describing is different. Neither woman I was sleeping with was conscious of the other. Certainly not of when the other woman’s period was. And all I can think is that somehow, something was passing between those two women. And it could only have been passed through me. You see? Hormones, cells of some kind…I don’t know. Cole’s had the same thing happen to him. This is weird stuff, but all I’m trying to show you is that even in this day and age, we understand very little about some things.”

“I’ll concede that much. But what do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to keep your mind open enough to help me in the way I really need help. That’s all. I’m a hell of a lot more afraid of Mallory Candler hurting my wife and child than I am of going to prison for murder. So…what do you think?”

Penn took a deep breath, sighed, and looked up at Waters with deep compassion. “I think I’m your lawyer, John. And I think no jury in this state is going to buy what you just told me as a defense for murder. Not unless we’re going for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. That’s all I know for sure. And today, that’s what we have to work with.”

Waters wasn’t sure what he had hoped for, but Penn’s refusal to even consider what he believed to be the truth drained something out of him. A debilitating fatigue settled into his limbs.

“I’d be irresponsible if I told you anything else,” Penn added.

“Of course. I understand. So. What do we do now?”

“We go to the path lab and give blood for the DNA sample.”

“Right.” Waters took the Mini-DV tape from his back pocket and slid it across the desk.

“What’s this?”

“The tape of Lily and me in bed. If I’m arrested at the lab, I don’t want the cops to find that on me.”

As Penn put the tape into his shirt pocket, Waters suddenly thought of Annelise sitting in class at school, oblivious to the storm gathering around her. “I need to call St. Stephens before we go.”

“All right. Anything wrong?”

“I just want to make sure my daughter’s in class. Where she’s supposed to be.”

Penn looked long and hard at his client. “I understand. No problem, John.”

The pathology lab was housed in an unobtrusive medical plaza near St. Catherine’s Hospital. Penn drove them over in his Audi. The nurse took them straight back to the lab when they arrived, but instead of finding Tom Jackson waiting for them, they found a technician from the police crime lab. Penn seemed pleased, and Waters soon saw why: the forensic technician said little and asked no direct questions.

Waters sat in the phlebotomist’s chair while a med-tech inserted a needle in the antecubital vein in the crook of his elbow. As his blood ran into the tube-evidence that could one day end his life-he watched Penn standing nearby, likely pondering the intricacies of murder defense. Waters thought only of Annelise, whom his phone call had verified as being safe in class at St. Stephens. He would check on her constantly today, for until Mallory moved out of Lily and into someone else, Ana was in critical danger.

The med-tech ripped off the Velcro tourniquet. “Press down hard,” she said, pointing at the cotton swab she’d placed over his vein. She took a scraping from the inside of Waters’s cheek, then dismissed him.

Penn looked at the police technician. “Satisfied?”

After the cop nodded, Penn took Waters’s arm, led him outside, and helped him into the passenger seat of the Audi. Then he got behind the wheel and started the engine.

“I know that was hard to take. Makes you feel like a felon, doesn’t it?”

“I’m fine. I’m glad Tom Jackson wasn’t there.”

“Yes. Informal questioning is hard to control. When your mind is on something else, you tend to say things you might not have meant to say.” Penn pulled the Roadster out of the lot and onto the highway. “But I have a feeling Tom is going to hit you hard this afternoon.”

Waters nodded, but his mind was already far away.

The little convertible quickly ate up the distance to downtown, and as Penn turned into the back lot of Waters’s office, Waters glanced down Main Street and saw Cole’s silver Lincoln protruding from the line of cars parked on the left.

“What are you going to do between now and three?” Penn asked.

“Probably stay right here.”

“Do you mind me asking why?”

“I’m going to try to do some work. Some mapping. It’s all I can think to do.” He lied because Penn could not help him in the way he needed help. “Something normal, you know?”

“I understand. But Cole may show up today. Be careful about confrontations at this point. Today is a critical day, and we don’t know what he knows about you and Eve.”

“I doubt he’s even coming in today.”

Penn squeezed Waters’s arm and gave him a warning look. “Don’t trust him, John. Never again. Cole Smith does not have your best interests at heart.”

“I hear you. Do you have my tape?”

Penn reached into his pocket and brought out the small plastic case, then passed it to his client.

“Thanks.” Waters shook his hand, got out, and closed the door.

“I’ll pick you up here at a quarter of three,” Penn said.

Waters nodded, then turned and trotted up the back stairs.

Cole sat at his desk, staring at the signed Number 18 Ole Miss jersey framed on the wall, but the glassy sheen in his eyes made it clear that his mind was elsewhere. Waters walked softly into the room and stopped a few feet from the desk.

“Hey!”

Cole whipped around as though he’d heard a gunshot. “Shit, Rock! Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Are you expecting company you don’t want to see?”

Cole splayed his hands on the desktop as if to steady himself. “I’m always expecting that.” He slid open his top drawer and took out what appeared to be a short-barreled Magnum.357.

“What the hell is that for?”

Cole laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s loaded. Where you been?”

“Giving a blood sample to the police for a DNA test.”

“Shit.” Cole’s smile vanished. “Did Penn Cage tell you to do that?”

Waters was taken aback. “How do you know Penn is my lawyer?”

“Lily told me. She called up here a little while ago, worried sick.” Cole slid the.357 back into the drawer.

What the hell is Mallory up to? he wondered. She could have called my cell phone. Why would she call Cole?

“I didn’t think Penn Cage took clients. I thought he just wrote books.”

“He’s doing it as a favor to me.”

“Celebrity lawyer, huh? I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

“He knows what he’s doing in court.” Waters let his eyes drill into his partner’s. “But that’s not the kind of help I need right now.”

Cole’s big head turned slowly, like that of a battle-scarred old bull. “Talk to me, John Boy.”

“I need to stay out of jail. I don’t give a damn what happens later, but I need to stay free right now, for as long as possible. And to do that, I need an alibi.”

Cole looked at him with sympathy. “I’d like to help you. But it’s too late. Cowboy Tom Jackson called me an hour ago and asked where I was the night of the murder. I had to tell him I was home watching HBO all by my lonesome. I couldn’t say you were there, because for all I knew, you’d already told him you were somewhere else.”

“Shit.” Waters cursed his paranoia. Because he hadn’t trusted his friend, he’d screwed himself on the alibi.

“I warned you about this.”

“I know.”

Cole stood and squeezed his powerful hands together. “Sit down, Rock. You look like you’re about to pop a blood vessel.”

“I don’t want to sit.”

“Sit your ass down. I can’t think with you standing up.”

Waters took the leather chair opposite Cole’s desk, and the big man began to pace the room.

“How much time does Penn think you have before the cops bring you in?”

“Probably not much. They’re questioning me this afternoon.”

“Well, let’s just cut to the chase. Did you kill that crazy bitch or not?”

Waters looked at the floor. “My hands strangled her. But I didn’t kill her. I know that now. Not that it’s much comfort, given my situation.”

“But that’s your joy juice on the slides down at the crime lab?”

“Yes.”

Cole gave a theatrical groan. “What about Lily for your alibi? I’m sure she’ll swear you were home when the murder happened.”

Waters looked up at his partner. “Lily’s not Lily anymore. I can’t trust her to act in my best interest. That’s why I’m here.”

Cole stopped in midstep and stared as though Waters had just sworn the world was flat. “I thought the possibility of being cornholed for forty years in Parchman Farm had finally cured you of this Wuthering Heights, Mallory’s-back-from-the-dead bullshit. But it hasn’t, has it?”

“No. And I’m here because you’re the only guy I know who might be crazy enough to believe me.”

Cole scratched the back of his neck, amusement in his eyes.

“But even if you don’t believe me,” Waters continued, “I know you’ll do anything you can to help me.”

“Now you’re talking,” Cole said. “Okay, lay the weirdness on me.”

“Mallory’s inside Lily now.”

“Tell me I didn’t just hear that.”

“I’m serious. Mallory passed into me on the night Eve died. She killed Eve to shut her up, and to hold the murder over my head. Then she passed from me into Lily.”

Cole began to pace again, moving in a wide circle around Waters. “Why would she do that?”

“Because she thought I’d never leave Lily for Eve.”

“Huh. Would you have?”

Waters thought about it. “I’d like to say no, but I can’t honestly tell you. Did I risk losing Lily and Annelise just to sleep with Eve for two weeks?”

“I guess now we’ll never know.”

“Don’t be so sure. Last night, I convinced Mallory to leave Lily alone. To move into some other woman, on the condition that I would leave Lily for whoever it was. Now I’m afraid I might be arrested today. Penn says it won’t happen, but I have a feeling it’s going to. And if it does, Mallory might decide to stay right where she is. Inside Lily. She’ll be alone in the house with Annelise, and I’ll be stuck in jail.”

“That scares you?”

“What do you think?”

Cole stopped behind Waters and laid a hand on his shoulder. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

“If I’m arrested, I want you to bail me out. I’m going to give you access to an account with enough money to do it.”

“You don’t need me for that. Lily will bail you out of jail in a heartbeat.”

“I told you-”

“Lily isn’t Lily anymore…right.”

“That’s right. And I have no way of knowing what she’ll do until she does it.”

Cole took his hand from Waters’s shoulder, walked to his desk, and sat on its forward edge. “Okay, I’ll bail you out of jail. What else?”

“The charge will be murder one. The judge could deny bail. If that happens, I’ll need you to be my go-between with Mallory while I’m in jail. Obviously, she could visit me in jail as Lily, but only for a short time. I wouldn’t be able to monitor her movements or state of mind, or keep her calm if she starts to flip out. You have to do all that, and keep her moving forward with my plan. She has to move into another woman.”

“How do I do that?”

“Tell her I’ll get out of jail one way or another. And when I do, I’ll come to her. I’ll run away with her. You have to keep her convinced of that.”

Cole’s eyes narrowed as he studied Waters. “Is that really your plan? Or are you just trying to get Mallory out of the way so you can run with Lily and Annelise?”

“Christ, man. First things first. I’m not even in jail yet.”

“Seriously, John. I mean, Ward Cleaver gets the chance to run off to paradise…Does he take the wife and kid? Or his beautiful love goddess?”

Waters gripped the arms of the chair in frustration. “This isn’t some hypothetical game! The police want my ass. And I’ll be face-to-face with them at three o’clock!”

Cole held up his hands. “Easy, John Boy. I get the picture.” He got off the desk and walked to within a few feet of Waters. “So, what are you going to tell the cops? I mean, if your lawyer thinks you’re crazy with this Mallory stuff, how are you going to play it?”

“Penn may think I’m nuts, but he also thinks I’m innocent.”

“He does? Who does he think killed Eve?”

Waters gave a hollow laugh. “Are you ready for this? You.”

Cole blinked in surprise. “What?”

“Penn thinks you slipped in and strangled her while I was passed out.”

“No shit.” Cole folded his arms across his chest and looked at the floor. “Penn always was too smart for his own good.”

Waters started to laugh again, but something in Cole’s voice stopped him. “What do you mean?”

Cole stepped forward and crouched before the chair, his eyes inches from Waters’s own. Up close, the blood vessels in his nose were a ravaged red network of lines, like worms flattened by a car tire.

“I mean I killed her.”

The glint in Cole’s eyes left no doubt as to the truth of his words. The hair on Waters’s forearms stood erect, and a shiver went through his heart. He drew back in the chair, but Cole clutched its arms with both hands, penning him in.

“Penn was right?” Waters whispered. “It was you all along? You fed Eve all that stuff about Mallory and me?”

“You’re so lost,” Cole said, as though the subject were not worthy of discussion. “You don’t know which end is up, do you?”

Fragments of Penn’s merciless logic poured into Waters’s mind with the crushing weight of hindsight. Who’s in a position to know all about you and Mallory? Who would benefit if you were to go to prison for murder? I think we both know who we’re talking about…. I’ve seen things done between lifelong friends that you wouldn’t believe. There’s literally no depth to which human beings cannot sink….

Waters smashed his fists into Cole’s forearms, knocking them from the chair arms, and jumped to his feet. “Goddamn it, why?”

“John-”

“Just tell me one thing, you son of a bitch! Is Lily involved in this?”

Cole stood up, his face bright red. “Not anymore. But why do you even care about that?”

“Why do I care? Lily is all I care about. Lily and Annelise.”

Cole looked suddenly bereft. “Don’t say that.”

“Compared to Lily, you think I give a shit about you and your problems? You made a good living from this company, and you pissed it away on gambling and God knows what else. Now you want to take me down for murder so you can steal the company and get your ass out of a hole you dug yourself? And you use my wife to do it?”

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.”