Sleep No More

Chapter 22

Six Weeks Later

John Waters slowed his Land Cruiser, then turned off the gravel onto a dirt road that had not existed a week ago. Lily sat in the passenger seat, wearing blue jeans and a straw hat. Annelise was strapped into the backseat. The river was still half a mile away, but he could smell it already.

“Where’s the oil derrick, Daddy?” Annelise asked, scanning the nearly bare trees and brown fields.

“There’s no derrick yet. Just a stake in the ground. This is a location, baby. A prospective well.”

“That’s no fun.”

“I think it’s pretty fun.”

Lily laughed and rolled down her window, letting in a blast of cold air. “That feels better. The heater was giving me claustrophobia.”

He was glad she could laugh. Waters had not laughed much in the past six weeks. During that time, he had been free on bail, but “free” was a misleading term. The daily routine of life was illusory, a mock reality that could be snatched away by the jury that would be selected in less than a week. Still, he had worked hard to keep his family’s spirits up and his oil company alive.

Two weeks after Lily’s accident, the EPA had determined that the salt water that destroyed the Louisiana rice farm had leaked from another company’s well. The relief this judgment brought was undercut by the effects of Waters’s arrest for murder and the scandal caused by the revelation of his affair with Eve Sumner. The faces he met on the street were cold, and loyal investors stopped taking his calls. Even Cole’s less reputable moneymen seemed to want to steer clear of the company. Waters spent two weeks doing nothing but damage control, but with his shattered reputation, there was little he could do.

He had paid off Cole’s gambling debts to the tune of $658,000. In exchange, Cole signed an agreement by which Waters would recoup his money out of newly discovered oil production. The question was, would there ever be any new Smith-Waters wells? The first issue was personal. Cole had not once mentioned having sex with Lily while Lily was under Mallory’s influence. But he had done it, and done it knowingly. Yet Mallory herself had admitted that she plied Cole with a fifth of Johnnie Walker during the seduction, and it was possible that he had no memory of the event. Beyond this, Waters had some doubt as to whether Cole would have yielded to Lily, had she been herself. God only knew what Mallory had done to draw Cole into having sex with her. Waters had thought long and hard about the situation, and in the end he’d decided that forgiveness was his only option. Cut off from his friendship and aid, Cole would become a shell of himself, and spiral down into depression, possibly even suicide. With the support Waters had shown him, Cole had joined AA and was now thirty-one days sober. Waters had no illusions about his friend’s strength of character, but he did have faith.

The second issue was lack of investor support for the company. After two weeks of total rejection of their latest prospective well, Waters told Cole he was going to drill a well “straight up”-which meant he would fund the cost entirely out of his own pocket. And he was not going to drill the prospect they had been marketing. He was going back to Jackson Point, to the dry hole they had drilled just before he started seeing Eve. If he moved the site six hundred feet to the south, he believed, he would hit the reservoir he had missed on that unlucky night.

“Slow down!” Lily said, as the Land Cruiser bounced over a giant pothole.

“Sorry. My mind’s somewhere else.”

“I know. Remember, one day at a time.”

He blew air from his cheeks and tried not to show his irritation. There were guys in Parchman Prison repeating the same mantra, and they would die behind those walls.

Waters jumped when his cell phone rang. In the current social climate, it didn’t ring often, and the chirp still reminded him of Eve. He took the phone out of a plastic tray under the dash and looked at the ID. PENN CAGE. He pressed SEND and heard a burst of static.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello!”

More static. “John? Can you hear me?”

“Barely! You’re in and out, Penn. What’s going on?”

“I just got a call from the D.A. They got the DNA analysis back.”

Waters wished he hadn’t answered the call. The DNA match of his blood and the semen taken from Eve Sumner would be the final nail that crucified him in court.

“Are you there, John?”

“I wish I wasn’t!”

“The test was negative.”

“Well, we knew that.”

“No! The samples didn’t match. Did you hear me?”

The static was bad, but Waters had heard. “How can that be?”

Lily was looking at him strangely, as though she expected tragic news.

“I don’t know,” Penn yelled through the static. “Maybe Eve slept with someone else that day. But the lab says it wasn’t”-static drowned the lawyer’s words-“didn’t show genetic evidence of two different men. And neither sample was corrupted either. Not your blood or the semen…DNA simply didn’t match.”

“You’re breaking up!”

“…exact words? They said, ‘Close but no cigar.’ You believe that?”

Penn’s last words had come through clearly, so Waters stopped the Land Cruiser in the middle of the dirt road. “What does this mean for the trial?”

“Are you kidding? To convict you, the D.A. has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His own DNA test proves that an unknown man had sex with Eve on the night she died! That’s reasonable doubt right there. I’ll be surprised if the D.A. even goes to trial now. I really will.”

Lily took hold of his hand, and Waters realized he was shaking. “But…” He wanted to continue but could not.

“Who cares how it happened?” Penn exulted. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. This is the second miracle you’ve got in a very short time. Take it and run, buddy. Hug your wife and daughter. Live your life.”

Waters put a quivering hand to his face and tried to hold the tears of relief in his eyes. He couldn’t do it. “I have to go, Penn. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He clicked off.

“Daddy, what’s wrong?” Ana asked.

“Nothing, punkin. I just got some good news.”

“What is it?” Lily whispered.

“The DNA didn’t match. Penn says there’s no way I’ll be convicted without it. There may not even be a trial.”

Lily closed her good hand into a fist and brought it to her mouth, then shut her eyes in what appeared to be a prayer of thanks. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it would work out.”

“I didn’t. Not like this. This is impossible.”

Lily shook her head. “After what we went through, how can you say anything is impossible? Let’s go to the well, John. Drive on and don’t look back.”

He glanced back at Annelise, who looked more than a little afraid. “It’s all right, baby,” he assured her, putting the Land Cruiser back in gear. “Everything’s okay.”

As the Land Cruiser trundled over the last few hundred yards to the location, Waters pondered Penn’s news. He was a scientist, and he was not prepared to accept what he had heard on faith. The DNA match should have been automatic. A formality. The semen taken from Eve had come from him-of that he had no doubt. How would it not match the blood he’d given at the pathology lab? Barring gross error on the part of the lab, there was only one conclusion he could see. Something had genetically altered either his blood or his semen in the time that separated the taking of those two samples.

That “something” could only be Mallory Candler.

Mallory had passed from Eve’s body into him during the moment of his climax with Eve. His semen had obviously been produced prior to Mallory entering him. The vast majority of blood cells taken from his arm four days later would also have been produced before Mallory entered him, but with one difference. They had remained in his body during the roughly twenty-four hours that Mallory had possessed him.

That’s got to be it, Waters thought. I’m genetically different now, and I have been ever since Mallory entered me. The semen I left in Eve had my old DNA signature. The blood they took from my arm had the new one. The same alteration must have happened to Lily-and to Cole and Eve and Danny Buckles and all the rest.

“John? Is that Cole?”

As they approached the well location, Waters saw Cole’s silver Lincoln Continental parked low in the shadow of a stand of pine trees. Dressed in jeans, a Polo shirt, and Red Wing boots, Cole strode away from the car with a long wooden stake in his hand. A red cloth fluttered from the stake like a knight’s battle standard.

When Waters parked, Annelise leaped out yelling Cole’s name, but Waters took a moment to hug his wife. Things had been difficult for the three of them during the past weeks, though Lily was slowly thawing toward Cole, who remembered nothing of the time he spent under Mallory’s influence, and seemed to have no memory of yielding to “Lily’s” seduction. In public they were treated like disgraced citizens. The first couple of times Waters and Lily tried to dine out, the restaurants had fallen silent when they entered. When Cole heard this, he insisted on taking them to the Castle, the first-class restaurant behind Dunleith, and when the dining room fell silent and everyone stared, Cole hugged his wife to his side and bellowed, “What’s the matter? You people never seen class before?” Then he led them to the best table in the house.

“I’m okay,” Lily promised. “Go talk to him.”

Waters got out and went to greet Cole, who was already dancing a jitterbug with Annelise.

“All right, Rock!” he cried. “You ready to stake this baby?”

“More than ready. Where do you want to put it?”

“You’re paying for the well. You decide where the stake goes.”

Waters accepted the stake and surveyed the ground. Mostly sand and dirt, it stretched flat and unbroken to the broad brown expanse of river. At this point, it didn’t much matter where the stake went, give or take fifty feet.

“Ana?”

His daughter looked up from a puddle she had been studying twenty yards away.

“You want to stake the well?”

Her face lit up, and she ran to him and took the pointed stake from his hands. “Anywhere I want?”

“Within reason. Anywhere in a fifty-foot circle of where we are now.”

She scrunched up her face, then began marching away from the river like a conquistador with an imperial flag.

Waters turned toward the Land Cruiser to check on Lily. She was standing by the hood, staring fixedly at the river. He was about to call to her when she lifted her right hand to the short locks of hair at her neck and twisted a strand tightly around her finger. His blood pressure dropped like a stone.

“Hey, Lily!” Cole yelled. “What do you think about this well?”

She looked vaguely toward them, but her eyes seemed blank, and the finger stayed in her hair.

“She’s still not over the accident,” Cole said under his breath. “What do you think about this puppy, Rock? We gonna go big-time again?”

His eyes locked on Lily’s twisting finger, Waters tried not to show his anxiety. “It’s a good play. But that oil is either there or it’s not. And it’s-”

“It’s been there or not for two million years,” Cole finished. “Shit. Hey, Lily! This guy won’t give me a straight answer! Is this well going to hit or not?”

At last his voice seemed to register. Lily dropped her hand and smiled brightly. “It’s going to be huge,” she called. “The river’s lucky for us!”

As she walked toward them, Waters said a silent prayer and turned to see Annelise triumphantly drive the stake into the soft earth twenty paces away. She’s going to be all right, he told himself. Dear God, let her be all right. He raised his hands and applauded Annelise.

His daughter’s face glowed with pride.