Sleep No More

Chapter 5

Eve Sumner’s office building stood a thousand yards from the Mississippi River Bridge. A false front of brick and wood molding had been grafted onto its front, but one glance would tell any passerby that it was an aluminum box. The familiar logo of a national brokerage company decorated the SUMNER SELECT PROPERTIES sign outside, and expensive cars crowded the asphalt parking lot. Waters remembered from newspaper ads that eight or ten agents worked for Sumner. He couldn’t believe there were enough houses changing hands in Natchez to support those ten agents, much less the hundred or so whose pictures he saw in the newspaper every week. For the last six months, everything seemed to be for sale, but nobody was buying.

He parked in a reserved space by the front doors, then got out and pushed into a large open-plan office with two lines of desks and some partitioned cubicles against the right wall. Several women and two men sat at the desks, the women dressed to the nines and looking bored, the men reading newspapers. A receptionist with too much blue eye shadow sat near the door, half blocking the corridor created by the cubicles. Everyone looked up when the door banged open, and nobody went back to what they were doing.

“May we help you?” asked the receptionist.

“I’m here to see Eve Sumner.”

“Umm…okay. She’s with somebody right now.”

“This can’t wait.”

“Can I have your name?”

“That’s John Waters, Debbie,” called one of the men in the cubicles. “Hi, John.”

Waters didn’t recognize the man, but he gave a half wave as Debbie picked up her phone and spoke softly.

“She said to go on back,” Debbie said in a startled voice.

As though on cue, a door opened in the back wall and two female voices rode the air to Waters, one low and throaty, the other high and ebullient. Waters started toward the door, and two women emerged. One was Eve Sumner, wearing a blue skirt suit, a cream silk blouse, and heels; the other was a fiftyish woman in a bright blowsy dress. Eve tried to introduce Waters to her older guest, but he didn’t slow down. He walked past them into the private office and closed the door behind him.

The room held a metal desk, glass shelves lined with real estate textbooks and photos of a junior high school-age boy, and a framed map of the city as it had appeared in 1835. Waters sat behind the desk and waited.

It didn’t take long. Eve walked in, closed the door, and stood looking down at him, her eyes more curious than surprised. Before coming in, she had swept her dark hair up from her neck and loosely pinned it, which gave her a rakish air, and the generic skirt suit could not hide the sensual curves beneath it. Lily had guessed her age at thirty-two, but Eve’s figure said twenty-five. She probably spent hours in the gym, but she clearly had genetics on her side. And she knew it.

“I thought you were going to call me,” she said.

“The police just arrested Danny Buckles. You’ve got thirty seconds to explain how you knew about him before I get a detective over here to do the same to you.”

Eve leaned back against the door. “Why didn’t you bring one with you?”

Waters said nothing.

“It’s because of Mallory, isn’t it?”

Waters reached for the phone.

“What can you tell the police?” Eve asked.

“The truth. And Cole Smith can back me up.”

“Cole needs a little backup himself these days.” Her eyes gently mocked him. “I called you about a house I have for sale. I also have a buyer for Linton Hill. That’s all we talked about.”

“There a connection between you and Danny Buckles. There has to be. The police will find it.”

Eve slowly shook her head. “No one could ever find it, Johnny. I advise you to trust me on that.”

For some reason, he believed her.

“Besides, I saved Annelise a terrible experience. Why would you want to hurt me?”

“What are you really up to? This has to be about money. So let’s go ahead and get to the bottom line.”

She looked genuinely hurt. “I don’t care about money. I want to talk to you. That’s all.”

“Talk.”

She licked her lips as though about to confide in him, but then she shook her head. “Not here.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I have to say can’t be heard by anyone. Especially anyone here. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together, and we don’t want people suspicious from the start.”

She was speaking to him like a fellow conspirator, and her low, confiding tone gave him a surreal feeling of complicity. “You’re out of your mind, lady.”

Eve glanced at the door and whispered, “Look, this one time, we could go to my house.”

“Your house?”

“A house on the market, then. An empty house? That’s perfect cover.”

He couldn’t believe her persistence. “Whatever you have to say, say it right here. Right now.”

She took a step closer to the desk. Her proximity made his skin tingle. Here was a woman he had never really met, yet he felt as though they already shared the invisible connection of secret lovers.

“I’m not who you think I am, Johnny.”

“Danny Buckles wasn’t who anyone thought, either. Who are you? And don’t tell me Mallory Candler.”

Eve’s dark eyes became liquid. “I’m the girl you first said ‘I love you’ to under the Faulkner quote on the front of the library at Ole Miss.”

Waters’s mouth fell open. Who knows that? he asked himself. Who the hell knows that? Someone, obviously.

She smiled at his reaction. “I’m the girl you first made love to at Sardis Reservoir.”

His hand slipped off the desktop. “Who the hell are you, lady?”

“You know who I am. Johnny, I’m Mal-”

“Shut up!”

“Please keep your voice down. We have to figure out what to do.”

He tried to think logically, but her knowledge of his intimate past had somehow short-circuited his reason. “I’m leaving,” he said, and stood.

“Please don’t. I’ll meet you anywhere. You name the place. Somewhere we used to go.”

“Where would that be?”

“The Trace?”

Waters couldn’t believe it. He and Mallory had spent countless hours on the Natchez Trace, a wooded highway crossed by dozens of beautiful side roads and creeks. “Anybody could have guessed that. Lots of kids went there.”

“Did they go to the creek under the wooden suspension bridge? Where we went skinny-dipping?”

Waters’s skin went cold.

“Or we could go to the cemetery. Behind Catholic Hill, where the big cross is.”

“Stop.” He realized that he had whispered, that he too was now trying to keep those outside from hearing their exchange.

Eve leaned across the desk. Perfume wafted to him as her silk blouse parted, revealing the deep cleft between her breasts. “Take it easy, Johnny. Everything’s all right.”

Waters shivered at the familiar way she said his name.

“It just takes some getting used to,” she went on. “It’s really simple, once you understand. Like all profound things. Like gravity.”

“Listen to me,” Waters hissed. “I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want you to call me. If you come around my daughter, I’ll have you arrested. And if you try to hurt her…”

Eve opened her mouth, feigning shock. “You’ll what? You’ll kill me?”

“You said that, not me.”

“But you thought it.”

He had thought it. That was the level of threat he felt in the presence of this woman. “Yes, I did. So…now you know the rules.”

The mocking smile again. “I was never one for rules, was I, Johnny?”

He had to get out of the office. As he came around the desk, he half expected her to try to stop him, but she didn’t. She stepped aside and watched him, letting her eyes do their work. He felt an almost physical tug as he broke her gaze, and then he was in the main office again, storming past the staring realtors and pushing into the sun of the parking lot.

He felt strangely grateful for the familiarity of the Land Cruiser, which he started and pointed up the bypass toward the bridge. As he turned right at Canal Street, toward his office, he punched Cole’s number into the cell phone. Sybil answered and put him straight through.

“What’s up, John?” Cole asked. “Is Annelise okay?”

“Yeah. But I want you to do me a favor. You still have a good relationship with your law school buddies in New Orleans?”

“More or less.”

“They have investigators on their payroll, right?”

“Sure.”

“I want a copy of Mallory’s death certificate.”

A pregnant silence.

“I also want to see the newspaper accounts of her murder. The Times-Picayune, The Clarion-Ledger, anyone who covered it. And if it’s possible, I want to talk to the homicide detective who handled her case.”

More silence. Then Cole said, “Okay, Rock. I think you’ve lost it, but if that’s what you want, you got it.”

“And I want everything there is on Eve Sumner. I mean everything. Pull out all the stops.”

“What the hell did she tell you? Have you seen her?”

“I’ll call you tonight and explain.”

“You’re not coming back to the office?”

Waters had intended to go back to work, but he was already passing the turn on Main Street, headed toward the north side of town. “Can you handle things for the rest of the day?”

“No problem, amigo.”

“Thanks. And look, about that loan…”

“Forget it, man, I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“Bullshit. I’ll cut you a check in the morning.” Lily would kill him for doing this, but she didn’t need to know about it.

“Thanks, buddy,” Cole said softly. “You don’t know how big a favor this is.”

“I have a feeling I do. And when the mood strikes you, I want you to tell me what the hell is going on.”

Cole gave a noncommittal grunt, and Waters clicked off.

Three minutes later, he found himself driving along Cemetery Road, looking off the bluff at the river. When he came to the third gate of the cemetery, he turned in. Why he had come back, he wasn’t sure. The open space and the silence had always drawn him when he had things on his mind, but something else had brought him here today. He parked atop Jewish Hill, but instead of walking to the edge of its flat summit, where the river view was spectacular, he walked toward the line of oaks that shaded Mallory’s grave. Even from a distance it stood out, the imposing black marble amid a field of plebeian white and gray. Today he swung to the left of her grave and veered down one of the narrow asphalt lanes between cedar-shaded hills, into the depths of the cemetery.

Long beards of moss hung from the oaks, and a thin sprinkling of reddish-brown leaves dotted the grass. He passed ornate wrought-iron fences, markers for Confederate soldiers, countless metal plaques reading PERPETUAL CARE. Some days the cemetery was alive with the drone of push mowers and Weed Eaters, but today all was still but for an occasional breath of wind in the trees. The absence of sound heightened his senses. He felt the wind pulling at his shirt like invisible fingers, but what dominated his mind was his emotional state.

He’d been away from Eve Sumner for twenty minutes, yet the sense of being close to her had not left him. She had disturbed him on a level far deeper than that of reason. Against his will, she had reincarnated the feeling he’d had whenever he was close to Mallory Candler. He had no idea what subtle chemical signals were transmitted and detected by lovers-pheromones, or whatever the scientists called them these days-but whatever they were, he and Mallory had shared them, and Eve Sumner emitted exactly the same ones. And she knew it. She had known that her mere presence was working on him in a way that her secret knowledge of his past never could.

“It’s some kind of scam,” he murmured, as images of Mallory rose in his mind. “It has to be.”

And yet, for a brief moment after leaving the real estate office, he had wondered if Eve Sumner might in fact be Mallory Candler. If Mallory might somehow have survived the attack that supposedly killed her. The two women had facial similarities; no one would deny that. And their bodies were not dissimilar, though Eve seemed bigger-boned than Mallory had been, and her features not quite as fine. But Eve Sumner was thirty-two at most, and looked ten years younger; Mallory would be forty-two now. What other explanation could there be? Could Mallory be alive and helping Eve to deceive him? For this to be true, there would have to have been a case of mistaken identity at Mallory’s murder scene. He’d heard of cases like that before. Only it could not have happened in Mallory’s case. He possessed few details of her murder, but he did know there had been little or no facial disfiguration, because Mallory-against her oft-stated wishes-had been given an open-casket funeral. Her parents’ vanity had outweighed their loyalty to their daughter, and for once Mallory wasn’t there to argue.

Waters started at a moving shadow, then ducked to avoid a quick beating sound above his head. When he straightened, he saw a large black crow light on a tree limb only a few feet above him. A female, he guessed. She must have a nest nearby. But fall was the wrong time of year for that. The crow stared back at him in profile, its solitary eye blinking slowly at the lone man standing in the narrow lane. Looking away from the bird, he realized he was practically in the shadow of the great cross on Catholic Hill. The ornate monument-easily fifteen feet tall-marked one of the secret meeting places he and Mallory had used before their affair became public in the town.

Catholic Hill wasn’t actually much of a hill, just a few feet high at the front, but at the back it dropped off about eight feet at some places, where a cracked masonry wall held in the old graves. Between this wall and the kudzu-filled gully behind it was a narrow strip of grass, maybe fifteen feet wide, where a couple could lie in the shade on a hot day, shielded from the eyes of cemetery visitors, the only risk of discovery coming from the grass-cutters or another couple seeking privacy.

Waters walked up the steps and past the massive cross to a wooden gazebo built over an old cistern. Here the black men who eternally battled the cemetery grass and made good on the promise of “perpetual care” ate their baloney sandwiches from paper bags. The cistern was filled now with Fritos bags and RC Cola cans. Waters walked beneath the gazebo to the back of the hill and looked down at the grassy strip where he had lain so many hours with Mallory all those years ago. Nothing had changed. A few masonry cracks had deepened, a few more bricks had fallen. All else remained the same. What had he expected? The sun shone, the rain fell, the grass grew, the mowers came, the dead stayed dead.

He glanced to his left and felt a fillip of excitement. Across the lane, shaded by drooping tree limbs, lay two low-walled rectangles that bordered very old graves. Behind one of those walls Waters had once buried a mason jar beneath six inches of earth. If he or Mallory arrived late at a rendezvous-or early and had to leave-they would leave the other a message in the jar. Sorry I missed you. I love you SO much. Or I’ll come back at 3:30. PLEASE try to be here. I need you. All the infantile gushing and obsessive logistics of clandestine lovers. He wondered if the jar was still there.

“What the hell,” he said. He strode across the hill and down into the deep shade below the overhanging limbs.

He heard a scuttling in the undergrowth as he approached, probably a possum or armadillo startled by the drumbeat of his feet. A faint scent of flowers hung in the air, and as he stepped over the low wall, he had the sensation of entering a dimly lit room. Leaning over the far wall, he saw a thickly tangled web of weeds covering the ground. Though it had been almost twenty years, his hand went to the exact spot where he’d dug the hole, and in the act of reaching, he felt the same thrill he’d felt years before, the delicious anticipation of reading a declaration of love or a frank expression of lust. He also felt fear. He had nearly been bitten by a coral snake here, a beautiful harbinger of death sunning itself in the weeds beside the wall. You almost never saw coral snakes in Mississippi, but they were here, and far more lethal than the moccasins and rattlesnakes you bumped into during summer if you spent much time in the woods.

Beneath the weeds, Waters’s fingers found a depression in the cool earth, like the shallow bowls that form over decomposing stumps. He drove his forefinger down through moist soil until it hit something flat and hard. Widening the hole with his finger, he scraped away some dirt, gripped the round lid, and pulled. The mason jar slipped easily from the ground, a translucent thing coated with a brown layer of soil, its once shiny brass lid now an orange-brown cap of rust. He was smiling with nostalgia when he saw a piece of paper lying in the bottom of the jar. Not a moldy yellow scrap, but a neatly folded piece of blue notepaper that could have been put there yesterday.

Powder blue paper…

His heart began to pound, and he whipped his head around, suddenly certain that he was being observed. More frightening, he had the sensation that he was following a trail of bread crumbs laid out by someone four steps ahead of him, someone who was pulling him along by the twin handles of his guilt and regret. If so, that person knew all his secrets, and Mallory’s too. At least he knew she always used blue notepaper. He peered anxiously up at Catholic Hill, but he saw only gravestones, empty lanes, and gently swaying trees.

Looking down at the jar, he felt a sudden urge to shove it back down the hole and walk away. That would be the smart thing to do. But he couldn’t. What man could?

He gripped the bottom of the jar with his left hand, the lid with his right, and twisted hard. The rusty lid squeaked but came off easily. Waters inverted the jar, and the notepaper fell to its mouth and stuck. He fished it out with his fingers and unfolded it. The flowing script sent his heart into his throat. Those words had been written either by Mallory Candler or by an expert forger with access to papers she’d left behind at her death.

Dear John,

I knew you’d come here sooner or later. I knew you’d look. You and I used to laugh at ideas like predestination, but I wonder if, even then, when we lay here kissing on the grass, what would happen to me in New Orleans had long been ordained, and even that you would one day be standing here with this note in your hand, wondering if you were going insane. You’re not, Johnny. You’re NOT. God, I love you. I LOVE YOU.

Mallory

“This isn’t happening,” Waters said softly, his hands shaking.

“Yes, it is,” answered a low female voice.

He whirled.

Eve Sumner stood twenty feet behind him, as still as a stone angel. She still wore her work clothes, and her hair was still pinned up from her neck. As he gaped, her lips spread in a languorous smile, and fear unlike any he had known since Mallory lost her mind gripped him. The compulsion to run was almost overpowering, but some primal impulse held him in place. He would not let this woman see she had the power to drive him to flight.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

Eve shrugged and walked a few steps closer, down to the low wall that bordered the graves. “I knew you’d come.”

“Do you know what this is?” Waters held out the note.

“It’s the letter I left here the day after I saw you at the soccer game.”

He closed his eyes and tried to keep his mind from spinning out of control. Facts, he thought. Who knew about this jar? Did I ever tell Cole about it? Did Mallory ever tell anyone? She must have. How else could Eve know about it?

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want, Ms. Sumner? It would save a lot of time. Surely it can’t be worth going to all this trouble.”

“I want what I’ve always wanted. You.”

Waters blinked. This was exactly what Mallory would have said, had she been standing before him.

“You want me how?”

The languid smile again. “Every way. In my life. In my bed. I want you inside me. I want to have your children.”

The mention of children made Waters’s stomach flip over. “You’re not Mallory Candler. Your name is Eve Sumner.”

“Legally, that’s true.”

“What do you mean? Were you born under another name?”

“I was born Mallory Gray Candler, on February fifth, nineteen sixty.”

“You got that off her gravestone.”

Eve looked skyward. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to listen to what I have to say.”

“I’m listening now.”

“You say that, but your mind is closed. To hear what I have to say, it’s going to have to be open. To anything. Everything.”

“I’m open.”

Eve smiled sadly, then without a word turned away and walked toward the strip of grass behind Catholic Hill. Waters stood in the shadow of the woods, his eyes following her vanishing figure as though chained to it. He hesitated for nearly a minute. Then put the jar and the note back in the hole and went after her.

He found her lying on the grass, her eyes open to the sky, her arms outstretched like Christ on the cross. The navy skirt suit seemed totally incongruous with her relaxed posture.

Without looking at him, Eve said, “Ask me anything you like, Johnny. Things only you or I would know.”

“I’m not playing that stupid fact game with you. God only knows how you found all that stuff out, and it doesn’t matter anyway. No matter what secrets you know, you can’t negate the single most important fact: Mallory Candler is dead, and has been for ten years.”

Eve sighed and turned her head to face him, her eyes empty of artifice. “That’s not true.”

The boldness of her statement left him speechless for a moment. “Are you seriously trying to tell me you’re Mallory Candler returned from the dead? Are you mentally ill?”

Eve bit her bottom lip, and Waters had the eerie feeling that he was talking to a small child concealing a secret.

“I’m not back from the dead,” she said. “I never died.”

Waters shivered at the conviction in her voice. “What?”

“I never died, Johnny. Not for more than a second or two, anyway.”

“You may not have died, but Mallory Candler had an open casket funeral.”

“And her body lay in it.” Eve rolled up onto one elbow and propped her head on her hand. “Do you think that’s all a person is, Johnny? Has science jaded you so much? A woman is the sum of her flesh?”

“What else is there?”

“What about the soul? For lack of a better term. The spirit?”

“You’re telling me you’re the soul of Mallory Candler?”

Eve bit her lip again, as if seriously considering this question. “Maybe. I don’t really know what a soul is.”

“If you’re the soul of Mallory Candler, where is Eve Sumner’s soul?”

“Here. With me. Only…”

“What?”

“She’s sleeping.” Eve shrugged with childlike wonder. “Sort of.”

“Eve Sumner’s soul is sleeping?”

“That’s what I call it. I’m awake now. Most of the time, really. It’s something that’s taken me a long time to learn. Years.”

Three days ago, Waters could not have imagined having this conversation. “Is this craziness what you wanted to tell me?”

“Partly. But I knew it wouldn’t convince you. I really wanted to tell you a story.”

“About what?”

“My murder.”

“Do you know something about Mallory’s murder?”

Another sad smile. “Mallory’s, mine, whatever. But she wasn’t murdered. A man tried to murder her. Tried and failed.”

“This is pointless, Ms. Sumner.”

“Is it? You’re still here.”

He wanted to walk away, but he couldn’t. And she knew it. He sat Indian-style on the grass a few feet away from her and said, “Talk.”

Eve sat up and gracefully folded her legs beneath her, exactly the way Mallory had two decades before. Her smile disappeared, replaced by a look of deep concentration. Waters was reminded of Annelise when she tried to recall details of the house they had lived in when she was a small child.

“It was summer,” Eve said. “We were living in downtown New Orleans. I’d driven across the river to the Dillard’s Department Store in Slidell. On my way back, my Camry broke down. I couldn’t believe it. That car was so reliable. This was nineteen ninety-two, and I didn’t have a cell phone. I wasn’t too worried, though. It was only nine-thirty, and I thought I could flag down a cop. I turned on my flashers, locked the doors, and started watching my rearview mirror. After forty-five minutes, I hadn’t seen a single patrol car. I hoped my husband would come looking for me, but I’m not exactly the punctual type, and I knew he wouldn’t really start worrying till at least eleven.

“I was a mile from City Park-the projects-and wearing a fairly skimpy outfit, so I didn’t want to get out and start flagging people. But I did. After about five minutes, a truck with a blue flashing light pulled in front of me. It had a camper thing on the back, but it looked official. Like one of those canine units, or maybe a fire department thing. Anyway, I was blocked by a concrete rail on one side and zooming traffic on the other. A man got out and waved, then called out and asked if I needed help. I asked if he had a cell phone. He said he did, and I saw the little funny aerial sticking off his back windshield. He reached in and held out a phone on a cord, and I took a couple of steps forward. I knew it might not be the smartest thing to do, but I didn’t want to have to jog down into the projects if I could help it.

“When I got close enough to reach the phone, he sprayed me with something that burned my eyes. Mace, I guess. I wanted to run, but traffic was flying past and I couldn’t see where I was going. He hit me on the side of the head, and suddenly I was lifted and dropped onto metal. There was a roaring sound, and then…I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the dark. The truck was parked somewhere, with nothing but moonlight coming through the windows. I couldn’t hear any traffic-just woods sounds-and I was more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. My hands were tied behind me, and I was lying on them, so my arms were numb to the shoulders.

“I thought at first that I was alone. Then I heard quiet breathing in the dark, and I knew he was in there with me. Close. I felt something touch my leg-fingers, I think-and I realized I was naked from the waist down. He started talking to me. In the dark like that. A voice in the dark. He told me he had a knife, and he pressed the blade against my thigh. It was cold. He said he was going to free my hands, because he wanted me to use them, but if I fought, he would cut my throat. He rolled me halfway over and cut whatever was tying me. Before the circulation came back to my arms, he climbed on top of me and started-” Eve’s voice cracked and went silent, then returned. “Started to do what he wanted. It was terribly painful, and my arms were paralyzed, burning from the blood coming back into them. I could hardly see, and he was grunting and saying things I couldn’t understand-something about how beautiful I was-and I remember thinking then how strangers had been leering at me and saying suggestive things since I was thirteen, and I was so goddamn angry that I’d been stupid, that one of them was finally doing what they’d all dreamed of doing.

“Anyway, I was trying to keep my head together, to decide how best to survive. Just lie there and wait for it to be over? Or fight? I mean, it was already happening. And he was holding the knife in one hand, right at my throat. As it went on, he got more violent. It was like he couldn’t finish, and that was making him furious. He dropped the knife and put his arms around my throat and started choking me. I started to fight then, but he was so much stronger than I was. And suddenly…Johnny, suddenly I had this absolute flash of certainty that I was going to die there. Under him. In the dark. That this pathetic tragedy was going to be the last chapter of my life.”

Waters wanted to argue, but there was no denying the pain in Eve’s eyes and voice. Whatever else she might be, whatever ill intent she might ultimately have toward him, she was in this moment a woman in distress, remembering something that had actually happened to her.

Her voice dropped. “Then something very strange happened. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, the way people say it does. Memories flooded into my head, but they weren’t of my husband or my children. I saw us, Johnny.” She looked urgently at him, her eyes wet with tears. “I saw you. I had this sense of a life unlived, of the road we’d never taken together, and that now we never would. And I knew that if I was thinking of you in that moment, then I had always been right about us.”

Her words chilled him to the core, and still she went on.

“He was strangling me while he raped me, his eyes almost popping out of his head, and my vision started to go black. There was no white light or anything like that. No angels. Just awful blackness enveloping me from all sides. But suddenly in my heart, it was like this fire burst into life, this cold blue fire that screamed, ‘NO! I’M NOT GOING TO DIE! I CAN’T DIE! I’M NOT DONE!’ And then his hands loosened or slipped, because he was in the throes of finishing-I know that now-and suddenly…”

Eve’s mouth was open but no sound emerged. Her eyes had the glaze of someone who had stared for an hour at the sun.

“What happened?”

“Suddenly I wasn’t Mallory anymore. I was looking at Mallory. Looking at myself.”

He blinked in confusion. “What?”

“I was looking at my dead body, Johnny. I was…in him.”

Waters sat frozen, unable to break the spell her words had cast. If she was lying, she was either a first-rate actress or a delusional schizophrenic. As he stared, she rose onto her knees and hobbled to within two feet of him.

“You know I’m telling the truth,” she said, her eyes pleading. “Don’t you?”

He swallowed. “I think you believe what you’re saying. But I don’t understand. It’s crazy. And it doesn’t explain how you could be Mallory.”

She nodded. “I don’t want to think about that part right now. I’ve waited so long for this moment.” She reached out and touched his cheek, and a current of heat went through him. “Will you do me a favor, Johnny? One favor?”

“What?”

“Kiss me.”

He pulled back slightly.

“Just one kiss,” she said, sliding her finger down to his lips. “Where’s the harm in that?”

“Why kiss you?”

“If you kiss me, you’ll know.”

“Know what?”

“That it’s all true. That it’s me.”

He pulled her fingers away from his face. “I think you’ve suffered a terrible thing, Eve. But I’m not some fairy-tale prince. I can’t magically solve your problems for you.”

“Yes, you can. And I can solve yours.”

“I don’t have any.”

Her eyes were serene in their knowledge. “Are you really so happy?”

He looked away.

“Kiss me, Johnny. Please. Just once.”

She took his hands and pulled him up to his knees. Now his face was above hers as they knelt, inches apart. Her eyes seemed to expand and deepen, drawing him into her. Those eyes knew him in a way no others on earth did, and he felt that he knew them. He wasn’t sure whether he leaned forward or she rose to him, but after a brief hesitation, their lips touched, and with the gentlest pressure they kissed. Her lips remained closed for a moment, and then he felt the soft touch of her tongue. He parted his lips, and she slipped her tongue inside, then took his lower lip between her teeth and tugged it toward her. A shock of recognition shot through him, and he almost pulled away, but with recognition came a wave of desire. He kissed her harder, slipping his tongue into her mouth to taste her. Eve did not taste like Mallory, but she responded like Mallory. Her mouth moved with perfect elasticity, yielding to the pressure of his lips, then reciprocating like a gifted dancer who senses her partner’s every move. He had no idea how long they kissed, but when he felt her breasts swelling against him, he suddenly found himself unable to breathe. He broke the kiss and pushed her away.

Eve caught her balance and stared back at him, her cheeks flushed, her lips deep red as she panted for breath. “I told you,” she said. “Oh God, I’m so happy.”

He got to his feet and wiped his mouth, meaning to put more distance between them, but he wavered. Not the passion of her kiss but the memory of it had dislocated his sense of time. How could he remember kissing a woman he had never kissed before? He feared that if he walked back toward his Land Cruiser, he would find the old Triumph he’d driven in college waiting for him.

“I’m going,” he said.

For a moment Eve looked as though she might panic, but she looked away and bit her bottom lip again. This too made him think of Mallory, of her infantile reactions to parting.

“Go on,” she said, trying not to pout.

He took a few steps toward the edge of Catholic Hill, then looked back at her. “How did you know about Danny Buckles and the little girls at school?”

“If I told you that, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“If I stay, will you tell me that? And the rest of your story?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready. You’re not there yet. You need time to think. And we need some more time together.” She looked up at him and forced a smile. “You know where to find me, Johnny. I’ll be waiting.”

“I’m not going to call you,” he said harshly.

She fell back on the grass as though he had not spoken, her arms outstretched again, her gaze lost in the clouds. Watching her, he was reminded of the young Natalie Wood playing Alva in Tennessee Williams’s This Property Is Condemned. He waited, but Eve did not look his way again, so he turned and walked back to the lane.

When his feet hit the asphalt, a sudden sense of urgency rose in him, and he increased his pace to a jog, then a run. How had she simply appeared behind him? He’d seen no other cars, nor heard any before she appeared. It was as though she’d materialized on Catholic Hill at the moment he read the note, like a genie conjured from the buried jar. But as he neared his Land Cruiser, an engine rumbled to life somewhere among the stones far behind him. When he turned, he saw the black Lexus he’d seen at Dunleith slide between distant graves with reptilian stealth, headed for one of the far gates.

“Jesus,” he panted, reaching for the Land Cruiser’s door. “What the hell just happened?”

chapter 6

Waters lay awake in the dark beside his sleeping wife. His watch read 3:00 A.M., and he had not slept at all. The evening had not gone well. As he left the cemetery, Lily had called his cell phone, furious because she’d already heard one rumor of molestation at the school and another that her husband had brought it to light. She was angry primarily because she had not been the first to know of these events. Waters apologized for this, but what he really felt guilty about was what he had neglected to say once he got home.

When Lily asked how he had come to get the information about “the school closet” out of Annelise, he stood silent for a few moments, thinking of Eve Sumner’s cryptic warning and all that had come after. And then he lied. He told Lily he’d simply asked Annelise about school and sensed something unusual in her answer, a feeling that she wanted to say more but was afraid to. By lying, he had entered into a tacit compact to protect Eve and her secret knowledge, whatever its source. This was a serious step, but hadn’t she used her knowledge for good, as she said in her office? And yet…how had she known the abuse was happening in the first place?

If I told you that, you wouldn’t believe me….

Waters shut his eyes and tried not to think of Eve. It required concentrated thoughts of Annelise to banish the haunting face. He and Lily had spoken to Annelise about what kind of talk she was likely to hear at school tomorrow. Kids might call her a tattletale or talk about things she didn’t yet understand. Conversing with a second-grader about child molestation was not easy, but he and Lily believed frankness was best, and Annelise didn’t seem too upset by their explanation. They agreed to watch her closely and speak to her again tomorrow night.

When they finally got into bed, Lily read two pages of a Nora Roberts novel and fell asleep. Waters lifted the paperback from her chest and put it on the night table, then lay on his back as images from that afternoon spun through his mind, merging with memories from twenty years before. Eve’s kiss remained on his lips as surely as Mallory’s was engraved in the convolutions of his brain. That was easily enough explained: their kisses were identical. How this could be so was not so easily explained, and so he raveled threads in the dark.

Foremost in his mind were the intimate details Eve had thrown at him, things only Mallory could have known. He considered getting up and making a list, but the more he thought about it, the more trouble he had separating the memories Eve had mentioned from those rising from his own subconscious. Her irrational words and actions had shattered a dam he had built in his mind, freeing a river of memory that he was powerless to resist. Yet one bedrock reality refused to yield: Mallory Candler was dead. Eve Sumner might believe she was Mallory, but that did not make it so. At the very least she wanted him to believe she believed that, and to bolster her delusion, she’d told a heart-wrenching tale of rape culminating with an outlandish fantasy of soul transmigration. As a scientist, Waters found it difficult enough to accept the existence of an immortal soul; the idea that souls could move freely between human bodies he rejected out of hand. And despite a brief flirtation with Eastern philosophy in college, he had not one iota of belief in reincarnation.

What possibilities did that leave? Psychotic delusions seemed most likely. He suspected that the background information he’d requested from Cole’s New Orleans connections would support this theory. The idea of demonic possession flashed into his mind and fled just as quickly. That was the stuff of medieval folktales, fodder for Hollywood filmmakers and religious fundamentalists. Besides, what Eve had described sounded more like possession of one person by another rather than some sordid satanic scenario. As best as he could recall, she had spoken of two personalities living inside a single mind: one “sleeping,” the other “awake.” Could she be some sort of schizophrenic? A victim of multiple-personality disorder? Waters knew little of such things, and since Natchez had no practicing psychiatrists, he knew no one to call about it.

As Lily began to snore, his wilder speculations gave way to scientific analysis. If a reasonable man studied what had happened since John Waters saw Eve Sumner at the soccer field, what might he conclude? One: Sumner wanted to initiate a sexual affair. Two: Sumner was using knowledge of Waters’s past to interest him. These conclusions alone were not remarkable. The fact that Eve was trying to persuade him that she was actually a dead lover from his past infinitely complicated matters. Assuming she was sane-and this question was still very much in doubt-what motive could she possibly have to do this?

First principles, he told himself. What has been the result of Eve’s words and actions? She’s thrown a levelheaded man into a state of emotional disarray. How can she benefit from that? Who else might benefit? Waters wasn’t presently involved in business negotiations that would suffer due to a lack of concentration on his part. But perhaps Eve had only begun her campaign to disrupt his life. Maybe her ultimate goal was to draw him into an affair, then blackmail him. It seemed a great deal of trouble to go to, particularly since he stood to lose his fortune if the EPA investigation went against his company. But maybe she knew nothing about that.

And where had Eve gotten the intimate details of his old life? Given all she’d said, he half expected the background investigation to reveal some familial relation to Mallory. If none existed, Eve would almost have to have gotten her information from someone like Cole, or-

Waters blinked in the darkness.

Cole. Cole had known about Soon. He knew other things too. He knew Waters had first slept with Mallory on a camping trip at Sardis Reservoir. They had been roommates at the time. What else had Waters confided in the excitement of college love? And what had Cole confided to Eve? He’d already admitted they’d slept together. She’s a hell of a lay, but too twisted for me…. Watch out…She’s always looking for advantage. Reminds me a little of me…. Waters swallowed and tried to figure out what motive Cole could possibly have to give Eve private information about him. Maybe he was just drunk and answered anything she asked him. But that was unlikely, given the intimate nature of her knowledge. Try as he might, Waters could come up with nothing. Cole’s fortunes depended on his partner remaining sane and healthy enough to keep finding oil-end of story.

Lily’s snores stopped with a gasp, then resumed at a higher decibel level. Waters could stay in bed no longer. He got up and padded into the kitchen in his boxers, more awake than he’d felt in years. His mind and body thrummed as though rushing on the pure cocaine he’d snorted with Sara on the slope of a volcano in Ecuador. His blood was singing. And he knew why. The strange encounters with Eve had stirred his long-suppressed desire, and like a bear waking from hibernation, that desire would not return to sleep. It stretched and breathed, feeling its power, and beneath that power a hunger that had grown steadily through the long night of winter.

Almost before he knew what he was doing, he lifted a phone book from Lily’s alcove and looked up Eve’s number. He found two listed: work and home. The kitchen clock read 3:40 A.M. He looked at the phone but did not touch it. Yet some part of him knew that Eve was waiting at the other end for the connection to be made. Sleeping perhaps, but waiting still. The soft ring would come, and before it faded, the phone would be in her hand, her voice already weaving its spell.

Waters left the alcove and walked to the marble-topped island where Annelise’s schoolbooks awaited her. School, he thought. Where we learn to read and write and add and subtract while learning subtler but more important lessons: how to speak and listen, how to lie and tell the truth, how to honor and betray, how to strive, to whisper, to hold hands, to kiss, to insist and evade, to make love, to marry, to honor and again betray-

“Jesus,” he muttered, feeling his mind slipping off its tracks. He went to the laundry room and pulled a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the wicker basket. He slipped the jeans over his boxers, put on the T-shirt, then laced on the running shoes he kept by the back door. This time of night, Lily slept too soundly to hear him start the Land Cruiser, but just in case, he scribbled a note saying he was going to Wal-Mart for some ice cream. Then he grabbed his keys, wallet, and cell phone and went out the front door.

The streets of Natchez were deserted at this hour. He drove slowly down Main Street, past the Eola Hotel and his office, then turned onto Broadway and coasted down the long precipitous drop of Silver Street to the river. The Under-the-Hill Saloon was shut tight, but the Steamboat Casino threw a garish Las Vegas light over the water, and a few rumpled patrons stumbled along the gangplank toward the shore. Waters accelerated up the sweeping lane that led back up the bluff, then turned right onto Canal and headed toward the bypass.

To honor and betray…Eve Sumner no longer filled his mind; memories of Mallory had driven her out. Waters’s relationship with Mallory had been born from a double betrayal: one of a friend, the other of a lover. During his sophomore year of college, he’d been home for a weekend in mid-October, when the sun still burned down like summer. He was dating a sophomore from Tulane, a Natchez girl who had graduated St. Stephens a year ahead of Cole. They’d been invited to the home-estate, really-of a young local internist, Dr. David Denton, for a Sunday picnic. Through several unusual connections, Waters knew Denton well. Waters’s mother worked as a receptionist for Denton’s older partner, but their real bond had grown through baseball. During Waters’s senior year of high school, when his team made a run for the state championship, Denton went along as an unofficial coach. Fifteen years earlier, David Denton had been the star third baseman for the St. Stephens state championship team, and since Waters played third base, they spent many hours together. Waters missed his father badly, and his association with the young doctor had helped him with a lot more than baseball. Some people thought Denton arrogant, but Waters respected him, and always looked forward to seeing him.

When Waters and his date arrived at Denton’s house that Sunday, they did not find the large party they expected. They found two blankets laid out with food worthy of a five-star restaurant, and no people in sight. As they tried to figure out what was going on, two figures walked out of Denton’s stables. One was the doctor himself, tall and handsome at thirty-six; the other was Mallory Candler, twenty years old and as beautiful as any woman Waters had ever seen. Waters’s date squealed, ran over to Mallory, and gave her an exaggerated hug. Though Mallory attended Ole Miss and she Tulane, they belonged to the same sorority. Waters would later learn that Mallory had no close female friends, but other women were always drawn to her, as though to learn the secrets of her remarkable self-possession.

Hiding his shock at the age difference, Waters shook hands with Denton and sat down to eat. Because of Mallory’s beauty, he expected her to reveal herself as the vapid creature many Ole Miss sorority girls turned out to be, but he was surprised. She did not gossip or squeal; she conversed with erudition on politics, religion, literature, and sex. Denton was clearly enamored with her, and he seemed amused by Mallory’s attempts to draw Waters out during the afternoon. When they went riding, Mallory cantered alongside Waters while Denton lectured on the lineage of his horses, and all the while Waters felt her appraising him: the way he talked, moved, handled his horse.

When they retired to the house for late-afternoon drinks, Waters’s date asked him to play the grand piano in Denton’s living room. With half a bottle of pinot noir in him, Waters agreed. He had never taken formal lessons, but his mother was a fine pianist and he had been blessed to inherit her ear. He ran through a few songs from the period-mostly Elton John and Billy Joel-singing in a voice made confident by wine, and Denton professed amazement that a third baseman could do anything requiring that much talent. Only Mallory did not compliment his playing, but when Waters glanced up from the keyboard, he saw that she had been profoundly affected by his performance.

During one song, the phone rang, and Denton took the call. Holding the phone against his chest, he told them that Mallory’s ride back to Ole Miss was leaving, and would be by to pick her up in fifteen minutes. Clearly unhappy, Denton asked Waters how he was getting back to school. Waters explained he was driving back in his drafty thirdhand Triumph convertible. Would he mind, Denton asked, driving Mallory back so that they could continue their evening? In that moment, Waters had a sense of massive stones sliding into place somewhere, and he saw a glint in Mallory Candler’s eye that he would see many times over the next two years.

No, he replied. I wouldn’t mind at all….

Denton treated them all to dinner at a restaurant on the bluff, and then it was time to begin the five-hour journey back to Oxford. In the parking lot of the restaurant, Waters’s date climbed into the doctor’s BMW, and Mallory crammed her suitcase into the trunk of Waters’s TR-6, a symbolic switching of partners that gave Waters a chill.

They began the ride in silence, and the silence lasted forty miles. Occasionally he or Mallory would glance over the console, but their eyes did not meet. Then-at the turn for the northbound interstate-they shared a gaze during which a full conversation took place without words. With Ole Miss still four hours away, Mallory entwined her hand in his and began to talk.

She spoke first of Dr. Denton, how she had accepted his request for a date to prove that “age was no big thing” to her, and also because he was a close friend of her parents. She’d continued dating him because it was fun to shock people and because she liked watching how far Denton would go to win her approval. But he was more a businessman than a physician, she said, and she knew she could never be with “someone like that.” She asked Waters about his relationship with her Tulane sorority sister, and he was cautiously frank. He was sleeping with her, and they had agreed not to see other people. Mallory asked about his family but confided little about her own. She wondered aloud how they had lived in the same town for so long without more than a cursory acquaintance. Waters pointed out that she had attended preppy St. Stephens, while he’d graduated from public school “with the blacks.” Mallory made light of this difference, but that was easy to do when you were from the rich side of the tracks.

Soon she was asking Waters about his dreams, his thoughts on God, his sexual history. As for her own past, she professed one “serious” relationship in high school with an older boy who had known nothing beyond “basic high school football player stuff,” and another in college during which she’d done a lot of experimenting. Her relations with Dr. Denton had not progressed to intercourse; the age difference made him especially solicitous of her, and she’d taken advantage of that. By the time they hit Oxford-at 3:00 A.M.-Mallory said there was really no point in going to sleep. Better to push through till morning and do Monday classes on adrenaline.

Instead of driving to campus, Waters drove out to Sardis Reservoir, a massive, man-made lake held in check by a three-mile-long dam. At one end of the dam was a single-outlet spillway, where a juggernaut of water thirty feet thick blasted through the concrete with earth-shaking force and spent itself in a rocky channel. A narrow catwalk crossed above this spillway, where you could stand above the thundering jet and feel the spray swirl around you like gravity-defying rain as the primal roar filled first your ears and then your mind.

On this catwalk Mallory took Waters’s face in her hands and kissed him with infinitely more passion than he had known in his nineteen years. When she pulled back, he looked into her bottomless green eyes and knew that he was lost. He had a sense of being chosen-by her and also by something greater, something unknowable, the same amorphous force he had felt when Denton asked if he would drive Mallory back to Ole Miss. A sense that his destiny, whatever that might be, was gathering itself around him at last.

After the kiss, they walked hand in hand back to the car. Waters drove back to the campus, but when they reached the sorority house, Mallory simply shook her head. He needed no prompting. He drove to an empty athletic field on a hill above his dorm and parked the convertible in the predawn darkness. Mallory lay across him, and he leaned down to her uplifted face. In the timeless hour that followed, his hands never went below her waist, but the two of them left the physical domain of that car as surely as if they had lifted into the dark with wings. He sensed in Mallory a sexuality of limitless scope, like a man looking through an open door at a closed one, yet sensing that behind that door lay still another, an endless succession of doors, each concealing its own mystery, each mystery folding into another, the inmost circle unreachable, impenetrable, an essentially feminine core that he had no choice but to try to reach and understand.

Waters went through the next day in a trance, wondering if Mallory had felt what he had, whether she had seen that night as a beginning or merely an interesting Sunday diversion for a beautiful woman with nothing better to do. At four that afternoon, his telephone rang. Mallory had slept through all her classes, but she wanted to see him again. His exhaustion left him in a moment. They spent most of that night together, watching a movie, eating dinner, driving for miles, talking, and then not talking.

In the span of two weeks, they became inseparable. A wild euphoria permeated their days, yet it was shadowed by an unspoken reality. Mallory was still technically dating Dr. Denton, and Waters, the girl from Tulane. For this reason, and others, they kept to themselves much of the time, and stopped their impassioned couplings short of intercourse. But by the end of the first month, it was becoming difficult to restrain themselves. One rainy night in Waters’s dorm room, Mallory straddled him, took him in her hand, and guided him to her opening. She started to sit, moaned softly, then sobbed once and got off the bed. While he stared in confusion, she pulled on her jeans and ran from the room. Waters put on his pants and gave chase. By the time he reached the door of the dormitory, Mallory was running up the hill toward the library, her hair flying behind her in the rain. Barefoot, he sprinted after her, dodging cars to cross the road, finally coming within earshot on the library lawn. Under foot-high letters trumpeting Faulkner’s assertion that man would not merely endure but prevail, he screamed for her to stop. When she turned, he saw that her eyes were not red from tears, but filled with wild joy.

“Do you love me?” she cried.

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

He stood there in the rain, knowing only that he could not stand to be physically apart from this woman. “Yes,” he replied.

“What?”

“I love you!”

She came back to him and kissed him, and then the tears did come. After a time she dragged him toward the library door.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

Just inside the doors were two pay phones. Mallory lifted a receiver and handed it to him.

“Who am I calling?”

“You know.”

And then he did. She wanted him to call his girlfriend at Tulane and break off the relationship. He hesitated only a moment. He told the girl he was finding a long-distance relationship too hard to sustain. She asked tearfully if he had met someone, and he said yes. When she asked who, he looked at Mallory, and for the first time she looked uncertain. Waters lied and said he’d met someone from another state. As they spoke, he felt strangely detached, as though discussing the death of a distant relative, but as he hung up, he felt angry. He handed Mallory the phone.

“Do you want me to call David?” she asked.

“You’re damn right.”

She bit her bottom lip, then took the receiver and started to dial his number.

“Wait,” he said.

“Why?” She kept dialing. “You’re not sure?”

“I’m sure about you. About how I feel. But…telling David is different from what I just did.”

She looked intrigued. “How?”

“He’s a friend of mine…of my mother’s. Of your parents. My brother’s supposed to work for him next summer, for God’s sake. Taking care of his horses.”

Mallory nodded. “I know all that.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“He says he is.”

“Shit.”

She laid a hand over his and looked deep into his eyes. “I’m ready, if you think I should.”

“You should do it face-to-face.”

She hung up the phone. “This weekend. There’s a big party at his house.”

His anger took him by surprise. “You didn’t tell me that. You were going home this weekend? To see him?”

“No. I wasn’t going to go.”

He wasn’t sure he believed her.

“You should come too, John.”

“No, I shouldn’t. Besides, I wasn’t invited.”

“You weren’t?” Her eyes narrowed. “That’s weird. A lot of college people are going.”

A shiver of apprehension went through him. “Jesus. You think David’s heard something?”

Mallory shrugged. “We haven’t been as careful as we should have been. And there are only, what, like five hundred students here from Natchez?”

He nodded, wondering if David Denton already saw him as a son of a bitch.

“You should come anyway,” Mallory told him. “It’s a masquerade party. For Halloween. No one will know.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Sometimes I think so. You really should come though.” She laughed and hugged him tight. “In fact, I’m not going unless you do.”

So he went. Mallory rented him a Sir Lancelot costume in Memphis, and three nights later he walked into David Denton’s house wearing a visored metal helmet. If anyone asked who he was, he planned to say he was Cole Smith. Cole had been invited to the party but had chosen to go deer hunting instead (which struck Waters as hilarious now). There were between eighty and a hundred masked guests, so remaining incognito turned out to be no problem. People drank in grand Natchez style, and dancers spilled from Denton’s great room onto the huge stone patio behind his house.

Mallory had come as a ballerina, with a white tulle skirt blossoming over her leotard and a glittering mask adorned with pearls. Her regal bearing and fluid dance style drew the eyes of everyone, and Denton-dressed as Louis XIV-almost never left her side. Waters watched them dance from a distance, mingling with people who didn’t know him well. Mallory seemed to be having the time of her life, and after an hour-and three stiff drinks-he began to feel resentful. Mallory had asked him to the party, even rented his costume, yet she acted as if he weren’t there. He was at the point of doing something monumentally stupid-like asking her to dance-when he realized he’d lost sight of her. Suddenly, a hand squeezed his behind.

“Feeling neglected?”

He was almost sure the person whispering in his ear was Mallory. Reaching back, he felt the tulle skirt and pinched her thigh hard enough to hurt. He heard a laugh and another whisper: “Meet me behind the stables.”

He slipped outside as quickly as he could and made his way across the lawn to Denton’s capacious stables. He waited in the dark with the smell of hay and horses, wondering if Mallory would be able to get away without Denton noticing. Suddenly, a white apparition materialized out of the night, floating toward him as though borne on the wind.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” he hissed as she neared him.

Mallory pulled up her mask and smiled mischievously. “Do you want to talk or do you want to kiss me?”

He pushed her against the stable wall and kissed her, and in seconds they were panting in the dark.

“Have you told David anything?”

She shook her head. “I’m going to do it after. When everyone’s gone.”

He kissed her again. Her fingers dug into his back, then raked around his ribs to his chest. He wanted her badly, but he could almost see Denton searching the house for her now.

“You’d better get back.”

She nodded and put a finger to his lips. “Are you all right?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

She smiled knowingly, then put her mask back on, slid to her knees, and lifted the tunic of his knight’s costume. He sucked in his breath when she took him into her mouth, then closed his eyes and tried to stay silent as she went to work with feverish intensity. Once, he thought he heard voices nearby, but when he touched Mallory’s head to warn her, she slapped his hand away and continued with more fervor. Seconds later he cried out and started to push her away, but she grabbed his wrists and finished while music and laughter echoed across the lawn and horses stamped in their stables and he shuddered in the dark.

She rose to her feet, her eyes twinkling. “Better now?”

Without waiting for an answer, she kissed him, then took off across the lawn, the tulle skirt trailing after her like a fallen angel’s wings.

When Waters returned to the party, Mallory was dancing with Denton on the patio. Through the mesh of her skirt he saw two oblong grass stains on her knees, but no one else seemed to notice. He went inside for another drink.

All masks were to be removed at midnight. At five ’til, someone turned off the stereo, and Waters prepared to slip out a side door. Before he could, he heard someone ask Denton to play his piano. The doctor looked thoughtfully at the Kawai concert grand and said, “I wish Johnny Waters was here. I thought that kid couldn’t play anything but third base, but he’s a genius on piano.”

“Why didn’t you invite him?” Mallory asked casually.

“I meant to. It just slipped my mind. I’ll remember next time.”

A wave of guilt surged through Waters, and instead of leaving, he signaled Mallory to follow him down the hall to the bathroom. When she did, he pulled her inside and said, “Don’t tell him tonight.”

She shook her head. “I knew you were going to say that.”

“You still want to?”

“No. But we’re just putting off the inevitable.”

“I know, but…Look, just do whatever feels right to you.”

Mallory nodded and went back to the main room, where guests were beginning to remove their masks and pop the corks on champagne bottles. Waters stole a last glance at Mallory and Denton at the center of the crowd, then faded through the garage door, more confused than he’d been in a long time.

At 2:00 A.M., Mallory knocked at his window, and he learned that she hadn’t told Denton anything. Thus began a two-month period of secrecy that nearly caused both of them to fail the semester. When they returned to Ole Miss, they camped for a weekend at Sardis and made love for the first time. But they did not go out together in public. They frequently drove the hour to Memphis to avoid prying eyes, and even there they spent most of their time in hotel rooms. When they returned to Natchez for the Thanksgiving holiday, Mallory accepted only one date with Denton, and that night she made excuses and went home early, so that later-as she had every other night-she could slip out to meet Waters and make love in his car. It was a ridiculous situation, but Waters couldn’t bear the idea of hurting the man who had helped him so unselfishly during high school. Beyond this, he knew that Mallory’s parents would be enraged when they learned she had cheated on their ideal suitor to “go in the street” with a boy from the wrong side of town. But as the Christmas holidays approached, Natchez students started to gossip at Ole Miss, and it was only a matter of time before Denton heard what was going on.

It took an almost unbearable irony to bring things to a head. Three days before Christmas, Denton called Waters and asked him to accompany him to an antebellum home to look at a piano. The doctor was thinking of buying an antique Bosendorfer brought from Berlin to Natchez during the 1850s. Driven by a desire to maintain the illusion of normalcy-and not least by morbid curiosity-Waters agreed. As he and Denton examined the piano and discovered dry rot inside, Denton asked him what he thought of Mallory Candler. Waters swallowed and said he thought she was a “great girl,” which was the ultimate Ole Miss stamp of approval. Did Waters see Mallory much in Oxford? With his nerves stretched to maximum tension, Waters replied that it was a small school, and everyone saw everyone pretty regularly. Denton said he was only asking because Mallory had been acting a bit distant, but he thought he knew the reason. Mallory Candler was the kind of girl who didn’t get too involved with a man unless she knew the relationship was more than a passing affair. Then he smiled and confided that he planned to ask her to marry him on Christmas Eve. She was a little young, Denton conceded, but Mallory’s father was all for it, and he was sure Mallory would be too. As Waters sat frozen, his heart thundering in his chest, Denton said he’d just wanted to make sure he wasn’t reading Mallory wrong, that there wasn’t another man in her life. Waters almost confessed everything then, but he stopped himself. That was Mallory’s duty, not his. Besides, if Denton was considering a marriage proposal, maybe Mallory had been encouraging him more than she let on to Waters.

When Waters recounted this conversation to Mallory, she turned white. That night, she went to Denton’s house and told him she was in love with another man. Yes, it was someone he knew. She elided some details, such as the rendezvous behind the stables, but for the most part she told him everything. At two that morning, Waters, his mother, and his brother awoke to a pounding on their front door. Waters answered in his underwear, and found a drunken David Denton on the front porch, his BMW idling in the street behind him. Denton greeted Mrs. Waters with a rant against her “worthless” son, and Waters asked her to go back to bed. He listened to Denton’s railing for as long as he could. Then he looked at the doctor and said, “David, I’m sorry it happened the way it did. We should have told you from the start. But the woman chooses in these things. Okay? The woman chooses, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

“You could have done the decent thing!” Denton yelled. “You could have been a friend! And if not that, you could at least be a goddamn gentleman!”

This wounded Waters deeply, but he’d only begun to wallow in his guilt when Denton added, “I should have known better though. You’re no gentleman. You’re trash. That’s why you live over here with the rest of the goddamn trash. I ought to kick your ass.”

All his guilt forgotten, Waters clenched his quivering hands into fists. In his mind he saw his father, and he felt as though Denton had just called his father trash. In a barely audible voice he said, “Go ahead, if you think you can. But you’d better be ready to kill me.”

Denton took a wild swing, and Waters easily ducked it.

“You’re drunk, David,” he said, trying to restrain himself.

Denton punched him in the stomach. As Waters drew back his fist to throw a punishing right, he saw his mother silhouetted in the window behind him.

“Go home!” he shouted. “And don’t come back!”

Denton blinked in confusion, mumbled something unintelligible, then turned around and stumbled back to his BMW, cursing and sobbing as he went. When Waters walked back inside, his mother shook her head.

“Is this over that Candler girl?” she asked, her face tight and vulnerable without makeup.

Waters nodded.

“She’s no good, John. I know you won’t listen to me, but that girl’s not right, not for you or anybody else.”

He asked what his mother knew about Mallory, but she just turned away and went back to bed. That night was the beginning of his public relationship with Mallory, a brief window of bliss during which all seemed golden, when the horrors to come still lay out of sight.

Now-driving down the deserted road by the paper mill-he thought again of Mallory at Denton’s party, but this time, when she pulled down her mask by the stables, he saw not her face but Eve Sumner’s. He tried to push the image from his mind, but the harder he tried, the clearer Eve became. He could not see Mallory’s face. It made him crazy, like trying to remember the name of a familiar actor whose face was right in front of him on television. Frustration built in him with manic intensity, like the feedback loops he’d read about in obsessive-compulsive people. He had to see Mallory’s face.

He swung onto Lower Woodville Road and sped up to sixty. He kept a rented storeroom less than a mile away, a climate-controlled cubicle filled with furniture and boxes from his mother’s house and his own. His mother saved everything, and somewhere in that cubicle was a footlocker containing whatever junk was left from his Ole Miss days.

He turned into the storage company lot, punched a code into the security gate, and parked by a long aluminum building. The room was near the end of the inside corridor, the PIN code for its lock his social security number. When he opened the door, the musty smell surprised him, but he felt for the light switch, flicked it, and went inside.

Furniture and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Plastic bags held old clothes-some his father’s-and broken lamps sat on all available flat surfaces. Even his father’s old power tools were here, saved like the instruments of a renowned surgeon. Another time, Waters might have stopped to go through some of the stuff, but tonight there was only one thing on his mind.

He found the old footlocker behind some boxes of books. It wasn’t locked, and he tore open the lid like a heart-attack victim searching for nitroglycerin. Here lay several chapters of his past, deposited in no particular order and with no particular intent. He found football programs, grade reports, the tassel from his graduation cap, love letters with a rubber band around them, geological specimens, a guitar pick from a Jimmy Buffett concert, a box of snapshots from Ole Miss and another from his summers working the pipeline in Alaska. He was about to go through the photos when he saw a banded portfolio near the bottom. Something clicked in his mind. Inside the portfolio he found everything dating from the time he spent with Mallory-everything that had survived, anyway. At some point he must have grouped it all together, but he didn’t remember doing it.

The first thing he saw was a copy of the campus newspaper, the Daily Mississippian, with Mallory Candler filling most of the front page. MISS UNIVERSITY 1982! proclaimed the headline. ON TO MISS MISSISSIPPI PAGEANT? asked a smaller font. Below the type, Mallory stood facing the camera with a dozen roses, flashing her megawatt smile and wearing a sequined gown that could have been made for Grace Kelly. The instant Waters saw her face, Eve vanished from his mind. Eve Sumner had the sensual but not uncommon gifts of good bones, good tits, and sultry eyes. Mallory’s beauty was the once-in-a-decade sort, her features drawn from and sharing in some portion of eternity. As he lifted the newspaper to look for other photos, the cell phone in his pocket rang, startling him. When he answered, he heard Lily’s worried voice.

“I woke up and found you gone,” she said sleepily. “Are you still at Wal-Mart?”

“I didn’t go to Wal-Mart.”

Silence. “Where are you?”

“I went for a ride. I couldn’t sleep.”

“What’s wrong?”

Mallory stared out of the newspaper photograph with eerie vitality. “I don’t know. The dry hole…the EPA thing.”

“Come home, and I’ll make some coffee. It’s five a.m., John.”

“All right.”

He hung up but did not stand. Even when reduced to a millimeter-thick sheet of paper, Mallory seemed more alive than the people he saw in town every day. He shook his head. If anyone in that audience on that night had known what was going on behind those hypnotic green eyes, they would have left the auditorium in shock. But of course they hadn’t. No one had, except John Waters. He started to fold the newspaper and bring it with him, but then he slid it back into the portfolio and carried the portfolio out to the Land Cruiser. Lily never drove the SUV. He could leave the portfolio under its seat with no worries. And if he got the desperate feeling that he could not recall Mallory’s face, all he’d have to do was pull it out and look at her picture.

Waters had driven most of the way home when a blue dashboard light flashed and swirled wildly in his rearview mirror. Though reminded of Eve’s rape story, he pulled over, rolled down his window, and waited. He heard heavy footsteps, and then a man said, “John? You’re out kind of early, pardner. Or is it late?”

The speaker was Detective Tom Jackson, the man who’d arrested Danny Buckles the day before.

“Hey, Tom. Was I speeding?”

Jackson stopped at Waters’s window and gave him a friendly nod. “No, I just recognized your vehicle. I wanted to make sure you were okay. All that molestation stuff yesterday…I know it’s tough to deal with.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t sleep. I’m just doing some thinking.”

Jackson gave him a sympathetic smile. “Your little girl okay?”

“Oh, yeah. She took it better than I thought she would.”

“Good. You know, it looks like the guy didn’t touch the girls at all. He just did some looking, exposed himself, that kind of thing.”

“Thank God.”

“Yeah.” The detective sniffed and looked up the road. In the darkness, his size and his cowboy mustache gave him the look of a Frederic Remington bronze. “Well,” he said, looking back at Waters. “You have a good day, John. Try to get some sleep. You look like you need some.”

“I will. Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

Waters drove away slowly, wondering how long Jackson had been following him.