Sleep No More

Chapter 10

When he arrived at the Eola suite that night, he saw that she’d been right to choose it. The brick and stone hotel was a local landmark; it occupied most of a city block, and at seven stories had held the title of tallest building in the city for decades. Two popular nightclubs operated nearby, and their patrons frequently spilled out into Main Street, go cups in hand as they laughed and danced to the beat of live bands thumping through the walls. On any given night, those bars were filled with people who would recognize Waters on sight, but he felt reasonably safe approaching on foot from Pearl Street, as Mallory had told him to do.

Entering the doors of the grand hotel hurled him back in time, not twenty years but thirty. When he was a boy, his father had often brought the family to the Eola for Sunday dinner. He still remembered his passage through the lobby as they walked to the restaurant. Old men sat in club chairs, smoking cigars and playing checkers; a black shoe-shine man quietly solicited business; an attendant with a gold-braided uniform manned the elevator, which had a brass cage door that Waters always dreamed of opening and closing. He could still hear his father ordering shrimp remoulade from the red-haired waitress, still see the sliced yellow pound cake, strawberries, and whipped cream that awaited them for dessert.

On the first night he met Eve, the lobby was empty but for a lone security guard who sat far away with his back to the door. A bell rang somewhere, but as Eve had predicted, the guard did not challenge him. A dark business suit provided all the bona fides he needed for access.

When he opened the door to suite 324, he found Eve lying naked across the bed like Marilyn Monroe, a huge red bow tied around her waist, a champagne flute in her hand. The Rat Pack campiness of it broke the tension that had built inside him on his way up, and they celebrated their new digs with wild excess.

It was a good beginning for a week that would end badly. For after that first night, things began to change. Lily was behaving differently toward Waters at home. Her tone of voice became more affected, and sometimes he caught her watching him from the corner of her eye. He began to worry that he’d made some mistake, that she could smell Eve on him despite the fact that he always showered before returning home. And not all the clues to his betrayal were as subtle as scent. Eve was so physical that she sometimes left marks on him, even though she tried not to. If he and Lily had had a normal sexual relationship, his infidelity would have been discovered in the first week. But though she did not discover the marks of passion, Lily did notice changes in his behavior.

The move to the Eola had necessitated that the trysts become nocturnal, and Waters’s nightly ritual never varied. He would put Annelise to bed, wait for Lily to retire, then go out to the slave quarters to “do some mapping.” After he was sure Lily was asleep, he would slip on a sport coat, drive down to Pearl Street, park under some trees, and walk two blocks to the Eola.

One night, though, Lily varied her ritual. She came into the kitchen after they’d put Annelise to bed, and remarked that he’d been cold to her for the past few days. Waters could not believe she’d used the word “cold.” When he asked for clarification, she said he seemed unusually distant, and she didn’t think it was just the EPA investigation. He hadn’t hugged or kissed her for ten days, she said. Waters almost pointed out that Lily hadn’t made love with him for seven weeks, and that effort was only a painful charade she suffered through to keep him from going out of his mind with frustration. But he didn’t. As he stood awkwardly by the refrigerator, Lily walked up and laid her head on his shoulder, then said she was going to take a hot shower. Waters stiffened. Lily normally took baths. “Taking a hot shower” was one of her rare preambles to sex.

Afraid she would sense his anxiety, he hugged her, then said that he had a full night’s work ahead, mapping a new prospect. Lily gave him a hurt look, but he did not relent. He went out to the slave quarters and sat looking blankly at his drafting table while he waited for Lily to fall asleep. As his mind drifted, an underlying irony of his marital sex life hit him. As long as Lily knew that he wanted to go to bed with her, she was quite content not to have sex. But the moment she sensed real indifference on his part, she felt compelled to take him to bed.

He went to the Eola that night in the hope of forgetting the tension at home, but he found only more tension. That night, when Eve said, “I love you,” she held eye contact, waiting for her declaration to be returned. When Waters didn’t comply, he saw anger in her eyes. Later, after sleep deprivation had caused him to doze off, he awakened to find her sitting Indian-style at the foot of the bed, staring at him in the half dark.

His bladder almost emptied at the sight. Coming out of sleep, he was not sure whether the woman watching him with shining cat’s eyes was Eve or Mallory. He had found Mallory like that countless times, and he’d hoped never to see the sight again. Mallory never slept. If she did, it was while he was sleeping, and she always woke before he did. He couldn’t count the times he had surfaced out of slumber to find her propped on one elbow, watching him with luminous unblinking eyes. It unnerved him. And after her mind slipped its moorings, the cutting became part of her nocturnal vigil. He would awaken to find her sitting at the foot of the bed, her eyes glazed as she slowly raked the point of a safety pin along her inner forearms, leaving little trails of blood behind. Sometimes she used only her fingernails, but other times a key or a pocketknife. To wake and find Eve in the same position made him shudder beneath the covers. He was trying to think of some banal words to mask his fear when her lips parted and her low voice floated to him.

“Do you ever think about our babies, Johnny?”

“What?” he asked, hoping he’d misheard.

“Our babies.”

Memories too traumatic to face flooded his mind, and his fear morphed into panic. He could no longer convince himself that the woman sitting three feet from him was Eve Sumner. Her face was lost in shadow, her eyes seemed to burn with cold light, and her question reflected the central preoccupation of Mallory Candler’s broken mind. During her time with Waters, Mallory had terminated two pregnancies, both babies fathered by him. The first abortion had triggered her descent into madness, and Waters knew-if no one else did-that even after marriage and the birth of three healthy children, Mallory had never fully recovered from those abortions.

“Tell me, Johnny,” Eve insisted, her eyes never leaving his face.

He could hardly bring himself to address her as Mallory in a nonsexual situation, but what choice did he have? “I’ve thought about what happened,” he said cautiously. “I’ve thought about it a lot. And I still think it was the right thing to do at the time. I know you don’t agree, but-”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Do you think about what they would have been like? Blends of you and me. They would be twenty-one and twenty-two now. Do you realize that?”

The skin on Waters’s neck rippled as though he’d touched a snake.

Eve hugged herself and rocked slowly. “I don’t think of them that way,” she went on. “I think of them as children. Three and four. A boy and a girl, Johnny. That’s what they were. I asked the doctors.”

He had heard this a thousand times, but that did not lessen his anxiety. When Mallory let herself think this way, she entered a psychological danger zone, in which thoughts of her lost children drove out all else, and her guilt and anger searched desperately for an object upon which to discharge themselves. Eve might only believe she was Mallory, but that wouldn’t lessen the violence of her actions if she carried her delusion that far. She sat three feet away from him, her nude body as still as that of a meditating yogi. Yet danger radiated from her as from a coiled cobra.

“Are you afraid, Johnny?”

He fought to keep his voice under control. “No.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Then go back to sleep. I’m fine.”

“I probably should go,” he said, looking at his watch.

She slowly shook her head. “No. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up in plenty of time.”

He rolled back over and closed his eyes for an hour, but he did not sleep. He lay like a man spending his first night in prison, waiting for a fist, a knife, or worse. It took all his willpower not to leap out of bed and run from the room.

After he finally escaped the suite, he vowed never to see Eve again. When she called his cell phone the next day, he lied and told her Lily was leaving town for the night, and that he had to stay home with Annelise. Eve offered to come to his house and wait for him in the slave quarters, but he told her he couldn’t possibly see her with Annelise in the house. She tried to act casual, but thirty minutes later she called back. Couldn’t he find a sitter for a few hours and come to the hotel during that time? No, he told her. Annelise would tell Lily what he’d done, and that wasn’t their agreement. Eve called back twice more and tried various approaches, but Waters held firm. That night, after he and Lily put Annelise to bed, he sat on the porch at Linton Hill until dawn, like a lone settler guarding his family on the Great Plains. He wasn’t sure what he feared, but he knew he could not sleep.

Several times, headlights slowed as they passed the house, and one car actually nosed into the driveway and parked, its engine idling. This was not uncommon in a tourist town; people got lost all the time. Yet as the vehicle sat at the end of the drive, obscured by the trees and darkness, Waters felt in his blood that behind those bright lights was a black Lexus, and behind its wheel Eve Sumner, her eyes as watchful as the previous night when she had watched him in sleep. He thought of switching on his cell phone, but he did not want to give Eve a chance to interrogate him or persuade him of anything.

Just before dawn, he went out to the slave quarters and crashed on the twin bed he kept there. When he awakened that afternoon, Lily was gone. His cell phone showed fourteen missed calls, all from pay phones. He knew that if he didn’t answer soon, Eve would show up in person at his home or office. Just as Mallory would have done.

As he drove to his office, his phone chirped. The caller ID showed a pay phone. Despite Eve’s recent behavior, the Pavlovian response still kicked in: desire stirred in him, utterly detached from the misgivings in his mind. He picked up the phone.

“Here.”

“Tonight,” Eve snapped, her voice so clipped it was hard to read. She might have been crying.

“Um-”

“You don’t want me anymore?”

“Of course I do.”

“I know I scared you, Johnny. I know I’m going too fast. It’s just that I’ve waited so long-”

“I know,” he cut in, not at all sure what he knew. “Look, are you going to keep on with the Mallory stuff? All the painful things from the past?”

“No. I swear to God. No talking. Let’s go back to what we know. I need you inside me.”

Even if it was a lie, her words dulled his anxieties like Valium.

“We could go right now,” she whispered. “I’m ready now. You know how I get.”

Images bloomed like night flowers in his mind: Eve’s dark hair lying across her shoulder blades; the river of sweat running down her spine; her mouth as she growled in a way that was not quite animal and not quite human-

“Not now,” he whispered. “Tonight.”

“Tonight,” she said. “Don’t stand me up, Johnny.”

“I won’t.”

Rain lashed the walls and windows of the Eola in silver sheets turned pink by the streetlamps as Waters drove his Land Cruiser down Main Street toward the old hotel. At the corner of Main and Pearl, he turned right, and his breath stuck in his throat. Police and ambulance lights arced like antiaircraft tracers from the intersection of Pearl and Franklin streets, a block to the north. This was close to where Waters normally parked. Braking, he saw that an old Grand Am had smashed into a Mississippi Power amp; Light truck with its cherry picker extended. He considered cruising slowly past the scene and parking farther away than usual, but something made him stop. Perhaps it was the memory of Detective Tom Jackson recognizing his vehicle and stopping him that night. In any case, the police and rescue vehicles were blocking most of the intersection, and no one working the scene seemed to notice when he reversed the Land Cruiser back onto Main Street and continued toward the river.

Passing the bars near the Eola, he saw the silhouettes of several patrons through neon-lit rain. He turned left on South Wall, then made another left and parked in a law firm’s lot on South Pearl. He’d brought an umbrella with him, but it was almost useless. The rain blew at a forty-five-degree angle, soaking his coat and slacks. As he ran across Main Street, he used the umbrella to hide his face from any curious drinkers in the bars.

He walked through the hotel doors like a businessman late for an appointment, despite the hour. The bell chimed through the spacious lobby, and he heard the scrape of the security guard’s chair, but as usual no one challenged him. He ascended to the mezzanine and pressed the elevator button. Waiting, he fought the urge to look back over the mezzanine rail. If he did, he would be visible to the desk clerk working below and to his right. The ancient elevator always seemed to take forever. At the sound of groaning cables, he willed the car to be empty, as it had been on most nights he’d come.

It was.

He reached the door of the suite without seeing a soul or-he hoped-a soul seeing him. But as he turned the doorknob, he felt a disquieting premonition, like the one he’d had when he first touched the door at Bienville. Nerves, he thought. Suck it up. He shook his head and pushed open the door.

Tonight Eve wasn’t sprawled across the bed or hiding naked in the dark, as she had been on some nights, and for a moment he thought he had arrived first. Then he felt wind blowing through the suite. He looked across the bed at the door-sized windows and saw Eve silhouetted on the balcony, her unmistakable curves framed in the pink glow of the streetlights below. She was leaning on the rail with her back to him, naked, apparently oblivious to the rain that had stung his face only moments ago.

As he stared, she looked back over her shoulder, and her eyes glinted in the dark. The rain and the halos of the streetlights created the impression that the balcony was superfluous, that Eve was floating in space. He started to go to her, but she stopped him with an upraised hand.

“You lied to me,” she said in a voice devoid of emotion.

“What?”

“Lily didn’t leave town. She was home with you. I saw her leave the house this morning.”

Waters swallowed and tried to marshal his thoughts. This was Mallory to the life: paranoia, surveillance, confrontation. She would begin with cold fury, then escalate to the inevitable explosion. He felt himself tensing for violence.

“I know why you lied,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Lightning strobed, freezing her body in time, burning eerie images onto his retinas: her soaked hair hanging limp, rainwater spattering her breasts and abdomen, her skin almost blue from cold. Then a colossal peal of thunder shook the building, and she seemed to shudder in place. He saw confusion in her eyes, as though for a moment she had forgotten who and where she was.

“I’m not afraid,” he told her.

Eve blinked several times, then folded her arms across her breasts. “I’m cold,” she said, her teeth chattering.

Waters grabbed the comforter off the bed and went to her. He gathered the fabric around her shoulders and pulled her inside. His shoes made sucking sounds in the soaked carpet as he shut the windows.

Standing by the bed, he switched on a lamp. Dark circles shadowed Eve’s eyes, and her cheeks looked drawn. She might not have slept or eaten for days, yet thirty-six hours ago she had looked the picture of health.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She did not reply.

“I’m worried about you.”

Now she looked up at him. “Are you? What are we going to do, Johnny?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we just going to keep fucking like animals in the dark?”

He drew back, stunned by the bitterness in her voice.

“Every day you go back to sweet little Lily, but at night you come to me. Everything’s just fine for you, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie. You’d keep going like this forever, if I would. Do you think this is all I want? Do you?”

“What do you want me to do? You want me to leave my wife and daughter?”

She looked away from him and stared straight ahead. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes and tried to keep himself together. Cole was right: he had lost his perspective. He had lost his perspective and now Eve had expectations. Reasonable expectations, by any fair standard.

“You can’t do it, can you?” she said.

He wanted to tell her the truth, but he feared her reaction. He wanted to hug her, but she clearly did not want that. She was still shivering despite the comforter, and her teeth still chattered. There was a glass of red wine under the lamp on the end table. He picked it up and held it up to her mouth, but she ignored it. He drained it himself, thankful for the heat in his throat.

“Listen,” he said softly. “We should-”

“I want you to cut me.”

Now she was looking at him, her face almost empty of humanity.

“I can’t do that.”

“You’ve done it before.”

It was true. Once, at Mallory’s request, he had cut her arm during sex. He had done it in the hope that they could somehow uncover the source of the pain that she mutilated herself to alleviate. He used a knife, and the act had brought them closer than he thought human beings could get. But it did not have the desired result.

“I’m not going to cut you.”

She let the comforter fall and held out her arms. The surfaces of both inner forearms had been deeply scratched, by her fingernails, probably. She had bled, but the comforter had wiped most of it away.

“What’s a few more?” she asked. “You don’t know how badly I need it.”

“Why? Why do you need it?”

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him onto the bed. He tried to resist, but she covered his mouth with hers in an almost vicious kiss. She didn’t even try to remove his clothes. She pulled him on top of her, reached down, and freed him from his trousers, her fist closing around him like the hand of a demon. He cried out in pain.

Rolling him over with frantic movements, Eve placed him against her opening and tried to sit down. She wasn’t ready, but she did not intend to wait. She shut her eyes and settled hard upon him.

He cried out again, but Eve made no sound. She began to move with slow insistence that escalated to a blank-faced urgency and left Waters feeling he was not even part of the act. One concentrated minute was all it took, and she finished with facial contortions that looked as though she had lost control of her nerves. When she collapsed upon him, he thought surely she would surrender to sleep at last. But only a few seconds later, she wrapped her arms around his back and, using all her strength, rolled him over in the bed, so that he lay on top of her.

As he looked into her eyes, they went wide, as though a bolt of electricity had shot through her, and he saw something in them he had not seen before: fear.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Shut up,” she hissed, sliding her hands down his back and pushing him deeper. “You’re not done.”

“Eve-”

“Don’t call me that!”

She made claws of her hands and dug them into his pectoral muscles, then locked her heels behind his thighs. The conditioning of the past two weeks took over, and he began to move, his body charged with the energy stored during the twenty-four hours he’d gone without her. With every thrust she urged him on, her hands raking his back. The reciprocal rhythm of her hips drove him toward his peak, but he held himself in abeyance, unsure of what she needed from him.

“Scratch me, Johnny…please.”

“No.”

“I need you to cut me!”

He had never seen Eve this way. Beneath her carnality he had always sensed arrogance, a confidence that she could rule and possess him. Tonight uncertainty clouded her eyes. She was like Mallory fleeing her demons, using sex as an escape. But from what? And why did she want to be cut? Until tonight she had wanted only to be called Mallory. Now there was no mention of that.

“Please,” she begged. “Make me hurt.”

Waters slid his hands beneath her back, set his knees against the mattress, and heaved her up off the bed. Now he had all the leverage, and he yanked her to him or held her back as he chose, driving her mad with hesitations and sudden reversals. She fought only to hold herself against him.

“Please,” she rasped, her breath ragged. “Make me…make her go away.”

Her words registered only as encouragement, their specific meanings lost in the violence of their union. He drove harder, yet still she demanded more, her cries no longer a language but guttural syllables any mammal could understand. He let go his conscious mind and thrashed wildly, as a man pursued senses that his only hope of survival is to battle his way through an unyielding wall before him.

“Make it stop!” she screamed. “Make her stop!”

His heart thundered as it fought to feed his starving tissues, and for an instant his vision faded. Fearing he might faint, he let himself fall forward, pinning her to the mattress. Her fingernails dug into the flesh of his upper arms, and the sudden pain made him open his eyes.

Eve was staring at him as though she had no idea who he was, her mouth frozen in an O that he read as a symbol of a shattering climax. When she began to flail her arms, he used his last reserve of energy to magnify her sensation to the limit, thrashing inside her like a man possessed. Had he not been so lost within the act-or had his partner been someone else-he might have realized he was in one of those situations in which the woman later claims she tried to stop and the man refused. But the idea of Eve stopping sex in medias res was incomprehensible. Her screams of ecstasy were indistinguishable from those of agony. Yet this time, tears were streaming from her eyes.

Her movements became disjointed, as though she were having a seizure rather than an orgasm. In the moment that doubt truly entered Waters’s mind, her spastic movements drove him past the point of no return. All that remained of his conscious mind shot out across light-years of space and time, while the animal in him ejaculated with withering force. Eve faded, flashed, and then his mind went black.

He awoke facedown on the bed, shivering like a wet dog. At some point while he slept, the wind had driven the rain across the balcony and into the suite. The bed was drenched, and him with it. He lay half across Eve, his hips between her legs, his torso to the right of hers. He tried to pull off the wet covers, but the twisted sheet was pinned beneath her.

“Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”

Even before the silence stretched into eternity, he sensed something wrong with her skin. It felt only slightly warmer than the sopping bedclothes. He recoiled and threw himself onto the floor.

At first he could not bear to look at her, to confirm with his cerebral cortex what his medulla already knew. Kneeling beside the tall tester bed, he reached out and placed the tip of his forefinger beneath her jawbone. There was no pulse beneath the bluish skin, only a waxy resilience that had nothing in common with the rich pink tissue he had kissed a short while ago, soft skin animated by thrumming nerves and oxygenated blood.

In death, Eve finally looked her age. The breasts that had piqued Lily’s curiosity now lay flat on her chest like Baggies half-filled with water. Her face was stiller than a statue’s, for statues are sculpted to look alive, and Eve had lost all semblance of life. Her mouth hung open as though gasping for air, and around her eyes were small pinpricks of dark blood. Something ticked in Waters’s brain at this sight, something from a film or novel, and he remembered that such small hemorrhages were petechiae, telltale side effects of strangulation.

He looked at Eve’s neck.

The skin there was bluish red, bruised from pressure and abrasion. She had definitely been strangled. This realization led to another-I was alone with her-and nausea hit him in a sickening wave. He staggered into the bathroom and emptied the contents of his stomach into the commode, the spasms racking his body down to his cramping groin muscles.

“Jesus God,” he croaked, hugging the toilet.

He got to his feet, washed his face, and went back into the bedroom. A thousand irrational thoughts assailed him, but the cold center of his mind knew there was only one thing to do. Taking a wet rag from the bathroom, he methodically wiped down every surface in the suite that he might have touched. He didn’t look at the corpse on the bed. If he stopped to think about what he was doing, he might pick up the phone and call the police. With Lily and Annelise to think about, he could not risk that.

After wiping down the room, he searched for anything he might have left behind on previous visits. Socks, underwear, a scrap of paper. Finding nothing, he went back to the bathroom. There was something here, he knew. Something dangerous. His vomitus? No. The drain trap. He had showered here every night before returning home. There would be hair in the drain, hair that could be matched to that on his head with a hundred percent certainty. He crouched in the shower stall and examined the drain. It was held down tight with tiny Phillips screws. He had no screwdriver with him. Not even a pocketknife.

Cut me, Eve had begged.

What had she wanted him to use? He walked back into the bedroom and searched her purse. Sure enough, he found a small pocketknife inside. A Gerber. He took it into the bathroom, but its thin point made no headway with the Phillips screws. Digging into the purse again, he found a scrap of blue notepaper with his home phone number written on it. As he put the paper in his pocket, he saw a small flat case made of faux leather. Inside he found a mini tool kit, and one of the tools was a screwdriver. Not a Phillips head, but a standard one that would probably do the job. He went back into the shower stall and removed the drain trap, dug the hair and funk out of it, then flung the mess off the balcony onto the rain-slicked parking lot. As he screwed the drain back down, he felt his composure fragmenting. It was time to leave.

Holding the doorknob with a washcloth, he looked back at the suite one last time, not out of sentiment, but because he had left evidence here that he could not destroy. Inside the body on the bed. Inside Eve. It might be possible to destroy that evidence, he supposed, or at least corrupt it (an image of a maid’s cleaning cart came into his mind), but he was not up to that task. The best he could manage was hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outer doorknob.

Standing frozen in the hallway with his umbrella, he saw his journey to the first floor as fraught with peril. The hallway. The elevator. The mezzanine. The staircase. The lobby. The security guard. For a moment he considered going back into the suite and trying to climb down the outer balconies to the parking lot, but that was ridiculous. They were slick with rain, and even if he didn’t kill himself, anyone passing on the street below could easily see him climbing down.

Move! shouted a voice in his head. Do you want to lose your wife and daughter? Do you want the remainder of your sex life to happen in Parchman Prison?

He put out his right foot, halted, then began to walk briskly toward the elevators, his eyes watching the carpet. His mind was already two blocks away, at his car. See it, said the voice. All you have to do is get your body to the place where your mind is already. He opened his umbrella as soon as he reached the lobby, and used it to conceal his face from the security guard. When he hit the street, rain whipped him like a vengeful spirit, and thunder reverberated off the walls of the hotel, buffeting the air in his lungs. He clutched the umbrella close over his head and began to run.