GREG ILES
Sleep No More

This book is dedicated to my readers, who have allowed me to write something different each time out. We all like the familiar, but in the end I think we’re all the richer for going new places with new characters. You may not like every book as much as your favourite, but at least you – and I – won’t be bored. This novel is a wild one, so settle in and open your memory and imagination. (And for those who write in to ask, you may just see some familiar characters here and in the future, but probably where you least expect them.)

“The normal man is a fiction.”

– Carl Jung

“Cathy! Cathy!”

– HEATHCLIFF, Wuthering Heights

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books By Greg Iles

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Eve Sumner appeared on the first day of fall. Not the official first day—there was nothing official about Eve – but the first day the air turned cool, blowing through John Waters’s shirt as though it weren’t there. It was chilly enough for a jacket, but he didn’t want one because it had been so hot for so damn long, because the air tasted like metal and his blood was up, quickened by the change in temperature and the drop in pressure on his skin, like a change in altitude. His steps were lighter, the wind carrying him forward, and deep within his chest something stirred the way the bucks were stirring in the deep woods and the high leaves were pulling at their branches. Soon those bucks would be stalked through the oaks and shot, and those leaves would be burning in piles, but on that day all remained unresolved, poised in a great ballet of expectation, an indrawn breath. And borne on the first prescient breeze of exhalation came Eve Sumner.

She stood on the far sideline of the soccer field, too far away for Waters to really see her. He first saw her the way the other fathers did, a silhouette that caught his eye: symmetry and curves and a mane of dark hair that made the mothers on both sides of the soccer field irrationally angry. But he hadn’t time to notice more than that. He was coaching his daughter’s team.

Seven-year-old Annelise raced along the sea of grass with her eye on the ball, throwing herself between eight-year-old boys nearly twice her size. Waters trotted along behind the pack, encouraging the stragglers and reminding the precocious ones which direction to kick the ball. He ran lightly for his age and size – a year past forty, an inch over six feet – and he pivoted quickly enough to ensure soreness in the morning. But it was a soreness that he liked, that reminded him he was still alive and kicking. He felt pride following Annelise down the field; last year his daughter was a shy little girl, afraid to get close to the ball; this year, with her father’s coaching, she had found new confidence. He sensed that even now, so young, she was learning lessons that would serve her well in the future.

“Out of bounds!” he called. “Blue’s ball.”

As the opposing team put the ball inbounds, Waters felt the pressure of eyes like fingers on his skin. He was being watched, and not only by the kids and their parents. Glancing toward the opposite sideline, he looked directly into the eyes of the dark-haired woman. They were deep and as dark as her hair, serene and supremely focused. He quickly averted his own, but an indelible afterimage floated in his mind: dusky, knowing eyes that knew the souls of men.

The opposing coach was keeping time for the tied game, and Waters knew there was precious little left. Brandon Davis, his star eight-year-old, had the ball on his toe and was controlling it well, threading it through the mass of opponents. Waters sprinted to catch up. Annelise was close behind Brandon, trying to get into position to receive a pass as they neared the goal. Girls thought more about passing than boys; the boys just wanted to score. But Annelise did the right thing all the same, flanking out to the right as Brandon took a vicious shot at the net. The ball ricocheted off the goalie’s shins, right back to Brandon. He was about to kick again when he sensed Annelise to his right and scooped the ball into her path, marking himself as that rarest of boys, one who understands deferred gratification. Annelise was almost too surprised by this unselfishness to react, but at the last moment she kicked the ball past the goalie into the net.

A whoop went up from the near sideline, and Waters heard his wife’s voice leading the din. He knew he shouldn’t show favoritism, but he couldn’t help running forward and hugging Annelise to his chest.

“I got one, Daddy!” she cried, her eyes shining with pride and surprise. “I scored!”

“You sure did.”

“Brandon passed it to me!”

“He sure did.”

Sensing Brandon behind him, Waters reached back and grabbed the boy’s hand and lifted it skyward along with Annelise’s, showing everyone that it was a shared effort.

“Okay, de-fense!” he shouted.

His team raced back to get into position, but the opposing coach blew his whistle, ending the game with a flat, half-articulated note.

The parents of Waters’s team streamed onto the field, congratulating the children and their coach, talking happily among themselves. Waters’s wife, Lily, trundled forward with the ice chest containing the postgame treats: POWERade and Oreos. As she planted the Igloo on the ground and removed the lid, a small tornado whirled around her, snatching bottles and blue bags from her hands. Lily smiled up from the chaos, silently conveying her pride in Annelise as male hands slapped Waters’s back. Lily’s eyes were cornflower blue, her hair burnished gold and hanging to her shoulders. In moments like this, she looked as she had in high school, running cross-country and beating all comers. The warmth of real happiness welled in Waters at the center of this collage of flushed faces, grass stains, skinned knees, and little Jimmy O’Brien’s broken tooth, which had been lost during the second quarter and was now being passed around like an artifact of a historic battle.

“Hell of a season, John!” said Brandon Davis’s father. “Only one more game to go.”

“Today was a good day.”

“How about that last pass?”

“Brandon’s got good instincts.”

“You better believe it,” insisted Davis. “Kid’s got a hell of a future. Wait till AYA football starts.”

Waters wasn’t comfortable with this kind of talk. In truth, he didn’t much care if the kids won or lost. The point at this age was fun and teamwork, but it was a point a lot of parents missed.

“I need to get the ball,” he said by way of excusing himself.

He trotted toward the spot where the ball had fallen when the whistle blew. Parents from the opposing team nodded to him as they headed for their cars, and a warm sense of camaraderie filled him. This emerald island of chalked rectangles was where it was happening today in Natchez, a town of twenty thousand souls, steeped in history but a little at a loss about its future. In Waters’s youth, the neighborhoods surrounding these fields had housed blue-collar mill workers; now they were almost exclusively black. Twenty years ago, that would have made this area off limits, but today there were black kids on his soccer team, a mark of change so profound that only people who had lived through those times really understood its significance. Before he knew why, Waters panned his eyes around the field, sensing an emptiness like that he felt when he sighted a cardinal landing outside his office window and, looking closer at the smear of scarlet, saw only the empty space left after the quick beat of wings. He was looking for the dark-haired woman, but she was gone.

He picked up the ball and jogged back to his group, which stood waiting for concluding remarks before splitting up and heading for their various neighborhoods.

“Everybody played a great game,” he told them, his eyes on the kids as their parents cheered. “There’s only one more to go. I think we’re going to win it, but win or lose, I’m taking everybody to McDonald’s after for a Happy Meal and ice cream.”

“Yaaaaaaay!” screamed ten throats in unison.

“Now go home and get that homework done!”

“Boooooooooo!”

The parents laughed and shepherded their kids toward the SUVs, pickups, and cars parked along the sideline.

Annelise walked forward. “You blew it at the end, Daddy.”

“You don’t have that much homework.”

“No, but the third-graders have a lot.”

Waters squeezed her shoulders and stood, then took the Igloo from his wife and softly said, “Did we have homework in second grade?”

Lily leaned in close. “We didn’t have homework until sixth grade.”

“Yeah? Well, we did all right.”

He took Annelise’s hand and led her toward his muddy Land Cruiser. A newly divorced mother named Janie somebody fell in beside Lily and started to talk. Waters nodded but said nothing as Janie began a familiar litany of complaints about her ex. Annelise ran ahead, toward another family whose car was parked beside the Land Cruiser. Alone with his thoughts for the first time in hours, Waters took a deep breath of cool air and savored the betweenness of the season. Someone was grilling meat across the road, and the scent made him salivate.

Turning toward the cooking smell, he saw the dark-haired woman walking toward him. She was twenty feet away and to his right, moving with fluid grace, her eyes fixed on his face. He felt oddly on the spot until he realized she was headed back to the now-empty soccer field. He was about to ask her if she’d lost her keys when she tilted her head back and gave him a smile that nearly stopped him in his tracks.

Waters felt a wave of heat rush from his face to his toes. The smile withheld nothing: her lips spread wide, revealing perfect white teeth; her nostrils flared with feline excitement; and her eyes flashed fire. He wanted to keep looking, to stop and speak to her, but he knew better. It’s often said that looking is okay, but no wife really believes that. He nodded politely, then looked straight ahead and kept moving until he passed her. Yet his mind could not recover as quickly as his body. When Lily leaned toward Janie to say something, he glanced back over his shoulder.

The dark-haired woman was doing the same. Her smile was less broad now, but her eyes still teased him, and just before Waters looked away, her lips came together and formed a single word – unvocalized, but one he could not mistake for any other.

“Soon,” she said without sound. And John Waters’s heart stopped.

He was a mile from the soccer field before he really started to regain his composure. Annelise was telling a story about a scuffle between two boys at recess, and mercifully, Lily seemed engrossed.

“Hey, we won,” she said, touching her husband’s elbow. “What’s the matter?”

Waters’s mind spun in neutral, searching for a reasonable explanation for his trancelike state. “It’s the EPA investigation.”

Lily’s face tightened, and her curiosity died, as Waters had known it would. An independent petroleum geologist, Waters owned half of a company with more than thirty producing oil wells, but he now lived with a sword hanging over his head. Seventeen years of success had been thrown into jeopardy by a single well that might have leaked salt water into a Louisiana rice farmer’s fields. For two months, the EPA had been trying to determine the source of the leak. This unpleasant situation had been made potentially devastating by Waters’s business partner’s failure to keep their liability insurance up to date, and since the company was jointly owned, Waters would suffer equally if the EPA deemed the leak their fault. He could be wiped out.

“Don’t think about it,” Lily pleaded.

For once, Waters wasn’t. He wanted to speak of comforting trivialities, but none came to him. His composure had been shattered by a smile and a soundless word. At length, in the most casual voice he could muster, he said, “Who was that woman who looked at me when we were leaving?”

“I thought you were looking at her,” Lily said, proving yet again that nothing got by her.

“Come on, babe … she just looked familiar.”

“Eve Sumner.” A definite chill in the voice. “She’s a real estate agent.”

Now he remembered. Cole Smith, his partner, had mentioned Eve Sumner before. In a sexual context, he thought, but most of what Cole mentioned had a sexual context, or a sexual subtext.

“I think Cole’s mentioned her.”

“I’ll bet he has. Evie really gets around, from what I understand.”

Waters looked over at his wife, wondering at the change in her. A few years ago, she never made this sort of comment. Or maybe she had – maybe it was her tone that had changed. It held a bitterness that went along with the now-perpetual severity in her face. Four years ago, the smiling girlish looks that had lasted to thirty-five vanished almost overnight, and the bright eyes dulled to an almost sullen opacity. He knew the date by heart, though he didn’t like to think about the reason.

“How old is she?” he asked.

“How old did she look to you?”

Potential minefield. “Um … forty-two?”

Lily snorted. “More like thirty-two. She probably wants to sell our house out from under us. She does that all the time.”

“Our house isn’t for sale.”

“People like Eve Sumner think everything has a price.”

“She sounds like Cole.”

“I’m sure they have a lot in common.” Lily cut her eyes at him in a way that as much as said, I’m sure Cole has slept with her. Which was a problem for Waters, since his business partner was – nominally at least – a happily married father of three. But this was a problem he was accustomed to dealing with. Cole Smith had been cheating on his wife since the honeymoon ended, but he’d never let it interfere with his marriage. Cole’s chronic philandering was more of a problem for Waters, who not infrequently found himself in the position of having to cover for a friend and partner whose actions he deplored. On another day he might have given a token grunt of skepticism in response to Lily’s assumption, but his patience with his partner had worn thin of late.

He swung the Land Cruiser around a dawdling log truck on Highway 61 and tried to clear his mind. There was a low-grade buzz deep in his brain, a hum of preoccupation set off by Eve Sumner’s smile but which had nothing to do with Eve Sumner. The smile on her face had risen straight from Waters’s past; the word she’d silently spoken echoed in a dark chamber of his heart. Soon …

“Damn,” he said under his breath.

“What is it?” asked Lily.

He made a show of looking at his watch. “The Jackson Point well. Cole called and said it may come in about three in the morning. I’m probably going to have to log it tonight.” Logging a well was the task of the geologist, who read complex measurements transmitted by an instrument lowered to the bottom of a newly drilled well in order to determine whether there was oil present. “There’s some stuff I need to do at the office before I go out to the rig.”

Lily sighed. “Why don’t you swing by now and pick up your maps and briefcase? You can make your phone calls from home.”

Waters knew she had made this suggestion without much hope. Whenever he logged wells, he had a ritual of spending time alone. Most geologists did, and he was thankful for that today.

“I won’t be more than an hour,” he said, a twinge of guilt going through him. “I’ll drop you guys off and be home as quick as I can.”

“Daddy!” objected Annelise. “You have to help with my homework.”

Waters laughed. His daughter needed no help with homework; she just liked him sitting close by in the hour before bedtime. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

“I know what that means.”

“I promise,” he insisted.

Annelise brightened. Her father kept his promises.

Lily and Annelise waved as Waters pulled away from Linton Hill, the house that was not for sale, an antebellum home he’d bought five years ago with the proceeds from a well in Franklin County. Linton Hill wasn’t a palace like Dunleith or Melrose, but it had four thousand square feet with detached slave quarters that Waters used as a home office, and many small touches of architectural significance. Since they moved in, Lily had been leading a one-woman campaign to have the house placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and victory seemed close. Having grown up in a clapboard house less than a mile from Linton Hill, Waters usually felt pride when he looked at his home. But today, watching his rearview mirror, he barely saw the place. As soon as Lily led Annelise up the steps, his mind began to run where it had wanted to for the past ten minutes.

“I imagined it,” he murmured.

But the old pain was there. Dormant for two decades, it remained stubbornly alive, like a tumor that refused to metastasize or to be absorbed. Waters gave the Land Cruiser some gas and headed downtown, toward the north side, where live oaks towered overhead like the walls of a great tunnel. Most houses here were tall Victorian gingerbreads, but there were also plain clapboards and even shotgun shacks. Natchez was a lot like New Orleans on this side: half-million-dollar mansions stood yards away from crumbling row houses that wouldn’t bring thirty thousand.

Waters turned right, onto Linton Avenue, a shaded street of middle-aged affluent whites that terminated near the Little Theater, where Maple Street rose sharply toward the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. There he would break out of the warren of one-way streets and into the last real light of the day. Like biblical rain, the sunlight fell upon the just and unjust alike, and in this deceptively somnolent river town, the last rays always fell upon the tourists standing on the bluff, the drunks sipping whiskey at the Under-the-Hill Saloon, and upon the dead.

In 1822, the old town burial ground had been moved from the shadow of St. Mary’s Cathedral Church to a hundred acres of hilly ground on the high bluff north of town. Over the next century, this became one of the most beautiful and unique cemeteries in the South, and it was through its gates that John Waters finally pulled his Land Cruiser and slowed to a near idle. Some of the stones he passed looked new, others as though they’d been cut centuries before, and probably were. Remains from the old cemetery had been disinterred and transferred here, so tombstones dating to the 1700s were not uncommon. Waters parked the Land Cruiser on the crest of Jewish Hill, climbed out, and stared down four breathtaking miles of river.

In Natchez, the dead have long had a better view than the living. The view from Jewish Hill always stirred something deep within him. The river affected everyone who lived near it; he had heard uneducated roughnecks speak with halting eloquence of its mythic pull. Yet he saw the muddy river differently from most. The Mississippi was an ancient river, but it had not spent its life cutting its way into the continent like the Colorado. The Mississippi had built the very land that now tried in vain to hem it in. Two hundred and fifty million years ago this part of America – from the Gulf Coast to St. Louis – was an ocean called the Mississippi Embayment, but somewhere north of Memphis the nameless proto-Mississippi River was already dumping millions of tons of sediment into that ocean, creating a massive delta system. That process went inexorably on until the ocean was filled, and 35,000 feet of soil covered the bedrock. It was from the upper layers of those deposits that Waters took his family’s living, from the oil-bearing strata just a few thousand feet down. Tonight, thirty miles downriver, he would pull up core samples that would tell a tiny part of what had been happening here 60 million years ago. Compared with these notions of time, the vaunted “history” of his hometown – going back a respectable three hundred years in human terms – was as nothing.

Yet even in geological terms, Natchez was unique. The bluff that supported the antebellum city had not been built by the river but by the wind; aeolian deposition, it was called, or loess, according to the Germans. The city shared this rare phenomenon with parts of China and Austria, and drew scientists from around the world to study it. Sometimes, after saturating rains, whole sections of the bluff would slide like earthen avalanches to the river, and over the past few years the Army Corps of Engineers had fought a massive holding action to stabilize it. The citizens who lived along the kudzu-faced precipice clung tenaciously to their homes like bystanders to a war, human metaphors for the faith that had kept the town alive through good times and bad.

Waters turned away from the river and surveyed a gently rolling city of white obelisks, mausoleums, statuary, and gravestones you could spend a week exploring without beginning to fathom the stories beneath them. The surnames on the stones were still common in the town, some going back seven generations. Natchez was the oldest settlement on the Mississippi River, and while she had witnessed many changes, the names had remained constant. Standing in the midst of the monuments, each a touchstone of memory, Waters was suffused with hot awareness of the essentially incestuous nature of small towns, and of Natchez in particular.

As gooseflesh rose on his shoulders, he started down Jewish Hill toward the Protestant section of the cemetery, scanning the gravestones as he walked. He edged down a steep hill and through a line of gnarled oaks. Almost immediately his eyes settled on what he sought. Her stone was easy to spot. Black Alabama marble veined with grayish white, it rose three feet higher than the surrounding stones, its mirror-like face deeply graven with large roman letters that could have been there a thousand years.

MALLORY GRAY CANDLER

Miss Mississippi 1982

As Waters neared the stone, smaller letters came into clear relief.

Born, Natchez, Mississippi

February 5, 1960

Died, New Orleans, Louisiana

August 8, 1992

“The flame that burns twice as bright

burns half as long.”

He stopped and stood silent before the black slab. He visited the cemetery often enough, but he had never visited this grave. Nor had he attended the funeral. He was not wanted by the family, and he had no desire to go. He’d said his good-byes to Mallory Candler long before then, and the process had almost killed him. For this reason, the inscription surprised him. The quote was from Blade Runner, a film Mallory had seen with Waters. She had liked the line of dialogue so much that she’d written it down in her diary.

The family must have discovered it there after her death and decided it captured her spirit – which it did. That Mallory Candler had sought out provocative films like Blade Runner while her peers numbed out to Endless Love or imitated Flashdance spoke volumes about her, and it was one of those traits few had known. Mallory played the Southern belle so well that only Waters, so far as he knew, had gotten to know the complex woman beneath. He was almost certain her husband had not.

The year Mallory reigned as Miss Mississippi, she told Waters she sometimes felt like the beautiful android woman in Blade Runner – so well trained, practiced, and seemingly flawless that her own sense of reality fled her, leaving an automaton going through the motions of life, feeling nothing, wondering if even her memories were invented. A few duties of her office had actually lightened her heart – the hospitals, the camps for retarded kids, the real things – but ceremonies for the opening of factories and car dealerships had left her cold and depressed.

Waters knelt at the border of the grave and laid his right hand flat on the St. Augustine grass. Six feet beneath his palm lay a body with which he had coupled hundreds of times, sometimes gently, other times thrashing in the dark with desperate passion that would not be quenched. How could it lie cold and utterly still now? Waters was forty-one; Mallory would have been forty-two. Her body was forty-two, he realized, but the passage of time meant only decay to her now. Morbid thoughts, but how else could he think of her, here, under the blank and pitiless stare of this stone? Twenty years ago, they had made love in this cemetery. They chased each other through tunnels in the tall grass, trackless paths cut by an army of old black men with push mowers, then fell into each other’s arms in the bright sun and the buzz of grasshoppers, affirming life in the midst of death.

“Ten years gone,” he murmured. “Jesus.”

In the emotional trough left by this unexpected wave of grief, myriad images bubbled up from his subconscious. The first few made him shiver, for they were the old vivid ones, shot through with violence and blood. Waters usually steeled himself against these and pressed down all other remembrance. But today he did not resist. Because here, in the shadow of this stone, reality was absolute: Mallory Candler was gone. Here he could let the fearful memories go, the ones he’d always kept close to remind him of the danger. That she had twice tried to kill him and might do so again. Or worse, hurt his wife, as she had threatened to do.

In this silent place, less sanguinary memories rose into his mind. Now he could see Mallory as he had known her in the beginning. What he most recalled was her beauty. That and her life force, for the two were inextricably bound. The first thing you noticed was her hair: a glorious mane of mahogany, full of body, a little wild, and highlighted with a shining streak of copper from the crown of her head to the backs of her shoulders. Anyone who saw that streak thought it had been added by a stylist, but it had come in her genes, a God-given sign of the unpredictability in her nature. You couldn’t miss Mallory in a crowd. She could be surrounded by a hundred sorority girls in the Grove at Ole Miss, and the sun would pick out that flaming streak of hair, the cream skin, rose lips, and Nile-green eyes, and mark her like a spotlight picking the prima ballerina from a chorus. Tall without being awkward, voluptuous without being plump, proud without conveying arrogance, Mallory drew people to her with effortless but inexorable power. Waters often wondered how he had grown up in the same town with her and not noticed her sooner. But they had gone to different schools, and a population of twenty-five thousand (the town was larger then) made it just possible not to know a few people worth knowing. Mallory also possessed an attribute shared by few women of her generation: regal bearing. She moved with utter self-possession and assurance, as though she had been reared in a royal court, and this caused men and women to treat her with deference.

Thinking of her this way, Waters could nearly see her standing before him. He’d always thought the truest thing William Faulkner ever said wasn’t written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it’s not even past. Trust a Mississippian to understand that. Maybe every man was haunted by his first great love to some degree. For Marcel Proust, it had been a scent that acted as a time machine, bringing the past hurtling into the present. For Waters it was a smile and a word. Soon …

Staring at the gravestone, he thought its blackness looked somehow deeper, and then he realized the light was fading. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the kudzu strangling the trees across Cemetery Road. A gibbous moon was already visible high in the violet sky, and the sun would soon fall below the rim of the bluff. The cemetery gates were generally closed at 7:00 P.M., but the time wasn’t absolute. If you were still inside the walls at dusk, you could see the dilapidated car of the black woman responsible for closing the gates, the woman herself sitting patiently in her front seat or standing by a brick gatepost, dipping snuff and watching the odd car or truck roll past on Cemetery Road. Waters knew she would be waiting for him at the “first” gate, where the old Charity Hospital had once stood. Now only a concrete slab marked the spot, but before it burned, the hulking hospital with its tubular fire escapes had towered over the cemetery, prompting tasteless jokes about doctors sliding the corpses of the indigent down into the cemetery like garbage down a chute.

He sighed and looked back at the gravestone: Died, New Orleans, Louisiana. He had often wondered about Mallory’s death, whether the woman who had once claimed to despair of life, who had tried several times to kill herself, had fought death when it came for her. In his bones he knew she had. The New Orleans police had found skin under her fingernails. But the family had not been interested in giving him more details, and no one else in Natchez got them either. The Candlers were that kind of family: pathologically obsessed with appearances. Typical of them to think that having a daughter raped and murdered somehow reflected badly on them, or on Mallory herself, like medieval bourgeoisie believing physical deformity to be a mark of sin. Waters realized he was gritting his teeth. The thought of Mallory’s parents could still do that to him.

For the first time, his eye settled on a smaller gravestone to the right of Mallory’s. Not quite half as high, it appeared to be made of a cheap composite “stone material,” so it stunned Waters to see the name Benjamin Gray Candler engraved on its face. Ben Candler was Mallory’s father. More surprising still, the stone appeared to have been defaced with a heavy tool like a crowbar. He stepped that way to examine it but stopped before he reached it. The smell of stale urine seemed to permeate the air around that stone, as if a dog routinely marked its territory there each day. There’s justice after all, he thought. Mallory’s father occupied a special place of loathing in Waters’s mind, but today all Waters pictured when he looked at the stone was a self-important man more than half in love with his daughter, trailing her with an ever-present camera, recording every social event, no matter how small, for what he called posterity.

The grinding whine of a pulpwood truck carried to Waters from the road. He glanced at his watch. 6:15. He’d already stayed too long. His wife and daughter were waiting for him at home. Across town, Cole Smith was priming two big investors with bourbon and scotch, preparing to drive them down to the well to await what they hoped was a huge payday. And thirty miles south, on a sandbar of the Mississippi River, a tool pusher and a crew of roughnecks were guiding a diamond-tipped drill bit the last few hundred feet toward a buried formation Waters had mapped five months ago, every man jack of them earning his livelihood from Waters’s dream. A lot was in play tonight. Yet he could not bring himself to leave the grave.

Soon …

He and Mallory had used that word as a sort of code in college, after they’d become lovers, which was almost as soon as they met. They spent every available moment together, but in the social whirl of Ole Miss, “together” did not always mean together alone. Whenever they found themselves separated by others but still within eye contact – at parties, between classes, or in the library – one of them would mouth that word, soon, to reassure the other that it wouldn’t be long before they held each other again. Soon was a sacred promise in the idolatrous religion they had founded together, the rites of which were consummated in the darkness of his dorm room, her sorority house, or the Education Building parking lot, alongside the cars of others who had no more comfortable or private place to go.

Soon … To see their secret promise mouthed by a stranger – a beautiful one, to be sure, but still a stranger – had rattled Waters to the core. Kneeling in the fading light, he tried to convince himself that he’d misunderstood what Eve Sumner had said. After all, she hadn’t actually said anything; she’d only mouthed a word. And had she even done that? She had certainly smiled the most openly flirtatious smile Waters had received in years. But the word … was it really soon? Or something else? What else might Eve Sumner have said in that moment? Something mundane? Perhaps it hadn’t been a word at all. Now that he thought about it, the movement of her lips was a lot like a pucker. Could she have blown him a kiss? Maybe he’d been too thick to recognize the gesture for what it was.

Evie really gets around, Lily had said. Maybe a blown kiss was part of Eve Sumner’s come-on. Maybe a dozen guys in town had gotten the same smile, the same blown kiss. Waters suddenly felt sheepish, even stupid. That something so casual had sent him out to the cemetery in search of ghosts from his past … maybe the pressure of the EPA investigation was getting to him.

Yet he was not a man prone to misunderstandings. He trusted his eyes and his instincts. As he reflected on Eve’s actions, a long mournful note echoed across the cemetery. He ignored it, but the sound came again, as though a bugler were warming up for “Taps” at day’s end. All at once the sky went dark, and Waters realized the bugle call was a car horn. The woman at the gate was emptying the graveyard.

He got to his feet and wiped the seat of his pants, in his mind already walking back toward Jewish Hill. But he wasn’t walking. He could not leave Mallory’s grave without … doing something. With a hollow feeling in his chest, he turned toward the black stone.

“I’ve never come here before,” he said, his voice awkward in the silent dark. “And you know I don’t believe you can hear me. But … it shouldn’t have ended like this for you.” He raised a hand as if it could somehow help communicate the ineffable sorrow welling within him, but nothing could, and he let it fall. “You deserved better than this. That’s all. You deserved better.”

He felt he should continue, but his voice had failed him, so he turned away from the stone and marched up through the oaks toward Jewish Hill and his Land Cruiser, the horn blowing from the cemetery gate like a clarion call back to the present.

TWO

Waters stopped at his office to pick up his maps and briefcase on his way home from the cemetery, and he said nothing to Lily about his side trip when he arrived. He sat at the kitchen table with Annelise, studying the maps that he hoped described the underlying structure around the well he would log tonight. While he rechecked every step of his geology, Annelise did second-grade math problems across the table. Now and then she would laugh at his “serious face,” and he would laugh with her. The two shared an original turn of mind, and also a conspiratorial sense of humor that sometimes excluded Lily. Waters wondered if these similarities were attributable to genetics or socialization. Lily had been trained as an accountant, and her math skills were formidable, but Annelise’s mind seemed to run along its own quirky track, as her father’s did, and Lily herself often pointed this out.

While Waters and Annelise worked, Lily sat in the alcove where she paid the household bills, typing a letter to the Department of the Interior, yet another skirmish in her campaign to add Linton Hill to the National Register. Waters admired her tenacity, but he didn’t much care whether they got a brass plaque to mount beside the front door or not. He’d bought Linton Hill because he liked it, not as a badge of the quasi-feudal status that much of the moneyed class in Natchez seemed to cherish.

At 8:30 they went upstairs to put Annelise to bed. Waters walked back down first, but he waited for Lily at the foot of the steps, as was his custom. He had no illusions about what would happen next. She gave him a stiff hug – without eye contact – then headed back to the alcove to finish her letter.

He stood alone in the foyer as he had countless nights before, wondering what to do next. Most nights he would go out to the old slave quarters that was his home office and work at his computer, pressing down the frustration that had been building in him for more years than he wanted to think about. Frustration had been a profitable motivator for him. Using it, he had in his spare time developed geological mapping software that earned him seventy thousand dollars a year in royalties. This brought him a sense of accomplishment, but it did nothing to resolve his basic problem.

Tonight he did not feel like writing computer code. Nor did he want to telephone any investors, as he had promised his partner he would do. Seeing Eve Sumner that afternoon had deeply aroused him, even if he’d been mistaken about what she said. The energy humming in him now was almost impossible to contain, and he wanted to release it with his wife. Not the best motivation for marital sex, perhaps, but it was reality. Yet he knew there would be no release tonight. Not in any satisfactory way. There hadn’t been for the past four years. And suddenly – without emotional fanfare of any kind – Waters knew that he could no longer endure that situation. The wall of forbearance he had so painstakingly constructed was finally giving way.

He left the foyer and walked through the back door to the patio, but he did not go to the slave quarters. He stood in the cool of the night, looking at the old cistern pump and reflecting how he and Lily had come to this impasse. Looking back, the sequence of events seemed to have the weight of inevitability. Annelise had been born in 1995, after a normal pregnancy and delivery. The next year, they tried again, and Lily immediately got pregnant. Then, in her fourth month, she miscarried. It happened at a party, and the night at the hospital was a long and difficult one. The fetus had been male, and this hit Lily hard, as she’d been set on naming the child after her father, who was gravely ill at the time. Three months after the miscarriage, her father died. Depression set in with a melancholy vengeance, and Lily went on Zoloft. They continued to have occasional sex, but the passion had gone out of her. Waters told himself this was a side effect of the drug, and Lily’s doctor agreed. After two difficult years, she announced she was ready to try again. She got off the drug, began to exercise and eat well, and they started making love every night. Three weeks later, she was pregnant.

All seemed fine until a lab test revealed that Lily’s blood had developed antibodies to the fetus’s blood. Lily was Rh-negative, the baby Rh-positive, and because of the severity of their incompatibility, Lily’s blood would soon begin destroying the baby’s blood at a dangerously rapid rate. Carrying Annelise had sensitized Lily to Rh-positive blood, but it was in subsequent pregnancies that the disease blossomed to its destructive potential, growing worse each time. An injection of a drug called RhoGAM was supposed to prevent Rh disease in later pregnancies, but for some unknown reason, it had not.

Waters and Lily began commuting a hundred miles to University Hospital in Jackson to treat mother and fetus, with an exhausting round of amniocenteses and finally an intrauterine transfusion to get fresh blood into the struggling baby. This miraculous procedure worked, but it bought them only weeks. More transfusions would be required, possibly as many as five if the baby was to survive to term. The next time Lily climbed onto the table for an ultrasound exam, the doctor looked at the computer screen, listened to the baby’s heartbeat, then put down the ultrasound wand and met Waters’s eyes with somber significance. Waters’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked. “What’s the matter?”

The doctor took her upper arm and squeezed, then spoke in the most compassionate voice John Waters had ever heard from the mouth of a man. “Lily, you’re going to lose the baby.”

She went rigid on the examination table. The doctor looked stricken. He knew how much emotion she had invested in that child. Another pregnancy was medically out of the question.

“What are you talking about?” Lily asked. “How do you know?” Then her face drained of color. “You mean … he’s dead now? Now?” The doctor looked at Waters as though for help, but Waters had no idea what emergency procedures might exist. He did know they were in one of those situations for which physicians are not adequately trained in medical school.

“The fetal heartbeat is decelerating now,” the doctor said. “The baby is already in hydrops.”

“What’s that?” Lily asked in a shaky voice.

“Heart failure.”

She began to hyperventilate. Waters squeezed her hand, feeling a wild helplessness in his chest. He was more afraid for Lily than for the baby.

“Do something!” Lily shrieked at the stunned doctor. She turned to her husband. “Do something!”

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the doctor said in a soft voice that told Waters the man was relearning a terrible lesson about the limits of his profession.

Lily stared at the fuzzy image on the monitor, her eyes showing more white than color. “Don’t just sit there, damn you! Do something! Deliver him right now!”

“He can’t survive outside of you, Lily. His lungs aren’t developed. And he can’t survive inside either. I’m sorry.”

“Take-him-OUT!”

In the four years since that day, Waters had not allowed himself to think about what happened after that – not more than once or twice, anyway. Lily’s mother had been reading a magazine in the hall outside, and she burst in when Lily began to scream. The doctor did his best to explain what was happening, and Lily’s mother tried everything she knew to comfort her daughter. But in the ten minutes it took Waters’s unborn child’s heart to stop, his wife’s soul cracked at the core. The sight unmanned him, and it still could now, if he allowed the memory its full resonance. This was how he had survived the past four years without sexual intimacy: by never quite blocking out the horror of that day. His wife had been wounded as severely as a soldier shot through the chest, even if the wound didn’t show, and it was his duty to live with the consequences.

The ring of the telephone sounded faintly through the French doors. After about a minute, Waters heard Lily call his name. He went inside and picked up the den extension.

“Hello?”

“Goddamn, John Boy!”

Nobody but Cole Smith got away with calling Waters that, and Cole sounded like he already had a load of scotch in him.

“Where are you?” asked Waters.

“I’ve got Billy Guidraux and Mr. Hill Tauzin with me in my Lincoln Confidential. We’re ten miles south of Jackson Point. You think this land yacht can make it all the way to the rig?”

“It hasn’t rained for a few days. You shouldn’t have any trouble. If you do get stuck, you’ll be close enough for Dooley’s boys to drag you in.” Dooley’s boys were the crew working the bulldozers at the well location.

“That’s what I figured. When are you coming down?”

Waters didn’t answer immediately. Normally, he would wait until the tool pusher called and said they had reached total depth and were bringing the drill bit out of the hole before he drove out to the rig location. That way he didn’t have to spend much time doing things he didn’t like. On logging nights – the last few anyway – Cole usually talked a lot of crap while the investors stood around giving Waters nervous glances, wishing the only geologist in the bunch would give them some additional hope that their dollars had not been wasted on this deal. But tonight Waters didn’t want to sit in the silent house, waiting.

“I’m leaving now,” he told Cole.

“Son of a bitch!” Cole exulted. “The Rock Man is breaking precedent, boys. It’s a sign. You must have a special feeling about this one, son.”

Rock Man. Rock. Waters hated the nicknames, but many geologists got saddled with them, and there was nothing he could do about it when his partner was drunk. He recalled a time when Cole had kept his cards close to his vest, but Cole had held his liquor a lot better back then. Or perhaps he was just drinking more these days. For all the pressure the EPA investigation had put on Waters, it had bled pounds out of his partner.

“I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” he said in a clipped voice.

Before he could ring off, he heard coarse laughter fill the Continental, and then Cole’s voice dropped to half-volume.

“What you think, John? Can you tell me anything?”

“At this point you know as much as I do. It’s there or it’s not. And it’s—”

“It’s been there or not for two million years,” Cole finished wearily. “Shit, you’re no fun.” His voice suddenly returned to its normal pitch. “Loosen up, Rock. Get on down here and have a Glenmorangie with us.”

Waters clicked off, then gathered his maps, logs, and briefcase. He kissed Lily on the top of the head as she worked, but her only response was a preoccupied shrug.

He went out to the Land Cruiser and cranked it to life.

Waters was four miles from the location when the rig appeared out of the night like an alien ship that had landed in the dark beside the greatest river on the continent. The steel tower stood ninety feet tall, its giant struts dotted with blue-white lights. Below the derrick was the metal substructure, where shirtless men in hard hats worked with chains that could rip them in half in one careless second. The ground below the deck was a sea of mud and planking, with hydraulic hoses snaking everywhere and the doghouse – the driller’s portable office – standing nearby. Unearthly light bathed the whole location, and the bellow of pumps and generators rolled over the sandbar and the mile-wide river like Patton’s tanks approaching the Rhine.

Something leaped in Waters’s chest as he neared the tower. This was his forty-sixth well, but the old thrill had not faded with time. That drilling rig was a tangible symbol of his will. At one time there were seventy oil companies in Natchez. Now there were seven. That simple statistic described more heartache and broken dreams than you could tell in words; it summed up the decline of a town. Adversity was a way of life in the oil business, but the last eight years had been particularly harsh. Only the most tenacious operators had survived, and Waters was proud to be among them.

He turned onto a stretch of newly scraped earth, a road that had not existed ten days ago. If you had stood here then, all you would have heard was crickets and wind. All you’d have seen was moonlight reflecting off the river. Perhaps a long, low line of barges being pushed up- or downstream would send a white wake rolling softly against the shore, but in minutes it would pass, leaving the land as pristine as it had been before men walked the earth. Seven days ago, at Waters’s command, the bulldozers had come. And the men. Every animal for miles knew something was happening. The diesel engines running the colossal machines around the rig had fired up and not stopped, as crews worked round-the-clock to drive the bit down, down, down to the depth where John Waters was willing it.

Drilling a well represented different things to different people. Even for Waters, who had pored over countless maps and miles of logs, who had mapped the hidden sands, it meant different things. First was the science. There was oil seven thousand feet below this land, but there was no easy way to find out exactly where. Not even with the priceless technology available to Exxon or Oxy Petroleum. In the end, someone still had to punch a hole through numberless layers of earth, sand, shale, limestone, and lignite, down to the soft sands that sometimes trapped the migrating oil that sixty million years ago was the surface life of the planet. And knowing where to punch that hole … well, that was a life’s work.

In the 1940s and ’50s, it hadn’t been so hard. Oil was abundant in Adams County, and quite a few fellows with more balls than brains had simply put together some money, drilled in a spot they “had a feeling about,” and hit the jackpot. But those days were gone. Adams County now had more holes in it than a grandmother’s pincushion, and the big fields had all been found as surely as they were now playing out – or so went the conventional wisdom. Waters and a few others believed there were one or two significant fields left. Not big by Saudi standards, or even by offshore U.S. standards, but still containing enough reserves to make a Mississippi boy more money than he could ever spend in one lifetime. Enough to take care of one’s heirs and assigns into perpetuity, as the lawyers said. But those fields, if they existed, would not be easy to find. No rank wildcatter was going to park his F-150 to take a leak in a soybean field, suddenly yell, This here’s the spot! with near-religious zeal, and hit the big one. It would take a scientist like Waters, and that was one of the things that kept him going.

Another motivator was simpler but a little embarrassing to admit: the boyhood thrill of the treasure hunt. Because at some point the science ended and you went with your gut; you slapped an X on a paper map and you by God went out to dig up something that had been waiting for you since dinosaurs roamed the planet. Other guys were trying to find the same treasure, with the same tools, and some of those guys were all right and some were pirates as surely as the ones who had roamed the Spanish Main.

Waters’s Land Cruiser jounced over a couple of broken two-by-fours, and then he turned into the open area of the location. Parking some distance from the other vehicles, he got out with his briefcase and map tube and began walking toward the silver Lincoln parked beside the Schlumberger logging truck. The car’s interior light illuminated three figures: two in the front seat, one in back. Cole Smith sat behind the wheel. Once he spotted Waters, the Continental’s doors would burst open with an exhalation of beer and whiskey, and the circus would begin. As Waters walked, he breathed in the conflicting odors of river water, mud, kudzu, pipe dope, and diesel fuel. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant smell, but it fired the senses if you knew what it added up to.

Suddenly, the driver’s door of the Lincoln flew open, and the vehicle rose on its shocks as Cole Smith climbed out wearing khaki pants, a Polo button-down, and a Houston Astros baseball cap. Cole had been an athlete in college, but in the years since, he had ballooned up to 250 pounds. He carried the weight well; some women still thought him handsome. But when you studied his face, you saw his health fading fast. The alcohol had taken its toll, and there was a dark light in his eyes, a hunted look that had not been there five years ago. Once only infectious optimism had shone from those eyes, an irresistible force that persuaded levelheaded men to take risks they would never have dreamed of in the sober light of rational thought. But something – or a slow accretion of somethings – had changed that.

“Here’s the Rock Man, boys!” Cole cried, clapping a beefy hand on Waters’s shoulder. “Here’s the witch doctor!”

These must be the mullets, Waters thought, as the two visiting big shots followed Cole out of the Lincoln. As a rule, he never used derogatory slang for investors, but these two looked like they might deserve it. There had been a time when he and Cole allowed only good friends to buy into their wells, but the business had gotten too tough to be picky. These days, he relied on Cole to find the money to finance their wells, and Cole’s sources were too numerous – and sometimes too nebulous – to think about. The oil business attracted all kinds of investors, from dentists to mafiosi to billionaires. All shared a dream of easy money, and that was what separated them (and Cole Smith) from Waters. Still, Waters shook hands with them – two dark-haired men in their fifties with Cajun accents and squinting eyes – and committed their first names to memory, if only for the night.

“Everybody’s feeling good,” Cole said, his mouth fixed in a grin. “How do you feel, John Boy?”

Waters forced himself not to wince. “It’s a good play. That’s why we’re here.”

“What’s the upside?” asked one of the Cajuns – Billy.

“Well, as we outlined in the prospectus—”

“Oh, hell,” Cole cut in. “You know we always go conservative in those things. We’re logging this baby in a few hours, Rock. What’s the biggest it could go?”

This was the wrong kind of talk to have in front of investors, but Waters kept his poker face. In two hours they could all be looking at the log of a dry hole, and the anger and disappointment the investors felt would be directly proportional to the degree their hopes had been raised.

“If we come in high,” he said cautiously, referring to the geologic structure, “the reserves could be significant. This isn’t a close-in deal. We’re after something no one’s found before.”

“Damn right,” said Cole. “Going for big game tonight. We’re gunning for the bull elephant.”

He leaned into the Lincoln’s door and pulled a Styrofoam cup off the dash, took a slug from it.

“What’s the upside?” insisted Billy. “No shit. Cole says it could go five million barrels.”

Waters felt his stomach clench. He wanted to smack Cole in the mouth. Five million barrels was the absolute outside of the envelope, if everything drilled out exactly right. The odds of that happening were one in a hundred. “That’s probably a little generous,” he said, meeting Billy’s eye.

“Generous, my ass,” Cole said quickly. “Our Steel Creek field was three million, and John was predicting one-point-five, tops.” He poked Waters in the chest. “But Rock knew all along.”

“So you said,” growled Billy, his eyes on Waters.

“The statistics say one out of twenty-nine,” said Cole. “That’s the odds of hitting a well around here. John’s drilled forty-six prospects, and he’s hit seventeen wells. He’s the goddamn Mark McGwire of the oil business.”

“So you said.” Billy was measuring Waters like a boxer preparing for a fight. “Five million barrels is a hundred and fifty million bucks at thirty-dollar oil. We like the sound of that.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” Waters said, his eyes on Cole. “I need to talk to the engineer. I’ll see you guys in a bit.”

He walked up the steps of the Schlumberger truck, a massive blue vehicle packed to the walls with computers, CRTs, printers, and racked equipment. Schlumberger rotated engineers in and out of town pretty often – most of them Yankees – but the man at the console tonight had worked several of Waters’s wells.

“How’s it going, Pete?” Waters handed the engineer a surveyor’s plat showing the well location and name.

A bookish young man with John Lennon glasses looked up, smiled, and answered in a northern accent. “The tool is calibrated. Just waiting to hit total depth.”

“Cole been up here yet?”

The engineer rolled his eyes. “He’s talking a pretty big game. You feel good about this one?”

“It’s a solid play. But it’s definitely a wildcat. It could shale out.”

“God knows that’s right. Happens to the best of them.”

Waters grabbed a walkie-talkie off the desk and clipped it to his belt. “I’m going up to look at the rig. Holler if you need anything, or if Cole gets to be too much of a pain in the ass.”

Pete grinned. “I’ll do that.”

Waters stood by the river on a patch of gray sand, watching a string of barges plow upstream in the darkness. The spotlight of the pushboat played across the surface of the river like the eye of a military patrol boat, and for good reason. There were sandbars out there that could turn that ordered line of barges into a lethal group of runaways floating downriver with nothing to slow them down but bridge pilings or other vessels.

The spotlight swung past him, then back, and he raised his hand in greeting. The light hung there a minute, then moved on. Waters smiled. The man behind that light was working through the night, just as he was, and that gave him a feeling of kinship. The same kinship he felt with the men working the rig behind him. He had made a point of speaking to the driller and crew when he went up to the rig’s floor. Then he got a Coke from an ice chest on one of the workmen’s trucks. The driller said Cole had brought crawfish and smoked salmon, but Waters didn’t want to spend any more time with Billy and the other mullet than he had to. It was times like this – waiting out the last few hours when the chips could fall either way – that he sometimes questioned his choice of career. And that kind of thinking led to other questions, some better left unasked. But tonight the voice that asked those questions would not stay silent.

Waters had never planned to return to his hometown, much less enter the oil business. Nor had he planned to go to Ole Miss. He’d worked hard in high school, done well on his college boards, and received a full academic scholarship to the Colorado School of Mines, the most prestigious school of geology in the United States. But his father was dead, his mother had not remarried, and his brother was in the ninth grade. Henry Waters had not expected to die young, and so had not left enough insurance. Checks from his oil wells had been steady, but they wouldn’t last forever, and the price of oil had already begun to drop. With all this in mind, Waters turned down Colorado and went to Ole Miss.

While his old friends drank, gambled, and chased sorority girls, Waters studied. Summers, he flew to Alaska and worked the pipeline. That was the best pay he could find, and his family soon needed it. His father’s wells depleted rapidly, and the checks got steadily smaller. After the madness with Mallory peaked, he transferred to Colorado for his senior year. There he met Sara Valdes, the woman with whom he would spend the next few years of his life. Sara was a vulcanologist who pursued her work with a single-minded passion that carried her to some of the most isolated and beautiful spots in the world. Waters began dabbling in her specialty just to be near her, and soon they were traveling the world together, doing graduate research. He spent nearly three years scuba diving beneath volcanoes to study marine ecosystems that lived off the heat of magma, and camping on pumice slopes to study active craters. In Argentina, they’d stumbled upon a meteorite of unusual composition and structure. In Ecuador, he found the frozen remains of a small mammoth dating back fifty thousand years. It was probably the nostalgic haze of selective memory, but he could not remember once being bored during those years.

Then his mother fell ill. His brother was in college, and Waters saw no alternative but to go home and take care of her. Sara Valdes loved him deeply, but she was not about to move to Mississippi, where the last volcanic activity occurred two hundred million years before she was born. That move was the start of the life Waters now lived. He’d been back in Natchez less than a month when Cole Smith – his old roommate and now a lawyer – asked if he thought he could find some oil. Since he had to do something for money, Waters set about mapping the region with a vengeance. Three months later, he was sure he had a cod-lock cinch. Cole sold the prospect in two weeks, and they prepared to make their first million dollars.

What they made was a dry hole.

Waters learned a hard lesson from that first failure, but the next morning he went back to his maps. He studied substructure for four months almost without sleep. And this time, he swore to Cole, he had it. It took Cole five months to sell that second prospect – split between sixty investors. Cole and Waters could barely afford to keep small shares for themselves. But at 4:00 A.M. in the middle of dense Franklin County woods, they hit twenty-nine feet of pay sand – a likely four million barrels of reserves – and one of the last big fields discovered in the area. After that, they couldn’t put prospects together fast enough. Waters kept finding oil, and the money rolled in like a green tide. Even after the oil industry crashed in 1986, Cole somehow continued to sell deals, and Waters kept finding oil.

It was around this time that Lily Anderson graduated from SMU’s Cox School of Business and returned to Natchez. A CPA, she planned to stay in town only long enough to help her father straighten out some tax troubles, but after she and Waters started seeing each other, she decided to stay a bit longer. Smart, quick-witted, and attractive, Lily kept Waters from slipping into the mild depressions he sometimes felt at a life that, despite the money, seemed significantly smaller than the one he’d left behind. But there were other compensations. His mother’s health improved, and his brother graduated cum laude from LSU. When Lily expressed restlessness that their relationship seemed stalled, Waters took a hard look at his life – the old dreams and the new realities – and decided that he had not been born to roam the world in search of scientific adventure. He had built something in Natchez, a thriving company his father would have been proud of, and that – he told himself – was good enough. It was time to be fair to Lily.

“What the hell are you doing down here by yourself in the mud?”

Cole’s voice was slurred from too much scotch. Waters heard him push through some weeds, then stop to keep his shoes out of the gumbo mud that bordered the river here. There’d been a time when Cole wore steel-toed Red Wings out to the locations, just like Waters. Now he wore the same Guccis or Cole Haans he sported at the office. Waters turned to face him.

“Have you lost your mind?”

Cole’s eyes looked cloudy. “What you mean?”

“You told them five million barrels?”

“You said yourself it could go that high.”

Waters’s frustration boiled over. “That’s you and me! In the office! That’s blue-sky dreaming. The outside of the goddamn envelope.”

“We’ve hit it before.” Cole’s eyes narrowed with resentment. “Look, I handle the investors. You have to trust me about what makes them tick. It’s the romance of it, John. They’re just like women that way.”

“You’ve obviously forgotten how women get when they’re disappointed. You’d better start trimming their expectations a little.”

Worry wrinkled Cole’s fleshy face. “You don’t think we’re gonna hit?”

“You said it yourself one out of twenty-nine.”

“That’s factoring in all the assholes who don’t know what they’re doing. You’re one out of three, John.”

Waters felt a hot rush of self-consciousness at this admission of the degree to which everyone’s fortunes depended on him. “We can’t ever rely on that.”

“But I always have.” Cole smiled crookedly. “And you’ve never let me down, partner.”

“We’ve hit the last two we drilled. That ought to tell you adversity can’t be far away.”

Cole blinked like a fighter realizing that he has underestimated his opponent. A little clarity had burned through the scotch at last. Even in his inebriated state, Cole knew that fate was always out there waiting to hand you an ass-whipping.

“Who are those guys, anyway?” asked Waters. “The mullets.”

“South Louisiana guys, I told you. I’ve hunted with them a few times. They got some land leased south of town this season. Paid thirty an acre.

“You don’t hunt anymore.”

“Not without a damn good reason.” Cole grinned suddenly, his old bravado back in a flash. “You know deer season’s my favorite time of year. While all the husbands are in the woods chasing the elusive whitetail, I’m back in town chasing the married hot tail.”

Waters had heard this too many times to laugh. “Look, I know you want me up there. But I’d just as soon not spend much time with those guys. Okay?”

“Don’t be an asshole. Investors like having the witch doctor around while they’re waiting to log. Tones up the party. Unless it’s a dry hole. Then nobody will want to see your ass.” Cole grinned again. “Least of all me.”

Waters started to walk up out of the mud, but more words came almost before he realized he was speaking.

“What do you know about Eve Sumner?”

Cole looked nonplussed. “The real estate chick?”

“Yeah.”

“What about her? I thought you didn’t want to know about any of my adventures.”

“You’ve slept with her?”

“What do you think? She ain’t no prude, and she looks like two million bucks. Besides, she likes married guys. Fewer complications.”

“Is she—” Waters dropped the thought. “Never mind.”

“What? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about hooking up with her. Not Ward Cleaver himself.”

“No. She just came on to me a little, and I was curious.”

“Yeah? Watch out, then. She’s a hell of a lay, but too twisted for me. She’s a sly one. Always looking for advantage. Reminds me a little of me. I like my women a little more … pliable.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Hey, though, Evie does this thing with her—”

Waters stopped him with an upraised hand. “Don’t tell me, okay? I don’t need to know.”

Cole snickered. “You don’t know if you need to know or not until I tell you what she does.”

“I think I can live without that knowledge.”

“Okay, fine. Now come on up here and hang out with the great unwashed, okay?”

“I will, if you lay off the scotch. I’m looking for two million barrels, but this baby could shale out in a heartbeat.”

The levity that ruminating over sex with Eve Sumner had brought Cole vanished from his face. He stepped out of the grass and into the mud, his Guccis sinking ankle deep as he marched to within a foot of Waters.

“Listen to me, partner,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more negative waves, okay? Especially not around the mullets.”

Negative waves? “Hey, I’m just telling it like it is.”

Cole laid a heavy hand on Waters’s shoulder and squeezed. “That kind of honesty’s for the classroom and the confessional. This is sales, Rock. You’re not so far up the ivory tower that you’ve forgotten that.”

“Cole, what the hell is going on? Something feels wrong about this.”

The big man smiled a beatific smile. “Nothing’s wrong, John Boy. Nothing a few million barrels of crude won’t fix.” He leaned in as close as a lover and spoke with quiet earnestness, his breath a fog of scotch. “We need this one, partner. I need it.”

Waters shook his shoulder free. “You know there’s no way to—”

Cole waved him off and walked up out of the mud. “Don’t be long. We’re gonna be celebrating in a couple of hours.”

Waters turned back to the dark river, his gut hollow with foreboding, his mind roiling with images of two women, neither of whom was his wife.

Claustrophobic. That’s how it felt in the Schlumberger truck, where Waters sat in the glow of a CRT with Cole and the money men and the engineer crowded around him. The driller stood on the metal steps in the door, some roughnecks lined up behind him. Everyone wanted to know whether the work they had done was for a reason or not, and interest in the outcome – and the risk riding on it – increased with proximity to John Waters.

He watched the paper log scroll out of the printer like a cardiologist reading an EKG. The logging tool had been lowered down the bore hole to total depth and was now being slowly pulled up, electrically reading the properties of the fluids in the geologic formations around it as it rose. Waters’s predictions were being proved or negated with every foot of rise, and soon he would know whether the potentially oil-bearing sand was where he’d predicted or not, and if so, whether or not it held oil.

Cole’s face looked red and swollen, his eyes almost bulging, and Waters sensed that his partner’s blood pressure was dangerously high. The tension slowly wound itself to an almost unbearable pitch, but Waters shut it out: the dripping sweat, the grunts and curses, white knuckles, taut faces. He was waiting for a moment none of the others had known and never would. There was a point when you didn’t know what you needed to know and another when you did, the sliver of time between those two states not quantifiable, during which the human brain, trained by evolution to search for patterns and by rigorous education to interpret them, read the data as voraciously as any Neanderthal had searched the savannah for game. The slightest tick of the needle could trigger your instinct, and even before the actual data emerged from the machine the knowledge was there in your medulla, as sweet as the moment you plunged into a woman or as terrible as the ache of metastatic cancer in your belly. Fate’s hand was revealed, and it was all over but the bullshittin’ and spittin’, as Waters’s father had so often put it.

“I missed it,” Waters said in a flat voice.

“What?” someone whispered.

“Shaled out.” Waters clenched his jaw and took the hit, accepting his failure as the price of courage. “It happens.”

“What the fuck?” muttered Billy, the sullen-faced Cajun. “What happens? You sayin’ there’s no oil?”

Waters expected Cole to reply, but he heard nothing. He took his gaze away from the log tape long enough to see that the redness in his partner’s face had vanished. Cole was as pale as a fish’s belly now, his chin quivering.

“What the fuck, Smith?” bellowed Billy. Cole wasn’t “Cole” anymore. The Cajun glared at Waters. “What about show? Gotta be some goddamn show, right?”

Waters shook his head. “Show” was the presence of oil in a sand stratum, but usually not enough to justify “running pipe,” or completing the well to the point of production. After wells were logged, debates frequently arose over whether pipe should be set or not. Some people wanted to set pipe on marginal wells to be able to boast that they had made a well. Waters was thankful there would be none of that.

“This ain’t right,” said the other Cajun, silent up till now.

Waters focused on the log. This ain’t right? What the hell was that supposed to mean? This was the way it worked. Every prospective well was an educated guess, nothing more. Had Cole not made that clear to them? Was this the first well they’d ever invested in?

Cole gave a little shudder that only Waters noticed. Then he straightened up with his old bravado and said, “Fate hammered our ass, boys. Let’s give the man some room to do his paperwork.”

“Hammered … my ass,” said Billy. “I got money tied up in this well!”

Waters thought he heard the Schlumberger engineer snort. “You got something to say, bookworm?” snarled the Cajun.

The engineer looked like he did, but he was working for Waters and Cole and would not speak without their leave.

Waters expected Cole to manhandle the whining mullets right out of the truck, but for some reason, Cole didn’t look up to the task. Waters hesitated a moment, then dropped the log and stood up. At six foot one, he rose above both investors, and in the closeness of the truck, he stood well into their space.

“We gave it our best shot,” he said quietly. “But we missed it. I’ll lose more money today than either of you, and—”

“That’s shit,” said Billy. “You guys take a free ride on our money, and keep the override too.”

“I don’t get carried,” Waters said, his palms tingling with potential violence. “I keep the major interest in every well. If it’s a duster, I take it right in the wallet. So if you guys don’t want to do anything but whine about what you lost, your partner needs to un-ass that chair and you go back to the car and drown your sorrows in scotch.”

Billy looked like he wanted to knife Waters in the gut. Cole was staring at his partner as if he’d just watched a transformation of supernatural proportions. Rather than retaliate against Waters, Billy grabbed Cole’s arm and growled, “This ain’t over, Smith. Bet your ass on that. Now get out there and drive us back to town!”

Billy stomped down the steps of the truck, followed by his stone-faced companion, but Cole stayed behind.

“Been a long time since I seen you do something like that, Rock,” he said. “I enjoyed it, but … Well, no use talking now.”

Waters looked curiously at his old friend, but there was no time to delve into the morass of Cole’s private life. He held out his hand, and Cole shook it with the iron grip he’d always had.

“We’ll hit the next one,” Waters said with confidence. “That’s how it always goes, isn’t it?”

Cole tried to smile, but the effect was more like a grimace. And though he hadn’t spoken, Waters was almost sure he’d heard a thought passing through Cole’s mind: I hope there is a next one …

“I gotta drive those assholes back,” Cole said softly. “What a ride that’ll be.”

“You’ve handled worse.”

Cole seemed to weigh this idea in his mind. Then he laughed darkly, shook hands with the engineer, and climbed down the steps into the night. Waters picked up the log and reread the tale of his failure.

“Those guys really bugged me,” said the engineer, speaking at last.

“Me too, Pete.” Waters sensed that the Schlumberger man wanted to say more. He looked up and waited.

“I think Cole was scared when he left,” Pete said, sounding genuinely concerned.

“Fear is an emotion Cole Smith never had to deal with,” Waters said with a forced smile.

Pete looked relieved.

But as Waters looked back at the log, he thought, I think he was scared too. After a few minutes, he got up and went to the door, then looked back and gave his final order.

“Rig down.”

THREE

By the time Waters saw Eve Sumner again, he had nearly convinced himself that the strangeness of their initial encounter had been a distortion of his imagination. Their second meeting was as unexpected as the first, the occasion a party for a duke and duchess of the Mardi Gras krewe to which Waters and Lily belonged. Like New Orleans, Natchez had celebrated Fat Tuesday in the nineteenth century, and the tradition had been revived in the second half of the twentieth. Mardi Gras parties were not of a scale comparable to those of Natchez’s greatest tradition, the Spring Pilgrimage, but they compensated for this by being less staid and generally more fun. Waters and Lily attended only two or three a year, and this accounted for Waters not knowing Eve Sumner was a member.

The party was held at Dunleith, the premier mansion of the city. If any single building personified the antebellum South as it existed in the minds of Yankees, Dunleith did. Standing majestically on forty landscaped acres and flanked by outbuildings styled after Gothic castles, this colossal Greek Revival mansion took away the breath of travelers who’d circled the globe to study architecture. At night its massive white columns were lit by fluorescent beams, and as Waters and Lily pulled up the private driveway in Lily’s Acura, he saw a line of cars awaiting valets at the broad front steps.

“I hear Mike’s done a fantastic job of restoration,” Lily said, referring to Dunleith’s new owner, a co-owner in Waters’s largest oil field. “He’s adding on to the B and B in back. I can’t wait to see it.”

Waters nodded but said nothing. The days following a dry hole were always long ones, filled with useless paperwork, regretful phone calls to investors, and consoling visits from colleagues. This time he felt more subdued than usual, but his partner had become almost manic in his desire to put together a new deal. That morning, Cole had pressed Waters to show him whatever prospects he was working on, claiming he was in the mood to sell some interest. “Can’t let people think we’re down,” he said in his promoter’s voice, but his eyes held something other than enthusiasm.

A valet knocked lightly on the Acura’s window. Waters opened his door, got out, and went around for Lily. She wore a knee-length black dress that flattered her figure, but she carried a glittering gold handbag he had always thought gaudy. He had mentioned it once, but she kept carrying the bag, so he dropped the issue. He didn’t know much about fashion, only what he liked.

“There’s … what’s his name?” said Lily. “That actor who bought Devereux.”

Waters glanced up at a gray-haired man on the front gallery. The man looked familiar, but Waters couldn’t place him. Natchez always collected a few celebrities. They arrived and departed in approximate five-year cycles, it seemed to Waters, and he never paid much attention. “I don’t remember,” he said. As he turned away, he saw a form-fitting red cocktail dress and a gleaming mane of dark hair float through the massive front door of the mansion. A spark of recognition went through him, but when he tried to focus, all he saw clearly was a well-turned ankle as it vanished through the door. Still, he was almost sure he had just seen Eve Sumner.

When Lily paused on the gallery to speak to the wife of a local physician, Waters was surprised by his impatience to enter the house. When she finally broke away, and they passed into the wide central hallway, he saw no sign of the woman in the red dress.

Tonight’s party was larger than most Mardi Gras court affairs. About forty couples milled through the rooms on the ground floor, with more in the large courtyard in back. Two bars had been set up on the rear gallery, and a long wine table bookended by six-liter imperials of Silver Oak waited at the back of the courtyard. A black Dixieland band played exuberant jazz a few yards from the wine table, their brass instruments shining under the gaslights. Waters recognized every guest he saw. Many he had known since he was a boy, although quite a few new people had moved to town in the past few years, despite its flagging economy.

He left Lily engrossed in conversation with a tennis friend and got himself a Bombay Sapphire and tonic. He and Lily had an understanding about parties: they mingled separately, but every ten or fifteen minutes they would contrive to bump into each other, in case one was ready to make a quick exit. Waters was usually the first to make this request.

Tonight he spoke to everyone who greeted him, and he stopped to discuss the Jackson Point well with a couple of local oilmen. But though he eventually moved through every room of the house, he saw no sign of the tight red dress. Seeing Lily trapped with a talkative garden club matron, he delivered her a Chardonnay to ease the pain. He was making his way back to the bar to refresh his gin and tonic when his eyes swept up to the rear gallery and froze.

Eve Sumner stood twenty feet away, looking down at him over a man’s shoulder, her eyes burning with hypnotic intensity. She must be tall, he thought, or else wearing very high heels for her face to be visible over her companion’s shoulder. The man was talking animatedly to her, and Waters wondered if the speaker thought those burning eyes were locked on him.

“John? Is this the line?”

Startled, Waters looked around and realized he was blocking access to the bar. “Sorry, Andrew.” He shook hands with a local attorney. “Maybe I don’t need another drink after all.”

“Oh, yes you do. I heard about Jackson Point. Drown your sorrows, buddy. Go for it.”

When Waters turned back to the gallery, Eve Sumner was gone. He looked to his left, toward the rear steps, but she was not among the guests there. He glanced to his right, at the northeast corner of the house, but saw only shadows on that part of the gallery. He was about to look away when Eve Sumner stepped around the shadowy corner, raised her drink in acknowledgment, then receded into the shadows like a fading mirage. Waters stood mute, a metallic humming inside him, as though someone had reached into his chest and plucked wires he had not even known were there.

“What can I get you?” asked a white-jacketed bartender. “Another Bombay Sapphire?”

“Yeah,” Waters managed to get out. “Hit it hard.”

“You got it.”

Eve had known he was looking for her. Not only that. It was as if she had known the precise moment he would look up at the corner that concealed her. She could have been peeking around it, of course – spying on him – but that would have looked odd to anyone standing nearby. Yet one moment after he’d looked that way, she’d stepped from behind the wall and saluted the precise spot he occupied.

He took a bitter pull from his drink and glanced around for his wife. Lily wasn’t the paranoid type, despite their troubles in the bedroom, but she did tend to notice the kind of eye contact Eve Sumner had just given him.

This time she hadn’t. Before he could go looking for her, Lily appeared at the top of the courtyard steps, coming up from the rear grounds with the manager of Dunleith’s bed and breakfast. She’d obviously been taking a tour of the new construction. A dozen women at the party would have liked to see it; trust Lily to simply walk up and ask the manager for a private tour. She caught her husband’s eye and silently communicated that she was ready to leave. Though separated by only fifteen yards, Waters knew it would take her ten minutes to cross the space between, as she would be stopped by at least three people on her way. He sipped his gin and looked up at the crowded gallery.

The liquor had reached the collective bloodstream of the party. The Dixieland band launched into a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and several couples began a chain dance. Most of the women wore sequined dresses and glittering masks that reflected the lamplight in varicolored flashes, and their voices rose and echoed across the courtyard in a babel of excitement. The men spoke less but laughed more, and tales of hunting deer in nearby forests mixed with quieter comments about various female guests. Waters felt out of place at these times. He hunted a rarer thing than animals, inanimate but maddeningly elusive. Sometimes he hunted in libraries rather than the field, but that didn’t lessen the thrill of the chase. With three drinks in him, though, he felt the old wistful dream of getting back to Alaska or New Guinea, choppering over glaciers and rappelling into volcanoes. With this dream came a memory of Sara Valdes, but suddenly her guileless face morphed into the seductive gaze of Eve Sumner, and a wave of heat warmed his skin. Then Eve’s face wavered and vanished, leaving the archetypal visage of Mallory Candler. Mallory had been gone ten years, but not one person at this party would ever forget her—

“Stop,” he said aloud. “Jesus.”

He set his drink on a table and rubbed his eyes. He felt foolish for letting Eve get to him this way. What was so strange about her behavior, anyway? Both Lily and Cole had told him she was sexually adventurous, and for some reason, she had picked him as her next conquest. Anything beyond that was his imagination. She likes married guys, Cole had said. Fewer complications …

“John? Hey, it’s been a while.”

Waters turned to see a man of his own age and height standing beside him, a wineglass in hand. Penn Cage was an accomplished prosecutor who had turned to writing fiction and then given up the law when he hit best-seller status. Penn and Waters had gone to different high schools (Penn’s father was a doctor, so he had attended preppy St. Stephens, like Cole and Lily and Mallory), but Penn had never shown any of the arrogance that other St. Stephens students had towards kids from the public school. Penn had been in the same Cub Scout pack as Waters and Cole, but only Penn and Waters had gone all the way to Eagle Scout before leaving for Ole Miss. They hadn’t seen each other much since Penn moved back to Natchez from Houston, where he’d made his legal reputation, but they shared the bond of hometown boys who had succeeded beyond their parents’ dreams, and they felt easy around each other.

“It has been a while,” Waters said. “I’ve been working on a well.”

“I’m working on a book,” Penn told him. “Guess we both needed a break tonight.”

Waters chuckled. “I already got my break. Dry hole. Two nights ago. Seems like everybody knows about it.”

“Not me. I’m a hermit.” Penn smiled, but his voice dropped. “I did hear about your EPA problem, though. Are you guys going to come out all right on that?”

“I don’t know. When the EPA tells us whose well is leaking salt water, we’ll know if we’re still in business or not.”

“The cleanup costs could put you under?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Waters thought of the unpaid liability insurance. “But hey, I started with nothing. I can make it back again if I have to.”

Penn laid a hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes I think we wish for some catastrophe, so we could fight that old battle again. Prove ourselves again.”

“Who would we be proving ourselves to?”

“Ourselves, of course.” Penn smiled again, and Waters laughed in spite of the anxiety that the author’s mention of the EPA had conjured. Penn inclined his head at someone on the gallery. Two men leaning on the wrought-iron rail parted, and Waters saw Penn’s girlfriend, Caitlin Masters, looking down at them. She was lean and sleek, with jet-black hair and a look of perpetual amusement in her eyes. Ten years younger than Waters and Cage, she’d come down from Boston to knock the local newspaper into shape, and because her father owned the chain, a lot of Natchezians had groused about nepotism. But before long, nearly everyone admitted that the quality of reporting in the Examiner had doubled.

“Caitlin seems like a great girl,” Waters observed.

“She is.”

While Penn watched Caitlin tell a story to two rapt lawyers on the gallery, Waters studied his old scouting buddy. Penn had become famous for writing legal thrillers, but he’d also written one “real novel” called The Quiet Game. Set in Natchez, the book’s cast of characters was drawn from the people Waters had grown up with, and the hidden relationships that surfaced in that book had left him in a haze of recollection for a week. Livy Marston – the femme fatale of The Quiet Game – had been inspired by Lynne Merrill, one of the two great beauties of her generation (the other was Mallory Candler), and Penn had clearly felt haunted by Lynne the way he himself was haunted by Mallory. Had Penn had an experience similar to his own at the soccer field? he wondered. Had The Quiet Game been an exorcism of sorts?

“Where’s Lynne Merrill these days?” he asked.

The smile froze on Penn’s face, but he recovered quickly and tried to play off his surprise. “In New Orleans for a while, I think.”

After an awkward moment, Waters said, “I’m sorry I said that. I was … trying to figure something out.”

The author looked intrigued. “Something besides whether Lynne was the basis for Livy Marston in my book?”

“I knew that from the moment I saw her on the page. No, I wanted to know if you ever get over something like that. An affair like that. A—”

“A woman like that?” Penn finished. He looked deep into Waters’s eyes, his own glinting with the power of his perception. It was a bluntly penetrative act, and Waters felt oddly violated by it. “My answer is yes,” Cage said slowly. “But somehow I don’t think you’d answer that question the same way tonight.”

When Waters said nothing, Penn added, “It’s not a passive thing, you know? You have to work it out of you. Or something has to. Someone. If you’re lucky, you meet a woman who finally obliterates all trace of the one who – who came before. Or knocks the memory down to a tolerable level, anyway.”

“Penn!” Caitlin called from the gallery. “I need to get over to the paper. Get me a gimlet for the road.”

At that moment, Lily touched Waters’s shoulder and said, “Go take care of that girl, Penn Cage. I need my husband.”

Penn smiled and walked over to the steps, but as he ascended them, he glanced back over his shoulder, and Waters saw deep interest in his eyes.

“Let’s go,” Lily said quietly. “I’d like to just slip around the side of the house, but we need to tell Mike we enjoyed ourselves.”

Waters followed her up the steps and into the main hall. Conversation indoors had grown to a din, and most faces were flushed from alcohol. Lily walked quickly to discourage buttonholing, but she kept an eye out for their host as she picked a course through the crowd. As they neared the front door, she caught sight of him, but there were too many people between them to make progress. Mike helplessly turned up his hands, then blew Lily a kiss and waved good-bye. Waters nodded thankfully and started toward the door with Lily on his heels. He had his hand on the knob when an old woman cried, “Lily Waters, it’s been a coon’s age! You come here and talk to me this instant!”

Lily reluctantly broke away and walked to a lushly upholstered chair to pay her respects to a grande dame of the Pilgrimage Garden Club.

As Waters stood in the crowded hall, a cool hand closed around his wrist, and something feather-soft brushed the side of his face. Before he could react, a sultry voice said, “You didn’t imagine anything, Johnny. It’s me. Me. Call me tomorrow.” Then something wet brushed the shell of his ear. Before he could jerk away, sharp teeth bit down on his earlobe, and then the air was cold against his skin. He tried not to whirl, but he turned quickly enough to see the red dress and black mane of hair vanish through the door.

He thought Eve was gone, but then she reappeared, the upper half of her face hidden by an eerily predatory mask of sequins and feathers. She did not smile, but her gaze burned through the eyeholes of the mask with such intensity that a shiver went through him. Then the door closed, and she was gone.

“I’m ready,” Lily said from his left. “Let’s go before someone else traps me.

Waters began to walk on feet he could barely feel. You didn’t imagine anything … It’s me …

He hesitated at the door. If he walked outside now, he and Lily would have to go down the steps and stand with Eve while they waited for the valets to get their cars. He would have to make small talk. Watch the women measure each other. Call me tomorrow …

“What’s the matter?” asked Lily.

“Nothing.”

Lily pulled open the great door and walked through. Waters hesitated, then stepped out into the flickering yellow light coming from the brass gasolier above their heads.

Eve stood at the foot of the wide steps, her back to them, waiting for her car. Her shoulders were bare, her skin still tanned despite the changing season.

You didn’t imagine anything, Johnny …

As Lily started down the steps, Waters caught movement to his left and instinctively turned toward it. Standing on the porch smoking a cigar was Penn Cage’s father, Tom Cage. A general practitioner who had treated Waters’s father until his death, Tom Cage took a token position in all of Waters’s wells. He’d had a three sixty-fourths interest in the Jackson Point deal.

“Hey, Doc,” Waters said, stepping over and extending his hand. “You recovered from that spanking we took?”

“I’m philosophical about losses,” Dr. Cage replied. “I don’t risk much. I never make a killing, but neither do I lose my buttocks.”

“That’s a good attitude.”

Tom smiled through his silver beard. “You should recommend it to your partner.

“Cole?”

“Last time Smith was in my office, his pressure was way up. And that scotch isn’t doing his liver any favors. Or his diabetes.”

Cole had been diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes two years ago, but he ignored his condition so regularly that Waters sometimes forgot he had it. “I’ll talk to him,” he promised.

“Good. He doesn’t give a damn what I tell him. And make him take that pressure medication. If it’s giving him side effects, we’ll find another drug.”

“Thanks.”

Waters looked down the steps and saw Lily standing alone as Eve Sumner swept toward the driver’s door of a black Lexus. Eve didn’t acknowledge Waters, but she winked at Lily before she disappeared into the car’s interior. As Waters gaped, the Lexus shot forward with an aggressive rumble.

He descended the steps and stood beside Lily as the Acura pulled up the circular drive. “She must sell a lot of houses,” he said, trying to sound casual. “That was an LS-four-thirty.”

“I wonder who paid for it,” Lily said archly. “But maybe she did. All the real estate agents drive more car than they can afford. They think image is everything in that business.”

Waters got out his wallet and took out some ones for a tip.

“She told me she’d like to see the inside of our house sometime,” Lily went on. “That means someone’s interested in it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That Linton Hill won’t be on the market for as long as I’m alive.”

“That’s pretty definite.”

“It won’t put Eve Sumner off for a week. Watch and see.” Lily brushed something off the front of her dress. “I wonder if her breasts are real.”

Even in his unsettled state of his mind, Waters knew not to touch that one. Still, the question surprised him. Lily wasn’t usually given to such comments. Eve Sumner seemed to bring out the cat in her. Maybe she had that effect on all women; hence, her reputation.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t notice them,” said Lily. “She told some girls down at Mainstream Fitness they’re real, but I think they’re store-bought. She’s a fake-baker too.”

“A what?”

“Her tan, John. Here’s the car.”

Waters tipped the valet and got behind the wheel, his inner ear still cold from the saliva Eve Sumner had left on his skin.

FOUR

“What do I think? I think you’re losing your mind.”

Cole Smith leaned back in his sumptuous office chair, kicked a pair of gleaming Guccis up on his desk, and lit a Macanudo. His eyes shone with incredulity.

“So how do you explain it?” asked Waters.

“Explain what? Evie wants to do the wild thing. Where’s the mystery?”

“I’m talking about what she said.”

“What she said?” Cole shrugged. “Okay, let’s recap. At the soccer field she said zip. Right? She blew you a kiss.”

“It looked like she said, ‘Soon.’ I told you that.”

“It looked like she might have said that. But Eve Sumner has no way of knowing what secret things you and Mallory said to each other twenty years ago. And since she didn’t actually say anything, I think we can assume she blew you a freaking kiss.”

“And last night?”

“‘You’re not imagining anything’? ‘Call me tomorrow’?”

“Right.”

Cole chuckled and blew a blue cloud of smoke across his desk. “She’s just recognized what your partner already knows: that since your marriage, you’re a little slow on the uptake where sex is concerned. You haven’t hooked up in, what, twelve years? John Waters, Old Faithful. Last of a breed. Evie’s telling you you’re not wrong, that you’re not imagining that she’s coming on to you. You should call her.”

“What about, ‘It’s me’?”

“Maybe she’s already tried to get your attention and you missed it. Sent you something, maybe. ‘It’s me.’ Get it? I’m the one trying to get your attention.”’

“Nobody’s sent me anything.”

Cole sighed wearily but said nothing more.

Waters looked around the room. Cole’s office felt more like a den than a working room. The walls were festooned with Ole Miss Rebels pennants and other memorabilia: a football helmet signed by coach Johnny Vaught, a framed Number 18 Rebels jersey autographed by Archie Manning, a Tennessee Vols jersey autographed by Archie’s son Peyton, snapshots of Cole with pro athletes, a nine-pound bass he’d caught when he was seventeen, samurai swords he’d collected in his early thirties, and countless other souvenirs. Waters always felt a little embarrassed here, but the investors loved it. Even if they supported rival LSU, the Ole Miss relics made for lively conversation.

“What are you telling me, John?” Cole asked. “You think Eve Sumner is really Mallory Candler? Back from the grave?”

“No. I don’t know what I’m saying. All I know is, she knew that word, ‘Soon,’ and she knew the context.”

“So what? I knew about it too.”

“You did?”

“Sure. I saw you and Mallory do that a dozen times in Oxford.”

Waters studied his partner’s face, trying to remember how it had looked twenty years ago.

“You did it at frat parties, in the library, all kinds of places. And if I saw it, Mallory’s friends saw it too.”

“But Eve Sumner wasn’t a friend of Mallory’s. She’s ten years younger than Mallory.”

“Maybe Eve has an older sister who was at Ole Miss.”

“Does she?”

“How the hell do I know? I doubt it, though. Evie’s not even from Natchez. She’s from across the river somewhere. I think she graduated from a junior college. Yeah, she told me that. Mallory was a whole different class than Evie, John. Though I hate to admit it.”

“Why do you hate to admit it?”

“Why? Mallory couldn’t stand having me around. Anyone or anything that took you away from her for five seconds, she hated with a passion. Do you remember how bad it got when she lost it? I don’t even want to get into that. She almost fucked up your whole life. That bitch – excuse me, that woman – is dead. And any appearance of evidence to the contrary tells me my best buddy is losing his fucking grip.”

Waters pressed down the disturbing images Cole’s words had conjured. “I’ve never come close to losing my grip.”

Cole nodded indulgently. “Not since Mallory. But everybody has a breaking point. You’re used to having all your ducks in a row. Your whole life is about that. Now everything you have is up in the air. We could both be dead broke in a month. That’s bound to be affecting you down deep.”

“I don’t deny that. But it’s not making me hallucinate.”

“You don’t know that. You’ve never gotten over Mallory, John. You almost did, but then she was murdered, and you actually started feeling sorry for her. Even though the chick might have killed you one day. Or Lily. Or even Annelise. You’ve told me that before.”

“I know.”

Cole leaned forward and laid his cigar in a Colonel Reb ashtray. “Drop this bullshit, Rock. Eve Sumner wants you in her pants – end of story. You got a decision to make: walk the strange road, or keep doing your martyr act.

“Goddamn it—”

Smith held up his hands in apology. “Sorry, sorry. Saint John of the great blue balls can’t take too much honesty.”

“You want me to be honest about your life?”

Cole sighed. “We’ll save that onerous task for God.”

They fell into silence and were quite comfortable with it. A partnership could be like a marriage that way; two people sitting in a room, neither talking nor feeling the need to, all communication made abundantly clear through a complex interplay of movement, sighs, and glances. Waters and Cole had a lot of practice at this. They’d grown up in the same neighborhood, and even attended the same school until the integration laws were enforced and Cole’s parents moved him to St. Stephens Prep. Two years later, Cole’s family moved to a more affluent neighborhood where all the houses had two stories and there were rules about what you could keep in your yard. Waters’s parents had similar plans, but nine months after Cole moved, Henry Waters was standing beside a pipe truck in Wilkinson County when a chain broke and ten thousand pounds of steel pipe casing slid off the truck bed and crushed him.

He lived for three hours, but he never regained consciousness. The doctors never even got him stable enough for surgery. All Waters remembered was a horribly stitched and swollen face with a breathing tube going into the nose and his mother holding a shattered purple hand. John had taken hold of that hand for a few seconds. It was hot and stretched and did not feel natural. The calluses were still there, though, and they let him know it was still his father’s hand. Henry Waters was a good geologist; he didn’t have to do manual labor. But somehow he was always in there with the roughnecks and workover crews, cranking on three-foot wrenches, lifting pumps and motors, thrusting himself into the dirty middle of things. His biggest smiles had always flashed out of a face covered with grease or crude oil.

Cole was the only boy John’s age to attend the funeral. Waters remembered sitting in the pews reserved for family, looking back into rows of old people, and seeing one thirteen-year-old face. After the service, Cole came up and shook his hand with awkward formality. Then he leaned in and quietly said, “This sucks, man. Your dad was a cool guy. I wish it hadn’t happened.” The adult that Cole Smith had grown into would have to commit a profound betrayal to erase the goodwill that this moment of sincerity – and others like it – had engendered. Cole had certainly tested Waters’s patience through the years, but in sum, he was the one man John felt he could trust with his life.

“Speaking of meeting God,” Waters said into the silence. “I saw Tom Cage at Dunleith. He told me you’re not taking your blood pressure medicine.”

Cole picked up his cigar and puffed irritably.

“I know you’re not watching your diabetes. Your weight’s still up, and I never see you check your sugar.”

“It’s under control,” Cole said in a taut voice.

“‘Control’ isn’t the word that comes to mind when I think of you.” Waters let a little emotion enter his voice. “You could stroke out, man. You could go blind. That happened to Pat Davis, and he was only thirty-seven. Diabetes is serious business.”

“Christ, you sound like Jenny. If I want a lecture, I’ll go home, okay?”

Waters was about to reply when Sybil Sonnier, their receptionist, walked in with something for Cole to sign. She did not smile at either of them; she walked primly to the desk and handed Cole the papers. This pricked up Waters’s antennae. Sybil was twenty-eight years old, a divorcee from South Louisiana, and much too pretty to be working in an office with Cole Smith. Cole had “dabbled” with their receptionists before, as he called it, and one of his escapades had cost them over fifty thousand dollars in a legal settlement. At that point, Waters had vowed to do all the hiring himself. But when their last receptionist’s husband lost his job and left town, Waters had been on vacation. When he got back, he found Sybil installed at the front desk: one hundred and twenty pounds of curves, dark hair, and smiles. Cole swore he had never touched her, but Waters no longer trusted him about women. When Sybil exited, Waters gave his partner a hard look.

“Sybil’s been pretty cold for the past week. You got any idea why that might be?”

Cole shrugged. “PMS?”

“Cole, goddamn it. Did you sleep with her?”

“Hell no. I learned my lesson about employees when I had to pay reparations.”

“When we had to pay, them, you mean. Next time you pay solo, Romeo.”

Cole chuckled. “No problem.”

“Back to your health. You don’t get off that easy.”

Cole frowned and shook his head. “Why don’t you use all this energy you’re expending on paranoia and lectures to generate a new prospect, Rock?”

This was an old bone of contention between them. Their partnership was like a union of the grasshopper and the ant. Whenever they scored big, Waters put forty percent of his money into an account reserved for income taxes. The rest he invested conservatively in the stock market. Each time they drilled a new well, he maintained a large share of it by giving up “override,” or cash profit up front. That way, if they struck oil, he was ensured a large profit over time. Cole preferred to take the lion’s share of cash up front; thus his “completion costs” on the wells were smaller, but so were his eventual profits. Even when Cole kept a large piece of a well, he almost always sold his interest for cash – usually the equivalent of two years’ worth of production – the day after the well hit. And Cole simply could not hang on to cash. He and his wife spent lavishly on houses, cars, antiques, clothing, jewelry, parties, and vacations. He invested in ventures outside the oil business, whatever sounded like big money fast. He had hit some big licks, but he always lost his profits by sinking them into ever-bigger schemes. And most damaging, Cole gambled heavily on sports. This addiction had begun at Ole Miss, where he and Waters had roomed together for three semesters. When Cole moved into the Kappa Alpha house and continued his partying and gambling, Waters stayed in the dorm. Only two things had allowed Cole to remain solvent through the years: a knack for buying existing oil wells and improving their efficiency by managing operations himself; and a partner who continued to find new oil, even in the worst of times. Thus, he was always after Waters to generate new prospective wells. As the attorney of the two, Cole handled the land work – leasing up the acreage where their wells would be drilled – but he saw his real job as sales. And a natural salesman without something to sell is a frustrated man.

In the absence of a prospective oil well, Cole set about selling what he had on hand – himself – usually to the prettier and more adventurous wives in town. He promoted himself to his chosen paramour with the same enthusiasm he gave to oil wells – though with slightly more discretion – ultimately convincing her that she had to have Cole Smith in her life, beginning in her bed. It was all about ego and acceptance. Cole had that manic yet magical combination of insecurity and bravado that drives sports agents, fashion models, and Hollywood stars. And in the oil business, Cole Smith was a star. That was why his name was first on the sign and on the letterhead. Years ago, Cole had suggested this order based on the alphabet, but Waters knew better. It made no difference to him. The proof of primacy in the partnership was in their private discourse and in the awareness of the close-knit oil community. The people who mattered knew who put the “X” on the map and said, “This is where the oil will be.” The rest was showbiz.

“Oh, hey,” Cole said casually. “I meant to tell you. I’m in a little bind over some margin calls on that WorldCom. I need some cash to tide me over the next thirty days.”

Waters struggled to keep a straight face. Cole had said this as if he made such requests all the time, but in fact, it was the first time he had ever asked for a substantial loan. Cole had been in financial trouble from time to time, but he always found sources of emergency cash, and he’d never borrowed more than fifty bucks from Waters for a bar tab.

“How much do you need?” Waters asked.

“About fifty-five, I think.”

“Fifty-five … thousand?”

Cole nodded, then pursed his lips. “Well, seventy-five might be better. It’s just for thirty days, like I said. But seventy-five would smooth things out a little flatter.”

“A little flatter,” Waters echoed, still in shock. “Cole, what the hell’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” A lopsided grin. “Business as usual in the Smith empire.”

“Business as usual?”

The grin vanished. “Look, if you don’t want to do it—”

“That’s not it. It’s just that I want to really help you, not—”

“You think I’m a bum on the street?” Cole’s face went red. “You’ll give me five bucks for food, but nothing for another drink?”

His bitter tone set Waters back in his chair. “Look, maybe we need to talk realistically about what could happen if the EPA investigation goes against us.”

“Why? If it goes our way, seventy-five grand is nothing to you. And if it doesn’t, that money won’t help either of us.”

He was right. But Waters couldn’t help thinking that their exposure would be a lot less if Cole had paid the goddamn liability premium like he was supposed to. Cole had always said it was an oversight, but Waters was beginning to wonder if he had needed and used that cash for something else.

“Cole, why didn’t you pay that insurance premium? Are you in real trouble?”

His partner toyed distractedly with his cigar. “John, you’re like a wife who keeps dredging up some old affair. ‘But why did you do it, Cole? Why.’ I just forgot, okay? It’s that simple.”

“Okay.”

Waters thought Cole would look relieved at his acceptance of this explanation, but he didn’t. He glanced nervously through the cloud of smoke and said, “So, you can slide me the cash?”

Waters was searching for a noncommittal answer when the phone on the desk rang. Cole picked it up but did not switch on the speaker phone, as he once had with all calls. “What is it, Sybil? … Yeah? She give a name?”

Cole’s face suddenly lost its color.

“What is it?” asked Waters. “What’s happened?”

“You’ve got a phone call. A woman.”

“Is it Lily? Is Annelise all right?”

“Sybil says she gave her name as Mallory Candler.”

A cold finger of dread hooked itself around Waters’s heart.

“Let me handle this,” Cole said sharply. “I’ll put a stop to this bullshit right now.”

“No. Give me the phone.”

Cole reluctantly passed the hard line across the desk. The cold plastic pressed Waters’s ear flat.

“Who is this?”

“Eve,” said a low female voice. “I thought you might hang up unless I said what I did.”

“What the hell are you trying to do?”

“I just want to talk to you, Johnny. That’s all.”

Johnny … “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I know you’re suspicious. Maybe even afraid. You don’t understand what’s happening. I’m going to prove to you that I’m not trying to hurt you. Only to help you.”

“How can you do that?”

“Your daughter’s in trouble, Johnny.”

Waters went into free fall. He covered the phone and hissed at Cole: “Call St. Stephens and make sure Annelise is in class.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it!”

Cole grabbed a different extension. “Sybil, get me St. Stephens Prep. The lower elementary office.”

“What do you know about my little girl?” Waters said into the phone. “Have you hurt her?”

“God, no. She’s fine right now. I’m just telling you that she’s in danger at that school. That’s all I want to say. Talk to her about it, then call me. I’m going now.”

“Wait—”

“You’ll understand soon, Johnny. I’ll explain everything. But you have to trust me first.”

“I’ll understand what?”

“What happened to Mallory.”

“What about Mallory? Did you—”

Cole whispered, “They just let the kids out of school. Your maid picked up Annelise five minutes ago.”

Waters felt only slight relief. “Listen to me, Ms. Sumner. Did you have something to do with Mallory Candler’s death? Did you know her?”

“I didn’t know her,” Eve said in a soft voice. “I am her.”

Waters closed his eyes. His voice, when it finally came, emerged as a whisper. “Did you just say—”

“The world isn’t how we think it is, Johnny. I know that now. And soon you will too. Soon you’ll understand.”

“What do you mean? What are you—”

The phone clicked dead.

Waters jumped to his feet and ran for the door.

“What the hell’s going on?” Cole yelled.

“I’m going to get Annelise!” Waters veered into the hall, checking his pocket for his keys as he ran. “I’ll call you when I find her.”

“Let me drive you!” Cole shouted, but Waters was already halfway down the stairs.

Waters drove fifty miles an hour through the center of town, the Land Cruiser’s emergency lights flashing. When he hit State Street, he accelerated to eighty. The beautiful boulevard tunneled through a large wooded area in the center of town that concealed two antebellum homes: sprawling Arlington plantation; and his own smaller estate, Linton Hill. He’d tried to reach Lily on her cell phone but failed, which meant she was probably swimming at the indoor pool downtown. That was why Rose, their maid, had picked up Annelise from school. He’d bought Rose a cell phone last year, but half the time she forgot to switch it on.

Annelise didn’t have soccer practice this afternoon, and he prayed that she didn’t have ballet or gymnastics or any of the other countless activities she pursued with the dedication of a seven-year-old career woman. He often wished the world were as simple as it had been when he was a kid; that there were long afternoons when Annelise would have nothing to do but use her imagination and play.

He slowed and swung the Land Cruiser into his driveway, then accelerated again. For the first thirty yards, trees shielded the house, but when he rounded the turn, he saw Rose’s maroon Saturn parked in the semicircular drive, and his pulse slowed a little. He parked beside her and sprinted up the steps, then paused at the door and took a breath. He didn’t want to panic Rose or Annelise if there was nothing to worry about.

When he opened the door, he smelled mustard greens and heard metal utensils clanking in the kitchen. He started to move toward the sounds, but then he heard Annelise’s voice down the hall to his left.

He found her sitting on the floor in the den, playing with Pebbles, her cat. She was trying to coax Pebbles into a house she had built out of plastic blocks that reminded him of Legos but weren’t.

“Daddy,” she complained, “Pebbles won’t check into the kitty hotel!”

Waters smiled, then struggled to keep the smile in place as tears of relief welled in his eyes. Seeing Ana playing there, it was hard to imagine what he’d been afraid of two minutes ago. Yet Eve Sumner had sounded deadly serious on the telephone. Your daughter’s in danger at school …

“How was school today, punkin?” he asked, sitting beside Annelise on the floor.

“Good. Why won’t she go inside, Dad?”

“Cats are pretty independent. They don’t like being told what to do. Does that remind you of anybody?”

She grinned. “Me?”

“You said it, not me.”

Ana pushed the cat’s bottom, but Pebbles pressed back against her hand and glared like a woman groped in an elevator. Waters started to laugh, but stopped when he saw something that would normally have caused him to scold his daughter. The family’s fifteen-hundred-dollar video camera was lying on the floor behind Annelise.

“Honey, what’s the camcorder doing on the floor?”

Annelise hung her head. “I know. I wanted to make a movie of Pebbles in the hotel I built.”

“What’s the rule about that camera?”

“Only with adult supervision.”

“We’ll make a movie later, okay? I want to talk to you for a minute. We haven’t spent enough time together lately.”

She looked up at him. “It’s always like that when you’re drilling a well.”

From the mouths of babes. “Has everything been going okay at school lately?”

“Uh-huh.” Annelise’s attention had returned to Pebbles.

“Are there any bullies bothering you?”

“Fletcher hit Hayes on the ear, but Mrs. Simpson put him in the sweet chair for an hour.”

The sweet chair. “But no one’s picking on you? Other girls, maybe?”

“No.” Annelise grabbed a paw and earned a feline slap.

“Have you seen any strangers hanging around the school? Around the playground, maybe?”

“Um … no. Junie’s dad hung around the fence for a while one day, but then a policeman came and made him leave. Her parents are divorced, and her dad’s not supposed to see her except sometimes.”

God, they have to grow up fast, Waters thought bleakly. Another idea came to him. He didn’t want to consider it – Annelise was only in the second grade – but he knew that the dark side of human nature observed no rules. “Honey, has anyone … touched you somewhere they’re not supposed to? Boys, I mean?”

Annelise looked up, her eyes interested. “No.”

She said nothing else, but she continued to look at Waters, and he knew something was working behind her eyes.

“What is it, Ana?”

“Well … I think maybe Lucy and Pam have been doing something they’re not supposed to.”

Two girls, Waters thought. This can’t be too bad. “Like what?” Annelise clearly wanted to speak, but still she hesitated.

“You know you can tell me anything, baby. You’re not going to get in trouble. No matter what it is.”

“Well … they’ve been going to the closet during recess to see stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Stuff Mr. Danny shows them.”

A chill raced up Waters’s back, and a vague image of a soft-faced thirty-year-old carrying a ladder came into his mind. “What does Mr. Danny show them?”

“I don’t know. But I think it’s stuff girls aren’t supposed to look at.”

Waters desperately wanted more information, but he didn’t want to press his daughter on something sexual. “Have you been in that closet, Ana?”

“No way. I don’t like Mr. Danny.”

“Why not?”

“He reminds me of something. I don’t know what. Something from a movie. When he looks at me, I feel creepy.”

Waters realized his hands were shaking. “Rose!”

With a sudden clank of metal, Rose’s footsteps sounded in the hall and she appeared in the door, a stout black woman in her sixties who looked as though she would make it through her nineties with ease.

“What is it, Mr. John?”

“I’ve got to run an errand. I want you to keep Annelise with you in the kitchen until Lily gets back. You understand?”

Rose often forgot things like switching on cell phones, but she was hypersensitive to the subtleties of human behavior.

“I’ll keep her right by me. Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine.” He got to his feet. “I’ll be back soon.”

Rose smiled at Annelise. “You run in the kitchen, girl. I’ll let you mix the cornbread today.”

Annelise smiled, then stood and ran into the kitchen.

Rose’s smile vanished. “Something bad done happened, Mr. Johnny? Is Lily all right?”

“She’s fine. It’s business, Rose.”

Rose’s look said she knew different. “You go on. I won’t let that baby out of my sight.”

“Thank you.”

Waters hurried out to the Land Cruiser and roared down the driveway. Picking up his cell phone, he called directory assistance and got the number of Kevin Flynn, the president of the Board of Trustees of St. Stephens Prep. Waters had not known Flynn well growing up, but as a major contributor to the school’s annual fund, he knew the man would bend over backwards to accommodate him.

“Hello?” said Flynn.

“Kevin, this is John Waters.”

“Hey, John. What’s up?”

“I think we have a problem at the school.”

“Oh, no. Air-conditioning gone again?”

“No. It’s much more serious. I don’t want to discuss it on a cell. I think we should meet at the school.”

“Why don’t you come by my office?”

An attorney with two partners, Flynn owned a nice building four blocks up Main Street from Waters’s office. “The school would be better. Would that maintenance man still be there? Danny?”

“I think he stays till five, most days.”

“Meet me there. Do you know Tom Jackson well?”

A hesitation. “The police detective?”

“Yes. He and I graduated from South Natchez together.”

“Is this a police matter, John?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m going to have Tom meet us there if he can.”

“Jesus. I’m on my way.”

Waters tried to hold the Land Cruiser at the speed limit as he called the police department.

Kevin Flynn’s Infiniti was parked near the front door of St. Stephens when Waters arrived, and the lawyer climbed out when he saw the Land Cruiser. An athletic man of medium height, Flynn had an open manner that made people like him immediately. Waters got out and shook hands, noticing as he did that some of the school’s front windows were open to let in the autumn air.

“What’s going on, John?” Flynn asked. “Why the secrecy? Why the cops?”

“Let’s talk inside.”

Flynn’s smile slipped a little, but he led Waters through the front door and into the headmaster’s empty office. He sat behind the desk, Waters on a sofa facing him.

“You look pretty upset,” the attorney said.

“You’re about to join me.” Waters quickly recounted his conversation with Annelise, omitting any mention of Eve Sumner’s initial warning. By the time he finished, Flynn had covered his mouth with one hand and was shaking his head.

“Jesus Christ, John. This is my worst nightmare. We do background checks on everyone we hire, for just this reason. We’re required to by the insurance company. Danny Buckles came back clean.”

A soft knock sounded at the office door. Waters turned and saw Tom Jackson leaning through the door, his outsized frame intimidating in the small space. The detective had light blue eyes and a cowboy-style mustache, and the brushed gray nine-millimeter automatic on his hip magnified the subtle aura of threat he projected.

“What’s going on, fellas?” he asked, extending a big hand to Waters. “John? Long time.”

Waters let Flynn take the lead.

“We’re afraid we may have a molestation situation on our hands, Detective. Our maintenance man, Danny Buckles. John’s daughter said Danny’s been taking some second-grade girls into a closet to ‘show them things.’”

Jackson sighed and pursed his lips. “We’d better talk to him, then.”

“I have a civil practice. Nothing criminal. How should we handle this?”

“Is Buckles here now?”

“Yes. Or he should be, anyway.”

“You’re the head of the school board, right? Invite him in for a friendly chat. I’ll stand where he can see me when he goes in to talk to you. You got a portable tape recorder?”

“Dr. Andrews has one, I think.” Flynn searched the headmaster’s desk and brought out a small Sony. “Here we go.”

“Tell him you want to record the conversation as a formality. If he starts screaming for a lawyer, that’ll tell us something.”

“I’d scream for a lawyer,” Flynn declared, “and I’m innocent.”

“You never know what these guys will do,” Jackson said thoughtfully. “Molesters are a slimy bunch. They frequently take jobs where they’ll be close to children. At video arcades, camps, even churches.”

“Jesus,” breathed Flynn. “I wish you hadn’t told me that. I’ve got six-year-old twins.”

The attorney went into the front office and paged Danny Buckles over the intercom system. After about twenty seconds, a hillbilly voice answered, “I’m on my way.” While they waited, Flynn got out Buckles’s personnel file and scanned it.

“Here’s Danny’s background check. Clean as a whistle.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” said Detective Jackson. “You pay a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks worth of checking is what you get. All kinds of stuff slips through those.”

A white man in his early thirties suddenly appeared at the window. Blades of grass covered his shirt, and his face was pink-cheeked from labor.

“That’s Danny,” said Flynn, giving the janitor an awkward wave.

Waters looked into the bland face, trying to read what secrets might lie behind it.

“We’ll go out without saying anything to him,” Jackson said to Flynn. “Then you bring him in.”

Waters followed the detective out into the school’s entrance area, a wide hallway lined with trophy cases. Jackson gave Buckles a long look as he passed, and Waters thought he saw the color go out of the maintenance man’s face.

“Your little girl told you about this?” Jackson asked Waters as Buckles went through the door.

“That’s right,” Waters replied, watching through the window as Flynn led the younger man into the headmaster’s private office.

“Just out of the blue?”

“Not exactly.”

Jackson’s face grew grave. “Did he touch your little girl, John?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not up here to do anything stupid, are you?”

Waters looked Jackson full in the face. He was six foot one, but he still had to tilt his head up to meet the detective’s suspicious gaze. “Like what?”

The detective was watching him closely. “You’re not armed.”

“Hell no. If I was going to kill the guy, would I have called you first?”

“It happens. This kind of situation, especially. Fathers have killed molesters right in front of deputies and then turned themselves in on the spot.”

“Don’t worry about that, Tom.”

A sound between a wail and a scream suddenly issued from the headmaster’s office. Waters froze, but Jackson ran straight for the receptionist’s door. As he opened it, Waters heard Kevin Flynn say, “Detective? This is a police matter now.”

When Waters reached the office, he saw Danny Buckles sitting on the sofa he himself had occupied only moments before. Buckles’s cheeks were bright red and streaked with tears, and his nose was running like a crying child’s.

“I can’t help it!” he sobbed. “I try and try, but it don’t … do … no … good. It won’t let me loose! I can’t stop thinking about it.”

A shudder of revulsion went through Waters, followed by an unreasoning anger.

“I don’t hurt ’em none!” Danny whined in a tone of supplication. “You ask ’em.”

“Danny Buckles isn’t even his real name,” said Flynn. “God, what a mess. What am I going to tell the parents of those little girls?”

“The truth,” Tom Jackson said. “As soon as you can. Call both parents of each child and get them up here right now. Twenty minutes after I get this boy down to the station, the story’ll be all over town. I’m sorry, but you know how it works.”

“Yes, I do,” Flynn murmured.

For Waters, a different reality had suddenly sunk in. Eve Sumner had warned him of this danger, and her warning had proved accurate. Did the beautiful real estate agent know this blubbering pervert sitting on the couch? She must. How else could she know what he’d been up to? Waters started to tell Jackson about Eve, but even as he opened his mouth, something held him back.

“I’m going home, guys,” he said. “I want to hug my little girl.”

“I may need you to make a statement,” said Jackson. “But I’ll try to keep your daughter out of it.”

“Thanks, Tom. You know where to find me.”

Jackson told “Danny Buckles” he was going to place him under arrest. The janitor started crying again, then moaned something about how horribly he’d been abused in jail. Waters walked calmly out of the office and climbed into his Land Cruiser. He drove slowly away from the school, but as soon as he reached the highway, he accelerated to seventy and headed toward the Mississippi River Bridge. Eve Sumner’s office was on the bypass that led to the twin spans, and if he pushed it, he could be there in less than five minutes.

FIVE

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 Frito 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 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.

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