Sleep No More

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.