Sleep No More

“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.”