by Greg Iles
“Ow,” she cried. “What was that for?”
“You know what I like.” He spanked her again. “What do you like?”
“I don’t like that.”
He slapped her once more, and harder. Lily tried to jerk away, but he grabbed her hips, thrust forward, and went between her thighs. She froze. Poised in this odd position, this confusion of desire and resistance, Waters felt something change. The flesh under his hands seemed to shiver, and then, as he watched in fascination, Lily looked back over her shoulder, her eyes glinting with excitement and anticipation.
“Oh, I know what you like,” she said, pressing her hips back against him. “And you know what I like. So do it.”
Waters was paralyzed. The consciousness glittering in those eyes belonged to a woman he had first made love to more than twenty years ago, before he even met his wife.
“Mallory?” he whispered.
She laughed then, a low, throaty sound, and her eyes filled with dark amusement. “When did you know?”
Waters could not find his voice. To look at his wife’s face and see no trace of her in it was more than he could endure. As he knelt with his mouth open, Lily reached between her legs and took hold of him.
Her touch jolted him like a defibrillator jolting a dead heart. He had accomplished part of his goal, but what he needed to do next, he could not do now. He threw himself off the bed, grabbed his pants, and ran for the hallway.
“Johnny!” yelled the voice behind him.
He pulled on his pants by the back door and buttoned his shirt as he ran outside. He saw Annelise and Rose at the swing set, Rose pushing Annelise with the steady rocking motion of an oil-well pump. The moment Rose saw his face, she grabbed the chains of the swing and stopped it.
“What’s the matter, Mr. John? Where’s your shoes?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Lily’s too tired for supper. I’m going to take Ana to her grandmother’s for a while.”
Concern filled the maid’s eyes. “Are you sure everything’s all right? Lily don’t usually sleep like that. Maybe you should give Dr. Cage a call.”
“No, it’s—”
“Mama!” cried Annelise. “Daddy said you were sleeping.”
Waters whirled and saw Lily walking down the back porch steps. He ran toward her with his arms out.
“You need to rest, honey! You said you were dizzy.”
Lily squinted at him and shook her head. “I’m not dizzy. I want to see Annelise.”
“No,” Waters said firmly. “You need to lie down.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s still daylight.”
“Go back inside!”
“Daddy?” called Annelise. “Why are you yelling at Mom?”
Waters turned and saw his daughter walking up behind him. “Mama’s sick, baby. You stay right there.”
“Sick?” Ana’s voice cracked. “Sick how?”
Waters turned and saw Rose staring at him as if he had lost his mind. Have I? he thought. Then he remembered the eyes glinting in the bedroom. “Lily, please go back inside.”
Annelise began to cry.
Lily looked back at him with such a hurt expression that he felt like a Nazi storm trooper. But was she really upset? Or was Mallory reveling in a role she’d been waiting ten years to play?
“Mr. John,” Rose said in an indignant voice, “I think you the one needs to go back inside. Get yourself a drink and sit down for a while.”
Lily’s eyes remained on Waters, pleading for some explanation.
“Go back inside,” he begged. “Please.”
Lily burst into tears, then turned and ran back up the steps. Behind him, Annelise began to wail. Waters turned and saw Rose kneeling with the child in her arms, comforting her with soft words. But over Annelise’s shoulder, the maid glared at him with eyes that could melt steel.
“Keep Ana out here,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”
He ran up the back steps and started down the hall toward the master bedroom. As he walked, he cut his eyes left and right, half expecting some kind of attack from his blind side. Mallory had done such things before, and he sensed danger now.
Finding the bedroom door closed against him, he began to doubt himself. What if Lily had snapped back to herself after he fled the bedroom? He put his ear to the cypress face of the door but heard nothing. Testing the knob, he found it locked.
“Lily?” he called.
No reply.
“Lily!”
Still nothing.
“Lily, open the door,” he called in a reasonable voice. “I need to talk to you.”
The silence mocked him. He looked down at the brass knob. There was a tiny hole at its center. Annelise had picked the lock many times with a paper clip. He was about to go in search of one when he heard a soft click from the knob. When nothing else happened, he grabbed the knob and threw open the door.
Lily sat cross-legged at the center of the bed, her palms upturned in the manner of a Hindu in meditation, her wide-open eyes burning with a light that rooted Waters to the floor.
She smiled serenely. “Close the door.”
“You can’t do this,” Waters told her.
“It’s already done. Come in and close the door, Johnny. I’ll do the talking.”
Waters did as she said.
“I want to tell you how my father died,” Lily said. “Do you remember what I told you about him?”
Waters said nothing. He felt as though someone had injected him with the most powerful hallucinogen on the planet. To hear the voice of his wife speak Mallory’s inmost thoughts—and in Mallory’s diction—pushed him into a realm beyond fear. It inverted his sense of reality, so that the familiar engendered horror rather than affection, and dread replaced love.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
For some reason an image of Penn Cage behind his desk filled Waters’s mind. “That he abused you?”
“Mmm-hmm. You never believed me about that, did you?”
He tried to guess where she was going. “Why do you think that?”
Lily shook her head in reproof. “Because I was inside you, Johnny. I know your thoughts now. Your memories.”
“Did it really happen?”
“Maybe not like you imagine. But it happened. From the time I was about ten, I started to feel uncomfortable around my father. He said things to me he shouldn’t have said. He noticed things about me. It started as compliments, but the older I got…he talked about my beauty, all the time, of course. But then it was my body. And my ‘way,’ he called it. My ‘beguiling’ way. He’d walk into the bathroom when I was using it. Or trick me into coming into the bathroom when he was in there without clothes on.”
“Did he touch you?”
“He wanted to. My friends knew it too. Some of them. He did the same kinds of things to them. Too much time with us instead of with the grown-ups. Touches that lingered too long. It was only lack of nerve that stopped him from doing something physical.”
“If he never touched you, how do you know that’s true?”
“I’ll tell you. About fourteen months ago, when I first got back to Natchez, I wanted desperately to get into my old house. I wanted to remember what it was like, and to get some of my old things, if they were still there. I didn’t want to risk it when I was in Danny. But once I got into Eve, I felt confident enough. I took the key from under the rock in the flower bed where they’d always hidden it, and slipped inside.”
Lily’s eyes glazed with the power of memory. “I had no idea what it would be like. I found my room exactly as I’d left it. It was like a shrine. My old clothes, my posters, my photos. My cheerleading uniform. Everything. It was like going to Graceland and seeing Elvis’s old costumes on mannequins. They actually had my Miss Mississippi gown on a mannequin in the corner.” She shuddered. “I had never felt as dead as I did in that room. Anyway, I took a few small things. Some snapshots. A cross my grandmother had given me. A scarf I’d had when you and I were to
gether. In moments like that, you know which things are important. The things you can’t live without.”
“Your diaries?”
She nodded. “That’s what I really wanted. I expected them to be in my drawer, but they weren’t. I searched the whole house, but I couldn’t find them. Then I went into the attic. We had a walk-in attic on the second floor. Remember? I found the diaries in a glass-topped box by the back wall. There was light up there, so I started reading them.”
Waters thought he saw tears welling in her eyes.
“Reading what I’d written so long ago…it was the opposite of how I’d felt in my room. I felt more alive then—more myself—than I had since the night I was raped in New Orleans. There was my true soul, right there on the page. As I sat reading, I noticed something odd about the wall. The edge of a board was sticking out. But it wasn’t like a warp. The board was propped there. I pulled it away and found a space. There was a book inside it. A big one. It was a photo album.”
“What was in it?”
“When I opened it…I saw pictures of a naked girl. I thought it was just regular pornography at first. Then I saw that the girl was me.” Disgust rippled through Lily’s body. “Me, Johnny. I was about twelve, and I was in the bathroom. My own bathroom. I flipped the pages and saw more pictures of myself, from age eleven to about twenty. I was always naked or partly naked, and always in the bathroom. They were all shot from the same angle. Later, I found the hole in the wall that he’d shot them through. There were pictures of my friends too. Anyone who had come over to spend the night with me. When I saw those pictures…I knew that everything I’d felt when I was a child was true. Things I’d punished myself for thinking about my father…do you understand? I felt raped. By my own father. And I knew what he did with that book. He sneaked up there all those years and…you know what he did. It makes me want to throw up.”
Waters remembered Benjamin Candler’s odd combination of arrogance and smarmy glad-handing.
“Don’t you remember how he took pictures of everything?” Lily asked. “Every football game, every pep rally, every school play. But those weren’t the pictures he really wanted.”
“What did you do with the book?”
“I put it back where I found it.”
“Why?”
“I went back to Eve’s house and thought about it. Let it sink in. And then, three days later, I went back. But that time I took a gun.”
Waters’s stomach tightened. “Why?”
“I knew he’d deny it. I went on my mother’s bridge day. That was his afternoon off. I waited for him in the kitchen. When he walked in, he saw Eve Sumner, realtor, standing there with a gun.”
“What did he do?”
“‘What’s the matter, Ms. Sumner?’” Lily cried in a hysterical voice. “‘Are you in trouble? Is someone chasing you?’ I laughed and said, ‘No, I just want to talk to you.’ He asked what about. ‘Your daughter,’ I told him. ‘My daughter’s dead,’ he said. ‘Are you sure about that?’ I asked. He said that wasn’t appropriate conversation. He asked me to leave his house. I refused. I said, ‘I want to talk to you about why you molested your daughter.’”
“Jesus.”
“He looked stunned, but he didn’t kick me out. He asked what the hell I was talking about. I told him I knew about the pictures he’d been taking all those years. His face went white, Johnny. I was like the ghost of Christmas past. He told me to get the hell out, but you should have seen him staring at me. I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I was one of those other girls who’d come to spend the night. He said he’d call the police if I didn’t get out. I dared him to do it. He told me I couldn’t prove anything about him. Then I opened the drawer next to me and took out the photo album. I’d gotten it from the attic before he came home. That was all it took. He turned gray, like there was no blood going to his face. Then he started to cry. He asked me who I was.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth. ‘I’m Mallory,’ I said. He didn’t believe me until I started to talk. I told him things only I could know, like I did with you. I reminded him of things he’d said to me, things no one else could possibly have heard. I’d been talking for about two minutes when he grabbed his left arm. I ripped the phone out of the wall and walked out with the photo album. That night, I heard that he’d died of a heart attack.”
Savage satisfaction entered Lily’s face.
“Why did you tell me this?”
She cocked her head and smiled. “An object lesson. You betrayed me too, Johnny. Not like he did. You looked me in the face when you did it. You tried to ease the pain as much as you could, but in the end you only made it worse.”
“Mallory—”
“Don’t worry. I forgive you. I’m trying to, anyway. I know why you did what you did now. I felt your guilt when I was inside you. You were so young. You couldn’t even imagine being married. It takes men longer to see what the important things are in life. I know that now. We had some bad luck…but now we have a second chance.”
“Mallory, listen—”
“We don’t have time to talk about this now,” Lily said, uncrossing her legs and sliding to the edge of the bed. “We have to take care of Annelise. She’s scared, and she doesn’t understand what she just saw.”
He remembered his daughter’s tear-stained face. “Mallory, you can’t…This is all wrong. You can’t do this to my wife.”
She shook her head as though he were speaking nonsense. “I am your wife now, Johnny.”
“Mama? Where are you?” Annelise’s frightened voice echoed up the hall.
As he turned toward the door, Waters heard Rose call, “Mr. John, this baby’s upset! She got to see her mama!”
“In here, Rose,” Lily called.
Annelise shot through the door like a missile, then froze and looked from father to mother. Lily held out both arms.
“Come here, baby! Mama’s right here!”
Annelise leaped onto the bed and hugged Lily tightly.
“What ya’ll want me to do?” Rose asked from the doorway, her voice strangely suspicious.
Waters sighed in surrender. “Go home, Rose.”
“There’s nothing but cornbread made. The pork chops and macaroni still got to be done.”
“I’ll do that,” Lily said from the bed. “Go on home and rest old Arthur.”
Old Arthur… Rose’s nickname for arthritis. Mallory could access Lily’s memories at will. No one would ever be able to discover the truth by probing her with questions. Only Waters, who saw the differences revealed behind the bedroom door, would know Mallory lay hidden behind Lily’s eyes. Perhaps with time Rose would sense something amiss, but by then it would probably be too late.
“All right, then,” Rose said reluctantly. “I’m going on.” She gave Waters a last look of disapproval and walked down the hall.
“Are you really, okay, Mom?” asked Annelise.
Lily gave her a storybook smile. “Sure I am. You go with Daddy and start the water for the macaroni. I’ll put on some real clothes and then make the pork chops and the salad.”
Ana hugged her again, then climbed down from the bed and came to Waters. “Do I get to cook the macaroni by myself?”
“Do you think you can?”
“Mama said!”
“Okay, then. Come on.”
With a last hard look at Lily, Waters picked Ana up and ran for the kitchen. She giggled all the way there, but Waters’s heart felt like a stone. He wanted to run right out the front door to the Land Cruiser and put as much distance as he could between Annelise and the lost soul dressing in the bedroom.
But running was not an option. Mallory wouldn’t even have to chase him. She could simply call the police and accuse him of kidnapping. He’d be lucky to get a hundred miles from town before he was arrested. And no judge in the state would believe one word of his story.
Twenty minutes later, the pork chops were simmering in a skillet full of gravy, and
the macaroni was boiling on the range top set in the marble island. Lily had tried to make preparing the dinner a family affair, but it took all Waters’s will to simply play the role of a sane father.
Lily and Annelise were working on the salad now, and whenever Ana’s attention was diverted, Lily would wink or smile at him. As the charade played on, one question filled his mind: Where is Lily right now? While inside Eve, Mallory had described her host as “sleeping.” What did that mean? The only encouraging thing Waters could recall—as horrible as the memory was—was that Eve seemed to have snapped back to herself before she was murdered. Which meant that her true self had survived, even after a year of possession. Mallory had been inside Lily for only forty-eight hours.
Lily lifted a butcher knife from the block and began to slice tomatoes. Watching her deftly handle the blade, Waters recalled Mallory sitting in a fetal position in an empty bathtub, methodically cutting parallel lines into her wrists. He felt a scream building behind his lips. The only thing that kept it there was his desire to spare Ana the trauma of seeing her father lose control. Yet how long could he spare her? He was trapped in a situation no one would believe: while a murder investigation moved ever closer to him, his daughter lived under threat from the real killer—a woman everyone would perceive as her mother. And if no one believed him, no one would help him. He would have to solve his own problem. There was only one solution that he could see. Mallory had to leave Lily’s body.
“Hey, punkin?” he prompted Annelise. “Time to get the Velveeta ready.”
While Ana worked to tear open the foil packet, he strained the macaroni in the sink, then transferred the noodles to a ceramic dish. “You want to stir the cheese in this time?”
She clapped and grabbed a big spoon from the drawer.
“You know how to do it,” he told her. “I’m going to show Mom something in the dining room. We’ll be back in a second.”
“Okay.” Ana climbed up on a chair and began squeezing Velveeta into the noodle dish.
Waters took hold of Lily’s wrist, pulled her into the dining room, and shut the door behind them.