by Greg Iles
Something about the place looks different as I approach, but that’s only to be expected after the man of the house has died. At least the pool is being kept up. Mrs. Hemmeter stopped swimming several years ago, so the clear water sparkling in the sun strikes me much as my bedroom did—something maintained in the hope that I will return to it someday. Vanity, perhaps, but I suspect I’m right.
I jog around the house and check the garage. Empty. Returning to the pool, I strip off my jeans and blouse and dive cleanly into the deep end, leaving hardly a ripple behind me. The dive carries me halfway to the far wall. I breaststroke to the shallows, then get out and search the flower bed until I find a flat, heavy rock about the size of a serving platter. This I carry down the steps into the shallow end. After a period of pre-immersion meditation, during which my heart slows to around sixty beats per minute, I lie down on my back beneath the water and set the rock on my chest.
The water is just under ninety degrees, like the sea under an equatorial sun. I lie on the bottom for three minutes, until my chest spasms in its first “physical scream” for oxygen. Free divers train themselves to ignore this reflex, which would send a normal person into full-blown panic. After enduring a varying number of these spasms, humans can move into a far more primitive mammalian state, one the body dimly remembers from its genetic heritage as a waterborne animal. In the beginning, I endured as many as twenty spasms before entering the primitive dive state. Now the miraculous transition is almost painless. Once in the dive state, my heartbeat decreases dramatically, sometimes to as low as fifteen beats per minute. My blood circulation alters to serve only my core organs, and blood plasma slowly fills my lungs to resist the increasing pressure of deep water.
I can feel it now, the steady descent to a state of relaxation I can find nowhere else in my life. Not in sleep, where nightmares trouble me. Not in sex, where frantic urgency drives me to numb a pain I cannot even name. Not in the hunt for predators, where the triumph of trapping my quarry brings only transitory peace. Somehow, when I am submerged in water, the chaos that is my mind on the surface discharges itself, and my thoughts either go flat or pattern themselves into a comprehensible order that eludes me in the air. With the pool water gently swaying my body, the crazed events of the past week begin to come clear.
I’m not alone today. A child is growing in my belly, eating what I eat, breathing my air. Being pregnant doesn’t seem as frightening down here. The child’s conception is no mystery, after all. A simple combination of carelessness and lust. Sean’s kids were gone to summer camp, his wife was visiting her mother in Florida…he stayed over at my house from a Thursday to a Sunday. By Saturday morning I’d developed cystitis from too much sex—what they called honeymoon syndrome in medical school—so I took a brief course of Cipro to cure it. The antibiotic interfered with my birth control pills, and that was that. I was “with child,” as my grandmother used to say.
The mystery is why I haven’t yet told Sean. I love him. He loves me. Up to now, we’ve shared every thought and feeling. We’ve even confessed our secrets, which was painful but the only way to maintain sanity in a relationship conducted in the shadows. There has to be some honesty amid the lies. My fear—when I’m brave enough to face it—is that Sean will think I got pregnant on purpose. That I trapped him. And even if he believes the truth, will he leave his family to be with me? Will he want to father a child with me when he already has three of his own? Sean is obsessed with his work, so much so that it takes time away from his family now. Will the fact that we could work together persuade him that our relationship could succeed if it were out in the open?
I wonder if part of my zeal for solving Sean’s cases has been an effort to make myself indispensable to him. Pathetic, if true. Yet if it is…this time I’ve failed at even that. With the NOMURS victims connected at last, finding the killer is only a matter of time. If Nathan Malik’s teeth match the bite marks on the victims’ corpses, it’s all over but the lethal injection, ten years down the road….
The idea of a psychiatrist-murderer intrigues me. There are similar cases in the literature. I wonder if Dr. Malik is aware of that. I’ve had therapists I suspected of deep-rooted weirdness. There was Dr. DeLorme, a soft-spoken psychologist of sixty whose eyes glittered whenever he questioned me about sexual matters. His best efforts went in vain, but I at least found a diversion from my problems during the sessions, by trying to read what went on behind those eyes. What would DeLorme make of my panic attacks at the crime scenes? He’d probably attribute them to my pregnancy. But I experienced the first attack two days before I discovered I was pregnant. Unless slightly elevated hormones can precipitate panic, the cause must lie elsewhere. Alcohol is another possible culprit—too much or too little—but I had the first attack while floating comfortably on Grey Goose and the second while stone sober. I’ve always suffered occasional blackouts from drinking, but never panic attacks. In fact, alcohol gives me a surplus of courage. Dutch courage, they call it in old movies.
As the level of oxygen in my tissues continues to fall, deeper questions bubble up from my subconscious. What’s the significance of rain on a tin roof? Why am I hearing that? And why at the times that I do? The only tin roof at Malmaison is on the barn my father used for a studio, and my memories of that space are so precious as to be sacred. Nothing about the barn elicits panic. And my nightmares? For years my sleep has been haunted by terrifying scenes of creatures—sometimes human, other times half human, half beast—trying to break into my house and kill me. This scenario comes in a thousand variations, all of them as “real” as my experiences in the waking world. I also have recurring dreams, as though my subconscious is trying to send me a message. Yet neither I nor my therapists have been able to decode the imagery. Two weeks ago, before my first panic attack, I began dreaming of a summer day on DeSalle Island. I’m riding in the old, round-nosed pickup truck that my grandfather used for work on the island. Grandpapa is driving, and I’m just tall enough to see over the dashboard. The truck smells of old motor oil and hand-rolled cigarettes. We’re riding across a pasture, up a gentle hill. On the other side of that hill lies a small pond where the cows drink. Each time the dream recurs, we make it a little farther up the hill. But we never reach the crest.
The glowing footprint from my bedroom fills my darkening mind. Did my eight-year-old foot leave that track? Who else could have left it? That bedroom was mine alone for sixteen years. The carpet was installed the year I was born, when the whole room was remodeled. No other child lived at Malmaison after me, and as far as I know, no other child has ever stayed in that room. The conclusion seems inescapable. But why am I using logic? The overpowering wave of déjà vu that hit me when I first saw that glowing print is all the proof I need.
That bloody track is mine.
The question is, whose blood was on my foot? My father’s? If enough genetic markers survived Natriece’s luminol bath—and if I can get a sample of my father’s DNA from somewhere—a hair from an old brush, perhaps—then a DNA test can tell me whether it was his blood or not. Big ifs. And even with my contacts at the crime labs throughout the state, a DNA comparison could take several days. In the meantime, I have only my memory—or the lack of it—to go on.
I remember almost nothing from the night my father died, nothing before I walked through the rain to the dogwood tree and saw his body lying motionless on the ground. It’s as though I simply materialized from the grass. Without my voice. And it was more than a year before I spoke again. Why? Where was I when my father died? Asleep? Or did I witness something? Something too terrible to recall, much less speak of? Pearlie knows more about that night than she’s told me. But what is she holding back? And why? Once she states something to be true, she rarely goes back and adjusts her version of events. But maybe I don’t need Pearlie. For the first time in my life, I have a witness to that night’s events that cannot conceal or distort events: blood. The oldest sign of murder, Abel’s blood crying out from the ground—
That voice is the product of five years of dive training. It tells me when I’m nearing the crisis point. The level of oxygen in my tissues has fallen to a point where most people would be unconscious. In fact, most people submerged for the length of time I have lain here would be dead by now. But I still have a margin of safety. My thoughts have condensed from a bright stream of consciousness to a single line of pulsing blue light. The message carried in that blue light has nothing to do with my past. It’s about my baby. She is here with me, cosseted in the sheltered pool of my uterus, a core organ if anything qualifies as one. Most women would excoriate me for risking my baby’s life this way. In another situation, I might do the same. But I’m not in another situation. A lot of women, finding themselves pregnant by a married man, would already have scheduled an abortion. But I haven’t done that. I will not. This is my baby, and I intend to have her. I risk her life only by risking my own. As for my motive…the pulsing blue thread of light in my mind tells me this: my baby can survive this. When we rise from this water, we will be one, and nothing Sean Regan says or does will have any power over us—
My body tenses. Opening my eyes, I see a dark figure hovering above the water. Slowly, a golden spear separates from the figure and descends toward the surface, directly above me. I shove the rock off my chest and burst up into air and light, sputtering in terror. A tall man stands at the side of the pool, a ten-foot-long net in his hands. He looks more frightened than I.
“I thought you’d drowned!” he cries. Then he blushes and turns away.
I cross my arms over my breasts, only now remembering that I went into the pool in my underwear. “Who are you? Where’s Mrs. Hemmeter?”
“Magnolia House.” He’s still looking away. “The assisted-living home. She sold the house to me. Do you want to put on some clothes?”
I kneel so that the water covers me to my neck. “I’m decent now.”
The man turns around. He has sandy brown hair and blue eyes, and he’s wearing khakis and a blue button-down oxford shirt. Several tongue suppressors protrude from his shirt pocket. He looks to be in his early thirties, and something about him strikes me as familiar.
“Do I know you?” I ask.
He smiles. “Do you?”
I study him but can’t make the connection. “I do. Or I did.”
“I’m Michael Wells.”
“Oh my God! Michael? I didn’t—”
“Didn’t recognize me, I know. I’ve lost eighty pounds in the last two years.”
I survey him from head to toe. It’s difficult to reconcile what I see before me with my memories of high school, but there’s just enough of the old Michael left to recognize. It’s like meeting a man in the real world whom you first encountered as a cancer patient on steroid therapy—bloated and soft then, but now miraculously recovered, healthy and hard.
“My God, you look…well, hot.”
Michael’s blush returns, redder than before. “Thanks, Cat.”
He was three years ahead of me at St. Stephen’s, then at the University Medical Center in Jackson. “Did you stick with pediatrics?” I ask, searching my mind for details.
He nods. “I was practicing in North Carolina, but St. Catherine’s Hospital came up and recruited me. This town was desperate for more pediatricians.”
“Well, I’m glad you came back. You own this house now?”
“Yep.”
“I used to swim here all the time.”
He smiles. “Mrs. Hemmeter told me.”
“Did she? Well, do you like it? The house, I mean.”
“I do. I like being at the back of the neighborhood. It’s no Malmaison, of course.”
“Be glad it’s not. You don’t want the upkeep on that place.”
“I can imagine. Did you ever live anywhere else in Natchez?”
“No. My dad came back from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder. He couldn’t hold a job, so my mom came home from college, and they moved into one of the slave quarters. I was born four years later. We never left after that.”
“What did your father do before the war?”
“He was a welder.”
“Is that where his sculpting came from?”
“Yes.” I’m surprised Michael remembers that. After two years of wandering the woods and watching television, my dad fired up his welding equipment and began sculpting metal. In the beginning he produced huge, horrid pieces—Asian demons cut from steel and iron—but as time passed, his work mellowed and became quite popular with some collectors.
“Is that a rock down there?” Michael asks, pointing into the water.
“Yes. Your rock. I used it to keep me submerged. I’m a free diver.”
“What’s that?”
“I dive deep in the ocean using only the air in my lungs.”
Michael looks intrigued. “How deep?”
“I’ve been to three hundred and fifty feet.”
“Jesus! I scuba dive a little, and I’ve only been to ninety feet with tanks.”
“I use a weighted sled to help me get down quickly.”
“That’s one extreme sport I’ve never heard of.”
“It’s pretty intense. As solitary as you can be on this planet, I think.”
He squats beside the pool, his eyes filled with curiosity. “Do you like that? Solitude, I mean?”
“Sometimes. Other times I can’t stand to be alone. Literally.”
“I learned to fly five years ago. I’ve got a little Cessna 210 out at the airport. That’s where I get my solitude.”
“Well, there you go. Flying scares me to death. If I got into your Cessna, I’d need a doggie bag in the first two minutes.”
Michael laughs and blushes at the same time. “You’re just trying to save my pride.”
“I’m not. Flying scares me, especially small planes.” I look toward the trees that conceal Malmaison. “Have you met my grandfather yet?”
He smiles in a way that’s hard to read. “The lord of the manor? Yeah. He still comes to the occasional staff meeting at the hospital, even though he’s more of a wheeler-dealer than a surgeon these days, from what I hear.”
“For a lot of years now. By the time he was forty, surgery was just a prestige hobby for him.”
Michael glances toward the woods, as though my grandfather might be watching us. “I saw him out running one day. He didn’t recognize me. I tell you, he’s a tough old man. He’s what, seventy?”
“Seventy-seven.”
“God. He can run me into the ground. And he doesn’t have that old-man jog, either, you know? He runs.”
“He’s strong.”
“I haven’t seen him much lately. He’s apparently out of town a lot.” Michael bends and dips his hand into the pool. “There’s a rumor that he’s buying up most of downtown Natchez.”
“What?”
“When the paper mill closed, the real estate market here crashed. But then a front company started buying up downtown by the block. Like it’s boom times again. Word is, the front company is really your grandfather.”
I can’t fit this into my frame of reference about my grandfather. “Why would he do that? Where’s the profit in it?”
This time Michael shrugs. “Nobody seems to know. But some people say he has some grand plan to save the city.”
I shake my head. “He’s always done a lot for the town, but that seems a bit crazy, given the local economy.”
“Maybe he knows something we don’t.”
“He always does.”
We look at each other without speaking. Michael doesn’t feel compelled to fill every silence, as some men do. But then this is his property. I’m the interloper.
“You know I didn’t finish med school, right?” I say cautiously.
“I heard.”
“What did you hear?”
He replies in a neutral tone, careful to keep any judgment out of his voice. “Depressi
on. Nervous breakdown. The usual.”
“Nothing else?”
“Something about an affair with an attending physician. Or a professor, something. He flipped out over you and lost his job, you got booted, something like that. I don’t care much about gossip. Everybody’s got a past.”
I smile. “Do you?”
“Sure.” He chuckles softly. “Maybe not as colorful as yours.”
We both laugh.
“I had a terrible crush on you in high school,” he says. “I have to tell you that. I didn’t have the nerve to back then. The most beautiful girl at St. Stephen’s…my God.”
“And now I’m standing in your swimming pool in my underwear. How do I look?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. I’m surprised by the anxiety I feel about his answer. Why do I care so much what a virtual stranger thinks?
“You haven’t changed at all,” Michael says.
“Now I know you’re lying. You should have told me about the crush back then.”
He shakes his head. “Nah. You only dated jocks or bad boys.”
“What were you?”
“The chubby geek. You know that.”
I don’t insult him by arguing. “You seem to have reinvented yourself.”
He nods, his eyes reflective. “Sometimes you have to. It’s not easy, either.”
“You’re married, of course.”
“Nope. One girlfriend all the way through med school, but we ended up splitting.”
“You must be the most eligible bachelor in Natchez.”
Michael expels a lungful of air with obvious frustration. “The local matrons and divorcées certainly treat me that way. It’s a new reality for me.”
My cell phone rings in my jeans pocket on the side of the pool. I slide over to it on my knees and check the screen. My mother is calling again.
“Mom?”
“I’m home now, Cat. Where are you?”
“Swimming at the Hemmeters’ house.”