by Greg Iles
“I hear Mike’s done a fantastic job of restoration,” Lily said, referring to Dunleith’s new owner, a coowner 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 formfitting 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 toward 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 somone’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 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.”