by Greg Iles
First principles, he told himself. What has been the result of Eve’s words and actions? She’s thrown a levelheaded man into a state of emotional disarray. How can she benefit from that? Who else might benefit? Waters wasn’t presently involved in business negotiations that would suffer due to a lack of concentration on his part. But perhaps Eve had only begun her campaign to disrupt his life. Maybe her ultimate goal was to draw him into an affair, then blackmail him. It seemed a great deal of trouble to go to, particularly since he stood to lose his fortune if the EPA investigation went against his company. But maybe she knew nothing about that.
And where had Eve gotten the intimate details of his old life? Given all she’d said, he half expected the background investigation to reveal some familial relation to Mallory. If none existed, Eve would almost have to have gotten her information from someone like Cole, or-
Waters blinked in the darkness.
Cole. Cole had known about Soon. He knew other things too. He knew Waters had first slept with Mallory on a camping trip at Sardis Reservoir. They had been roommates at the time. What else had Waters confided in the excitement of college love? And what had Cole confided to Eve? He’d already admitted they’d slept together. She’s a hell of a lay, but too twisted for me…. Watch out…She’s always looking for advantage. Reminds me a little of me…. Waters swallowed and tried to figure out what motive Cole could possibly have to give Eve private information about him. Maybe he was just drunk and answered anything she asked him. But that was unlikely, given the intimate nature of her knowledge. Try as he might, Waters could come up with nothing. Cole’s fortunes depended on his partner remaining sane and healthy enough to keep finding oil-end of story.
Lily’s snores stopped with a gasp, then resumed at a higher decibel level. Waters could stay in bed no longer. He got up and padded into the kitchen in his boxers, more awake than he’d felt in years. His mind and body thrummed as though rushing on the pure cocaine he’d snorted with Sara on the slope of a volcano in Ecuador. His blood was singing. And he knew why. The strange encounters with Eve had stirred his long-suppressed desire, and like a bear waking from hibernation, that desire would not return to sleep. It stretched and breathed, feeling its power, and beneath that power a hunger that had grown steadily through the long night of winter.
Almost before he knew what he was doing, he lifted a phone book from Lily’s alcove and looked up Eve’s number. He found two listed: work and home. The kitchen clock read 3:40 A.M. He looked at the phone but did not touch it. Yet some part of him knew that Eve was waiting at the other end for the connection to be made. Sleeping perhaps, but waiting still. The soft ring would come, and before it faded, the phone would be in her hand, her voice already weaving its spell.
Waters left the alcove and walked to the marble-topped island where Annelise’s schoolbooks awaited her. School, he thought. Where we learn to read and write and add and subtract while learning subtler but more important lessons: how to speak and listen, how to lie and tell the truth, how to honor and betray, how to strive, to whisper, to hold hands, to kiss, to insist and evade, to make love, to marry, to honor and again betray-
“Jesus,” he muttered, feeling his mind slipping off its tracks. He went to the laundry room and pulled a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the wicker basket. He slipped the jeans over his boxers, put on the T-shirt, then laced on the running shoes he kept by the back door. This time of night, Lily slept too soundly to hear him start the Land Cruiser, but just in case, he scribbled a note saying he was going to Wal-Mart for some ice cream. Then he grabbed his keys, wallet, and cell phone and went out the front door.
The streets of Natchez were deserted at this hour. He drove slowly down Main Street, past the Eola Hotel and his office, then turned onto Broadway and coasted down the long precipitous drop of Silver Street to the river. The Under-the-Hill Saloon was shut tight, but the Steamboat Casino threw a garish Las Vegas light over the water, and a few rumpled patrons stumbled along the gangplank toward the shore. Waters accelerated up the sweeping lane that led back up the bluff, then turned right onto Canal and headed toward the bypass.
To honor and betray…Eve Sumner no longer filled his mind; memories of Mallory had driven her out. Waters’s relationship with Mallory had been born from a double betrayal: one of a friend, the other of a lover. During his sophomore year of college, he’d been home for a weekend in mid-October, when the sun still burned down like summer. He was dating a sophomore from Tulane, a Natchez girl who had graduated St. Stephens a year ahead of Cole. They’d been invited to the home-estate, really-of a young local internist, Dr. David Denton, for a Sunday picnic. Through several unusual connections, Waters knew Denton well. Waters’s mother worked as a receptionist for Denton’s older partner, but their real bond had grown through baseball. During Waters’s senior year of high school, when his team made a run for the state championship, Denton went along as an unofficial coach. Fifteen years earlier, David Denton had been the star third baseman for the St. Stephens state championship team, and since Waters played third base, they spent many hours together. Waters missed his father badly, and his association with the young doctor had helped him with a lot more than baseball. Some people thought Denton arrogant, but Waters respected him, and always looked forward to seeing him.
When Waters and his date arrived at Denton’s house that Sunday, they did not find the large party they expected. They found two blankets laid out with food worthy of a five-star restaurant, and no people in sight. As they tried to figure out what was going on, two figures walked out of Denton’s stables. One was the doctor himself, tall and handsome at thirty-six; the other was Mallory Candler, twenty years old and as beautiful as any woman Waters had ever seen. Waters’s date squealed, ran over to Mallory, and gave her an exaggerated hug. Though Mallory attended Ole Miss and she Tulane, they belonged to the same sorority. Waters would later learn that Mallory had no close female friends, but other women were always drawn to her, as though to learn the secrets of her remarkable self-possession.
Hiding his shock at the age difference, Waters shook hands with Denton and sat down to eat. Because of Mallory’s beauty, he expected her to reveal herself as the vapid creature many Ole Miss sorority girls turned out to be, but he was surprised. She did not gossip or squeal; she conversed with erudition on politics, religion, literature, and sex. Denton was clearly enamored with her, and he seemed amused by Mallory’s attempts to draw Waters out during the afternoon. When they went riding, Mallory cantered alongside Waters while Denton lectured on the lineage of his horses, and all the while Waters felt her appraising him: the way he talked, moved, handled his horse.
When they retired to the house for late-afternoon drinks, Waters’s date asked him to play the grand piano in Denton’s living room. With half a bottle of pinot noir in him, Waters agreed. He had never taken formal lessons, but his mother was a fine pianist and he had been blessed to inherit her ear. He ran through a few songs from the period-mostly Elton John and Billy Joel-singing in a voice made confident by wine, and Denton professed amazement that a third baseman could do anything requiring that much talent. Only Mallory did not compliment his playing, but when Waters glanced up from the keyboard, he saw that she had been profoundly affected by his performance.
During one song, the phone rang, and Denton took the call. Holding the phone against his chest, he told them that Mallory’s ride back to Ole Miss was leaving, and would be by to pick her up in fifteen minutes. Clearly unhappy, Denton asked Waters how he was getting back to school. Waters explained he was driving back in his drafty thirdhand Triumph convertible. Would he mind, Denton asked, driving Mallory back so that they could continue their evening? In that moment, Waters had a sense of massive stones sliding into place somewhere, and he saw a glint in Mallory Candler’s eye that he would see many times over the next two years.
No, he replied. I wouldn’t mind at all….
Denton treated them all to dinner at a restaurant on the bluff, and then it w
as time to begin the five-hour journey back to Oxford. In the parking lot of the restaurant, Waters’s date climbed into the doctor’s BMW, and Mallory crammed her suitcase into the trunk of Waters’s TR-6, a symbolic switching of partners that gave Waters a chill.
They began the ride in silence, and the silence lasted forty miles. Occasionally he or Mallory would glance over the console, but their eyes did not meet. Then-at the turn for the northbound interstate-they shared a gaze during which a full conversation took place without words. With Ole Miss still four hours away, Mallory entwined her hand in his and began to talk.
She spoke first of Dr. Denton, how she had accepted his request for a date to prove that “age was no big thing” to her, and also because he was a close friend of her parents. She’d continued dating him because it was fun to shock people and because she liked watching how far Denton would go to win her approval. But he was more a businessman than a physician, she said, and she knew she could never be with “someone like that.” She asked Waters about his relationship with her Tulane sorority sister, and he was cautiously frank. He was sleeping with her, and they had agreed not to see other people. Mallory asked about his family but confided little about her own. She wondered aloud how they had lived in the same town for so long without more than a cursory acquaintance. Waters pointed out that she had attended preppy St. Stephens, while he’d graduated from public school “with the blacks.” Mallory made light of this difference, but that was easy to do when you were from the rich side of the tracks.
Soon she was asking Waters about his dreams, his thoughts on God, his sexual history. As for her own past, she professed one “serious” relationship in high school with an older boy who had known nothing beyond “basic high school football player stuff,” and another in college during which she’d done a lot of experimenting. Her relations with Dr. Denton had not progressed to intercourse; the age difference made him especially solicitous of her, and she’d taken advantage of that. By the time they hit Oxford-at 3:00 A.M.-Mallory said there was really no point in going to sleep. Better to push through till morning and do Monday classes on adrenaline.
Instead of driving to campus, Waters drove out to Sardis Reservoir, a massive, man-made lake held in check by a three-mile-long dam. At one end of the dam was a single-outlet spillway, where a juggernaut of water thirty feet thick blasted through the concrete with earth-shaking force and spent itself in a rocky channel. A narrow catwalk crossed above this spillway, where you could stand above the thundering jet and feel the spray swirl around you like gravity-defying rain as the primal roar filled first your ears and then your mind.
On this catwalk Mallory took Waters’s face in her hands and kissed him with infinitely more passion than he had known in his nineteen years. When she pulled back, he looked into her bottomless green eyes and knew that he was lost. He had a sense of being chosen-by her and also by something greater, something unknowable, the same amorphous force he had felt when Denton asked if he would drive Mallory back to Ole Miss. A sense that his destiny, whatever that might be, was gathering itself around him at last.
After the kiss, they walked hand in hand back to the car. Waters drove back to the campus, but when they reached the sorority house, Mallory simply shook her head. He needed no prompting. He drove to an empty athletic field on a hill above his dorm and parked the convertible in the predawn darkness. Mallory lay across him, and he leaned down to her uplifted face. In the timeless hour that followed, his hands never went below her waist, but the two of them left the physical domain of that car as surely as if they had lifted into the dark with wings. He sensed in Mallory a sexuality of limitless scope, like a man looking through an open door at a closed one, yet sensing that behind that door lay still another, an endless succession of doors, each concealing its own mystery, each mystery folding into another, the inmost circle unreachable, impenetrable, an essentially feminine core that he had no choice but to try to reach and understand.
Waters went through the next day in a trance, wondering if Mallory had felt what he had, whether she had seen that night as a beginning or merely an interesting Sunday diversion for a beautiful woman with nothing better to do. At four that afternoon, his telephone rang. Mallory had slept through all her classes, but she wanted to see him again. His exhaustion left him in a moment. They spent most of that night together, watching a movie, eating dinner, driving for miles, talking, and then not talking.
In the span of two weeks, they became inseparable. A wild euphoria permeated their days, yet it was shadowed by an unspoken reality. Mallory was still technically dating Dr. Denton, and Waters, the girl from Tulane. For this reason, and others, they kept to themselves much of the time, and stopped their impassioned couplings short of intercourse. But by the end of the first month, it was becoming difficult to restrain themselves. One rainy night in Waters’s dorm room, Mallory straddled him, took him in her hand, and guided him to her opening. She started to sit, moaned softly, then sobbed once and got off the bed. While he stared in confusion, she pulled on her jeans and ran from the room. Waters put on his pants and gave chase. By the time he reached the door of the dormitory, Mallory was running up the hill toward the library, her hair flying behind her in the rain. Barefoot, he sprinted after her, dodging cars to cross the road, finally coming within earshot on the library lawn. Under foot-high letters trumpeting Faulkner’s assertion that man would not merely endure but prevail, he screamed for her to stop. When she turned, he saw that her eyes were not red from tears, but filled with wild joy.
“Do you love me?” she cried.
“What?”
“Do you love me?”
He stood there in the rain, knowing only that he could not stand to be physically apart from this woman. “Yes,” he replied.
“What?”
“I love you!”
She came back to him and kissed him, and then the tears did come. After a time she dragged him toward the library door.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Just inside the doors were two pay phones. Mallory lifted a receiver and handed it to him.
“Who am I calling?”
“You know.”
And then he did. She wanted him to call his girlfriend at Tulane and break off the relationship. He hesitated only a moment. He told the girl he was finding a long-distance relationship too hard to sustain. She asked tearfully if he had met someone, and he said yes. When she asked who, he looked at Mallory, and for the first time she looked uncertain. Waters lied and said he’d met someone from another state. As they spoke, he felt strangely detached, as though discussing the death of a distant relative, but as he hung up, he felt angry. He handed Mallory the phone.
“Do you want me to call David?” she asked.
“You’re damn right.”
She bit her bottom lip, then took the receiver and started to dial his number.
“Wait,” he said.
“Why?” She kept dialing. “You’re not sure?”
“I’m sure about you. About how I feel. But…telling David is different from what I just did.”
She looked intrigued. “How?”
“He’s a friend of mine…of my mother’s. Of your parents. My brother’s supposed to work for him next summer, for God’s sake. Taking care of his horses.”
Mallory nodded. “I know all that.”
“Is he in love with you?”
“He says he is.”
“Shit.”
She laid a hand over his and looked deep into his eyes. “I’m ready, if you think I should.”
“You should do it face-to-face.”
She hung up the phone. “This weekend. There’s a big party at his house.”
His anger took him by surprise. “You didn’t tell me that. You were going home this weekend? To see him?”
“No. I wasn’t going to go.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her.
“You should come too, John.”
“No, I s
houldn’t. Besides, I wasn’t invited.”
“You weren’t?” Her eyes narrowed. “That’s weird. A lot of college people are going.”
A shiver of apprehension went through him. “Jesus. You think David’s heard something?”
Mallory shrugged. “We haven’t been as careful as we should have been. And there are only, what, like five hundred students here from Natchez?”
He nodded, wondering if David Denton already saw him as a son of a bitch.
“You should come anyway,” Mallory told him. “It’s a masquerade party. For Halloween. No one will know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Sometimes I think so. You really should come though.” She laughed and hugged him tight. “In fact, I’m not going unless you do.”
So he went. Mallory rented him a Sir Lancelot costume in Memphis, and three nights later he walked into David Denton’s house wearing a visored metal helmet. If anyone asked who he was, he planned to say he was Cole Smith. Cole had been invited to the party but had chosen to go deer hunting instead (which struck Waters as hilarious now). There were between eighty and a hundred masked guests, so remaining incognito turned out to be no problem. People drank in grand Natchez style, and dancers spilled from Denton’s great room onto the huge stone patio behind his house.
Mallory had come as a ballerina, with a white tulle skirt blossoming over her leotard and a glittering mask adorned with pearls. Her regal bearing and fluid dance style drew the eyes of everyone, and Denton-dressed as Louis XIV-almost never left her side. Waters watched them dance from a distance, mingling with people who didn’t know him well. Mallory seemed to be having the time of her life, and after an hour-and three stiff drinks-he began to feel resentful. Mallory had asked him to the party, even rented his costume, yet she acted as if he weren’t there. He was at the point of doing something monumentally stupid-like asking her to dance-when he realized he’d lost sight of her. Suddenly, a hand squeezed his behind.