by Greg Iles
“Feeling neglected?”
He was almost sure the person whispering in his ear was Mallory. Reaching back, he felt the tulle skirt and pinched her thigh hard enough to hurt. He heard a laugh and another whisper: “Meet me behind the stables.”
He slipped outside as quickly as he could and made his way across the lawn to Denton’s capacious stables. He waited in the dark with the smell of hay and horses, wondering if Mallory would be able to get away without Denton noticing. Suddenly, a white apparition materialized out of the night, floating toward him as though borne on the wind.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” he hissed as she neared him.
Mallory pulled up her mask and smiled mischievously. “Do you want to talk or do you want to kiss me?”
He pushed her against the stable wall and kissed her, and in seconds they were panting in the dark.
“Have you told David anything?”
She shook her head. “I’m going to do it after. When everyone’s gone.”
He kissed her again. Her fingers dug into his back, then raked around his ribs to his chest. He wanted her badly, but he could almost see Denton searching the house for her now.
“You’d better get back.”
She nodded and put a finger to his lips. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
She smiled knowingly, then put her mask back on, slid to her knees, and lifted the tunic of his knight’s costume. He sucked in his breath when she took him into her mouth, then closed his eyes and tried to stay silent as she went to work with feverish intensity. Once, he thought he heard voices nearby, but when he touched Mallory’s head to warn her, she slapped his hand away and continued with more fervor. Seconds later he cried out and started to push her away, but she grabbed his wrists and finished while music and laughter echoed across the lawn and horses stamped in their stables and he shuddered in the dark.
She rose to her feet, her eyes twinkling. “Better now?”
Without waiting for an answer, she kissed him, then took off across the lawn, the tulle skirt trailing after her like a fallen angel’s wings.
When Waters returned to the party, Mallory was dancing with Denton on the patio. Through the mesh of her skirt he saw two oblong grass stains on her knees, but no one else seemed to notice. He went inside for another drink.
All masks were to be removed at midnight. At five ’til, someone turned off the stereo, and Waters prepared to slip out a side door. Before he could, he heard someone ask Denton to play his piano. The doctor looked thoughtfully at the Kawai concert grand and said, “I wish Johnny Waters was here. I thought that kid couldn’t play anything but third base, but he’s a genius on piano.”
“Why didn’t you invite him?” Mallory asked casually.
“I meant to. It just slipped my mind. I’ll remember next time.”
A wave of guilt surged through Waters, and instead of leaving, he signaled Mallory to follow him down the hall to the bathroom. When she did, he pulled her inside and said, “Don’t tell him tonight.”
She shook her head. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“You still want to?”
“No. But we’re just putting off the inevitable.”
“I know, but…Look, just do whatever feels right to you.”
Mallory nodded and went back to the main room, where guests were beginning to remove their masks and pop the corks on champagne bottles. Waters stole a last glance at Mallory and Denton at the center of the crowd, then faded through the garage door, more confused than he’d been in a long time.
At 2:00 A.M., Mallory knocked at his window, and he learned that she hadn’t told Denton anything. Thus began a two-month period of secrecy that nearly caused both of them to fail the semester. When they returned to Ole Miss, they camped for a weekend at Sardis and made love for the first time. But they did not go out together in public. They frequently drove the hour to Memphis to avoid prying eyes, and even there they spent most of their time in hotel rooms. When they returned to Natchez for the Thanksgiving holiday, Mallory accepted only one date with Denton, and that night she made excuses and went home early, so that later-as she had every other night-she could slip out to meet Waters and make love in his car. It was a ridiculous situation, but Waters couldn’t bear the idea of hurting the man who had helped him so unselfishly during high school. Beyond this, he knew that Mallory’s parents would be enraged when they learned she had cheated on their ideal suitor to “go in the street” with a boy from the wrong side of town. But as the Christmas holidays approached, Natchez students started to gossip at Ole Miss, and it was only a matter of time before Denton heard what was going on.
It took an almost unbearable irony to bring things to a head. Three days before Christmas, Denton called Waters and asked him to accompany him to an antebellum home to look at a piano. The doctor was thinking of buying an antique Bosendorfer brought from Berlin to Natchez during the 1850s. Driven by a desire to maintain the illusion of normalcy-and not least by morbid curiosity-Waters agreed. As he and Denton examined the piano and discovered dry rot inside, Denton asked him what he thought of Mallory Candler. Waters swallowed and said he thought she was a “great girl,” which was the ultimate Ole Miss stamp of approval. Did Waters see Mallory much in Oxford? With his nerves stretched to maximum tension, Waters replied that it was a small school, and everyone saw everyone pretty regularly. Denton said he was only asking because Mallory had been acting a bit distant, but he thought he knew the reason. Mallory Candler was the kind of girl who didn’t get too involved with a man unless she knew the relationship was more than a passing affair. Then he smiled and confided that he planned to ask her to marry him on Christmas Eve. She was a little young, Denton conceded, but Mallory’s father was all for it, and he was sure Mallory would be too. As Waters sat frozen, his heart thundering in his chest, Denton said he’d just wanted to make sure he wasn’t reading Mallory wrong, that there wasn’t another man in her life. Waters almost confessed everything then, but he stopped himself. That was Mallory’s duty, not his. Besides, if Denton was considering a marriage proposal, maybe Mallory had been encouraging him more than she let on to Waters.
When Waters recounted this conversation to Mallory, she turned white. That night, she went to Denton’s house and told him she was in love with another man. Yes, it was someone he knew. She elided some details, such as the rendezvous behind the stables, but for the most part she told him everything. At two that morning, Waters, his mother, and his brother awoke to a pounding on their front door. Waters answered in his underwear, and found a drunken David Denton on the front porch, his BMW idling in the street behind him. Denton greeted Mrs. Waters with a rant against her “worthless” son, and Waters asked her to go back to bed. He listened to Denton’s railing for as long as he could. Then he looked at the doctor and said, “David, I’m sorry it happened the way it did. We should have told you from the start. But the woman chooses in these things. Okay? The woman chooses, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
“You could have done the decent thing!” Denton yelled. “You could have been a friend! And if not that, you could at least be a goddamn gentleman!”
This wounded Waters deeply, but he’d only begun to wallow in his guilt when Denton added, “I should have known better though. You’re no gentleman. You’re trash. That’s why you live over here with the rest of the goddamn trash. I ought to kick your ass.”
All his guilt forgotten, Waters clenched his quivering hands into fists. In his mind he saw his father, and he felt as though Denton had just called his father trash. In a barely audible voice he said, “Go ahead, if you think you can. But you’d better be ready to kill me.”
Denton took a wild swing, and Waters easily ducked it.
“You’re drunk, David,” he said, trying to restrain himself.
Denton punched him in the stomach. As Waters drew back his fist to throw a punishing right, he saw his mother sil
houetted in the window behind him.
“Go home!” he shouted. “And don’t come back!”
Denton blinked in confusion, mumbled something unintelligible, then turned around and stumbled back to his BMW, cursing and sobbing as he went. When Waters walked back inside, his mother shook her head.
“Is this over that Candler girl?” she asked, her face tight and vulnerable without makeup.
Waters nodded.
“She’s no good, John. I know you won’t listen to me, but that girl’s not right, not for you or anybody else.”
He asked what his mother knew about Mallory, but she just turned away and went back to bed. That night was the beginning of his public relationship with Mallory, a brief window of bliss during which all seemed golden, when the horrors to come still lay out of sight.
Now-driving down the deserted road by the paper mill-he thought again of Mallory at Denton’s party, but this time, when she pulled down her mask by the stables, he saw not her face but Eve Sumner’s. He tried to push the image from his mind, but the harder he tried, the clearer Eve became. He could not see Mallory’s face. It made him crazy, like trying to remember the name of a familiar actor whose face was right in front of him on television. Frustration built in him with manic intensity, like the feedback loops he’d read about in obsessive-compulsive people. He had to see Mallory’s face.
He swung onto Lower Woodville Road and sped up to sixty. He kept a rented storeroom less than a mile away, a climate-controlled cubicle filled with furniture and boxes from his mother’s house and his own. His mother saved everything, and somewhere in that cubicle was a footlocker containing whatever junk was left from his Ole Miss days.
He turned into the storage company lot, punched a code into the security gate, and parked by a long aluminum building. The room was near the end of the inside corridor, the PIN code for its lock his social security number. When he opened the door, the musty smell surprised him, but he felt for the light switch, flicked it, and went inside.
Furniture and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Plastic bags held old clothes-some his father’s-and broken lamps sat on all available flat surfaces. Even his father’s old power tools were here, saved like the instruments of a renowned surgeon. Another time, Waters might have stopped to go through some of the stuff, but tonight there was only one thing on his mind.
He found the old footlocker behind some boxes of books. It wasn’t locked, and he tore open the lid like a heart-attack victim searching for nitroglycerin. Here lay several chapters of his past, deposited in no particular order and with no particular intent. He found football programs, grade reports, the tassel from his graduation cap, love letters with a rubber band around them, geological specimens, a guitar pick from a Jimmy Buffett concert, a box of snapshots from Ole Miss and another from his summers working the pipeline in Alaska. He was about to go through the photos when he saw a banded portfolio near the bottom. Something clicked in his mind. Inside the portfolio he found everything dating from the time he spent with Mallory-everything that had survived, anyway. At some point he must have grouped it all together, but he didn’t remember doing it.
The first thing he saw was a copy of the campus newspaper, the Daily Mississippian, with Mallory Candler filling most of the front page. MISS UNIVERSITY 1982! proclaimed the headline. ON TO MISS MISSISSIPPI PAGEANT? asked a smaller font. Below the type, Mallory stood facing the camera with a dozen roses, flashing her megawatt smile and wearing a sequined gown that could have been made for Grace Kelly. The instant Waters saw her face, Eve vanished from his mind. Eve Sumner had the sensual but not uncommon gifts of good bones, good tits, and sultry eyes. Mallory’s beauty was the once-in-a-decade sort, her features drawn from and sharing in some portion of eternity. As he lifted the newspaper to look for other photos, the cell phone in his pocket rang, startling him. When he answered, he heard Lily’s worried voice.
“I woke up and found you gone,” she said sleepily. “Are you still at Wal-Mart?”
“I didn’t go to Wal-Mart.”
Silence. “Where are you?”
“I went for a ride. I couldn’t sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
Mallory stared out of the newspaper photograph with eerie vitality. “I don’t know. The dry hole…the EPA thing.”
“Come home, and I’ll make some coffee. It’s five a.m., John.”
“All right.”
He hung up but did not stand. Even when reduced to a millimeter-thick sheet of paper, Mallory seemed more alive than the people he saw in town every day. He shook his head. If anyone in that audience on that night had known what was going on behind those hypnotic green eyes, they would have left the auditorium in shock. But of course they hadn’t. No one had, except John Waters. He started to fold the newspaper and bring it with him, but then he slid it back into the portfolio and carried the portfolio out to the Land Cruiser. Lily never drove the SUV. He could leave the portfolio under its seat with no worries. And if he got the desperate feeling that he could not recall Mallory’s face, all he’d have to do was pull it out and look at her picture.
Waters had driven most of the way home when a blue dashboard light flashed and swirled wildly in his rearview mirror. Though reminded of Eve’s rape story, he pulled over, rolled down his window, and waited. He heard heavy footsteps, and then a man said, “John? You’re out kind of early, pardner. Or is it late?”
The speaker was Detective Tom Jackson, the man who’d arrested Danny Buckles the day before.
“Hey, Tom. Was I speeding?”
Jackson stopped at Waters’s window and gave him a friendly nod. “No, I just recognized your vehicle. I wanted to make sure you were okay. All that molestation stuff yesterday…I know it’s tough to deal with.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t sleep. I’m just doing some thinking.”
Jackson gave him a sympathetic smile. “Your little girl okay?”
“Oh, yeah. She took it better than I thought she would.”
“Good. You know, it looks like the guy didn’t touch the girls at all. He just did some looking, exposed himself, that kind of thing.”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah.” The detective sniffed and looked up the road. In the darkness, his size and his cowboy mustache gave him the look of a Frederic Remington bronze. “Well,” he said, looking back at Waters. “You have a good day, John. Try to get some sleep. You look like you need some.”
“I will. Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Waters drove away slowly, wondering how long Jackson had been following him.
Chapter 7
“I got a preliminary report on Eve Sumner,” Cole said, setting down his morning cup of coffee. “You want to hear it?”
Waters put down his briefcase, sat in a leather chair, and looked around Cole’s one-room shrine to the Ole Miss Rebels.
“You look like shit,” Cole said.
“I didn’t sleep much. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“Eve was born Evie Ray Sumner in St. Joseph, Louisiana, in 1970.” Cole read from a faxed page. “Sounds right for St. Joe, doesn’t it? Evie Ray?”
Waters nodded. St. Joe was a center of cotton and soybean farming, an hour north of Natchez.
“She got knocked up when she was fifteen and had an abortion in Baton Rouge.”
“How did they find that out?”
Cole shrugged. “Made some calls, I guess. Old friends talk. For money, anyway.”
Waters felt more than a little sleazy to be funding that sort of muckraking. But he had to know about her.
“Evie graduated St. Joe High at seventeen. Salutatorian, if you can believe it. She lit out for Los Angeles, married a cop, got pregnant, and split town six months later. May have been some spousal abuse involved. She came back to Louisiana to have the kid, and her mother mostly raised it. Evie enrolled in Hinds Junior College and spent her time dating jocks. She didn’t graduate. She did try about eight different lines of work. Beauty school, para
legal school, massage therapist, you name it. Nothing worked out for long. Then she came to Natchez and got a job as a dealer on the casino boat. She studied nights for her real estate license, then went to work for Hubert Hartley’s company. After a year, she was leading salesman, or salesperson, whatever. Then she went out on her own.”
“Any evidence of mental illness? Depression? Suicide attempts?”
“Nothing they could find. And I myself would class Evie as irritatingly sane. You want them to keep looking?”
“Keep looking. What about Mallory’s murder?”
“We’ve got copies of all the newspaper stories coming FedEx. The law firm is trying to set up a call between you and the lead homicide detective on the case.”
“Good.”
Cole put down the papers and sipped his coffee. “John, what are you going to ask this detective if he does call?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Okay. So…are you going to tell me what happened after you stormed out of here yesterday?”
Cole had called twice last night to ask that question, but Waters and Lily had been in tense discussion, and he hadn’t answered the phone. Now, recalling the crazy conversation at the cemetery and the kiss, he didn’t want to answer at all. If he told that story with a straight face, Cole would think he’d lost his mind.
“It’s no big thing. Eve warned me about Danny Buckles. I checked it out. I don’t know how she knew about it, but she did a good thing. There’s some connection between her and Buckles, and I’m trying to find out what it is.”
“I haven’t heard Evie’s name in any of the rumors,” Cole said. “Did you tell the cops she was the one who warned you?”
“No.”
“I see. And that’s no big thing.”
Waters sighed and looked out the picture window at the sweeping vista of the rust-colored river below.
Cole’s chair groaned in protest as he heaved his bulk forward and dropped his heavy hand on the desktop to get Waters’s attention. “John? It’s never a good idea to keep things from your partner.”