by Greg Iles
Waters gave him a hard look. “I agree. Let’s start with you. You have anything you want to tell me?”
Cole rolled his eyes. “Look, I just don’t want you to get in trouble. Sailing the strange river is always murky waters. And you don’t have any experience at that kind of navigation.”
“I’m fine.”
“Great. Well…Evie’s been around. If you’re going to do it, double up.”
“Double up?”
“Wear two pairs of gloves.”
“Ahh.” Cole’s practicality surprised him.
“How’s Annelise doing? The Danny Buckles thing mess her up?”
“No. She didn’t go into that closet or anything.”
“Good. You know, there’s already a couple of lawsuits coming out of that.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“No, but if we don’t hurry up and sell another deal, I’m going to wish I was representing one of the plaintiffs.”
This was as good an opening as Waters was likely to get to question Cole about his financial problems, but for once he wasn’t in the mood. “I’ve got a couple of prospects in West Feliciana Parish that look good. One’s a close-in deal. If you really want to sell something, I could probably have that ready in a week.”
Cole’s face lit up. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“You been holding back on me, Rock!”
Waters stood. “I’m going to my office to do some mapping on it right now.”
Cole grinned. “Don’t let me stop you. Get Evie Ray’s ass off your mind and start thinking crude oil. I’ll have lunch sent to your office.”
Waters took an envelope from his pocket and laid it on Cole’s desk. Inside was a check for fifty thousand dollars.
“That’s what we talked about yesterday.”
Cole started to reach for the envelope, then seemed to think better of it. “John…”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in a while.” He picked up his briefcase and went down the hall to his door.
Entering his own space was a relief after Cole’s chaotic office. When they remodeled the two-story warehouse, Waters had taken the office with the most frontage on the bluff. Now he had two massive windows that gave an unsurpassed view of the Mississippi River, and unlike Cole, he had planned his sanctum sanctorum around it. He’d even added an outdoor balcony, fighting the Historical Preservation Commission all the way.
People were always surprised by the modernity of the room, but living in an antebellum home was all the nostalgia Waters could stand. During his years of postgraduate work-often living in tents on volcanic slopes-he had learned an economy of materials that stayed with him to this day. He liked his lines clean and sharp, his artificial lighting indirect, his corners empty. Four large skylights allowed natural light to fall onto the original heart pine floors, and tasteful displays of rare rocks in unexpected places gave a zenlike quality to the space. Each geological specimen represented a chapter in his life, and each had two provenances: one that chronicled its origin and life, and covered millions of years; the other much briefer, the story of Waters’s discovery and analysis of the specimen. On the walls hung framed satellite photos of global regions he had worked, river deltas and volcanoes and oceans, their unusual colors blending into abstract art to the untrained eye.
He set his briefcase on his desk and went to his drafting table, where a map showing 252 square miles of West Feliciana Parish awaited his attention. On a normal day, he would sharpen his colored pencils and go straight to work. But today was not normal. When he looked at the map, he felt no inclination to study it.
He walked back to his desk, opened his briefcase, and took out the portfolio he’d found in the storage room. Inside was the newspaper reporting Mallory’s Miss University win. There was also a copy of The Clarion-Ledger, trumpeting her victory in the Miss Mississippi pageant. Mallory had never entered a pageant before the Miss University contest, and she had only entered that because her sorority sisters begged her to do it. This was during one of the darkest times in her life: Waters was in Alaska, and she had just left there one step ahead of the state police. When her sorority and family pleaded with her to advance to the Miss Mississippi pageant, she entered it only to prove to Waters that she was sane enough to handle something “normal.” She acted stunned when she won the crown, but he wasn’t surprised in the slightest. By that time, he knew she could play her chosen role with the world falling in flames around her.
He set aside the newspapers and looked at a bundle of her letters. The handwriting on the envelopes evoked only dread. He was not yet ready to delve into the circular logic of Mallory Candler’s unhinged mind. He might never be ready for that. But he could not resist the boxes of photographs. One was filled with Ole Miss scenes: Waters and Cole drinking Coors at the annual shrimp boil; tailgating in the Grove during homecoming; mugging for the camera at a football game, their hands wrapped around bourbon and Cokes. There were also some night shots from a gonzo road trip to Vanderbilt, when Cole had driven Waters’s Triumph right through the campus on its brick sidewalks (and later told the police he’d thought they were narrow streets). The snapshots showed Waters just how much kinder the years had been to him than to his partner. Cole had lost hair and gained weight, while Waters’s lean build had hardly changed. And mercifully, Waters had received his mother’s genes where hair was concerned. But the most profound changes in Cole were subtler. Waters couldn’t put his finger on it; perhaps it was merely the air of dissipation that had hung around Cole for the past few years. But strangers tended to guess Cole was closer to fifty than forty, while many thought Waters was in his mid-thirties.
He slid aside a photo from a fraternity party and looked into Mallory’s incomparable face. The copper streak in her dark hair shone in the light of the flashbulb, and the stark intensity in her eyes pierced him to the core. The next thirty pictures were all of Mallory, some taken in and around Oxford, others shot on the shoestring vacations they’d taken together. Crested Butte, Chaco Canyon, the Yucatan, Zihuatenejo, points in between. Seeing her in such varied settings-laughing in the snow, dancing in the surf, crouching outside a kiva in New Mexico-buttressed rather than diminished his memories of her beauty. The adjectives that New York models struggled to bring to life in their faces, Mallory conjured with effortless grace. With each flip of a photo she was by turns haughty, warm, insouciant, sentimental, naive, knowing, a little cold, a little mad. Every image brought back a vignette from their early lives together, but none more so than one taken in the mountains of Tennessee: Mallory standing nude beneath a sparkling waterfall. It had not been posed; Waters had simply turned the camera on her as she washed her hair in the falls, and her radiant smile had filled the lens with its power. Nothing in the image linked it to the modern world; it could have been shot ten thousand years before, had someone possessed a camera. Here is a twenty-one-year-old woman coming into the full flower of her sexuality, fully conscious of the process. She stands naked in the wilderness with no more embarrassment than a doe would feel drinking at the pool beneath the falls. Looking at her standing in the glittering mist, Waters felt a bittersweet awe, a faint echo of what it had felt like to hold that remarkable body in his arms. To be inside her. To look into eyes so alive with…life. He was staring entranced at the picture when Sybil pushed open his door and walked toward his desk.
“I’ve got some papers from the Oil and Gas Board,” she said. “You need to sign the last page.”
He slid a newspaper over the nude photo just as Sybil set the papers on his desk; he couldn’t be sure if she’d seen it or not. Sybil was no prude, but the woman in the snapshot was clearly not Waters’s wife, and he didn’t want his receptionist getting the wrong idea. He signed the papers, then picked up a remote control and switched on the small Sony television he kept behind his desk to monitor market reports and news crises. As Sybil walked slowly to the door, he flipped through the channels. At sixty, the numbers began to
recycle. When he hit channel four, he lifted his thumb, his chest tightening. Eve Sumner was staring at him from the television screen. Her sudden appearance disoriented him, but he soon realized he was watching Natchez’s local cable access channel. A real estate program. Eve was leading viewers on a tour of an antebellum home that was on the market. Waters watched her with fascination.
She was wearing the navy suit skirt again, with nude hose and high heels. Her alto voice and precise diction intrigued Waters; Evie Ray may have come from rural Louisiana, but somewhere along the way she had sweated blood to free herself from redneck syntax. Using her hands gracefully, she pointed out various attributes of a “thoroughly modern” kitchen, then began walking backward toward a door. As she led the cameraman into the dining room, Waters went rigid in his chair.
Pausing in the doorway, Eve had twisted a strand of hair around her right forefinger, tightened it, and begun pulling. As he stared, she popped her finger out, leaving the strand momentarily curled. It was an automatic gesture, probably developed in childhood, but it betrayed a touch of self-consciousness that let you know Eve was not quite so confident as she seemed. In that moment, she became Mallory Candler. For all Mallory’s beauty and self-possession, when she was under close scrutiny, she had twisted her hair in exactly that way. A lot of women probably did the same thing, but some gestures are uniquely one’s own; in this way we recognize family members or loved ones from behind. That unconscious twisting of hair was Mallory to the life, and in her it symbolized a more private and dangerous habit, one whose memory deeply unsettled Waters.
Rotating his chair back to the desk, he looked down at the photos spread across his desk. Then he turned to his computer keyboard and looked up Eve Sumner’s real estate company on the Web. Without pausing to second-guess himself, he called and asked to speak to her, giving the receptionist the name of a local surgeon.
Eve came on the line brimming with enthusiasm. “Dr. Davis? This is Eve Sumner. How may I help you?”
“You mean Evie Ray Sumner, don’t you?”
Silence. “Who is this?”
Waters did not reply.
“Johnny?” A whisper. “Is that you?”
“I’m watching you on TV right now.”
She exhaled with obvious relief. “God, I knew you’d call. I look awful on that show. It’s the lighting or something.”
“I want to ask you some questions.”
“Ask away.”
“Where did I take a nude picture of you?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Well…the bedroom, of course.”
He started to pounce on her response, then stopped. They had taken some photos in his bedroom, but he had destroyed those long ago. “Outside, I mean.”
“Outside? Let me think. Oh. Fall Creek Falls State Park? In Tennessee?”
He couldn’t speak. No one else knew about that. No one.
“My God,” Eve said softly. “You don’t still have that picture, do you?”
He pushed on, his face uncomfortably warm. “How many men did you sleep with before me?”
“Two.”
“Why did you have to leave Alaska the year you won the pageants?”
“Because I threatened your Alaskan girlfriend.”
“I didn’t have an Alaskan girlfriend.”
“French girlfriend, then. Or French Canadian or whatever the slut was.”
Real anger in her voice, enough to send a chill down his back. “What else did you do to her?”
“I put sugar in her gas tank and stranded her on the tundra. She nearly froze to death.”
He shook his head. Eve’s cadence and pronunciation were nothing like those of the woman on television. But for the timbre of her voice, she could be Mallory. “How did you get back to the lower forty-eight without the police getting you?”
“I chartered a private plane.”
“What kind?”
“Um…a Piper Saratoga.”
Confusion settled over Waters like a fog. Some of these details he may have confided in Cole, but not all. Close to desperation, he searched his mind for something that no one but Mallory could possibly know.
“What did we do behind the stables at David Denton’s party?”
“You didn’t do anything.” Eve’s voice sultry now. “I went down on you.”
He could go no further.
“Johnny, I want to see you.”
“No.”
“I know you want to see me. You wouldn’t have called if you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Ask me more questions, then. Anything. Eventually you’re going to believe me, because there’s nothing I don’t know.”
He sat silent for half a minute, listening to her breathing. “How did you try to kill me?”
He thought the phone had gone dead.
“Johnny…I’m so sorry for that.”
For the first time, he sensed evasion. “How did you try to kill me?” he asked in a harsher voice. “What did you use? You don’t know, do you?”
“The first time? A gun. The other time, your car.”
He was gripping the phone so hard his hand hurt. Cole knew about the time with the car, but not about the gun. No one knew about the gun. The phone squawked on the desktop, and he realized he had dropped it.
“Johnny? Are you there?”
“Here.”
“I want you to meet me somewhere. You know where Bienville is, right? The antebellum home? The Historic Foundation owns it, and it’s for sale. I can get the key. I’m going to be there in twenty minutes, waiting for you.”
“I’m not coming.”
“I’m leaving now. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
“Eve-”
She had rung off.
He sat numb at his desk. She had answered so damn quickly. Any hesitation could be attributed to surprise. Mallory herself might have paused in the face of some of those questions. Waters looked back at the television, where Eve was concluding her presentation. He could not put that face and body with the voice he had spoken to on the telephone.
He didn’t know what to do. He did know that the last thing he should do was drive across town to Bienville. With anxiety turning to panic in his chest, he picked up the phone and called Linton Hill. Rose answered. In a barely controlled voice, he asked to speak to Lily. He didn’t know what he was going to say to his wife, only that he needed to hear her voice.
“Lily gone with her walking group,” Rose replied. “And she left her cell phone right here on the counter.”
Waters hung up and went to his drafting table. The wavy substructure lines and numbers on the map looked as foreign to him as they would to a layman. He turned away and began pacing out the perimeter of his office. The room was more than a thousand square feet, but today it felt like a cage.
Opening a subtly concealed door, he stepped out onto his balcony and inhaled the cool air blowing up off the river. He looked south toward the bend that led to Baton Rouge and New Orleans, then north up the stretch that led to Memphis and St. Louis. He could see Weymouth Hall from here, an antebellum mansion with a widow’s walk sitting on a promontory a mile upriver. Across the street from Weymouth Hall stood Jewish Hill, and under the oaks below that hill lay Mallory’s grave. Mallory’s corpse.
So who in God’s name was waiting for him at Bienville?
He put the photos and newspapers back into the portfolio and locked it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he took his keys from his pocket and walked to the back stairwell of the office. Sybil gave him a questioning look, but he said nothing.
He couldn’t even manage a lie.
Chapter 8
Sited on half a city block on the north side of town, Bienville was a world unto itself. The foundation of the Greek Revival mansion had been laid into a hill twenty feet above the street, and high stucco walls rising from the sidewalk presented a blank face to passersby. Only a narrow gravel drive that tunneled off Wall St
reet through thick foliage led up to the terraced gardens behind the mansion, a sun-dappled world of spreading oaks, shrubs, azaleas, jasmine, and banana trees.
Eve’s black Lexus was parked near an opening in the garden wall. Waters pulled his Land Cruiser in behind her, blocking her exit, and walked through the gate. To his right rose the rear elevation of the mansion. Its scored concrete walls were relieved by jib windows, and its steeply sloped roof had several chimneys. To his left lay intricate gardens laced with brick walkways and shadowy paths, the centerpiece a fountain surrounded by statuary inspired by German fairy tales. The frozen figures of boys and girls had nothing in common with the stone angels from the cemetery; they captured an elusive quality of childhood, wonder mixed with boredom, a feeling that time had no meaning beyond the present moment.
As Waters approached the house, something made him look up. Through one of the jib windows, he saw the silhouette of a standing woman. She leaned forward and spread her palm against the pane like a starfish. His heart stuttered. Through the distorting blur of the century-old glass, she could be Mallory Candler. Her palm left the pane, and a forefinger pointed downward. A door stood immediately below the window, one of three in the back wall of the house. When he looked back up at the window, the figure had vanished.
He walked to the door, then hesitated with his hand on the knob. He felt like a man walking into a brothel, or a hospital, or a monastery. Once he walked through this door, he would never be the same. Some part of him even feared that he might not come out again.
The knob turned in his hand, and he jerked back his arm. He half-expected the door to open, but it remained closed. After several moments, he turned the knob and pushed open the door.
It led to a narrow, carpeted staircase. Looking up, he saw Eve Sumner standing at the top of the steps. Gone were the navy skirt suit and heels. She wore a bright yellow sundress that looked like something a St. Croix islander might wear. Her feet were bare, and her hair was tied back with a ruby scarf, exposing her fine neck and jaw. Waters was sure he remembered Mallory wearing a dress exactly like it on their Yucatan trip. Eve did not speak but watched him intently. She was waiting for him to enter on his own.