“Eve doesn’t want money!” Waters snapped. “You’re the only person who’s asked me for money recently.”
It was a reflexive blow, but Cole snapped back as though he’d been dealt a mortal wound. After a stunned moment, he stood and walked to the door, but before he went through, he turned and spoke in a quavering voice.
“I’m going to forget you said that, partner. And you’re right about one thing. Where you dip your wick is your own business. I just don’t want to see you lose Lily and Annelise. You’re not me, and Lily isn’t Jenny. Lily won’t take this well if she finds out. She won’t look the other way. And if you keep this shit up, she will find out. That’s the only sure bet I know. Because they always do.”
Waters stared out the window until Cole closed the door. He knew his partner’s advice was the fruit of bitter experience, but he didn’t much care. All he cared about right now was the cell phone on his desk. He wanted it to ring.
It didn’t. It lay there like an insult for an hour, then two, its silence a goad to his pride and to his faith in Eve. Like a junkie going cold turkey, he fought the urge to call her office. He tried a dozen distractions, but none worked.
Ten minutes before noon, it finally rang. With two chirps of the ringer, he was back on the crest of the wave, Cole’s warnings forgotten. But when he answered, Eve did not say, “Ten minutes.” She said, “We’ve got a problem. Don’t say anything.”
It was a measure of how much perspective Waters had lost that her words did not cause him panic.
“Some film producers are flying in from Los Angeles,” she explained. “The ones who bought Penn Cage’s novel. They’re considering shooting the film on location here.”
“Uh-huh.” Waters had no idea what this could have to do with him.
“The Historic Foundation is coordinating the visit, and they’re putting the producers up in Bienville for the week.”
“Ahh.” The strung-out addict’s feeling returned with a vengeance as he wondered if they would miss today’s rendezvous.
“Today’s no good,” Eve went on, confirming his fear. “But check the jar.”
He started to say something, but she’d already clicked off. Locking the portfolio in his bottom drawer, he got his keys and walked quickly to the back stairs, his mind already at the cemetery.
When he arrived at Catholic Hill, he parked and ran behind the wall to dig up the mason jar. Inside lay a piece of blue notepaper and a hotel key card. When he unfolded the paper, he saw Mallory’s flowing script.
Johnny,
This is a key to Suite 324 at the Eola Hotel. I’ve rented it for the week. I know the Eola is right in the middle of town, but it’s the safest place for us. It has a bar inside the Main Street entrance, so if anyone sees you go in, you can always say you were going to the bar. The Pearl Street entrance is best for you, though. It’s possible to get all the way to our suite without being seen. The security guard sits deep in the lobby, and he probably won’t see you. Even if he does, he won’t look at you more than a second if you’re dressed nice. Go in and immediately turn left. You’ll see a staircase leading to the mezzanine. Walk up, then take the elevator to the third floor. There’s an exposed walkway just before the suite’s door, where you can be seen from the courtyard or from rooms above, so walk fast there. I’ll be there by 10:30 p.m.
M
He put the jar back in its hole, but this time he kept the note. As soon as he got back to the office, he got the portfolio back out and did something he had not yet found the courage to do: he opened the bundle of Mallory’s old letters.
The handwriting matched perfectly.
chapter 10
When he arrived at the Eola suite that night, he saw that she’d been right to choose it. The brick and stone hotel was a local landmark; it occupied most of a city block, and at seven stories had held the title of tallest building in the city for decades. Two popular nightclubs operated nearby, and their patrons frequently spilled out into Main Street, go cups in hand as they laughed and danced to the beat of live bands thumping through the walls. On any given night, those bars were filled with people who would recognize Waters on sight, but he felt reasonably safe approaching on foot from Pearl Street, as Mallory had told him to do.
Entering the doors of the grand hotel hurled him back in time, not twenty years but thirty. When he was a boy, his father had often brought the family to the Eola for Sunday dinner. He still remembered his passage through the lobby as they walked to the restaurant. Old men sat in club chairs, smoking cigars and playing checkers; a black shoe-shine man quietly solicited business; an attendant with a gold-braided uniform manned the elevator, which had a brass cage door that Waters always dreamed of opening and closing. He could still hear his father ordering shrimp rémoulade from the red-haired waitress, still see the sliced yellow pound cake, strawberries, and whipped cream that awaited them for dessert.
On the first night he met Eve, the lobby was empty but for a lone security guard who sat far away with his back to the door. A bell rang somewhere, but as Eve had predicted, the guard did not challenge him. A dark business suit provided all the bona fides he needed for access.
When he opened the door to suite 324, he found Eve lying naked across the bed like Marilyn Monroe, a huge red bow tied around her waist, a champagne flute in her hand. The Rat Pack campiness of it broke the tension that had built inside him on his way up, and they celebrated their new digs with wild excess.
It was a good beginning for a week that would end badly. For after that first night, things began to change. Lily was behaving differently toward Waters at home. Her tone of voice became more affected, and sometimes he caught her watching him from the corner of her eye. He began to worry that he’d made some mistake, that she could smell Eve on him despite the fact that he always showered before returning home. And not all the clues to his betrayal were as subtle as scent. Eve was so physical that she sometimes left marks on him, even though she tried not to. If he and Lily had had a normal sexual relationship, his infidelity would have been discovered in the first week. But though she did not discover the marks of passion, Lily did notice changes in his behavior.
The move to the Eola had necessitated that the trysts become nocturnal, and Waters’s nightly ritual never varied. He would put Annelise to bed, wait for Lily to retire, then go out to the slave quarters to “do some mapping.” After he was sure Lily was asleep, he would slip on a sport coat, drive down to Pearl Street, park under some trees, and walk two blocks to the Eola.
One night, though, Lily varied her ritual. She came into the kitchen after they’d put Annelise to bed, and remarked that he’d been cold to her for the past few days. Waters could not believe she’d used the word “cold.” When he asked for clarification, she said he seemed unusually distant, and she didn’t think it was just the EPA investigation. He hadn’t hugged or kissed her for ten days, she said. Waters almost pointed out that Lily hadn’t made love with him for seven weeks, and that effort was only a painful charade she suffered through to keep him from going out of his mind with frustration. But he didn’t. As he stood awkwardly by the refrigerator, Lily walked up and laid her head on his shoulder, then said she was going to take a hot shower. Waters stiffened. Lily normally took baths. “Taking a hot shower” was one of her rare preambles to sex.
Afraid she would sense his anxiety, he hugged her, then said that he had a full night’s work ahead, mapping a new prospect. Lily gave him a hurt look, but he did not relent. He went out to the slave quarters and sat looking blankly at his drafting table while he waited for Lily to fall asleep. As his mind drifted, an underlying irony of his marital sex life hit him. As long as Lily knew that he wanted to go to bed with her, she was quite content not to have sex. But the moment she sensed real indifference on his part, she felt compelled to take him to bed.
He went to the Eola that night in the hope of forgetting the tension at home, but he found only more tension. That night, when Eve said, “I love you,” she held eye contact, wai
ting for her declaration to be returned. When Waters didn’t comply, he saw anger in her eyes. Later, after sleep deprivation had caused him to doze off, he awakened to find her sitting Indian-style at the foot of the bed, staring at him in the half dark.
His bladder almost emptied at the sight. Coming out of sleep, he was not sure whether the woman watching him with shining cat’s eyes was Eve or Mallory. He had found Mallory like that countless times, and he’d hoped never to see the sight again. Mallory never slept. If she did, it was while he was sleeping, and she always woke before he did. He couldn’t count the times he had surfaced out of slumber to find her propped on one elbow, watching him with luminous unblinking eyes. It unnerved him. And after her mind slipped its moorings, the cutting became part of her nocturnal vigil. He would awaken to find her sitting at the foot of the bed, her eyes glazed as she slowly raked the point of a safety pin along her inner forearms, leaving little trails of blood behind. Sometimes she used only her fingernails, but other times a key or a pocketknife. To wake and find Eve in the same position made him shudder beneath the covers. He was trying to think of some banal words to mask his fear when her lips parted and her low voice floated to him.
“Do you ever think about our babies, Johnny?”
“What?” he asked, hoping he’d misheard.
“Our babies.”
Memories too traumatic to face flooded his mind, and his fear morphed into panic. He could no longer convince himself that the woman sitting three feet from him was Eve Sumner. Her face was lost in shadow, her eyes seemed to burn with cold light, and her question reflected the central preoccupation of Mallory Candler’s broken mind. During her time with Waters, Mallory had terminated two pregnancies, both babies fathered by him. The first abortion had triggered her descent into madness, and Waters knew—if no one else did—that even after marriage and the birth of three healthy children, Mallory had never fully recovered from those abortions.
“Tell me, Johnny,” Eve insisted, her eyes never leaving his face.
He could hardly bring himself to address her as Mallory in a nonsexual situation, but what choice did he have? “I’ve thought about what happened,” he said cautiously. “I’ve thought about it a lot. And I still think it was the right thing to do at the time. I know you don’t agree, but—”
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Do you think about what they would have been like? Blends of you and me. They would be twenty-one and twenty-two now. Do you realize that?”
The skin on Waters’s neck rippled as though he’d touched a snake.
Eve hugged herself and rocked slowly. “I don’t think of them that way,” she went on. “I think of them as children. Three and four. A boy and a girl, Johnny. That’s what they were. I asked the doctors.”
He had heard this a thousand times, but that did not lessen his anxiety. When Mallory let herself think this way, she entered a psychological danger zone, in which thoughts of her lost children drove out all else, and her guilt and anger searched desperately for an object upon which to discharge themselves. Eve might only believe she was Mallory, but that wouldn’t lessen the violence of her actions if she carried her delusion that far. She sat three feet away from him, her nude body as still as that of a meditating yogi. Yet danger radiated from her as from a coiled cobra.
“Are you afraid, Johnny?”
He fought to keep his voice under control. “No.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I know that.”
“Good. Then go back to sleep. I’m fine.”
“I probably should go,” he said, looking at his watch.
She slowly shook her head. “No. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up in plenty of time.”
He rolled back over and closed his eyes for an hour, but he did not sleep. He lay like a man spending his first night in prison, waiting for a fist, a knife, or worse. It took all his willpower not to leap out of bed and run from the room.
After he finally escaped the suite, he vowed never to see Eve again. When she called his cell phone the next day, he lied and told her Lily was leaving town for the night, and that he had to stay home with Annelise. Eve offered to come to his house and wait for him in the slave quarters, but he told her he couldn’t possibly see her with Annelise in the house. She tried to act casual, but thirty minutes later she called back. Couldn’t he find a sitter for a few hours and come to the hotel during that time? No, he told her. Annelise would tell Lily what he’d done, and that wasn’t their agreement. Eve called back twice more and tried various approaches, but Waters held firm. That night, after he and Lily put Annelise to bed, he sat on the porch at Linton Hill until dawn, like a lone settler guarding his family on the Great Plains. He wasn’t sure what he feared, but he knew he could not sleep.
Several times, headlights slowed as they passed the house, and one car actually nosed into the driveway and parked, its engine idling. This was not uncommon in a tourist town; people got lost all the time. Yet as the vehicle sat at the end of the drive, obscured by the trees and darkness, Waters felt in his blood that behind those bright lights was a black Lexus, and behind its wheel Eve Sumner, her eyes as watchful as the previous night when she had watched him in sleep. He thought of switching on his cell phone, but he did not want to give Eve a chance to interrogate him or persuade him of anything.
Just before dawn, he went out to the slave quarters and crashed on the twin bed he kept there. When he awakened that afternoon, Lily was gone. His cell phone showed fourteen missed calls, all from pay phones. He knew that if he didn’t answer soon, Eve would show up in person at his home or office. Just as Mallory would have done.
As he drove to his office, his phone chirped. The caller ID showed a pay phone. Despite Eve’s recent behavior, the Pavlovian response still kicked in: desire stirred in him, utterly detached from the misgivings in his mind. He picked up the phone.
“Here.”
“Tonight,” Eve snapped, her voice so clipped it was hard to read. She might have been crying.
“Um—”
“You don’t want me anymore?”
“Of course I do.”
“I know I scared you, Johnny. I know I’m going too fast. It’s just that I’ve waited so long—”
“I know,” he cut in, not at all sure what he knew. “Look, are you going to keep on with the Mallory stuff? All the painful things from the past?”
“No. I swear to God. No talking. Let’s go back to what we know. I need you inside me.”
Even if it was a lie, her words dulled his anxieties like Valium.
“We could go right now,” she whispered. “I’m ready now. You know how I get.”
Images bloomed like night flowers in his mind: Eve’s dark hair lying across her shoulder blades; the river of sweat running down her spine; her mouth as she growled in a way that was not quite animal and not quite human—
“Not now,” he whispered. “Tonight.”
“Tonight,” she said. “Don’t stand me up, Johnny.”
“I won’t.”
Rain lashed the walls and windows of the Eola in silver sheets turned pink by the streetlamps as Waters drove his Land Cruiser down Main Street toward the old hotel. At the corner of Main and Pearl, he turned right, and his breath stuck in his throat. Police and ambulance lights arced like antiaircraft tracers from the intersection of Pearl and Franklin streets, a block to the north. This was close to where Waters normally parked. Braking, he saw that an old Grand Am had smashed into a Mississippi Power & Light truck with its cherry picker extended. He considered cruising slowly past the scene and parking farther away than usual, but something made him stop. Perhaps it was the memory of Detective Tom Jackson recognizing his vehicle and stopping him that night. In any case, the police and rescue vehicles were blocking most of the intersection, and no one working the scene seemed to notice when he reversed the Land Cruiser back onto Main Street and continued toward the river.
Passing the bars near the Eola, he saw the silhoue
ttes of several patrons through neon-lit rain. He turned left on South Wall, then made another left and parked in a law firm’s lot on South Pearl. He’d brought an umbrella with him, but it was almost useless. The rain blew at a forty-five-degree angle, soaking his coat and slacks. As he ran across Main Street, he used the umbrella to hide his face from any curious drinkers in the bars.
He walked through the hotel doors like a businessman late for an appointment, despite the hour. The bell chimed through the spacious lobby, and he heard the scrape of the security guard’s chair, but as usual no one challenged him. He ascended to the mezzanine and pressed the elevator button. Waiting, he fought the urge to look back over the mezzanine rail. If he did, he would be visible to the desk clerk working below and to his right. The ancient elevator always seemed to take forever. At the sound of groaning cables, he willed the car to be empty, as it had been on most nights he’d come.
It was.
He reached the door of the suite without seeing a soul or—he hoped—a soul seeing him. But as he turned the doorknob, he felt a disquieting premonition, like the one he’d had when he first touched the door at Bienville. Nerves, he thought. Suck it up. He shook his head and pushed open the door.
Tonight Eve wasn’t sprawled across the bed or hiding naked in the dark, as she had been on some nights, and for a moment he thought he had arrived first. Then he felt wind blowing through the suite. He looked across the bed at the door-sized windows and saw Eve silhouetted on the balcony, her unmistakable curves framed in the pink glow of the streetlights below. She was leaning on the rail with her back to him, naked, apparently oblivious to the rain that had stung his face only moments ago.
As he stared, she looked back over her shoulder, and her eyes glinted in the dark. The rain and the halos of the streetlights created the impression that the balcony was superfluous, that Eve was floating in space. He started to go to her, but she stopped him with an upraised hand.
“You lied to me,” she said in a voice devoid of emotion.