“What?”
“Lily didn’t leave town. She was home with you. I saw her leave the house this morning.”
Waters swallowed and tried to marshal his thoughts. This was Mallory to the life: paranoia, surveillance, confrontation. She would begin with cold fury, then escalate to the inevitable explosion. He felt himself tensing for violence.
“I know why you lied,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”
Lightning strobed, freezing her body in time, burning eerie images onto his retinas: her soaked hair hanging limp, rainwater spattering her breasts and abdomen, her skin almost blue from cold. Then a colossal peal of thunder shook the building, and she seemed to shudder in place. He saw confusion in her eyes, as though for a moment she had forgotten who and where she was.
“I’m not afraid,” he told her.
Eve blinked several times, then folded her arms across her breasts. “I’m cold,” she said, her teeth chattering.
Waters grabbed the comforter off the bed and went to her. He gathered the fabric around her shoulders and pulled her inside. His shoes made sucking sounds in the soaked carpet as he shut the windows.
Standing by the bed, he switched on a lamp. Dark circles shadowed Eve’s eyes, and her cheeks looked drawn. She might not have slept or eaten for days, yet thirty-six hours ago she had looked the picture of health.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
She did not reply.
“I’m worried about you.”
Now she looked up at him. “Are you? What are we going to do, Johnny?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are we just going to keep fucking like animals in the dark?”
He drew back, stunned by the bitterness in her voice.
“Every day you go back to sweet little Lily, but at night you come to me. Everything’s just fine for you, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie. You’d keep going like this forever, if I would. Do you think this is all I want? Do you?”
“What do you want me to do? You want me to leave my wife and daughter?”
She looked away from him and stared straight ahead. “Yes.”
He closed his eyes and tried to keep himself together. Cole was right: he had lost his perspective. He had lost his perspective and now Eve had expectations. Reasonable expectations, by any fair standard.
“You can’t do it, can you?” she said.
He wanted to tell her the truth, but he feared her reaction. He wanted to hug her, but she clearly did not want that. She was still shivering despite the comforter, and her teeth still chattered. There was a glass of red wine under the lamp on the end table. He picked it up and held it up to her mouth, but she ignored it. He drained it himself, thankful for the heat in his throat.
“Listen,” he said softly. “We should—”
“I want you to cut me.”
Now she was looking at him, her face almost empty of humanity.
“I can’t do that.”
“You’ve done it before.”
It was true. Once, at Mallory’s request, he had cut her arm during sex. He had done it in the hope that they could somehow uncover the source of the pain that she mutilated herself to alleviate. He used a knife, and the act had brought them closer than he thought human beings could get. But it did not have the desired result.
“I’m not going to cut you.”
She let the comforter fall and held out her arms. The surfaces of both inner forearms had been deeply scratched, by her fingernails, probably. She had bled, but the comforter had wiped most of it away.
“What’s a few more?” she asked. “You don’t know how badly I need it.”
“Why? Why do you need it?”
She grabbed his wrist and pulled him onto the bed. He tried to resist, but she covered his mouth with hers in an almost vicious kiss. She didn’t even try to remove his clothes. She pulled him on top of her, reached down, and freed him from his trousers, her fist closing around him like the hand of a demon. He cried out in pain.
Rolling him over with frantic movements, Eve placed him against her opening and tried to sit down. She wasn’t ready, but she did not intend to wait. She shut her eyes and settled hard upon him.
He cried out again, but Eve made no sound. She began to move with slow insistence that escalated to a blank-faced urgency and left Waters feeling he was not even part of the act. One concentrated minute was all it took, and she finished with facial contortions that looked as though she had lost control of her nerves. When she collapsed upon him, he thought surely she would surrender to sleep at last. But only a few seconds later, she wrapped her arms around his back and, using all her strength, rolled him over in the bed, so that he lay on top of her.
As he looked into her eyes, they went wide, as though a bolt of electricity had shot through her, and he saw something in them he had not seen before: fear.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Shut up,” she hissed, sliding her hands down his back and pushing him deeper. “You’re not done.”
“Eve—”
“Don’t call me that!”
She made claws of her hands and dug them into his pectoral muscles, then locked her heels behind his thighs. The conditioning of the past two weeks took over, and he began to move, his body charged with the energy stored during the twenty-four hours he’d gone without her. With every thrust she urged him on, her hands raking his back. The reciprocal rhythm of her hips drove him toward his peak, but he held himself in abeyance, unsure of what she needed from him.
“Scratch me, Johnny…please.”
“No.”
“I need you to cut me!”
He had never seen Eve this way. Beneath her carnality he had always sensed arrogance, a confidence that she could rule and possess him. Tonight uncertainty clouded her eyes. She was like Mallory fleeing her demons, using sex as an escape. But from what? And why did she want to be cut? Until tonight she had wanted only to be called Mallory. Now there was no mention of that.
“Please,” she begged. “Make me hurt.”
Waters slid his hands beneath her back, set his knees against the mattress, and heaved her up off the bed. Now he had all the leverage, and he yanked her to him or held her back as he chose, driving her mad with hesitations and sudden reversals. She fought only to hold herself against him.
“Please,” she rasped, her breath ragged. “Make me…make her go away.”
Her words registered only as encouragement, their specific meanings lost in the violence of their union. He drove harder, yet still she demanded more, her cries no longer a language but guttural syllables any mammal could understand. He let go his conscious mind and thrashed wildly, as a man pursued senses that his only hope of survival is to battle his way through an unyielding wall before him.
“Make it stop!” she screamed. “Make her stop!”
His heart thundered as it fought to feed his starving tissues, and for an instant his vision faded. Fearing he might faint, he let himself fall forward, pinning her to the mattress. Her fingernails dug into the flesh of his upper arms, and the sudden pain made him open his eyes.
Eve was staring at him as though she had no idea who he was, her mouth frozen in an O that he read as a symbol of a shattering climax. When she began to flail her arms, he used his last reserve of energy to magnify her sensation to the limit, thrashing inside her like a man possessed. Had he not been so lost within the act—or had his partner been someone else—he might have realized he was in one of those situations in which the woman later claims she tried to stop and the man refused. But the idea of Eve stopping sex in medias res was incomprehensible. Her screams of ecstasy were indistinguishable from those of agony. Yet this time, tears were streaming from her eyes.
Her movements became disjointed, as though she were having a seizure rather than an orgasm. In the moment that doubt truly entered Waters’s mind, her spastic movements drove him past the point of no return. A
ll that remained of his conscious mind shot out across light-years of space and time, while the animal in him ejaculated with withering force. Eve faded, flashed, and then his mind went black.
He awoke facedown on the bed, shivering like a wet dog. At some point while he slept, the wind had driven the rain across the balcony and into the suite. The bed was drenched, and him with it. He lay half across Eve, his hips between her legs, his torso to the right of hers. He tried to pull off the wet covers, but the twisted sheet was pinned beneath her.
“Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”
Even before the silence stretched into eternity, he sensed something wrong with her skin. It felt only slightly warmer than the sopping bedclothes. He recoiled and threw himself onto the floor.
At first he could not bear to look at her, to confirm with his cerebral cortex what his medulla already knew. Kneeling beside the tall tester bed, he reached out and placed the tip of his forefinger beneath her jawbone. There was no pulse beneath the bluish skin, only a waxy resilience that had nothing in common with the rich pink tissue he had kissed a short while ago, soft skin animated by thrumming nerves and oxygenated blood.
In death, Eve finally looked her age. The breasts that had piqued Lily’s curiosity now lay flat on her chest like Baggies half-filled with water. Her face was stiller than a statue’s, for statues are sculpted to look alive, and Eve had lost all semblance of life. Her mouth hung open as though gasping for air, and around her eyes were small pinpricks of dark blood. Something ticked in Waters’s brain at this sight, something from a film or novel, and he remembered that such small hemorrhages were petechiae, telltale side effects of strangulation.
He looked at Eve’s neck.
The skin there was bluish red, bruised from pressure and abrasion. She had definitely been strangled. This realization led to another—I was alone with her—and nausea hit him in a sickening wave. He staggered into the bathroom and emptied the contents of his stomach into the commode, the spasms racking his body down to his cramping groin muscles.
“Jesus God,” he croaked, hugging the toilet.
He got to his feet, washed his face, and went back into the bedroom. A thousand irrational thoughts assailed him, but the cold center of his mind knew there was only one thing to do. Taking a wet rag from the bathroom, he methodically wiped down every surface in the suite that he might have touched. He didn’t look at the corpse on the bed. If he stopped to think about what he was doing, he might pick up the phone and call the police. With Lily and Annelise to think about, he could not risk that.
After wiping down the room, he searched for anything he might have left behind on previous visits. Socks, underwear, a scrap of paper. Finding nothing, he went back to the bathroom. There was something here, he knew. Something dangerous. His vomitus? No. The drain trap. He had showered here every night before returning home. There would be hair in the drain, hair that could be matched to that on his head with a hundred percent certainty. He crouched in the shower stall and examined the drain. It was held down tight with tiny Phillips screws. He had no screwdriver with him. Not even a pocketknife.
Cut me, Eve had begged.
What had she wanted him to use? He walked back into the bedroom and searched her purse. Sure enough, he found a small pocketknife inside. A Gerber. He took it into the bathroom, but its thin point made no headway with the Phillips screws. Digging into the purse again, he found a scrap of blue notepaper with his home phone number written on it. As he put the paper in his pocket, he saw a small flat case made of faux leather. Inside he found a mini tool kit, and one of the tools was a screwdriver. Not a Phillips head, but a standard one that would probably do the job. He went back into the shower stall and removed the drain trap, dug the hair and funk out of it, then flung the mess off the balcony onto the rain-slicked parking lot. As he screwed the drain back down, he felt his composure fragmenting. It was time to leave.
Holding the doorknob with a washcloth, he looked back at the suite one last time, not out of sentiment, but because he had left evidence here that he could not destroy. Inside the body on the bed. Inside Eve. It might be possible to destroy that evidence, he supposed, or at least corrupt it (an image of a maid’s cleaning cart came into his mind), but he was not up to that task. The best he could manage was hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outer doorknob.
Standing frozen in the hallway with his umbrella, he saw his journey to the first floor as fraught with peril. The hallway. The elevator. The mezzanine. The staircase. The lobby. The security guard. For a moment he considered going back into the suite and trying to climb down the outer balconies to the parking lot, but that was ridiculous. They were slick with rain, and even if he didn’t kill himself, anyone passing on the street below could easily see him climbing down.
Move! shouted a voice in his head. Do you want to lose your wife and daughter? Do you want the remainder of your sex life to happen in Parchman Prison?
He put out his right foot, halted, then began to walk briskly toward the elevators, his eyes watching the carpet. His mind was already two blocks away, at his car. See it, said the voice. All you have to do is get your body to the place where your mind is already. He opened his umbrella as soon as he reached the lobby, and used it to conceal his face from the security guard. When he hit the street, rain whipped him like a vengeful spirit, and thunder reverberated off the walls of the hotel, buffeting the air in his lungs. He clutched the umbrella close over his head and began to run.
chapter 11
A hotel maid discovered Eve Sumner’s body just after noon. The news didn’t travel quite as fast as the news of Danny Buckles’s molestations at St. Stephens, but by 2:00 P.M., buzzing telephones and flying e-mail had informed most of the Natchez business community of her death. Shortly thereafter, Sybil came into Waters’s office with a stunned expression on her face and told him that “that real estate lady, Eve something” had just been found dead in the Eola Hotel. Raped and murdered, her throat cut, said the rumor. This distortion helped Waters put on a show of shock, but when he asked Sybil for details he found she had none.
When she closed the door, Waters got up, walked out onto his balcony, and stared across the river at the Louisiana lowlands. His vision seemed unusually acute. Last night’s rain had knocked the dust out of the air, and behind it came the cold telegram of approaching winter. In the bracing wind, his body felt numb, disconnected, as though his mind were trying to leave it behind as part of a survival strategy. A sense of inevitability permeated his consciousness, a dark conviction that during his presence in the hotel room last night, distant stars had shifted position, forever altering his fate, and that the millstones of the gods were aligning themselves to grind another mortal to powder.
His sense of time had fled him. During the two weeks of his affair with Eve, he’d had difficulty keeping track of the days, largely due to sleep deprivation. But when he returned home after fleeing the Eola, he’d had to stop the Land Cruiser at the head of the driveway and pick up the newspaper to learn what day it was. His last coherent memory was of Tuesday, but the top line of the paper said it was Thursday. He felt like a coma patient waking up to find himself in a different year than the one in which he’d had the accident that put him in the hospital. He had lost himself in a dream, and he had awakened to fear. Cold, nauseating, sphincter-twitching fear. All that he’d risked like so many plastic poker chips now filled his mind with heart-wrenching clarity.
Exactly what had happened last night, he was still unsure. He felt like the hapless senator in The Godfather Part II who went to bed with a laughing girl and woke up with a dead whore. Only in the real world there was no Tom Hagen standing by to make everything go back to the way it was before. In the real world, you were left alone with your horror and guilt, desperately needing to talk to another human being but afraid that any confession—even to a priest—could set you on a road that ended in the barred hell of Parchman Farm, strapped to a padded table while white-coated technicians helped you ride the
needle down into the smothering dark.
Despite these anxieties, some part of Waters’s brain continued to operate in survival mode, the way a soldier with a blown-off arm remains cogent enough to search for his bloody limb, then carry it back to the aid station with blank doll’s eyes, instinct driving him forward long after his higher brain functions have shut down. Waters was pretty sure no one had seen him leave the hotel. The security guard was sleeping, and the raging thunderstorm had cleared the streets. As he ran across Main Street toward his car, he did see a distant figure down near the bluff, a man with an umbrella standing over a urinating dog, but he didn’t think the man saw him. Even if he had, he would not have recognized Waters from so far.
As he drove home, he considered breaking into Eve’s house to see whether she kept anything there that would incriminate him. There was a good chance that she did, but he had never been to her house before. If he was seen trying to get in, tonight of all nights, that would be the end for him, even if there was no evidence inside.
When he pulled into his driveway, he noticed the kitchen light on. It had not been on when he left the night before. Disquieted, he parked the Land Cruiser on the side of the house and walked around to the slave quarters. From there he could look across the patio at the rear windows of the main house. He did not see Lily moving around, and the master bedroom was still dark. He watched the windows for an hour. While he did, the events of the past two weeks played through his head like a surrealistic film, intercut with horrifying stills of Eve’s lifeless body.
When the bedroom light clicked on, he went into the house and put on a pot of coffee, then walked back to the bedroom to check on Lily. She was using the bathroom. Standing by the partly open door, he asked how she’d slept.
“Not too well,” she said in a tired voice. “What about you?”
He paused, waiting for some clue to what she had seen last night, if anything. None came. “I couldn’t sleep again,” he told her.