She said nothing.
“I’ll get Ana up,” he offered.
“Thanks.”
He walked to the foot of the stairs and yelled for Annelise to roll out of bed, then went into the kitchen and began to make biscuits, bacon, and eggs. By the time Lily came out of the back of the house, Annelise was munching on a biscuit and watching the Disney Channel on the satellite.
Sitting in this Norman Rockwell illusion of normalcy, he was nearly overcome with regret. How could he have put this blessed, well-ordered universe at risk? Was he that perverse? Was the memory of Mallory Candler so powerful? Apparently so. But he was not so far gone that he did not see his duty as a father. To protect Lily and Annelise, he would have to construct an unbreakable alibi for last night. He needed to know exactly what Lily had seen last night, but he would have to wait until tonight for that information. Even if she had noticed him AWOL, she wouldn’t bring it up in front of Annelise.
As domestic life unfolded around him, he contemplated grim realities. The stakes riding on his remaining free were incalculable. The EPA could rule against his company at any time, and all his assets could be seized. Lily might retain the house, but she would have no income. If Waters was sitting in prison for murder, he would be unable to generate any, and Lily wouldn’t be able to earn more than thirty thousand dollars in the first year if she went back to accounting, if she could get a job in Natchez’s declining economy. Waters had two million in life insurance, but unless he received the death penalty—and unless it was carried out with unprecedented speed—Lily wouldn’t see that insurance money for decades. His wife and daughter could fall from the affluent middle class to poverty in a matter of weeks. As he passed Annelise jelly for her biscuit, he made a mental note to check the suicide clause in his life insurance policy, and also to see whether it would pay its death benefit if he should be executed by the state. That he had brought himself to a point where this kind of thinking was a necessity left him feeling hollowed out, like a man dying from a wasting disease.
Soon the whirlwind of getting Ana off to school with the proper books, her Coke money, and her ballet things was in full swing. Waters kissed Lily and his daughter, then went back to the master bedroom to “take a shower.” When he heard the Acura roll down the drive toward State Street, he sat down on the bed and began to shake.
His next clear memory was of sitting at his office desk, looking down at a photograph of Mallory. Somehow he had cleaned himself up and driven downtown, but he could not remember doing it. He had to get himself together. If anything should bring him under suspicion—phone records, something inside Eve’s house, a witness he knew nothing about—he would not be able to fool the police for five minutes in this mental state. Of course, if he really came under suspicion, he was lost anyway. The police would sample the semen taken from Eve’s corpse and test that DNA against the DNA of any suspects. With that evidence, nothing else would be required. In the harsh light of hindsight, he cursed his squeamishness. He should have steeled himself and found a maid’s cart with some powerful bottled cleaner, carried it back to the room, and used it to contaminate or destroy that conclusive evidence. But of course he had not. Such was the work of monsters, not men. And yet…the thought was in him.
“Rock Man, are you okay?”
Waters looked up to see Cole’s bulk bearing down on him. He swept Mallory’s photo into the portfolio and dropped the portfolio into an open drawer.
“Why would I not be?”
“Sybil said she told you about Eve.”
“She did. Sounds horrible.”
His eyes alert to the slightest tic in Waters’s face, Cole walked back to the door and closed it, then came and sat down opposite the desk.
“What’s going on?” Waters asked.
Cole took a deep breath and sighed. “This is your partner talking, John. We go way back, right? Way back.”
“Right.”
“Were you with Eve last night?”
“Eve Sumner?” Waters didn’t blink. “Hell no.”
Cole nodded slowly. “You were home with Lily?”
“Of course.”
“All night?”
Waters said nothing.
“Because, if you weren’t,” Cole went on, “if you were…alone, say. You were alone, and you thought that wouldn’t look good to certain people? Well, Jenny went to sleep early last night. She took a pill. So I watched HBO and drank Wild Turkey for most of the night.”
Waters’s mouth had gone dry. “And?”
“I’m just letting you know, before it becomes any kind of thing, that if you needed to be with me last night for some reason…then you were. Capisce?”
Despite the pressure he was under, a preternatural calm settled over Waters. He had always had the gift, in dire circumstances, of seeing to the heart of things. It had saved his life more than once during the years that he studied volcanoes, and also with Mallory. As Cole sat watching him, his face a perfect expression of loyalty, Waters realized two things. First, Cole had offered him the alibi he needed, should he fall under suspicion for Eve’s murder. If Cole swore that Waters had spent the night at his house, then the presence of Waters’s semen in Eve’s corpse could be explained. Yes, he’d had sex with her that day, but he had not been anywhere near the Eola Hotel that night. There would be a scandal. It might even end his marriage. But it would probably keep him out of prison, and he would then have a chance at salvaging his family. However—and this was the mother of all caveats—if he accepted Cole’s offer and went with that alibi, he would be placing his life in his partner’s hands. Cole would own him, now and forever.
“You’ve got that look,” Cole said.
“What look?”
“That deep-shit look. Your cold face.”
Waters had known Cole since he was four years old. They’d experienced the frictions common to any friendship over time, magnified by the tensions of a business partnership, but Cole had never truly screwed him. Waters wasn’t worried about outright betrayal. What worried him was weakness. Cole had vices. All men did, but Cole was exceptionally bad at resisting temptation. He drank, gambled, and chased women, and he was loose with money. In his youth he had been good about keeping his own counsel, but lately even that virtue had begun to erode.
“Let me help you, Rock,” Cole said in a quiet voice. “Everybody needs a little help sometimes.”
“I don’t,” Waters said, suddenly sure. “But I appreciate it.”
He saw disappointment in his partner’s eyes. It was human nature. When we feel weak, it comforts us to know that others share our vulnerabilities. But Waters could not afford to reveal his. Not to Cole. If he needed a confessor, he would have to choose very carefully.
“I need to get to work on that map,” he said. “The one you were after me about last week.”
Cole nodded but did not get up. “Be sure, Rock. Because once you take a fork in the trail, you can’t always get back to the same spot. You know?”
“I’m good,” Waters assured him. “No worries.”
Cole looked far from convinced, but he heaved himself out of the chair and walked to the door. Before he went out, he turned and gave Waters a mock salute that seemed to say, “I did my best. You’re on your own. Good luck.” Then he went out.
The rest of the day passed in a disjointed sequence of detached, fuguelike states interrupted by mundane phone calls. At one point he buzzed Sybil to bring him the newspaper, then remembered that Eve’s body had been discovered six hours after the paper hit the streets. There would be plenty of coverage tomorrow, though. Penn Cage’s girlfriend had probably been working the story like a pit bull from the moment Eve’s body was found. But he needed a faster source of information than tomorrow’s paper. He needed to know what the police knew. Had any hotel guests heard screaming from room 324? Had anyone come forward with knowledge about Eve’s recent activities? What kind of trace evidence had they taken from the scene?
His phone buzzed, and he s
napped out of his reverie.
“Your wife on line one,” Sybil informed him.
“I’ve got it.” He hit the button. “Hey, Lil.”
“Have you heard about Eve Sumner?”
“I heard.”
“Isn’t it just unbelievable?”
No…. “It is.”
The open line hissed in his right ear.
“John, I’ve been thinking.”
He waited.
“The rumor is, Eve was meeting someone at the hotel, and whoever it was killed her.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
“Oh, you know she was. Having an affair, I mean. That was what Eve did. She couldn’t find the love she needed, so she just kept looking. And ever since I heard about it, all I can think about is us.”
“Us? Why?”
“Because…I know you were gone last night.”
His chest tightened so suddenly that he found it hard to breathe.
“I know you were probably just taking a ride like you do sometimes. But think if you had been doing something. I couldn’t blame you if you were. Not with the way things have been between us. And what happened to Eve…that kind of thing could happen to anybody. When you’re desperate, and you go looking in the wrong places for something you should have at home—”
“Lily, don’t,” he said, surprised by the hysteria in her voice.
She sobbed, then choked it back. “I’m so stupid. It makes me so angry to know something is wrong with me and not be able to change it. I know I’ve said that before, but now…I just have to, John. I have to change. Life’s too short.”
Why hadn’t Lily said these things two weeks ago? Maybe he could have resisted Eve’s siren song. “It’s all right, babe. Everything’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. And I want to stop pretending that it is. I don’t want to lose you, John.”
And I don’t want to lose you and Annelise. “We’ll talk about it when I get home. Why don’t you go for a swim? That always helps you feel better.”
“I might. Are you coming straight home after work?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” She paused, but he sensed that she wanted to say more. “I want to put Annelise to bed early tonight,” she added. “And I…I want to make love with you. The way I used to.”
“Lily—”
“I love you, John.”
“I love you too.”
After a few moments, she hung up, and he set the phone in its cradle.
Her call almost pushed him into a manic state. How could things unfold this way? How could the death of a near-stranger change his wife’s attitude about sex when all his most patient efforts could not? And how could that stranger be the woman he had turned to for succor in his need? He felt trapped in some crazy Greek tragedy where only the Fates and Furies knew their roles well enough to carry them off.
He wanted to leave the office, but for appearance’s sake, he felt he should stick it out until five. He soon found himself pondering morbid ironies, like the fact that Eve’s body almost certainly now lay on the same embalming table that Mallory’s had lain upon ten years ago. Natchez had come a long way in race relations, but it was still segregated in death. If you died white in this town, or were to be buried here, there was only one funeral home to go to. Of course, her body might not be there yet. There would have to be an autopsy. He had no idea where that would be carried out. Would a Natchez pathologist do it? Or would the body be shipped to the state capital, Jackson?
What would the autopsy reveal? Was he right about strangulation? Or was there some other possibility? He had seen marks on her throat and petechiae around her eyes. But what if those marks had been made during the last minutes of their lovemaking, when he held her down on the mattress? What if something else had killed her? A heart attack? Or a stroke? Natchez was a small town, and Waters knew two women in their forties who had died of strokes in the past few years. Lily thought it had something to do with birth control pills. Eve wasn’t on the pill. She’d had her tubes tied. She was also in her early thirties. On the other hand, she’d led a wild life. Who knew what was possible? Eve might have been taking drugs the whole time he’d known her, which was only two weeks, after all. Cocaine caused heart attacks all the time. Strange as it seemed, these thoughts lifted his spirits. The alternative was to face the fact that he had strangled a woman for whom he had cared a great deal.
He went to a small refrigerator under his wet bar and took out a bottle of water, then returned to his desk. That brief activity exhausted him. He was puzzled until he remembered that he hadn’t slept last night. Laying his head on the desk, he tried to resist the worries that had been eating at him all day.
“John? Hey, John!”
Waters started and looked up into Sybil’s concerned face.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“It’s five-thirty. Do you want me to stay?”
He looked at his watch. He’d slept for two hours. “No, no. You go home. I’m sorry. Is Cole still here?”
“No, he left around four. He didn’t say where he was going.”
Sybil sounded put out by this, but it could have been Waters’s imagination. “Let’s shut it down and go home,” he said. “I want to see my daughter.”
Sybil smiled, but her eyes were sad. “Ana’s a lucky little girl. One day she’ll know that.”
I hope she stays lucky, he thought.
Turning into his drive, Waters stopped at the mailbox from habit. Junk mail and a couple of party invitations were stuffed between copies of the U.S. Geological Review and USA Today. As he laid the mail on the passenger seat, a four-door diesel pickup pulled in behind him. Its sudden appearance startled him, but when a leather-faced man of sixty got out, Waters calmed down and got out to shake hands.
Will Hinson was a well-checker. He monitored the daily operations of oil wells all over the county for a monthly fee. Though he checked about a dozen Smith-Waters wells, most communication was handled by telephone.
“How do, John?” Hinson said.
“Fine, Will. How’re you doing?”
“Not bad. Don’t want to bother you, but I saw you pull in.”
“I’m glad you stopped. Everything going okay?”
“Oh, fair. Always something to fix, but you know. You get the bills for it. Reason I stopped, I saw ’em hauling off the pumping unit at your Madam X well.”
Waters blinked in confusion. “You what?”
“I thought you might be replacing it, but then I remembered it was a three-twenty. Didn’t figure you wanted to push any more fluid than that.”
Waters wondered if Hinson was getting what Rose called “old-timer’s disease.” “Are you sure this was on our lease?”
“Yessir. I don’t check that well, but I stopped and asked the crew what they thought they was doing. They said you boys had sold the unit to a Texas outfit. That’s where that rig’s bound right now. Oil City, Texas.”
This news was shocking enough to bring Waters out of his haze. “I’d better make some calls. Somebody made a mistake somewhere.”
The older man nodded, but it was clear he had more to say.
“What is it, Will?”
“It was me? I’d call my partner first.”
Waters went still. “Tell me what you know.”
“I’m not one to talk behind anybody’s back. But you’re a pretty trusting fella, John. Just like your dad.”
“Come on. Out with it.”
“Word is, your boy Cole’s in a bind. A bad one. I heard all kinds of things he’s trying, but I don’t know what’s true, so I ain’t repeatin’ nothing. But you better look to your business. People get in money trouble, they do things they might not normally do. Like selling a pumping unit out from under a partner when they need cash.”
Waters nodded slowly, not believing his ears. “I appreciate you stopping, Will.”
“I hope I did the right thing.”
“You did. You take it easy,
now.”
“Nope. I never do. I’ll die in the saddle. Only way to go.”
They shook hands again, and the older man got into his truck and backed out of the driveway. Waters climbed into his Land Cruiser and drove slowly up to the house. The unreality of his situation was growing by the minute. The Madam X well was currently down, and due for a workover in two weeks. Cole was in charge of that. If someone like Will Hinson had not stopped out of the blue, Waters might not have known the pumping unit was gone for three weeks or more. Maybe longer, if Cole planned to lie about production runs. A used 320 pumping unit would bring about thirty thousand dollars on the open market. Would Cole betray his trust for thirty thousand dollars? He didn’t want to think so. But…how much trouble was Cole really in?
When he opened the front door of the house, his exhausted mind and body told him to go straight to bed. That wasn’t an option tonight. He walked into the kitchen and hugged Lily, who looked like she would have broken into tears, were not Annelise sitting at the table doing her homework.
“Sit down,” she said. “Supper’s ready.”
He sat, and she brought him a plate of shrimp and pasta that Rose had cooked during the afternoon. He had no appetite, but he made a show of picking at his food. His mind was on Cole and the pumping unit. After serving Annelise, Lily laid her hands on his shoulders and massaged them as Ana told a story about a new music program at school. When Ana finished, Lily got a plate for herself and sat opposite Waters. As she ate, she watched her husband and daughter as though she had never really seen them before. Under the circumstances, it made him uncomfortable.
Waters had a feeling that something about her had changed. It wasn’t her hair, which was the same dark blond it had always been and still fell to her shoulders. She might have on a touch more makeup, but not enough to give him an odd feeling.
“You look different,” he said.
“I ran today. Maybe that’s it.”
“You ran?”
“Mom, that’s cool,” Ana said. “I want to go next time.”
Lily had been a long-distance runner in high school. As a tenth-grader she’d won the state championship in the two-mile run. She had kept up her running well into their marriage, staying almost obsessively in shape. But after the first miscarriage, she couldn’t seem to find the energy to get outside. She gained weight, and that intensified her depression. Today was probably the first time in four years that she had “hit the road,” as she used to call it.