“Hey.”
“Where are you?” Lily asked.
“On my way to Saragossa for lunch. I’m going to meet Cole out there.” Actually Cole had no idea he was coming. “How’s your day?”
“Fine. Ana’s staying over at Lindsey’s tonight.”
Lindsey was a classmate who lived in one of the white-flight neighborhoods that had sprung up around the country club. “On a school night?”
“Tomorrow’s Lindsey’s birthday, so I said it was all right.”
“Okay.”
“Besides, that gives us some more time together.”
Waters had thought last night’s lovemaking an anomaly, despite Lily’s professed commitment to change. “That’s true,” he said neutrally.
“Have you checked your voice mail?”
“No.”
“You should. I haven’t left a message like that in a while. I’ll see you later on. Or call me, if you like the mail.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I love you.”
“You too,” he said, nonplussed by her forwardness.
He clicked off and punched in the code for his voice mail.
“It’s just me,” said Lily. “I’m not calling to ask you to pick up something at the store or bug you about some household junk. I’m calling to tell you I wish you were inside me right now.”
Waters swallowed. Lily had not done anything like this for years.
“I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. What we did last night. And I’m touching myself. I wish you could do this for me. Mmm. If you were, you’d know I’m telling the truth. Well…I hope you get home soon.”
He hung up and made the turn into Saragossa. As the clubhouse came into sight, he decided not to call Lily back. He was glad she was making an effort to close the distance that had separated them for so long, but he simply didn’t know how to respond.
He parked the Land Cruiser and walked through the front doors, then headed to the card room. Cole didn’t play golf anymore; he played gin or Bourée.
Waters found him sitting at a table with three men ranging in age from thirty to sixty. All four had stiff drinks in front of them. On any given day you could find the same crew here, talking, drinking, and gambling. If there was a game on TV, there would be money riding on that as well. Waters couldn’t imagine wasting his life this way, but he knew that men like Cole didn’t really have a choice. They followed their appetites, their appetites led them this way, and that was that.
“Rock!” Cole called. “You come out to play a few hands with us?”
“No. I need to talk to you for a minute. We’ve got some problems with a flow line in Jefferson County.”
“Flow line? What are you talking about?”
Waters jerked his head to the side, leaving no doubt that he wanted privacy. Cole stared at him for a few moments, then said, “Deal me out for a hand, guys. Duty calls.”
The other players grunted, and Cole got up and followed Waters through a side door that opened near the putting green. A retired surgeon was practicing there, so Waters walked out of earshot, Cole wheezing along behind him. They had taken walks like this many times, but always as brothers in arms, discussing strategy on deals they were putting together. Now events had divided them. Waters could feel it in his bones. Cole might not be his enemy, but a chasm had opened between them. When he stopped and turned by an iron bench, Cole squinted against the sunlight, then raised his right hand to protect his eyes.
“You wouldn’t drive out here over any damn flow line,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Didn’t you tell me it’s not a good idea to keep things from your partner?”
Cole’s neck tensed with the effort of remaining expressionless. “That’s right.”
“I hear we sold our three-twenty pumping unit off the Madam X well.”
Cole’s mouth opened slightly; then he drew back his head as if expressing shock at a gross misunderstanding. “Rock, we’ve talked a half dozen times about replacing that old three-twenty.”
“In a couple of years, maybe.”
Cole tilted his head to the side and pooched out his bottom lip. “Well, that’s a difference of opinion.”
“One I wasn’t aware of.”
“Look, am I in charge of that workover or not?”
“You were until today. But if you don’t give me some straight answers, you’re not going to be in charge of jack shit.”
His face reddening, Cole stepped forward like he meant to deck Waters. Instead, he looked at the ground and shook his head.
“Look, goddamn it. I just needed a few thousand to tide me over. I was going to replace the unit in a couple of weeks.”
This was a ludicrous statement, but it served as an admission of guilt. “Jesus, Cole, what about the fifty I lent you the other day?”
“I told you I needed seventy-five!”
“What the hell are you into? Is this gambling debt or what?”
Cole stared off over the eighteenth fairway. “Yeah.”
“Football? What?”
“Mostly football. Some high-stakes poker from the last trip Jenny and I took to Vegas. The vig on that is pretty tough. You know how it is. I tried to make back what I owed by going for broke.” Momentary excitement flashed in Cole’s eyes. “I had a sure thing, Rock. The Tulane–Ole Miss game. I had the inside poop from the team doctor. A guy in New Orleans clues me in—”
“But he was wrong, right?”
Cole shrugged. “I just didn’t catch the right spread.”
“Would you listen to yourself? You’ll never get out of the hole like that.”
“Shit, I know. I’m like a drunk with the gambling.”
“You’re like a drunk with the scotch too.”
Cole whipped up his arm. “Get off me, okay! You were screwing the local slut because she told you she was your dead girlfriend. That’s necrophilia, man.”
Waters felt his hands go cold. He wanted to scream back that he knew it was all a scam, that Cole and Eve were behind the whole thing, but he would not let his partner sidetrack him. He needed to get all the information he could. After today, the only communication he had with his partner might be through attorneys.
“What else have you done? Is this why you didn’t pay the liability premium? You used that money to pay debts?”
“No.”
“Am I going to have to audit every goddamn line of our books? Tell me the truth.”
Cole distended his cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and expelled air in a repentant rush. “Okay…I was in a bind then too. Not as bad as now, but bad enough. I slid the premium money into a different account and cashed it out.”
Waters felt like the earth had opened beneath his feet. “Do you realize that I could lose everything because of that? My retirement? Ana’s college money?”
“Uh-huh,” Cole said in a dead voice. “I’ve agonized over it ever since they found the leak. But goddamn it, John, you put all that at risk yourself when you started screwing Eve. What’s going to happen to them if you go down for murder?”
“Why would I go down for her murder?”
Cole’s eyes glinted. “You can’t fool your partner, Rock. I know you were with her that night.”
“You’re full of shit. What do you think you know?”
Something like satisfaction crossed Cole’s face. “I know what I know.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“No? Maybe I got curious about why you’d given up your true-blue work ethic after seventeen years. Maybe I followed you for a couple of days. Maybe I saw you go into the Eola to meet Evie. You should have taken me up on that alibi offer.”
“You couldn’t have seen me go into the Eola that night, because I wasn’t there.”
“Whatever you say, Rock. Just don’t push me, okay? Don’t even dream about going to the cops over this pumping unit thing.”
Waters shook his head in disbelief. “Is tha
t what you think I’d do? Turn you in to the police? I’m trying to help you, man.”
Cole looked uncertain.
“You know what this tells me? You wouldn’t hesitate to turn me in for something. Is that what you’re doing? Threatening to turn me in if I don’t pay off your debts?”
“Have I done that?” Cole snapped. “Have you heard me say that?”
“It sure sounded like you were leading up to it.”
“Goddamn it, Rock, everything’s just gotten fucked up. And I can’t see how to unfuck it.”
“This is a sad day, partner. We’ve known each other almost forty years. And this is how it ends up?”
Cole suddenly looked close to tears. “You don’t understand, John. This isn’t just about money. I don’t pay these guys? They take it out of my hide. And maybe they don’t stop there, you know? There’s no way Jenny can make it if something happens to me. I gotta find a way to pay this off.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. I been doing stuff like selling that pumping unit just to keep up the interest on the debt. I mean, what the hell? If the EPA thing goes against us, we’re going to lose it all anyway.”
This was true enough. And given his present difficulties, Waters could care less about the dollar value of a pumping unit. “Listen to me,” he said. “Think about when we were kids together. Those summers by St. Catherine’s Creek. The forts we built…the stuff we did together. You at my father’s funeral.”
Cole nodded. “That was a long time ago.”
“Not for me. For me it was yesterday. Now I want you to tell me something. Were you in with Eve on this thing from the start?”
“What thing?”
“Don’t lie, Cole. This is me. Did you feed Eve a bunch of stuff about Mallory and me so she could make me think I was going crazy?”
Cole did a first-rate impression of being shocked. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“You could sell a lot more pumping units with me out of the picture. Maybe even some production, if you forged my signature. And if you did it before the EPA lands on us with both feet, it might just buy your ass out of the hole.”
Cole’s mouth was hanging open. “Are you drunk?”
“I’m stone sober. I’m as sane as I’ve ever been, and I’m not going anywhere. You got it? I’ll be running this company till the EPA chains the door shut. And as of now, you’re making no solo decisions regarding cash flow, production, or anything else.”
“If you’re not drunk, you have gone crazy. You think I’d fuck my best friend like that?”
The hurt in his voice almost made Waters turn away, but this was no time to be soft. “I don’t know what to think anymore, partner. We’ve come to a pretty bad place.”
Cole shook his head, stepped forward, and put his beefy hands on Waters’s shoulders. “Rock,” he said in a cracked voice. “I’m under some real pressure, no lie. All told, I’m over six hundred grand in the hole. But I’d go down with my legs broken and a bullet in my head before I’d do something to hurt you or your family. That’s God’s truth.”
Despite his shock and fury, Waters felt tears sting his eyes. There was no doubt that Cole at least believed what he said. He started to press on with his accusations, as Penn would have wanted him to do, but he simply didn’t have it in him. He squeezed Cole’s arm and said, “I know you would, partner. I know.” Then he gave Cole a hug. He felt the big man shaking, and he knew then that Cole really was in the kind of trouble that some people never walked away from.
“Don’t sweat the little shit,” he said.
“And it’s all little shit,” Cole replied automatically.
They forced a laugh, and then Waters took out his keys.
“What are you going to do?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know. You just stay safe, okay? And don’t worry about that three-twenty.”
Cole took a step toward him. “Listen, John. I don’t know what you did exactly. But my offer for an alibi still stands. If you can’t figure a way out, come see me. We’ve dug ourselves out of holes before. Maybe we can do it again, if we stick together.”
Waters tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. Cole sounded so sincere, yet every word of it could be a lie.
The office was busy that afternoon. Monthly billing was going out to the coowners in all the wells, and Sybil couldn’t handle it alone. Since Cole was busy drinking and playing cards, that left Waters to fill in for him.
The printer jammed halfway through the job, and as he helped Sybil clear it, he felt tempted to ask her some questions. If she was sleeping with Cole, as he suspected, she might know a lot about his financial problems. She might also know if he’d had any recent contact with Eve. But Sybil seemed to be in a down mood, and he didn’t want her to think the company was in more trouble than she knew about already.
At a quarter to five, Sybil headed out to the post office to mail the bills. Cole still hadn’t returned, so Waters locked the office and headed home. He was nearly there when his cell phone rang, and he saw a mobile number he didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“This is your fellow Eagle Scout,” said a male voice.
Waters almost laughed at Penn Cage’s choice of code. “What’s going on?”
“We’re both on mobile phones. Where are you?”
“State Street, on my way home.”
“We need to talk. Your house?”
“Ah…I’d rather meet elsewhere.”
“Okay. How about the parking lot of Heard’s Music Company?”
The lot was only a few hundred yards from Waters’s driveway. “I’ll see you there.”
Waters hung up and sped past his driveway, then crossed one boulevard and turned into the music store parking lot. Waters had bought his last piano here, a nine-foot concert grand. As a boy, he and his mother could only dream of an instrument like that; now he owned a house that seemed incomplete without one. But for how long? he thought.
As he parked the Land Cruiser, Penn leaned out of a green Audi TT and motioned for him to get in. When Waters climbed into the convertible, Penn shook his hand and smiled.
“What’s up?” Waters asked. “Do you know something?”
“The police have a new lead. They’re keeping quiet about it, but Caitlin has a source inside the department.”
“And?”
Penn grimaced. “The guy thought he heard your name mentioned.”
“Shit.” A wild, unreasoning fear hit Waters in the bowels. “Was he sure?”
“Nothing’s sure yet. I don’t know what they have. Do you have any idea what it could be?”
Waters thought of the week at Bienville, then the nights at the Eola. “I don’t know. Maybe someone saw us, but we didn’t see them?”
“That may be it.”
“I’ve always been worried about Eve’s house. She’s bound to have had stuff about me in there.”
“Well, until we know something for sure, you should sit tight and stay calm. Go back over everything and try to anticipate the situation.”
Waters’s face suddenly felt cold.
“What is it, John?”
“I just talked to Cole, like you said to. Confronted him.”
“And?”
“He told me he knew I was with Eve at the Eola.”
Penn’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How could he know that?”
“He was coy about it. Said he followed me for a few days. But I think that was bullshit. I can’t see him doing that.”
“No. If he knows, it’s because Eve told him you would be there.” Penn tapped the steering wheel. “What if she called him to come up after you passed out, thinking he was going to do something to you? When in reality he was going to kill her all along, and frame you.”
Waters shook his head. “Cole couldn’t do that.”
“Are you so sure? What did he say about selling the pumping unit?”
“He admitted it. He’s up to his eyeballs in debt. To bookies, Ve
gas casinos, everybody.”
Penn turned up his palms, as if this proved his case.
“Did you find out anything about Mallory’s diaries?” Waters asked, wanting to change the subject.
“As a matter of fact, I did. I talked to Mrs. Candler for quite a while. I told her I was thinking of doing a nonfiction book about Natchez, and naturally I’d want to include a chapter on our second Miss Mississippi. I got a good bit of information out of her before she got suspicious.”
“Such as?”
“About a year ago—sometime around her husband’s death—some of Mallory’s things disappeared from their house.”
Waters felt a strange premonition, but of what, he wasn’t sure. “Like what?”
“Mallory’s diaries, for one thing.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. Also some jewelry, all Mallory’s. And some personal things of Mallory’s that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but her.”
“What do you think?”
“That tells us that someone has been planning this scam on you for over a year. They broke into the Candler house and took personal things that would help authenticate Eve’s story.”
“How could they take things that no one would know were important but Mallory?”
“John, they were taken from her room. Obviously she had saved them for some sentimental reason. My guess is that if you hadn’t swallowed Eve’s story so quickly, those little items would have started making appearances in your life. On Eve’s arm, or in her purse, maybe.”
Waters felt a strange lightness in his limbs. He leaned back in the seat, unable to believe what he was hearing.
“I’ve been thinking about what you told me about Mallory cutting herself,” Penn said. “You said you didn’t believe her when she told you that her father had sexually abused her.”
Waters nodded.
“Well, I’ve been asking questions about her family. Nobody could be very specific, but I got the feeling that Ben Candler was a little strange where sex was concerned.”
“How so?”
“A little pervy about young girls. He made inappropriate comments sometimes. He and his wife apparently had a nonsexual relationship. That’s the gist, anyway. The mother had an affair at some point, but when it threatened Ben’s political career, she ended it.”