The first thing he saw was a copy of the campus newspaper, the Daily Mississippian, with Mallory Candler filling most of the front page. MISS UNIVERSITY 1982! proclaimed the headline. ON TO MISS MISSISSIPPI PAGEANT? asked a smaller font. Below the type, Mallory stood facing the camera with a dozen roses, flashing her megawatt smile and wearing a sequined gown that could have been made for Grace Kelly. The instant Waters saw her face, Eve vanished from his mind. Eve Sumner had the sensual but not uncommon gifts of good bones, good tits, and sultry eyes. Mallory’s beauty was the once-in-a-decade sort, her features drawn from and sharing in some portion of eternity. As he lifted the newspaper to look for other photos, the cell phone in his pocket rang, startling him. When he answered, he heard Lily’s worried voice.
“I woke up and found you gone,” she said sleepily. “Are you still at Wal-Mart?”
“I didn’t go to Wal-Mart.”
Silence. “Where are you?”
“I went for a ride. I couldn’t sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
Mallory stared out of the newspaper photograph with eerie vitality. “I don’t know. The dry hole…the EPA thing.”
“Come home, and I’ll make some coffee. It’s five a.m., John.”
“All right.”
He hung up but did not stand. Even when reduced to a millimeter-thick sheet of paper, Mallory seemed more alive than the people he saw in town every day. He shook his head. If anyone in that audience on that night had known what was going on behind those hypnotic green eyes, they would have left the auditorium in shock. But of course they hadn’t. No one had, except John Waters. He started to fold the newspaper and bring it with him, but then he slid it back into the portfolio and carried the portfolio out to the Land Cruiser. Lily never drove the SUV. He could leave the portfolio under its seat with no worries. And if he got the desperate feeling that he could not recall Mallory’s face, all he’d have to do was pull it out and look at her picture.
Waters had driven most of the way home when a blue dashboard light flashed and swirled wildly in his rearview mirror. Though reminded of Eve’s rape story, he pulled over, rolled down his window, and waited. He heard heavy footsteps, and then a man said, “John? You’re out kind of early, pardner. Or is it late?”
The speaker was Detective Tom Jackson, the man who’d arrested Danny Buckles the day before.
“Hey, Tom. Was I speeding?”
Jackson stopped at Waters’s window and gave him a friendly nod. “No, I just recognized your vehicle. I wanted to make sure you were okay. All that molestation stuff yesterday…I know it’s tough to deal with.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t sleep. I’m just doing some thinking.”
Jackson gave him a sympathetic smile. “Your little girl okay?”
“Oh, yeah. She took it better than I thought she would.”
“Good. You know, it looks like the guy didn’t touch the girls at all. He just did some looking, exposed himself, that kind of thing.”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah.” The detective sniffed and looked up the road. In the darkness, his size and his cowboy mustache gave him the look of a Frederic Remington bronze. “Well,” he said, looking back at Waters. “You have a good day, John. Try to get some sleep. You look like you need some.”
“I will. Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Waters drove away slowly, wondering how long Jackson had been following him.
chapter 7
“I got a preliminary report on Eve Sumner,” Cole said, setting down his morning cup of coffee. “You want to hear it?”
Waters put down his briefcase, sat in a leather chair, and looked around Cole’s one-room shrine to the Ole Miss Rebels.
“You look like shit,” Cole said.
“I didn’t sleep much. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“Eve was born Evie Ray Sumner in St. Joseph, Louisiana, in 1970.” Cole read from a faxed page. “Sounds right for St. Joe, doesn’t it? Evie Ray?”
Waters nodded. St. Joe was a center of cotton and soybean farming, an hour north of Natchez.
“She got knocked up when she was fifteen and had an abortion in Baton Rouge.”
“How did they find that out?”
Cole shrugged. “Made some calls, I guess. Old friends talk. For money, anyway.”
Waters felt more than a little sleazy to be funding that sort of muckraking. But he had to know about her.
“Evie graduated St. Joe High at seventeen. Salutatorian, if you can believe it. She lit out for Los Angeles, married a cop, got pregnant, and split town six months later. May have been some spousal abuse involved. She came back to Louisiana to have the kid, and her mother mostly raised it. Evie enrolled in Hinds Junior College and spent her time dating jocks. She didn’t graduate. She did try about eight different lines of work. Beauty school, paralegal school, massage therapist, you name it. Nothing worked out for long. Then she came to Natchez and got a job as a dealer on the casino boat. She studied nights for her real estate license, then went to work for Hubert Hartley’s company. After a year, she was leading salesman, or salesperson, whatever. Then she went out on her own.”
“Any evidence of mental illness? Depression? Suicide attempts?”
“Nothing they could find. And I myself would class Evie as irritatingly sane. You want them to keep looking?”
“Keep looking. What about Mallory’s murder?”
“We’ve got copies of all the newspaper stories coming FedEx. The law firm is trying to set up a call between you and the lead homicide detective on the case.”
“Good.”
Cole put down the papers and sipped his coffee. “John, what are you going to ask this detective if he does call?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Okay. So…are you going to tell me what happened after you stormed out of here yesterday?”
Cole had called twice last night to ask that question, but Waters and Lily had been in tense discussion, and he hadn’t answered the phone. Now, recalling the crazy conversation at the cemetery and the kiss, he didn’t want to answer at all. If he told that story with a straight face, Cole would think he’d lost his mind.
“It’s no big thing. Eve warned me about Danny Buckles. I checked it out. I don’t know how she knew about it, but she did a good thing. There’s some connection between her and Buckles, and I’m trying to find out what it is.”
“I haven’t heard Evie’s name in any of the rumors,” Cole said. “Did you tell the cops she was the one who warned you?”
“No.”
“I see. And that’s no big thing.”
Waters sighed and looked out the picture window at the sweeping vista of the rust-colored river below.
Cole’s chair groaned in protest as he heaved his bulk forward and dropped his heavy hand on the desktop to get Waters’s attention. “John? It’s never a good idea to keep things from your partner.”
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 o
nce 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 Yucatán, 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.”