“I know.”
“Did you give me drugs or something?”
“No.”
“Then why…” The whites of her eyes grew as the implications of Waters’s story of possession broke through her last defense mechanisms.
“Oh God,” she whispered.
Waters reached out to her, but she jerked away from his hand.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t.”
Lily jumped to her feet and looked around as if to find somewhere to run, but there was nowhere. In her own home there was no sanctuary.
“Why did you tell me this?” she screamed. “You’re trying to drive me crazy! That’s what this is!”
He tried to keep his voice calm. “Why would I do that, Lily?”
“I don’t know. You want to leave me.”
“No. If I wanted that, I’d just leave.”
“Maybe you want to keep all your money! How do I know? Maybe you have another girlfriend somewhere!”
He held up his hands in supplication. “I made this tape to show you—Lily Waters—what had happened to you. To us. That’s not you on the tape, Lily. You know that.”
She splayed her shaking hands in front of her and stared at them like a mental patient on the verge of collapse.
Waters ran to the kitchen and poured a shot of vodka from a bottle in the freezer. When he got back, Lily lay panting on the floor, close to hyperventilating.
“Drink this,” he pleaded, kneeling over her.
She obeyed like a sick child, then squeezed her eyes shut against the burn of the alcohol.
“That’s it.”
“Oh no—” She scrabbled to her feet and ran into the bathroom, where she dropped over the commode and began to retch. Waters knelt beside her and held her convulsing body.
“Take it easy. Get your breath back.”
She planted both elbows on the toilet seat and raised her head. Her face was wet and blotchy red. When Waters took her arms to lift her, she didn’t resist, and when she got her feet beneath her, she went to the bed and sat on her side of it.
“What can I do?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes hollow and exhausted. “Am I myself now?”
“Yes.”
“But if what you told me is true—if Mallory is inside me—where is she now?”
Relief cascaded through him with the force of a religious epiphany. After days of isolation and ridicule, someone else believed. “She’s inside Cole now.”
“Cole Smith?”
“Yes.”
“And she was in me before that?”
He nodded.
“But that means…” Lily closed her eyes, then went deathly white.
“Don’t think about it, Lily.”
“Cole and me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She raised a quivering hand to her face. “I can’t take this, John. I can’t listen to this.”
“I won’t say any more.”
“Did I really threaten Annelise with a butcher knife?”
“That wasn’t you. It was Mallory.”
“This is madness!”
“I know it seems that way.” Desperate to pull her back to the present, he followed a perverse instinct. He got to his knees before her and spoke softly. “Lily, tell me something. I promise I won’t get upset by your answer. Did you sleep with Cole during college?”
Her eyes instantly locked onto his, and he saw a different kind of fear in them.
“It’s all right if you did,” he assured her. “I just…Mallory told me that you did, and I wanted to know if she was making it up.”
Lily’s chin started to quiver. She bit her lip and looked away from him. “I did. I slept with Cole at Ole Miss.”
The stark admission from her own lips hurt him more than he had expected, but it had the intended effect. By putting Lily in a position where she felt momentary guilt, he knew her desire to console him would overpower the shock of the situation.
“I know you must have imagined all kinds of terrible things about why I didn’t tell you,” she said. “The truth is, I hardly remember being with him. I certainly don’t remember what it felt like.”
He shook his head. “It’s all right. You don’t have to make excuses.”
“But I want you to know why I kept it from you. When I came back to Natchez after SMU, and you and I went out on our first date, I really fell for you. I mean, I knew then—right then—that you were the man I’d been searching for all my life. On that same night, I found out Cole was your partner. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t about to bring up something like that on our first date, and by the time we were close enough to talk about it, I felt too awkward to do it. I was afraid you’d be so disappointed that you’d leave me. I was petrified Cole would say something to you. You know how guys are. But one day I came by your office when you weren’t there, and he brought it up. He was a real gentleman about it. He said, ‘Look, John’s my buddy, he’s a great guy, and he really cares about you. As far as I’m concerned, what happened between us never happened.’ I almost cried, I was so relieved. Neither of us ever wanted you to think it had been more than it was, which was nothing.”
“I understand,” he said. “Really.”
Lily slid down off the bed and hugged him, and he felt tears soaking his shirt.
“Listen,” he said, holding her to him. “Do you really believe the things I told you? Do you believe Mallory is alive?”
Her reply was a warm vibration against his chest. “If you hadn’t shown me that tape, I wouldn’t have. But yes, I believe it.” She looked up at him, her eyes alive with terror. “She wants you, John. And I don’t see a way to stop her.”
“I do. I’ve thought about nothing else from the moment she went into you.”
“How? It seems impossible.”
He took Lily by the shoulders and held her away from him. “We have to kill her.”
Lily blinked. “But…you said she can’t be killed without killing whoever she’s inside. Didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
He could see the thoughts spinning behind her bloodshot eyes. “You mean commit murder,” she said. “Cold-blooded murder. Kill someone like…”
“Cole,” Waters finished.
Her lips parted slightly. “Do you mean that?”
“Yes.”
She looked into his eyes for a long time, then walked back to the bed. “There have to be other options.”
“I don’t think you’ll like them.”
“What are they?”
“We could run. Mallory actually suggested that, but for a different reason. To escape the murder charge.”
“Run where?”
“Central America, maybe. Costa Rica. Find a place without U.S. extradition. We’d have to leave everything behind. Change our names. I’d be a fugitive because of Eve’s murder. Running would make me look guilty, and the DNA match would prove it.”
Lily’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged for several moments. “So…even if we manage to get rid of Mallory, that DNA test could put you in prison for life.”
“Don’t think about that right now. We have to focus on one problem at a time. Do you want to take Annelise and leave the country forever? She might never see your mother again. You’d never be Lily Waters again.”
Lily looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time. “Before today, I’d have told you those weren’t the important things. Things like names and where we live. What job you have. What school Annelise goes to. But they are important. Those details are what make up our lives. I think if we throw all that away to run like criminals, then we’ll lose part of ourselves.”
“I think so too.”
“What other option is there?”
“I could plead guilty to Eve’s murder. You and Annelise would be safe then. And maybe Mallory would get tired of waiting for me.”
“That’s not an option,” Lily said forcefully. “You are not going
to prison.”
Waters sighed. “I don’t think it would stop Mallory anyway. She’s already been in prison once. She’d find some way to get in and get close to me.” He sat beside Lily on the bed. “I honestly don’t think there’s any option but to destroy her. And to do that, we have to kill an innocent person.”
“Can you kill Cole in cold blood? You’ve been friends since you were little boys.”
Waters thought of Cole knowingly yielding to “Lily’s” seduction only hours ago. That was affecting his judgment, but he saw nothing to be gained by reminding Lily of the event. “I said someone like Cole. It doesn’t have to be him.”
“Who, then?”
“Remember my deal with Mallory? I promised her that if she went into another woman—a woman chosen by me—I would leave you and Annelise to be with her.”
Lily closed her eyes and wavered on the bed. He reached out and steadied her.
“I’m all right,” she said. She stood up and looked him full in the face. “Who would it be? The woman? Who would you pick?”
“Mallory suggested Sybil.”
“Your receptionist?”
“Cole’s already sleeping with her. Or was, until recently.”
Disgust wrinkled Lily’s face. “How in God’s name does Jenny stay with him?”
“How are you going to stay with me?”
“That’s different. You did what you did because…I’ve been less than a wife to you for far too long.”
“That’s no excuse.”
She folded her arms across her chest and looked at the floor. “I never thought I’d say this, but it’s a mitigating circumstance.”
Her forgiving attitude stunned him, but before he could fully absorb it, she grabbed his arm and said, “Wait! What if we found someone who wasn’t innocent?”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know. Like that Danny Buckles character who molested the little girls at school.”
Waters thought about it. “He’s in jail. And he’s a man.”
“Okay. But you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know any female criminals. Even if I did…who are we to decide that someone deserves to die? Even Danny Buckles?”
Lily flipped away his comment with an angry hand gesture. “I’m not saying anyone deserves to die. But if I had to throw someone out of a sinking lifeboat to keep it afloat, and my choice was between Sybil Sonnier and Danny Buckles, I’d throw out Danny.”
The steel in her voice sent a shudder along his spine. Lily was not really talking in hypothetical terms. She had accepted the necessity. If murder was required to save her family, she would do it.
“We’re going to do it,” Waters said. “Aren’t we? We’re going to take an innocent life.”
Lily nodded soberly. “The only question is who.”
He closed his eyes as the reality sank into the marrow of his bones.
“You should pick someone we don’t know,” Lily said. “That way the guilt wouldn’t feel so personal. It would just be this anonymous person.”
“An anonymous person that I killed.”
“We killed.”
“Okay, we. But after you read the newspapers for a week, you’d feel like you knew her. And how do you think we’re going to kill her? From a mile away? There’s no way to soft-pedal this. If we decide to do it, it’s going to be bad. We’ll never get over it. The only real choice is whether it’s Cole, Sybil, or some other woman.”
“You can’t kill Cole. You couldn’t live with that.”
Waters had given this question a lot of thought. “Let me tell you something about Cole. His life is already in danger. He’s borrowed heavily from loan sharks to pay his gambling debts, far more than he can ever pay back. He keeps a pistol at the office now. They may literally send someone to kill him.”
Lily shook her head. “You’d never let that happen. You’d pay his debts yourself. Don’t kid yourself that you wouldn’t.”
“Normally, I’d agree. But it’s a lot of money, Lily. Over six hundred thousand dollars. And if the EPA rules against us, I won’t have the money to pay that debt.”
Her mouth fell open.
“So. Even if we pick Sybil or someone else, Cole could still be murdered. If he doesn’t come up with that money, I mean. And where’s he going to come up with it, except from us?”
“And we may not have it,” Lily said. She knit her brow and walked slowly around the room. “I don’t care. If you killed Cole, you’d be like that pathetic Poe character who heard the heart beating under the floorboards. You’d go crazy.”
“And I won’t be like that with Sybil?”
“Not as bad. You don’t really know her.” Lily stopped in midstep. “Do you?”
Despite her professed forgiveness, his affair with Eve had irreparably damaged her trust in him. “No,” he said. “She’s nice, but all I really know is that she’s a South Louisiana divorcée who needed a job. One of thousands.”
“Does she have children?”
“No.”
This seemed to settle the matter for Lily. “Cole has three children, and we know them all. Do you want to see those kids’ faces when they hear their father has been murdered? Knowing it was you who did it?”
Despite all his ruthless theorizing, Waters could not imagine that reality.
“When are you supposed to tell Mallory who to go into?”
“She was pressuring me when I saw Cole this afternoon.”
Lily’s cold eyes and set jaw showed the depth of her resolve. “Tell her tomorrow,” she said. “Tell her your answer is Sybil. And tell her not to waste time. You’ve been thinking about Sybil all night, and you want her.”
“Why the hurry?”
“The murder investigation. From what you told me, you could be arrested before supper tomorrow.”
“What if Cole sleeps with Sybil tomorrow? Will we be ready to deal with it?”
Lily sat on the bed in a posture of absolute concentration. He imagined this was how she looked when she knocked the top out of the CPA exam. “We’ll be ready,” she said. “It’s just a job. Like doing an audit. Drilling a well. We’ll plan every step. Then we’ll execute those steps in the safest, most efficient way possible. We’ll overlook nothing.”
Waters thought of Sybil Sonnier’s sincere eyes and her desire to please. Then he remembered a Nietzsche quote from college: In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man. Looking at his wife’s face, a study of moral detachment chiseled in ice, he believed it. And for the first time, he sensed that he had come face-to-face with Mallory Candler’s match.
chapter 18
The morning sun was already high when Waters started up the back stairs to his office, his eyes burning from fatigue. After their discussion the night before, he and Lily had decided to put Annelise in their bed, and her constant shifting made sleep almost impossible. Likewise, Lily had decided to keep Ana home from school for the day. She didn’t want her vulnerable to Mallory in any way while Waters tried to manipulate Mallory into Sybil.
Waters paused at his office door, started to go down the hall to Cole’s, then went into his own. If he went into Cole’s office and found only his friend and partner, he did not know if he could keep his emotions in check. To see Cole unaware of the dark presence submerged beneath his conscious mind would be like talking to a friend who did not know he was dying of inoperable cancer.
Waters walked to his desk but did not sit down. Turning to the picture window, he opened the door that led to the balcony and went outside. The river flowed gunmetal gray today. Usually a rusty brown, it now looked dead and deep, like it could swallow anything dropped into it without a trace. The twin bridges moved with desultory traffic, log trucks and big diesels mostly. Some steel was being replaced on the eastbound span. Antlike workers crawled over the girders with surprising speed, and for fifty yards there was nothing but a makeshift guardrail to keep you from dropping eighty feet to the river below if you drifted over the line.
That’s what I’ve done, Waters thought. Drifted over the line. And now I’m a few short steps from prison. That he had been pulled over the line would be a fact only in his own mind, not those of the jurors who would convict him. All that his recitation of the “facts” as he saw them might accomplish would be to get him sentenced to the state mental hospital at Whitfield rather than to Parchman Prison in the Delta.
“Johnny?”
He whirled and found Cole standing three feet behind him, clean-shaven and dressed in wool trousers, a custom-tailored shirt, and a silk tie. This and his use of “Johnny” made Waters think he was facing Mallory, but he wasn’t sure enough to open a dialogue based on that assumption.
“Hey, Cole,” he said in a casual voice.
Cole’s smile disappeared. “Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“You know it’s me.”
Waters looked into the smoldering eyes. “I didn’t know for sure.”
“Now you do.”
He turned back to the rail and gazed over the river to Louisiana, flat farmland stretching to the horizon. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I want you to decide today,” Cole said. The hand squeezed his shoulder with a near-painful grip. “By the end of the day, Johnny.”
Waters turned to face his partner. “I’ve already decided.”
Cole’s finger went to his neck as though to twist his hair, but there was not enough hair to twist. “Who?”
“Sybil.”
The big man’s shoulders sagged with relief. “I’m so glad. I thought you might be thinking of someone else.”
“Sybil makes the most sense. She has no family to ask questions. No one that I know of, anyway.”
“She has an aunt in Houma. And a half-sister in Boutte. But she’s not close to either of them.”
Waters nodded. “I guess that’s it, then.”
An unfamiliar vulnerability entered Cole’s face. “Is that all you have to say? ‘I guess that’s it’?”
“You’re right. There’s a lot more. There’s Eve’s murder. Lily and Annelise. The EPA investigation.”
Cole huffed with exasperation. “Are you going to be in the office all day?”