“You’re right. I know you’re right.”
He expected Sybil’s upstairs light to wink out, but it didn’t. He took this as a sign that Mallory had succeeded. If Sybil were still Sybil, and had just made love after a romantic dinner, he would expect her to be asleep by now. At least watching TV in her bed. But he didn’t see the flicker of a television through any of the windows. He had a feeling that Mallory was sitting in the silent house, waiting for him.
“I’m going,” he said, reaching under the seat for the gun.
“It hasn’t been an hour,” Lily protested.
“I don’t care. I’m doing it now.”
The gun felt cold in his hand. It was an old Smith & Wesson .38 Special that an uncle had given him when he was a teenager. His uncle bought it at a lodge auction, with no records of any kind made.
Lily watched him check the cylinder. He had driven here with an empty chamber under the hammer, but now he took a shell from his pocket and filled it.
“Here,” she said, dropping a pair of latex gloves in his lap. “Put these on.”
“Where did you get those?”
“My makeup box. They came with some hair coloring, but they’ll do the job.”
The gloves were too small, but he pulled them on anyway.
“Keep them on until you get back here. Someone might be able to take fingerprints from the inside of the latex.”
Her attention to detail amazed him. He nodded, then reached for the door handle, but Lily grabbed his shoulder and peered urgently into his eyes.
“Don’t think of her as Sybil. You have to see her as Mallory.”
“I know.” He pulled the handle and kicked the stubborn old door loose from its frame. “When you hear the shot, start the motor.”
“I love you, John. This is the only way.”
He pulled himself free, opened the door, and climbed down from the truck. Despite his efforts to be quiet, the door screeched when he closed it. He winced but did not hesitate, running low and quick across the open ground to the first floor of the apartment.
Through the nearest window, he saw a combination den/living room with a kitchenette against the far wall. A staircase went up one wall on the inside. Good. He reached down and tried the window. Locked. There were three more on the ground floor. He moved to the next one and pulled. The window shifted in its frame. Setting the pistol on the ground, he put both hands on the sash and pulled up with a steady pressure. The window gave and slid upward.
In seconds he stood inside the dark room. He smelled vinegar. Probably some sort of salad dressing. Meat too. Glancing toward the kitchenette, he saw dirty plates with the remnants of rib-eye steaks on them. Sybil didn’t seem the type to leave dirty dishes out, and he took this as another sign that Mallory had succeeded.
Drawing a deep breath, he moved to the staircase. The steps were carpeted, but he still put a foot on the second step and tested his weight. It didn’t creak. If Mallory was upstairs, there was no reason to be quiet, but he couldn’t shake the fear wrapped like tentacles around his heart. Gripping the gun with his finger on the trigger, he started up.
Lily sat in the pickup, listening to Annelise breathing. Once, the respirations got so faint that she reached over the seat and put her hand on Ana’s chest to feel the reassuring rise and fall. For a few panicked seconds, she wondered if she had used too much Benadryl—then the inhalation came, weak but there.
Where was John now? On the porch? In the apartment? She prayed that he had the nerve to go through with it. Her husband had great compassion; that was one reason she had married him. Now compassion was his enemy.
“Hurry,” she murmured. “Don’t think. Just do it.”
She had been sitting in the truck, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cloak of night parted to reveal a yard with a swing set, seesaws, and a rose garden by Sybil’s apartment. Lily could imagine Sybil out there on Sunday mornings, alone, doing her best to make her apartment seem like a home. That simple thought pierced her heart, but she shut her mind to empathy. It wasn’t too difficult. All she had to do was focus on an image of herself dangling a butcher knife over her own daughter’s head. Superimposed on this horrifying scene was another: naked figures thrashing in ghostly green light, her own face clenched in ecstasy as she demeaned herself in ways that nauseated her now. Mallory Candler had done all that.
Lily actually remembered Mallory from St. Stephens. Like Cole, Mallory had been a senior when Lily was in the ninth grade. Her clearest memory of Mallory was a tall, proud, and stunningly beautiful girl moving through the halls of the school, leaving a wake of staring boys behind her. Lily had been a gangly freshman then, obsessed with long-distance running, though in her secret heart she knew she used running as an excuse not to deal with her insecurity about boys. Someone like Mallory Candler was beyond her understanding, a girl so radiantly desirable that grown men fawned over her whenever she was around. Lily had once seen her own father become tongue-tied in Mallory’s presence. Having experienced that reality, it was hard to imagine Mallory as the obsessively jealous psychotic her husband described. Yet she knew it could be true. What would it feel like to be such a creature and be denied something after so many years of having everything?
Lily went rigid, gooseflesh covering her skin, her eyes and ears alert. Something had snapped outside the truck. She didn’t think an animal had made the sound. A large deer perhaps, but she was downtown, and her senses told her it had taken more weight than that to produce the sound she’d heard. She peered toward the main house, then the apartment, but she saw nothing. What would she say if the owner of the house suddenly appeared at her window with a gun?
Hi, I’m Lily Waters. My husband had to stop off and tell his receptionist something. I hope we didn’t scare you in this awful truck. John had to go out and check a leak at one of his wells on the river…
“That’s exactly what I’ll say,” she whispered.
And if a shot rang out while the owner stood there? What then? Would John have to kill him too?
Yes, said a voice inside her. That’s what happens when you start this kind of madness….
Annelise stirred in the backseat. Lily reached back and rubbed her shoulder, praying she would not wake.
Halfway up Sybil’s stairs, Waters stood motionless against the wall. He had heard something. A groan or a snore, perhaps. But only one. He had to keep moving, yet something held him where he was.
Go, he told himself. Don’t stop.
But his feet remained still. The gun had felt so natural in the truck. Now he wanted to throw it on the floor. He knew what horror awaited him upstairs. That was how he thought of Mallory now—not as a person, but as a thing. There was no human pity in her, no real love. He had no choice but to go on. Yet the image of Sybil smiling in his office today would not leave him. So young, so trusting. She had trusted Cole Smith with her heart, which was the height of lunacy. But she was not the first young woman to do it.
Waters shut his eyes and tried to visualize himself shooting her. If you can’t see it in your mind, you’ll never do it in life. A popular New Age platitude. And why should it be difficult? After all, he’d already killed one woman. At least his hands had killed her. But killing was not a thing of hands. It was a thing of the mind. Killing in cold blood demanded a cold mind. A gun made it easier, a matter of a momentary trigger pull rather than the eternity of crushing hands and bulging eyes it had taken to end Eve Sumner’s life. But for a man with a conscience, a single finger’s pull could be more difficult than lifting a mountain. Would shooting Sybil from behind make it easier? It seemed the act of a coward, but wouldn’t it be better for her if she never saw it coming?
That’s how I’d want it, he thought. None of that life-passing-before-your-eyes bullshit. If you saw it coming, those last seconds could dilate into a lifetime of regret and self-recrimination. But with a bullet through the base of your brain, there would be none of that—no white light or angel choirs either—only instant
and utter darkness.
He gritted his teeth and forced himself up to the next step. Then the next. There was a small landing at the top. Two doors led off it. The one on the right led to a bathroom. He saw light reflecting off a stainless-steel leg bracing the sink. The other door, only slightly open, would be her bedroom. Yellow light trickled onto the landing as though in invitation.
Why is she up here? he wondered. Why isn’t she waiting downstairs with a bottle of champagne? Maybe she was sitting naked on the bed in her favorite position, legs crossed yoga-style, silently awaiting the lover she had fought for a decade to reach. But then he remembered Cole, fast asleep at his desk that afternoon. Maybe Mallory was at this moment struggling to take control of Sybil’s sleeping mind. If so, it was the perfect opportunity to destroy her. Before she had a chance to plead for mercy or fight back. Only if she was asleep…how could he be certain Mallory was inside her? He concealed the .38 behind his back and slipped into the bedroom.
Sybil lay on the bed, the covers pulled loosely over her chest, her lower body exposed in the sheer nightgown. But for her curves and pubic hair, she looked like a sleeping child. She still wore her makeup. Maybe she’d passed out from too much alcohol. He knew he should wake her. If she panicked, she was Sybil. If she smiled and pulled him into the bed, she was Mallory. Simple. But he could not find it in himself to touch her.
Do it! Lily shouted in his mind. Hurry!
Waters picked up a throw pillow and held it over the muzzle of the gun, then held the pillow above Sybil’s face. His right hand began to shake. In his mind, he saw her eyes snap open, as ravenously alive as a vampire’s, filled with hatred and fury at his betrayal.
“Come on,” he whispered. “For Annelise…”
He tried to pull the trigger, but his finger would not obey.
Lily lay shivering in the backseat of the truck, trying to cover Annelise’s body with her own. There was someone outside. Close. Moving carefully. She could hear them through the window John had left open. It had taken all her self-restraint not to start the engine and race away, but she couldn’t abandon her husband. She wished she had brought a gun of her own, but there had seemed no reason. Shielding Annelise with her body seemed an ineffectual act, but she might keep Ana alive long enough for John to save her if an attacker came out of the night. If that happened, she would scream through the window and pray that John heard her. She was holding back a scream when a large black figure loomed in the driver’s window.
“What the hell are you doing, Lily?” Cole asked.
Lily’s throat locked shut.
“Do you think you’re invisible back there?”
As she stared up in shock, Cole began to laugh, a dark, deranged sound that stopped the blood in her veins.
Oh God, she screamed silently, thinking of John and his mission in Sybil’s little house. Oh, no…
Cole’s laughter went on and on.
Waters pushed the shaking gun into the pillow resting against Sybil’s head. She opened her mouth, and he knew from the smell that she had not brushed her teeth. As his finger tightened, she suddenly rolled away from him, groaned, and started to get out of bed. Waters stood silent as a tree as she walked to the door, crossed the landing, and went into the bathroom. The sound of urination reached him, and in his mind he saw his own wife as he had a hundred times, sitting sleepily on the commode, oblivious to the world, utterly and pathetically human.
I can’t do this, he thought. Walk in there and fire a bullet into her face?
As the sound slowed to a trickle, he darted onto the landing and rushed down the stairs.
“Hello?” Sybil called drowsily. “Cole?”
Waters froze on the ground floor. Why did she call out for Cole? Mallory would have said, “Johnny?” Maybe Sybil was stronger than Lily or Cole. Maybe Mallory couldn’t control her as easily—
“Is someone there?”
As footsteps descended the stairs, he folded his body and clambered through the window, then sprinted for the truck, pulling off the gloves as he ran.
He saw the shadow of Lily waiting in the backseat and wondered if Annelise had awakened. Lily would be angry, but she’d have to understand. They’d have to find another way, that was all. He opened the door and jumped into the driver’s seat.
“I knew you couldn’t do it,” Cole said, popping up from the floor of the passenger seat.
Waters tried to bring up his gun, but Cole’s big hand was already pointing a pistol over the seat at Lily and Annelise.
“You could make me kill two babies,” Cole said, “but you can’t kill a secretary that’s too stupid to live. Give me that fucking gun.”
Waters handed it over.
The fury and hurt in Cole’s eyes made him sick with fear.
“You felt pity for Sybil?” Cole said in a cracked voice. “I know it wasn’t for me. If you’d thought it was just me in there, you’d have pulled the trigger without a thought.”
“Mallory—”
Holding Waters at bay with his own pistol, Cole aimed his .357 at Annelise’s head. “I should kill her. It’s only fair, after what you made me do. Besides, you two need to learn a lesson.”
Lily began to cry. Waters wished he had shot Cole that afternoon.
“Shut up! You simpering little nothing. What good are you? You hardly gave him one child. You can’t even make love with him like a woman.”
Lily covered Annelise like a blanket, her face empty of anything but terror.
“Don’t do it!” Waters begged.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t.”
“The Mallory Candler I loved would never do that.”
Cole shuddered. “What?”
“The Mallory I knew would never be that cruel. I hurt her terribly, yes. She was heartbroken. But she never really hurt someone physically. You say you’re Mallory Candler. You may have started as Mallory…but in the ten years you’ve been like this, you’ve changed. Something’s twisted you. Mallory loved me. You don’t love me.”
Fury contorted Cole’s face into something horrible. “I love you more than anyone possibly could!”
“No. You want to own me. That’s not love. You don’t want to make me happy. You want me to make you happy. But I can’t. Because you’ll never feel loved enough.”
Cole’s lips quivered.
“Yes, I was going to kill you,” Waters said. “I honestly thought you would be better off dead. At peace. God forgive me, but you were meant to die ten years ago. Something allowed you to survive…like this. But it’s not natural. It’s not fair for you to steal someone else’s body, someone else’s life, to live out what you think is the life you deserved.”
A tear streaked Cole’s face. “It wasn’t fair for that man to rape me!” As he wiped away the tear, a savage light came into Cole’s eyes. “Who are you to tell me what I deserve? You gave me children and then took them away. You left me an empty shell.”
The gun shook against Annelise’s head.
“For God’s sake, no!” Lily pleaded. “She’s just a child!”
Waters closed his eyes. “I loved you once,” he said quietly. “Show me you’re worth loving again.”
Cole gasped, and his eyes locked on to Waters’s face. “You think I want to hurt her? You’re making me do this! You were going to kill me.”
“What choice did you give me!”
Cole’s left hand rose to his neck as if to twist a lock of hair around his finger, but there was no hair there. He seemed suddenly purposeless, disoriented. Waters was about to speak when Cole jerked the gun away from Annelise’s head and leaped out of the truck.
Lily began to sob in the backseat. Waters cranked the engine and threw the truck into gear, roaring out of the little driveway like a man fleeing the scene of a murder.
When they pulled up to Linton Hill, Lily was still crying. Waters had not dumped the pickup as planned; he didn’t think Lily could handle the logistics in her state. He parked the old Ford behind the house and lifted Anne
lise into his arms.
“Open the back door,” he told Lily. “Go up and get her bed ready.”
Lily ran to the door and opened it with her key, then disappeared into the house. Carrying Annelise up the stairs winded him, more from his nerves than her weight. As he pulled the covers up over her chest, Lily pulled him toward the door.
“What are we going to do? What can we do?”
Before he could answer, the downstairs phone rang. He bounded down the steps and checked the caller ID on the den telephone: UNKNOWN NUMBER. At 1:20 A.M.
He picked up the receiver but said nothing.
“John?” said a familiar voice. “John? It’s Penn Cage.”
“Penn! What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry to call so late. I’ve been calling for the past hour. I was about to get in my car and drive over there.”
Waters didn’t think it was possible to be more stressed than he was already, but the edge in his lawyer’s voice did the trick.
“What’s happened?”
“Are you on a land line?”
“Yes.”
“The police have a search warrant for your house. I’d expect them there by six a.m.”
Waters felt dizzy. “Why a search all of a sudden?”
“They may have new evidence. There’s just no way to know.”
“Okay,” Waters said, not at all sure what he should do.
“I’m telling you this,” Penn said carefully, “because people often have things inside their homes they’d rather not see made public. Pornography. Recreational drugs. Sexual paraphernalia. Diaries or journals…”
Evidence of murder, Waters thought. “I hear you. I appreciate the heads-up.”
“It won’t do any real good for me to be there during the search, but call me as soon as it’s over. You’re liable to be taken in for questioning again. Things could go south very quickly from here, but stay calm.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Waters hung up.