Lily pulled slowly across the parking lot and parked beside the Lincoln. Before she could turn off the motor, the door to number eleven opened and Cole rushed across the space to her window, a pistol in his hand. He held the gun at waist level, aimed at Lily’s neck, and motioned for her to roll down her window. Lily hit the button and the glass disappeared into the doorframe.
“Get out,” Cole said, pressing the gun barrel against her neck. “Leave your purse in there.”
As she climbed out, he spun her against the Acura and gave her a quick pat-down. Apparently satisfied, he took her arm and shoved her through the orange door into the room.
Slamming the door behind them, he threw her against it and searched her more thoroughly. She thought he was going to stop at the boots, but he slid his hands down into them, first the left, then the right. Her heart clenched when his hand closed around the haft of the knife and yanked it out.
“Was this for me?” Cole whispered in her ear.
“No. Just for protection.”
“I see.” The point of the blade pressed into her back, above her left kidney. “Do you feel safe now?” The knife point punctured her blouse, then her skin.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Remember why we’re here.”
Cole grabbed her shoulders and threw her onto the bed. Towering above her, he brandished the knife in his fist.
“Now that I know what you really came for, let me tell you what’s going to happen. You and I are going to have sex. And if I can’t get inside your head…I’m going to take this kitchen knife you brought and slit your throat. And you’ll never see your little girl again.”
Lily tried to shut out the horror of Cole standing above her, his fleshy face red with anger. Actually, Cole standing over her would not have been nearly so bad. Even if the real Cole meant to rape her, it would be infinitely preferable to this. The light in the eyes glaring at her now was malevolent and merciless, intending only her destruction.
“Take off your clothes,” Cole said. “Now!”
Lily rolled away from him and obeyed. When she was down to her underwear, she slid under the covers and waited.
Cole was still staring at her, but his face was no longer as red as before. Setting the knife on a high closet shelf, he began to undress. When his shirt came off, revealing a mass of pasty fat over decayed muscles, Lily felt a rush of nausea. Twenty years ago, she had voluntarily slept with this man. She was a lonely freshman, he a senior from her hometown. The familiarity of his face had so relieved her loneliness that when he pleaded for sex late in the night, she had given in. Cole had been a strapping young college boy then. The man before her now weighed seventy pounds more than the boy he had been, and his health was wrecked. Lily suddenly doubted whether the scenario she had envisioned was even possible. How could she climax with a man for whom she felt only revulsion? Even to save her family. Some reactions simply could not be forced.
When Cole was naked, he slid under the covers beside her. Lily lay as rigid as a board, afraid he would try to mount her like an animal. But Cole did nothing like that. He turned onto one elbow, raised a hand, and began to stroke her hair above the ear, the way her mother had when she was ill as a child.
“I know it’s not your fault,” Cole said softly. “You didn’t know about me when you married John. What we really had.”
He continued to stroke her hair, and Lily tried to relax. After a time, Cole’s hand moved lower, but he did not go straight to her genitals, as she had expected. He took his time, his touch feather-light, then firm, as he caressed first her arms, then her thighs, her abdomen, and finally her breasts. The real Cole Smith would never touch her this way, she knew. The tenderness in his fingers now was essentially and empirically feminine. The knowledge and instinct in them belonged to Mallory Candler. Lily tried to blank her mind and let physical sensation override her conflicted emotions.
“That’s it,” Cole whispered, as her nipples began to respond. “I know it’s not easy, Lily.”
She closed her eyes and tried to convince herself that the fingers touching her now belonged to her husband.
“I’ll tell you how to make it work,” Cole murmured in her ear. “Think about John while we do this.” He kissed her neck, then her earlobe. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
Tom Jackson walked back into the interrogation room with the air of a man expecting to hear a confession. Barlow followed like a smug acolyte.
“Well?” Jackson said.
“Either arrest him or let him go,” Penn replied. “He’s told you what he knows.”
Jackson blew air from his cheeks and settled into his chair. “Penn, this is the wrong way to play this. It’s obvious that John knows a lot more than he’s saying. And if he wants to stay out of jail, he’ll tell us.”
“What do you want to know?” Waters asked before Penn could reply.
“You dated Mallory Candler ten years ago. Why do you have all those pictures of her in your office now?”
“I was cleaning out our storeroom and I found them. It was just a walk down memory lane.”
Barlow snorted.
“Did you and Eve ever have a third party in the bed with you?” Jackson asked.
“What?”
The detective’s eyes didn’t waver. “You know what I’m talking about. Another woman, maybe? A man?”
“Hell no!”
“What about a kid?” asked Barlow.
Waters came to his feet, his face hot. “What about kissing my ass?”
Barlow balled his fists and started forward, but Jackson stopped him with an outstretched arm.
“I don’t have to listen to this crap,” Waters said.
“Yes, you do,” said Jackson. “You’re not giving us any choice, John. We don’t know what the hell’s going on. I’ve got guys going through your computer drives now. Is there anything you want to warn me about them finding?”
“Like what?”
“We get a lot of kiddy porn over the Internet, even here in Natchez. I’m wondering if Eve and Danny Buckles were into something like that. Running a BBS or something. They’ve got these naked pictures of Mallory Candler, and you’re the only person involved with them who might have access to something like that, though I don’t see exactly how.”
Waters found himself speechless.
Penn said, “Those photographs were taken by Benjamin Candler. Mallory’s father. Mallory discovered them in the attic during her reign as Miss Mississippi, and she suffered a breakdown because of it. She gave the photos to my client for safekeeping.”
“Ben Candler?” Jackson asked. “The state representative?”
Penn nodded. “Tom, I believe Eve Sumner got sexually involved with John in order to blackmail him. I think she stole those photographs from his home during an attempt to find embarrassing materials to use in her scheme. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Danny Buckles was involved in all of that.”
Jackson seemed unable to process what Penn had told him. Even Barlow had nothing to say.
“Ben Candler took those pictures of his own daughter?” Jackson asked finally.
“Benjamin Candler was a sexual deviant,” Penn said. “I think minimal investigation into that will bear out all I’ve told you. The point is, your suspicion that my client is somehow involved in the distribution of pornography is ridiculous.”
Jackson turned to Waters, who was staring in shock at his attorney. “Did Eve try to blackmail you with these pictures?”
“No.”
“Did Mallory’s father really take them?”
“Yes. I didn’t even know Mallory when she was that age.”
Jackson rubbed his eyes in frustration. “Tell me this. Did your wife know you were having an affair with Eve?”
“No. She does now.”
“When did she find out? Before Eve’s death?”
An alarm bell sounded in Waters’s head. “What are you suggesting?”
Jackson looked apologetic. “It happens,
John. A wife gets suspicious, starts following her husband. What if Lily saw you having sex with Eve in your slave quarters that day? What if she knew about the suite at the Eola? She might have followed Eve back to it and—”
“That’s crazy. That would never happen.”
“Jealousy’s a powerful motive, John. Where’s Lily now?”
“I don’t know.”
Jackson turned to Barlow. “Let’s find out.”
Lily came awake in room eleven at the Stardust Motel and sat up in bed. Cole lay naked on his back beside her, his mouth open, his eyes shut, and breathing so deeply that he might have been drugged. Shivering in her nakedness, she got out of bed, went to the bathroom mirror, and stared at her reflection.
“I’m me,” she said to the face in the mirror. “But I know you’re there. I’m the first person who’s ever known you were there.”
She rubbed her eyes and looked over at Cole again, then grabbed her clothes and dressed as quickly as she could. She found her keys on the dirty carpet by the door, picked them up, and started to leave. With her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned back to Cole.
She had to be sure.
Walking over to him, she reached down for his shoulder. The sight of his pale flesh filled her with revulsion, but she had to wake him. What did one touch matter after having sex with him? She grabbed the big shoulder and shook it. Cole groaned and pulled the covers up to his neck.
She shook him again. “Wake up!”
“Unnhh.”
“It’s Lily. Wake up.”
Cole opened one eye, then squinted until it was nearly shut. “What the hell? Did I sleep over at your house?”
She looked into the bleary eyes, searching for deception.
“Where’s John?” Cole mumbled. “Jesus. Is it morning?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
Cole blinked, still more asleep than awake. “I don’t know…the office? Sybil said something about meeting me. Shit—I don’t know.” He drew his knees up into a fetal position and pulled the covers over his head.
Hurry, Lily told herself. You may not have any time at all….
She turned away from the bed and went toward the door. Her sense of balance left her, and she nearly stumbled. As she reached for the doorknob to steady herself, the room went dim. Pure terror flushed through her. That dimness wasn’t in the room—it was in her mind. That dimness was Mallory.
“No,” she whispered.
She slapped the door hard and focused on the pain in her palm. “I know you’re there. You’re inside me, but it doesn’t matter. I’m Lily Ann Waters, born June twelfth, nineteen sixty-three.” She opened the door and struggled toward her car. “My daughter is…Annelise. Born June fourteenth, nineteen ninety-five.”
The dimness vanished and returned, flickering like electric lights during a brownout. “I feel you,” Lily said, clicking the unlock button on her key ring. “Damn you, you can’t…” She tried to cling to her identity by thinking about John and the threat of the murder case, but it wasn’t working. The simplest facts became her mantra, her only shield against the force she felt growing inside her. “Lily Ann Waters,” she gasped. “June twelfth, nineteen…Lilyannwaters…daughterborn…daughter June…fourteenth…Annelise born…lilyann…waters—”
She opened her car door and dropped into the driver’s seat. She tried to fit the ignition key into the slot on the steering wheel, but this simple task was beyond her, like trying to thread a needle in the dark. The fourth time she missed the slot, she began to weep, and darkness began closing around her.
She suddenly remembered her father, dying of cancer. At the end he had been afraid to go to sleep. If he did, he believed, he would never wake up. Superstition, she’d thought at the time. Now she knew his fear as a palpable reality. If she succumbed to the darkness now, darkness was all she would ever know.
“No!” she screamed, hammering the steering wheel with both hands. “Mallory is dead! You’re dead! Your body’s rotting in the dirt!”
A sudden flash of light drove back the shadows. She slid the key into the slot and cranked the Acura’s engine.
“John hates you!” she screamed. “He hates you! He never wanted your children…. That’s why he made you kill them. And he wanted to kill you last night!”
Agony knifed through her chest. She gasped but managed to get the car into gear and back away from the motel door.
“You’re dead,” she repeated. “You’re rotting in the ground on Cemetery Road. You’re a lost soul…fading into nothing. You’re nothing.”
Light bathed Lily’s mind like cool water.
She put the Acura into drive and pulled onto the highway. The bridge loomed in the distance. She wanted to blow past every car and truck between her and the bridge, but the police were aggressive about ticketing on this side of the river. Though she held the car to forty, the superstructure of the bridge neared rapidly. Soon she would ramp up onto it.
Thirty yards ahead, a pickup truck moved into the left lane, making room for her to pass on the right. A girl about Annelise’s age sat in a wicker chair in the back of the truck, facing Lily. Her face was dirty and her arms bare in the cold, but her eyes shone as she waved at Lily. Pure sadness filled Lily’s chest. At seven years old, Annelise was already remarkably independent, with a distinct personality that would only become stronger with the passing years. But she still needed help. She was so fragile in some ways—
The front of the Acura lifted onto the bridge and started up the grade toward the center of the span. Lily gripped the wheel, her mind filled with love for her daughter. That love warmed her whole body, so it was all the more terrifying when the rear of the pickup truck ahead wavered in the air like a mirage, and the sunlight went dim. With the dimness came a rush of malice from deep within her, like a tumor metastasizing at a fantastic rate, amorphous but swift, swallowing her spirit.
“No!” she shouted, battering the wheel with her hands. “Stop it!” The pain in her hands momentarily anchored her, yet still the darkness grew. “You can’t do this! You can’t—”
She could barely hold herself in the proper lane. At the limit of desperation, her mind searched back to childhood for some weapon to protect her. She had stopped going to church after losing her baby, but now words poured from her mouth in a flood, as though of their own accord:
“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…He…yea…yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…I will fear no evil…no evil…He restoreth my soul…He restoreth my soul!”
As tears flowed freely from her eyes, blue sky burst into her vision, and the road and bridge appeared before her. Every physical detail burned itself into her brain: the cement surface of the road, the dirty face of the girl in the back of the pickup, the rivet heads holding the silver superstructure of the bridge together, a workman hanging suspended from the girders on the right side. He wore a red bandanna beneath his hard hat, and he looked directly into Lily’s eyes, his expression timeless and kind. As Lily looked back, time seemed to slow, then stop, and in that timeless space began the only epiphany of her life.
She understood now, why she had done all she had since calling Mallory that morning. So simple and profound. She looked from the workman to the road, and as she did, the little girl sitting in the back of the pickup raised her hand and waved.
Lily raised her hand and waved back. Farewell, little one.
She reached beneath the seat, grabbed the handcuffs, and quickly cuffed her left wrist to the steering wheel. Then she yanked the wheel to the right and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
At sixty miles per hour, the Acura smashed through the makeshift guardrail and hurtled into space. The air bag deployed on impact, blowing into Lily’s face and blinding her for the duration of the fall. Her stomach flew into her throat, her inner ear lost all orientation, and she floated through
space like an astronaut in a ship without windows, her mind filled with bliss, a sweet peace that asked nothing of the world but to bid it good-bye.
The world snatched her back with an explosive impact, driving her head like a cannonball into the headrest behind her. She could neither breathe nor see, but only feel the strange weightlessness of the car bobbing in water. Then she heard a sloshing sound.
My feet are wet….
The Acura had righted itself. High above her hung the underside of the bridge, getting slowly smaller as the powerful current carried her southward, spinning the car as it slowly filled with water. She looked down at her handcuffed wrist with detachment. It seemed to be the wrist of someone else. As she stared, she heard a scream of rage and terror, and she looked outside the car for its source. When it came again, she realized it had burst from her own mouth.
Her arms suddenly began to flail, and the cuffed wrist jerked the steel chain taut, trying to break free. Lily felt as though someone had wired her to a computer and begun operating her limbs with a joystick. The scream came again, and then the malignant force she’d felt on the bridge returned. She tried to resist, but resistance was futile. This time the light did not merely dim but disappeared altogether. She felt like a woman in a coma who hears people speaking around her but cannot speak herself. And the person she heard now was shrieking like someone being stabbed to death.
The interior of the car flashed white, then vanished again, as though illuminated by lightning during a storm. Only the storm was in her mind. She saw a black flashlight in her free hand, the heavy Maglite John had put in her glove compartment. It rose to the roof, then hammered down against the handcuffs. The Maglite rose again, but this time when it hit the steel cuff, the head of the light flew off. Lily heard a scream of fury, and on the next upstroke, batteries sprayed into the air.