Sleep No More (27 page)

“Of course I do. That’s easy.”

“Will you do it for me?”

Annelise nodded and sat on the floor, the bowl between her knees. Lily turned to the cutting board and resumed slicing the tomatoes.

“I hope Pebbles doesn’t come in here and try to eat from this bowl,” Annelise said. “She won’t like mushrooms.” She looked up at Waters. “Will she, Dad?”

Tears stung Waters’s eyes as he looked down at his daughter. “Probably not, punkin.”

A bright reflection suddenly flashed past his eyes. He looked up at Lily, and his heart stopped. She was dangling the butcher knife over Annelise’s head like a miniature sword of Damocles. Its point swung back and forth as Ana patiently picked stems from the mushrooms.

“Your daddy’s in a funny mood today,” Lily said, her eyes mocking Waters. “I think he ought to realize how much he has to be thankful for. Don’t you think so, Ana?”

Annelise pursed her lips as she worked at a thick brown stem. “Daddy knows what to be thankful for.”

“I wonder sometimes.” Lily lowered the knife to within a half-inch of the crown of Annelise’s head. “Do you, John? Do you know what to be thankful for?”

“Yes,” he said in a shaky voice. “I do.”

Lily smiled, then lifted the blade about twelve inches. Waters felt slight relief until she dropped the knife and caught the flashing blade just above Annelise’s head.

“Oh!” Lily cried in an exaggerated voice. “I almost had an accident!”

“Be careful,” said Annelise. “More kids get killed from accidents than from getting sick or anything else. I learned that in school yesterday.”

Lily winked at Waters, then went back to slicing the tomatoes. He fell to his knees and hugged Annelise until she told him to stop. Ninety minutes later, Waters was tucking Annelise into bed upstairs.

“Why isn’t Mama tucking me in too?” she asked.

“Mama still feels tired.”

“She said she was all better.”

Waters nodded. “Mothers fib a little sometimes, so daddies and little girls don’t worry so much. But she’ll be fine. You sleep tight. Hang on to Albert tonight.”

Ana clutched her stuffed rabbit to her chest.

He kissed her forehead, then walked to the stairs.

“’Night! Love ya! See ya in the morning!”
Annelise called, and she laughed when he repeated it back to her.

As he descended the stairs, he realized why Mallory had let him put Ana to bed alone. She wanted to emphasize just what was at stake if he didn’t get with her program. For Waters, the stakes did not need emphasis. But as his foot hit the bottom step, he realized that Mallory’s latest object lesson cut two ways. Everyone feared losing someone, and Mallory was no different.

He found Lily in the bedroom, lying across the down comforter in a nearly transparent camisole that she had received as a gag gift at a friend’s bridal shower. She had never worn that piece of lingerie before tonight. He walked to the foot of the bed and spoke in a voice devoid of emotion.

“I want you to listen carefully. You think you hold all the cards, but you don’t. The final card, I hold. And if you don’t do what I tell you to do, I’ll play it.”

She must have heard something new in his voice, for her smile vanished, replaced by a crafty attentiveness. “What card are you talking about?”

“The death card. The ace of spades.”

Lily twined a lock of her short blond hair around her finger and began to twist it. “What do you mean?”

“Before I let you destroy my wife and child, I will blow my fucking head off. And you will never have me.”

She seemed not to have heard his threat. Or perhaps not to have fully understood it.

“You know me, Mallory. If you leave me no choice, I’ll kill myself.”

Lily shook her head. “You won’t. You wouldn’t leave Lily and Annelise without you.”

“You’re right. I’d take Lily with me. A bullet in the head for her. Then me.”

She went still, her eyes wide with fear. At last he had rattled her. “You wouldn’t do it,” she said, sounding not at all sure. “You wouldn’t abandon Annelise.”

“Here’s why you’re wrong,” Waters said. “When I shoot Lily, you die with her. I couldn’t live with myself after killing my wife, so I’d finish the job on me. But Annelise would survive and be safe. She’d go to live with her grandmother. That’s already arranged in our wills.”

Lily’s head moved slowly back and forth. “That will never happen.”

“You don’t think so? Do you know why I survived the hell that was the end of our relationship? Because I’m stronger than you are. How many times did you try to kill yourself? Four? Five? But you couldn’t do it. It was all theater. But I don’t act, Mallory. You know that. The day I decide to do it, consider it done.”

Lily got up and began to pace the bedroom, her mouth working in frustration. She gave off the desperate fury of a wild animal pacing a cage. Suddenly she stopped and met Waters’s eye.

“You said you’d do that if I don’t do what you wanted me to do. Well? What do you want me to do?”

“Leave Lily alone. Get out of her head.”

“If I do that, what will you do for me?”

“Why should I do anything for you?”

Her hand went to her neck and twined another lock of hair around her finger. “Because you love me. But if you can’t face that yet, you should do it because I’m the only thing keeping you out of jail.”

Waters fought back his anger. “I do love you.”

Lily’s eyes softened.

“I just can’t let you destroy my wife. That’s why I want you to go into another woman.”

She watched him in silence, trying to work out his thoughts. “Who?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But you pick this woman, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Someone you like.”

“Whose face and body I like,” he said.

She stared at him for nearly a minute, her eyes growing dark with suspicion. “If I go into this other woman, you’ll kill her. That’s what you’re thinking.”

“You know me better than that. I couldn’t kill an innocent person.”

“If you thought you were saving your family, you might.”

“I’d kill myself, Lily, and Annelise, before I’d kill an innocent person.”

Morbid curiosity flickered in her eyes. “Why?”

“Because I’m responsible for this. For you being like you are. Lily and Annelise are part of me. They’re involved, even though they didn’t ask to be. The sins of the fathers and all that. But I can’t visit this karma on anyone else. If someone has to pay, it should be me and mine.”

She tilted her head, studying his eyes. “You know what, Johnny?”

“What?”

“Lily is too old, anyway. We’re going to have our own babies, and thirty-nine is too old for that.” She lifted the camisole, grabbed a dimple of cellulite from her upper thigh, and pulled. “
Yuck.
Pick someone under thirty, okay?”

Waters struggled to suppress his rage. “I don’t have any problem with that.”

She walked forward and took hold of his hand. “Just one more thing, Johnny. Pick her soon, okay?”

Lily smiled as though things had arrived at the exact point she’d chosen from the beginning. “Now, get those clothes off and get into bed. I want you to finish what you started this afternoon.”

He pulled his hand free. “That’s not part of the deal. First you move into someone else. Then I come to you.”

She laughed. “Who do you think makes the rules here? I agreed to your idea because of the childbearing issue. But don’t forget that you could be spending the night in jail. I know all this has you freaked out, but I want you, Johnny. Now. And I’m going to have you.”

Waters made no move toward the bed.

“Re-
mem
-ber,” she said in a singsong voice. “If Mama ain’t happy,
no-
body’s happy.” Lily walked to the dresser, opened a drawer, and brought out a shining pair of handcuffs.

“Those look like Eve’s,” he observed.

“Of course they are. Your wife doesn’t have anything like this hidden in her underwear drawer. Not even a vibrator.”

Lily pranced toward the bed, dangling the handcuffs as though to provoke him. “These
were
Eve’s, I should have said. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, right?” She laughed. “Isn’t that what they say, Johnny?”

Waters stared at the handcuffs, a shining little metaphor for his situation. He recalled Eve cuffing him to the bed at the Eola. Thinking of that made him think of Mallory, not as she was now, but when they were together. In those days, Mallory had bound him with scarves, not handcuffs. He saw himself tied to the headboard of her parents’ bed, wondering if Ben Candler and his wife would come home unexpectedly and discover their princess
in flagrante delicto.
When he thought of Ben Candler, he felt something shift deep in his mind, and he saw what Mallory had described earlier: the local politician who liked to take secret snapshots of little girls. In the dark glow of that image was born his next move in the emotional chess match he would have to play for possession of his life and family.

“Take that slutty rag off and get under the covers,” he said in a harsh voice.

Lily looked curiously at him, trying to read his intent. “You first,” she replied.

“I’ll join you in a second. I have to do something first.”

“Like what?”

“Just get in the bed. And turn off the lights.”

A wary look in her eyes now. “I want the lights on.”

“I can’t do it with the lights on. I can’t look into Lily’s face and make love to her when she’s not there.”

“I thought you’d like the idea.”

“I don’t. You can use your handcuffs or whatever kinky stuff you want. Just turn off the lights.”

“All right. But where are you going?”

“What are you worried about? I can’t hurt you without hurting Lily.”

Pouting with her lips but not her eyes, she went to the bed and slipped off the camisole, then climbed under the covers and switched off the lamp.

Waters walked to the door.

“Tell me where you’re going!”

“For God’s sake, just lie back and enjoy it.”

“I intend to.”

He walked quickly to the den. Inside the cabinet under the TV was the camcorder he had scolded Annelise for using without permission. It was a Sony PC-110, a handheld digital camera with more special-effects functions than he would ever use. But the PC-110 also had one capability that he had found both fun and useful. Called Super Night Shot, it allowed you to shoot video in total darkness, by projecting an infrared beam onto a subject. He and Annelise had used it to film Pebbles hunting in the backyard at night. Tonight he would use it to try to save his life.

He inserted a fresh tape into the slot, then removed the lens cap and switched on the camera. The Super Night Shot switch was on the side. He activated it, then turned off the lights in the den and looked through the viewfinder. A ghostly green image of the room filled the screen, the camera autofocusing wherever he turned it.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Let’s make a movie.”

He took off his shirt and wrapped it partly around the camera, but took care to leave the lens and the infrared beam generator exposed. On his way back to the bedroom, he stopped in the hall bathroom, dug under the sink for a minute, then continued on, the camera and shirt held carefully in his left hand. At the bedroom door, he walked quickly through the darkness to Lily’s low dresser and set his shirt on it, the camera lens facing the bed. Then he walked around to his side of the bed and began removing his pants.

The lamp on Lily’s side flashed on, temporarily blinding him.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She looked at his pants on the floor, then up at him. Then she leaned off the bed and lifted the pants to look under them.

“Looking for a gun?” he asked.

A white plastic bottle of K-Y Silk-E lubricant lay beneath the khakis.

“My mistake,” she said. She lay back on the bed and stared at his nude body. “You still look good, Johnny.”

“Get on all fours and handcuff yourself to the bedpost.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, a mocking smile on her face.

“Teach you a lesson.” He reached over and switched off the lamp.

Her voice came out of the dark. “How are you going to do that?”

Waters climbed onto the bed, looked in the direction of the camera, and silently mouthed three words.
I’m sorry, Lily.
Then he faced forward, took hold of the familiar hips in front of him, and slapped one cheek. “You know what I like, Mallory,” he said.

He heard a metallic snick as the handcuffs snapped shut.

“Yes, I do,” came Mallory’s low voice. “And you know what I need.”

Waters set to work with a will.

When Waters walked into his office at nine the next morning, he found Penn Cage waiting behind his desk.

“You wouldn’t be here unless there was bad news.”

“It’s not catastrophic,” Penn said, “but it’s serious.”

“Tell me.”

“The police say they have a videotape of your Land Cruiser in front of the Eola Hotel one hour before Eve’s estimated time of death.”

The floor seemed to shudder beneath his feet. “That’s impossible.”

“Maybe not. They say there was a traffic accident at the intersection of Pearl and Franklin streets that night. A car hit an MP&L cherry-picker truck. Do you remember that?”

Waters tried to keep his facial muscles still. “Yes.”

“There were lots of squad cars there. Ambulances, a fire truck, and a sheriff’s department cruiser. For some reason, the sheriff’s car had his videocam running—the one they switch on during traffic stops. He was pointed the wrong way up Pearl Street, and the police say his camera recorded your Land Cruiser turning from Main onto Pearl, stopping, then backing onto Main again and disappearing. The tape is date-and time-stamped.”

“
Shit.
Do they have my license plate on tape?”

“I don’t know yet. But a Land Cruiser is a rare vehicle in this town, and they’ve asked that you give a DNA sample for testing.”

“Oh God.”

“Obviously they’ll want to compare this to the semen taken from Eve Sumner’s corpse.”

“And it will match.” Images of Parchman Prison filled Waters’s mind: endless rows of soybean fields and angry inmates, himself locked in a barred box. “The police called you?” he asked. “How did they know you were my lawyer?”

“Lily told them,” Penn replied. “Tom Jackson called her just as you left the house. She told him I was your lawyer, and that he should call me. I came straight here.”

“Lily didn’t know you were my lawyer.” Fresh fear poured into him.

“Obviously she did,” Penn said.

“She must have been following me.”

“Your wife?”

Not my wife,
Waters thought, touching his back pocket, where the Mini-DV videotape he had shot last night rested. He had felt so confident about his plan, but now…

“Am I going to be arrested?”

“I don’t think so. Tom wanted to bring you downtown for questioning today, though.”

“Jesus.” Waters felt inevitability closing around him like a noose.

“I requested that he interview you at the law office of a friend of mine. Since you’ve cooperated so far, Tom agreed. That may not seem like much of a gift, but it’s a lot better than going through this in some interrogation room at the police station. It’s set for three this afternoon.”

“What about the DNA test? What should I do?”

“Comply immediately. That’s what an innocent man would do.”

“But I know my DNA will match.”

“That’s not the point right now. DNA testing takes a long time to complete. Months, sometimes. I’ve seen tests come back in three weeks with the FBI pushing, but this is a local case. By agreeing to the test, you buy yourself three to twelve weeks. Closer to twelve is my bet.”

Waters felt his breath returning. “I can’t be arrested, Penn. I have to stay free.”

“You will.”

“If I’m arrested, will I get bail?”

“Almost certainly. You’re a pillar of the community with no criminal record.”

“But it’s murder.”

“Take it easy, John.”

“What if they trip me up during questioning? What if they arrest me then?”

“I think that’s unlikely. Tom might ask you to take a lie-detector test, though.”

“I can’t do that!”

Penn held up both palms to reassure him. “You won’t have to. I’ll advise you against submitting to a polygraph, and I’ll do that in Tom’s presence. The refusal will look more like my decision than yours. The police here still see me as a big-city prosecutor, and that’s to your advantage right now.”

“He’ll ask me if I had an affair with Eve. What if I deny it, and they have a witness or something?”

Penn answered carefully. “I will never advise you to lie, John. I can’t do that. But I will say this: If, after today’s questioning, the police still believe that you weren’t having an affair with Ms. Sumner, I’d wait until the day before the DNA test was due back, and then I’d tell them the semen found in Eve was probably yours. You were having an extramarital affair with a woman of dubious sexual character, and she happened to get murdered. You knew that getting mixed up in that could destroy your marriage. As an innocent man, you hoped—and even assumed—that the guilty party would be caught before the DNA test came back, which might obviate the need for any ruckus to be made about whose semen it was. The odds of that would be low, considering the nature of this case, but a scared husband will tell himself many things. The police understand reasoning like that. Being guilty of an affair does not make you guilty of murder.”

Waters found it hard to concentrate on his lawyer’s words. He looked around his office as though for an avenue of escape.

“John? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“When do they want the DNA sample?”

“Adams County Path Lab is ready for us as soon as we can get there. I suggest we go immediately. There will be police representatives there. Probably Tom Jackson.”

A bubble of panic ballooned in Waters’s chest, cutting off his air. If he were arrested today, Mallory might abandon her intention to move out of Lily and into another woman, as she had agreed to do last night. He had to let her know what was happening.

“You look like you might faint, John. Sit down.”

“I need to use the bathroom.”

Waters hurried from his office, went to Sybil’s desk, and grabbed her cordless phone from its cradle. She looked up in surprise, and he put his forefinger over his lips. Then he slipped into the conference room and called Linton Hill.

“Waters residence,” Rose said.

“It’s John, Rose. I need to talk to Lily.”

“Lily gone swimming, Mr. John.”

“Okay, thanks.” He clicked off and dialed Lily’s cell phone. It rang five times, and then a recorded message told him “the subscriber” was either unavailable or out of the service area. Desperate now, he hung up and walked down the hall toward Cole’s office. Cole had said to come to him if he needed help, and Waters definitely needed it now. Cole might not believe his story about Mallory being in Lily, but at bottom, that didn’t really matter. Because Cole would do what Waters asked, even if he thought he was crazy. But when he opened the door, he found Cole’s office empty.

“He hasn’t come in today,” Sybil said from behind Waters. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Shit.”

Sybil looked genuinely worried, and not about Cole. “Is there something I can do to help you, John?”

“I wish you could, but no.” He squeezed her arm, then walked back to his office.

Penn was standing at the center of the room, examining a dragonfly trapped in amber and mounted on a black pedestal.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“A little. Penn, we have to talk, and I mean for real.”

The lawyer looked up, concern in his face. “What is it? Have you been holding something back?”

“In a way. Last night, Lily told me she was Mallory. She
told
me that.”

“What did she tell you? Exactly?”

“That the theory I put to you yesterday is true. That she moved from Eve, through me, into Lily.”

Penn rolled his eyes. “John, we’ve been over this.”

“
Please
try to listen with an open mind. Last night I secretly videotaped Lily and me in bed. She’s doing things on that tape she’s never done in her life.”

“And you want to show this tape to me?”

“No, because you don’t have any frame of reference to judge it by. You don’t know what she was like before. I’m talking about kinky stuff, though. Bondage, handcuffs.”

Penn cleared his throat. “Handcuffs aren’t that kinky, John.”

“In Lily’s mind, handcuffs belong on felons, nowhere else.”

“As far as you know. Tell me what else happened.”

“Lily threatened Annelise’s life.”

Penn drew back, incredulous. “How?”

“She held a fucking butcher knife over her head!”

“Well…did Annelise see this?”

“No.”

“What else did Lily say to you?”

“Too much to remember. Penn, I know you think I’m psychotic, but it’s
her.
It’s Mallory! She told me she killed her father!”

“That’s crap. Ben Candler died of a heart attack.”

“Yes, but do you know what caused it? Remember you told me some people had told you Ben was a little strange? What word did you use? Pervy?”

“Pervy. Perverted.”

Waters quickly related Mallory’s tale of the secret photos and the gunpoint confrontation with her father. As Penn listened, his expression changed from skepticism to fascination.

“Jesus,” he said when Waters finished. “It’s hard to imagine Cole Smith making up that story. Maybe Danny Buckles, the child molester, did something like that, and Eve or Lily modified the story to use on you. We know Eve knew Buckles, because she warned you about his abuse at the school.”

“Are you
kidding
me?” Waters asked. “You’re grasping at straws!”

Penn walked over to Waters’s desk and sat behind it. “I don’t think so. And Ben’s heart attack…maybe Cole and Eve were trying to shake him down the same way they did you. They tried to convince him Mallory was alive, and it killed him.”

“You still see a conspiracy behind all this? Do you really think Lily would threaten her own daughter with a butcher knife?”

“I’m afraid so. By doing something a loving mother would never do, Lily convinces you beyond all doubt of the fantasy they want to sell you. She’s not Lily anymore. It’s like Eve cutting herself. That’s the only rational explanation for the events you’ve described.”

“There’s one other possibility.”

“What?”

“Eve was telling the truth from the start!”

The lawyer slammed his hand down on Waters’s desk. “For God’s sake, wake up! You’re about to be at the center of the biggest murder case this town has seen since I reopened the Del Payton case. You could go to prison for life. You could get the death penalty! And you’re so far down in denial, you can’t see anything. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you do!”

Waters threw up his hands to show he understood the obvious. “I don’t want to go to prison. But compared to a threat to my wife and daughter, prison is nothing. I can’t ignore what all my instincts tell me is true.” Waters put his hands on the front of his desk and leaned toward Penn. “You were a prosecutor, right? What happens when human beings have sex? Biologically. The seventh-grade sex-ed version.”

The lawyer shook his head in exasperation. “The male deposits sperm in the vagina of the female.”

“Exactly. An exchange of bodily fluids.”

“From male to female,” Penn clarified.

“You don’t think anything goes the other way? Forget intercourse. Just think about kissing. That old expression, swapping spit? That’s exactly what you’re doing. And scientists can do DNA tests on cells in saliva.”

“What are you getting at, John?”

“What do we really know about human consciousness? The top neuroscientists in the world can’t tell you what it is. Where in the brain is consciousness located? What if there’s consciousness in every strand of DNA in your body? Or what if your consciousness is at least
linked
to every strand of DNA in your body?

We know our individual consciousness grows out of our DNA maps. It has to. That’s where our brains come from. Do you dispute any of that?”

Penn waved his hand impatiently. “If we were sitting in a bar or a college seminar, I’d love to bat this around with you. But you’re in real trouble, and you’re proposing as an explanation something that defies all physical laws.”

“
Known
physical laws. Every Sunday, people go to church and pray for their immortal souls. Is there an immortal soul, Penn? If you believe so, you’re saying it survives past death. If that’s the case, who’s to say that in certain situations—extreme situations of violence or desire for survival—that the soul can’t move into another person the way Mallory said hers did?”

Penn sighed but did not argue.

“Mallory said the transfer can happen only during sex. And not just any sex, but during orgasm, when the individual self is blanked out. That creates a window of opportunity for the incoming soul—or consciousness—to gain a foothold. Do you deny that your conscious self, your identity even, basically blanks out during orgasm? Isn’t that how it feels to you?”

“In a way, yes. But this idea of soul transfer…it’s like some crazy blend of New Age science and Eastern mysticism.”

“That’s what quantum physics sounds like too, if you read much of it. Penn, have you ever slept with two women at the same time?”

“
What?
No.”

“I don’t mean in the same bed. I mean, have you slept with two women concurrently? Both for a long period of time?”

The lawyer shifted in his chair, obviously uncomfortable with some memory. “I was in that situation once. For a couple of months.”

“Two months isn’t really long enough. I was in that situation for five months one time. And something happened that I remember to this day. When I started sleeping with the second woman, her periods were three weeks off from those of the first woman. But by the third month, their periods had synchronized. And they
stayed
synchronized.”

Penn nodded thoughtfully. “I think it’s well known that women who live together—roommates, or girls living in the same dorm hall—sometimes get synchronized periods.”

“Yes, but something mental could be operating there. What I’m describing is different. Neither woman I was sleeping with was conscious of the other. Certainly not of when the other woman’s period was. And all I can think is that somehow, something was passing between those two women. And it could only have been passed through
me.
You see? Hormones, cells of some kind…I don’t know. Cole’s had the same thing happen to him. This is weird stuff, but all I’m trying to show you is that even in this day and age, we understand very little about some things.”