considering a marriage proposal, maybe Mallory had been encouraging him more than she let on to Waters.
When Waters recounted this conversation to Mallory, she turned white. That night, she went to Denton’s house and told him she was in love with another man. Yes, it was someone he knew. She elided some details, such as the rendezvous behind the stables, but for the most part she told him everything. At two that morning, Waters, his mother, and his brother awoke to a pounding on their front door. Waters answered in his underwear, and found a drunken David Denton on the front porch, his BMW idling in the street behind him. Denton greeted Mrs. Waters with a rant against her “worthless” son, and Waters asked her to go back to bed. He listened to Denton’s railing for as long as he could. Then he looked at the doctor and said, “David, I’m sorry it happened the way it did. We should have told you from the start. But the woman chooses in these things. Okay? The woman chooses, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
“You could have done the decent thing!” Denton yelled. “You could have been a friend! And if not that, you could at least be a goddamn gentleman!”
This wounded Waters deeply, but he’d only begun to wallow in his guilt when Denton added, “I should have known better though. You’re no gentleman. You’re trash. That’s why you live over here with the rest of the goddamn trash. I ought to kick your ass.”
All his guilt forgotten, Waters clenched his quivering hands into fists. In his mind he saw his father, and he felt as though Denton had just called his father trash. In a barely audible voice he said, “Go ahead, if you think you can. But you’d better be ready to kill me.”
Denton took a wild swing, and Waters easily ducked it.
“You’re drunk, David,” he said, trying to restrain himself.
Denton punched him in the stomach. As Waters drew back his fist to throw a punishing right, he saw his mother silhouetted in the window behind him.
“Go home!” he shouted. “And don’t come back!”
Denton blinked in confusion, mumbled something unintelligible, then turned around and stumbled back to his BMW, cursing and sobbing as he went. When Waters walked back inside, his mother shook her head.
“Is this over that Candler girl?” she asked, her face tight and vulnerable without makeup.
Waters nodded.
“She’s no good, John. I know you won’t listen to me, but that girl’s not right, not for you or anybody else.”
He asked what his mother knew about Mallory, but she just turned away and went back to bed. That night was the beginning of his public relationship with Mallory, a brief window of bliss during which all seemed golden, when the horrors to come still lay out of sight.
Now-driving down the deserted road by the paper mill-he thought again of Mallory at Denton’s party, but this time, when she pulled down her mask by the stables, he saw not her face but Eve Sumner’s. He tried to push the image from his mind, but the harder he tried, the clearer Eve became. He could
He swung onto Lower Woodville Road and sped up to sixty. He kept a rented storeroom less than a mile away, a climate-controlled cubicle filled with furniture and boxes from his mother’s house and his own. His mother saved everything, and somewhere in that cubicle was a footlocker containing whatever junk was left from his Ole Miss days.
He turned into the storage company lot, punched a code into the security gate, and parked by a long aluminum building. The room was near the end of the inside corridor, the PIN code for its lock his social security number. When he opened the door, the musty smell surprised him, but he felt for the light switch, flicked it, and went inside.
Furniture and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Plastic bags held old clothes-some his father’s-and broken lamps sat on all available flat surfaces. Even his father’s old power tools were here, saved like the instruments of a renowned surgeon. Another time, Waters might have stopped to go through some of the stuff, but tonight there was only one thing on his mind.
He found the old footlocker behind some boxes of books. It wasn’t locked, and he tore open the lid like a heart-attack victim searching for nitroglycerin. Here lay several chapters of his past, deposited in no particular order and with no particular intent. He found football programs, grade reports, the tassel from his graduation cap, love letters with a rubber band around them, geological specimens, a guitar pick from a Jimmy Buffett concert, a box of snapshots from Ole Miss and another from his summers working the pipeline in Alaska. He was about to go through the photos when he saw a banded portfolio near the bottom. Something clicked in his mind. Inside the portfolio he found everything dating from the time he spent with Mallory-everything that had survived, anyway. At some point he must have grouped it all together, but he didn’t remember doing it.
The first thing he saw was a copy of the campus newspaper, the
“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.”
