Sleep No More

He walked back to his desk, opened his briefcase, and took out the portfolio he’d found in the storage room. Inside was the newspaper reporting Mallory’s Miss University win. There was also a copy of The Clarion-Ledger, trumpeting her victory in the Miss Mississippi pageant. Mallory had never entered a pageant before the Miss University contest, and she had only entered that because her sorority sisters begged her to do it. This was during one of the darkest times in her life: Waters was in Alaska, and she had just left there one step ahead of the state police. When her sorority and family pleaded with her to advance to the Miss Mississippi pageant, she entered it only to prove to Waters that she was sane enough to handle something “normal.” She acted stunned when she won the crown, but he wasn’t surprised in the slightest. By that time, he knew she could play her chosen role with the world falling in flames around her.

He set aside the newspapers and looked at a bundle of her letters. The handwriting on the envelopes evoked only dread. He was not yet ready to delve into the circular logic of Mallory Candler’s unhinged mind. He might never be ready for that. But he could not resist the boxes of photographs. One was filled with Ole Miss scenes: Waters and Cole drinking Coors at the annual shrimp boil; tailgating in the Grove during homecoming; mugging for the camera at a football game, their hands wrapped around bourbon and Cokes. There were also some night shots from a gonzo road trip to Vanderbilt, when Cole had driven Waters’s Triumph right through the campus on its brick sidewalks (and later told the police he’d thought they were narrow streets). The snapshots showed Waters just how much kinder the years had been to him than to his partner. Cole had lost hair and gained weight, while Waters’s lean build had hardly changed. And mercifully, Waters had received his mother’s genes where hair was concerned. But the most profound changes in Cole were subtler. Waters couldn’t put his finger on it; perhaps it was merely the air of dissipation that had hung around Cole for the past few years. But strangers tended to guess Cole was closer to fifty than forty, while many thought Waters was in his mid-thirties.

He slid aside a photo from a fraternity party and looked into Mallory’s incomparable face. The copper streak in her dark hair shone in the light of the flashbulb, and the stark intensity in her eyes pierced him to the core. The next thirty pictures were all of Mallory, some taken in and around Oxford, others shot on the shoestring vacations they’d taken together. Crested Butte, Chaco Canyon, the Yucatan, Zihuatenejo, points in between. Seeing her in such varied settings-laughing in the snow, dancing in the surf, crouching outside a kiva in New Mexico-buttressed rather than diminished his memories of her beauty. The adjectives that New York models struggled to bring to life in their faces, Mallory conjured with effortless grace. With each flip of a photo she was by turns haughty, warm, insouciant, sentimental, naive, knowing, a little cold, a little mad. Every image brought back a vignette from their early lives together, but none more so than one taken in the mountains of Tennessee: Mallory standing nude beneath a sparkling waterfall. It had not been posed; Waters had simply turned the camera on her as she washed her hair in the falls, and her radiant smile had filled the lens with its power. Nothing in the image linked it to the modern world; it could have been shot ten thousand years before, had someone possessed a camera. Here is a twenty-one-year-old woman coming into the full flower of her sexuality, fully conscious of the process. She stands naked in the wilderness with no more embarrassment than a doe would feel drinking at the pool beneath the falls. Looking at her standing in the glittering mist, Waters felt a bittersweet awe, a faint echo of what it had felt like to hold that remarkable body in his arms. To be inside her. To look into eyes so alive with…life. He was staring entranced at the picture when Sybil pushed open his door and walked toward his desk.

“I’ve got some papers from the Oil and Gas Board,” she said. “You need to sign the last page.”

He slid a newspaper over the nude photo just as Sybil set the papers on his desk; he couldn’t be sure if she’d seen it or not. Sybil was no prude, but the woman in the snapshot was clearly not Waters’s wife, and he didn’t want his receptionist getting the wrong idea. He signed the papers, then picked up a remote control and switched on the small Sony television he kept behind his desk to monitor market reports and news crises. As Sybil walked slowly to the door, he flipped through the channels. At sixty, the numbers began to recycle. When he hit channel four, he lifted his thumb, his chest tightening. Eve Sumner was staring at him from the television screen. Her sudden appearance disoriented him, but he soon realized he was watching Natchez’s local cable access channel. A real estate program. Eve was leading viewers on a tour of an antebellum home that was on the market. Waters watched her with fascination.

She was wearing the navy suit skirt again, with nude hose and high heels. Her alto voice and precise diction intrigued Waters; Evie Ray may have come from rural Louisiana, but somewhere along the way she had sweated blood to free herself from redneck syntax. Using her hands gracefully, she pointed out various attributes of a “thoroughly modern” kitchen, then began walking backward toward a door. As she led the cameraman into the dining room, Waters went rigid in his chair.

Pausing in the doorway, Eve had twisted a strand of hair around her right forefinger, tightened it, and begun pulling. As he stared, she popped her finger out, leaving the strand momentarily curled. It was an automatic gesture, probably developed in childhood, but it betrayed a touch of self-consciousness that let you know Eve was not quite so confident as she seemed. In that moment, she became Mallory Candler. For all Mallory’s beauty and self-possession, when she was under close scrutiny, she had twisted her hair in exactly that way. A lot of women probably did the same thing, but some gestures are uniquely one’s own; in this way we recognize family members or loved ones from behind. That unconscious twisting of hair was Mallory to the life, and in her it symbolized a more private and dangerous habit, one whose memory deeply unsettled Waters.

Rotating his chair back to the desk, he looked down at the photos spread across his desk. Then he turned to his computer keyboard and looked up Eve Sumner’s real estate company on the Web. Without pausing to second- guess himself, he called and asked to speak to her, giving the receptionist the name of a local surgeon.

Eve came on the line brimming with enthusiasm. “Dr. Davis? This is Eve Sumner. How may I help you?”

“You mean Evie Ray Sumner, don’t you?”

Silence. “Who is this?”

Waters did not reply.

“Johnny?” A whisper. “Is that you?”

“I’m watching you on TV right now.”

She exhaled with obvious relief. “God, I knew you’d call. I look awful on that show. It’s the lighting or something.”

“I want to ask you some questions.”

“Ask away.”

“Where did I take a nude picture of you?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Well…the bedroom, of course.”

He started to pounce on her response, then stopped. They had taken some photos in his bedroom, but he had destroyed those long ago. “Outside, I mean.”

“Outside? Let me think. Oh. Fall Creek Falls State Park? In Tennessee?”

He couldn’t speak. No one else knew about that. No one.

“My God,” Eve said softly. “You don’t still have that picture, do you?”

He pushed on, his face uncomfortably warm. “How many men did you sleep with before me?”

“Two.”

“Why did you have to leave Alaska the year you won the pageants?”

“Because I threatened your Alaskan girlfriend.”

“I didn’t have an Alaskan girlfriend.”

“French girlfriend, then. Or French Canadian or whatever the slut was.”

Real anger in her voice, enough to send a chill down his back. “What else did you do to her?”

“I put sugar in her gas tank and stranded her on the tundra. She nearly froze to death.”

He shook his head. Eve’s cadence and pronunciation were nothing like those of the woman on television. But for the timbre of her voice, she could be Mallory. “How did you get back to the lower forty-eight without the police getting you?”

“I chartered a private plane.”

“What kind?”

“Um…a Piper Saratoga.”

Confusion settled over Waters like a fog. Some of these details he may have confided in Cole, but not all.