Sleep No More

remembered that such small hemorrhages were petechiae, telltale side effects of strangulation.

He looked at Eve’s neck.

The skin there was bluish red, bruised from pressure and abrasion. She had definitely been strangled. This realization led to another-I was alone with her-and nausea hit him in a sickening wave. He staggered into the bathroom and emptied the contents of his stomach into the commode, the spasms racking his body down to his cramping groin muscles.

“Jesus God,” he croaked, hugging the toilet.

He got to his feet, washed his face, and went back into the bedroom. A thousand irrational thoughts assailed him, but the cold center of his mind knew there was only one thing to do. Taking a wet rag from the bathroom, he methodically wiped down every surface in the suite that he might have touched. He didn’t look at the corpse on the bed. If he stopped to think about what he was doing, he might pick up the phone and call the police. With Lily and Annelise to think about, he could not risk that.

After wiping down the room, he searched for anything he might have left behind on previous visits. Socks, underwear, a scrap of paper. Finding nothing, he went back to the bathroom. There was something here, he knew. Something dangerous. His vomitus? No. The drain trap. He had showered here every night before returning home. There would be hair in the drain, hair that could be matched to that on his head with a hundred percent certainty. He crouched in the shower stall and examined the drain. It was held down tight with tiny Phillips screws. He had no screwdriver with him. Not even a pocketknife.

Cut me, Eve had begged.

What had she wanted him to use? He walked back into the bedroom and searched her purse. Sure enough, he found a small pocketknife inside. A Gerber. He took it into the bathroom, but its thin point made no headway with the Phillips screws. Digging into the purse again, he found a scrap of blue notepaper with his home phone number written on it. As he put the paper in his pocket, he saw a small flat case made of faux leather. Inside he found a mini tool kit, and one of the tools was a screwdriver. Not a Phillips head, but a standard one that would probably do the job. He went back into the shower stall and removed the drain trap, dug the hair and funk out of it, then flung the mess off the balcony onto the rain-slicked parking lot. As he screwed the drain back down, he felt his composure fragmenting. It was time to leave.

Holding the doorknob with a washcloth, he looked back at the suite one last time, not out of sentiment, but because he had left evidence here that he could not destroy. Inside the body on the bed. Inside Eve. It might be possible to destroy that evidence, he supposed, or at least corrupt it (an image of a maid’s cleaning cart came into his mind), but he was not up to that task. The best he could manage was hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outer doorknob.

Standing frozen in the hallway with his umbrella, he saw his journey to the first floor as fraught with peril. The hallway. The elevator. The mezzanine. The staircase. The lobby. The security guard. For a moment he considered going back into the suite and trying to climb down the outer balconies to the parking lot, but that was ridiculous. They were slick with rain, and even if he didn’t kill himself, anyone passing on the street below could easily see him climbing down.

Move! shouted a voice in his head. Do you want to lose your wife and daughter? Do you want the remainder of your sex life to happen in Parchman Prison?

He put out his right foot, halted, then began to walk briskly toward the elevators, his eyes watching the carpet. His mind was already two blocks away, at his car. See it, said the voice. All you have to do is get your body to the place where your mind is already. He opened his umbrella as soon as he reached the lobby, and used it to conceal his face from the security guard. When he hit the street, rain whipped him like a vengeful spirit, and thunder reverberated off the walls of the hotel, buffeting the air in his lungs. He clutched the umbrella close over his head and began to run.

Chapter 11

A hotel maid discovered Eve Sumner’s body just after noon. The news didn’t travel quite as fast as the news of Danny Buckles’s molestations at St. Stephens, but by 2:00 P.M., buzzing telephones and flying e-mail had informed most of the Natchez business community of her death. Shortly thereafter, Sybil came into Waters’s office with a stunned expression on her face and told him that “that real estate lady, Eve something” had just been found dead in the Eola Hotel. Raped and murdered, her throat cut, said the rumor. This distortion helped Waters put on a show of shock, but when he asked Sybil for details he found she had none.

When she closed the door, Waters got up, walked out onto his balcony, and stared across the river at the Louisiana lowlands. His vision seemed unusually acute. Last night’s rain had knocked the dust out of the air, and behind it came the cold telegram of approaching winter. In the bracing wind, his body felt numb, disconnected, as though his mind were trying to leave it behind as part of a survival strategy. A sense of inevitability permeated his consciousness, a dark conviction that during his presence in the hotel room last night, distant stars had shifted position, forever altering his fate, and that the millstones of the gods were aligning themselves to grind another mortal to powder.

His sense of time had fled him. During the two weeks of his affair with Eve, he’d had difficulty keeping track of the days, largely due to sleep deprivation. But when he returned home after fleeing the Eola, he’d had to stop the Land Cruiser at the head of the driveway and pick up the newspaper to learn what day it was. His last coherent memory was of Tuesday, but the top line of the paper said it was Thursday. He felt like a coma patient waking up to find himself in a different year than the one in which he’d had the accident that put him in the hospital. He had lost himself in a dream, and he had awakened to fear. Cold, nauseating, sphincter-twitching fear. All that he’d risked like so many plastic poker chips now filled his mind with heart-wrenching clarity.

Exactly what had happened last night, he was still unsure. He felt like the hapless senator in The Godfather Part II who went to bed with a laughing girl and woke up with a dead whore. Only in the real world there was no Tom Hagen standing by to make everything go back to the way it was before. In the real world, you were left alone with your horror and guilt, desperately needing to talk to another human being but afraid that any confession-even to a priest-could set you on a road that ended in the barred hell of Parchman Farm, strapped to a padded table while white-coated technicians helped you ride the needle down into the smothering dark.

Despite these anxieties, some part of Waters’s brain continued to operate in survival mode, the way a soldier with a blown-off arm remains cogent enough to search for his bloody limb, then carry it back to the aid station with blank doll’s eyes, instinct driving him forward long after his higher brain functions have shut down. Waters was pretty sure no one had seen him leave the hotel. The security guard was sleeping, and the raging thunderstorm had cleared the streets. As he ran across Main Street toward his car, he did see a distant figure down near the bluff, a man with an umbrella standing over a urinating dog, but he didn’t think the man saw him. Even if he had, he would not have recognized Waters from so far.

As he drove home, he considered breaking into Eve’s house to see whether she kept anything there that would incriminate him. There was a good chance that she did, but he had never been to her house before. If he was seen trying to get in, tonight of all nights, that would be the end for him, even if there was no evidence inside.

When he pulled into his driveway, he noticed the kitchen light on. It had not been on when he left the night before. Disquieted, he parked the Land Cruiser on the side of the house and walked around to the slave quarters. From there he could look across the patio at the rear windows of the main house. He did not see Lily moving around, and the master bedroom was still dark. He watched the windows for an hour. While he did, the events of the past two weeks played through his head like a surrealistic film, intercut with horrifying stills of Eve’s lifeless body.

When the bedroom light clicked on, he went into the house and put on a pot of coffee, then walked back to the bedroom to check on Lily. She was using the bathroom. Standing by the partly open door, he asked how she’d slept.

“Not too well,” she said in a tired voice. “What about you?”

He paused, waiting for some clue to what she had seen last night, if anything. None came. “I couldn’t sleep again,” he told her.