Sleep No More

“No. I mean over money. To save himself.”

“Never. He might sleep with your wife. Sex is an exception to every rule. But hurt you to save himself? No way. You have no idea how much your good opinion means to him. You’re sort of like a father to Cole, even though you’re the same age. He says you always do the right thing, and he never does. And he’s pretty close to right.”

“I don’t always do the right thing.”

“Well, nobody does, do they? But I’ve known a lot of men, and I’ve never known one like you. Your wife is really lucky. I hope she knows that.”

Waters could see how Cole could fall for this woman. The sincerity in her eyes made you want to please her, to make her feel all the happiness she could.

“Cole hasn’t come back in, has he?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t think he will today.”

“Okay. Look, I appreciate your being so forthcoming. Why don’t you go home? There’s nothing going on. Take a long nap, and then get yourself a good dinner tonight. Go to the Castle, and bring me the receipt.”

Sybil gave him an ironic smile. “Wendy’s tonight. I’m too bummed out for anything else.”

He laughed with her, then motioned for her to go. “Don’t worry, Sybil. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to Cole.”

She paused by the door and nodded gravely. “I just hope it’s not too late.”

“I do too,” he said softly, after she’d gone out.

At 1:50 P.M., Waters stood on top of Jewish Hill, looking out over the Mississippi River. After Sybil left, he’d called St. Stephens to verify that Annelise was in class. Then he’d shut down the office and driven straight to the cemetery. He needed time to think before he faced Lily again, and this was the place that drew him. He hadn’t much time. Ana would be dismissed from school at 2:30, and he wanted to be there to pick her up. He didn’t want her alone with Lily until he knew exactly what was going on.

As he watched a large sailing vessel make its way beneath the twin bridges over the river, a funeral cortege pulled up to the first gate of the cemetery and turned into its new section. The new section looked like any cemetery in any town in America. The gravestones were low and the ground flat, and there were few trees to break up the view. Waters was glad he’d managed to purchase a family plot in one of the older sections, shaded by oak trees and bordered by walls and wrought iron. It probably didn’t matter to the dead where they came to rest, but for those left behind, atmosphere made a difference. He’d spent enough time at his father’s grave to know that.

About five hundred yards from Jewish Hill, a green burial tent faded by the sun awaited the funeral procession. He hadn’t noticed it when he drove up. The tent kept the sun or rain from the open grave, the coffin, and the immediate family and close relations. The cars in the procession parked bumper-to-bumper in a long line, thirty or forty of them blocking the narrow lane. The headlights were extinguished, and then dark-suited mourners emerged from the vehicles and gathered in a somber circle around the tent. Waters had been to a hundred burials exactly like this one: the same tent, the same hearse, virtually the same crowd. That was how it was in small towns.

As he watched, a late arrival turned in through the wrong gate and began looking for a lane that would lead to the burial service. A sign on the car’s door read, SUMNER SELECT PROPERTIES. It took a moment for the significance of this to register, but as the latecomer turned and drove toward the green tent, Waters’s face felt cold.

Eve Sumner was lying under that burial tent. Cold and still with an ugly Y-incision stitched into her torso from the autopsy. She was about to be buried right before his eyes.

His first instinct was to flee. Tom Jackson might be in the crowd of mourners, watching to see who showed up at the murder victim’s funeral. Waters looked back at his Land Cruiser. Satisfied that it was parked out of sight of the burial tent, he walked over to a wrought-iron fence bordering old Jewish graves from Alsace and Bohemia and sat down against it. Anyone at the burial would need binoculars to make out his face at this distance, and sitting in front of the fence, he was unlikely to be noticed at all.

Eve’s mother and teenage son would be under that tent, grief-stricken and confused, roses and Kleenex clenched in their hands. Morbidly, Waters wondered how many men in that crowd had coupled with Eve while she was alive. It would probably please her to know they had come to her final farewell. Then again, he reflected, he might have no idea what Eve would have wanted. Because he might never have known the real Eve.

No matter how imaginatively Penn Cage twisted events to fit his logical explanations, Waters remained unconvinced. And not because of denial. No man wanted to think his wife and best friend might be trying to drive him mad. But he had not accepted Eve’s story of soul transmigration simply to avoid an unpleasant truth. He’d believed the things Eve told him because they felt true. Her intimate knowledge, the way she kissed him, her pushing of every limit in search of ecstasy, her desire to possess him totally-all these were the essence of Mallory Candler. Penn might believe Waters was enmeshed in a complex conspiracy designed to deprive him of his sanity, his freedom, and finally his money. But Penn could not know what Waters did.

He could not know that Cole, while weak where his vices were concerned, had always been a rock about the big things. Friendship. Loyalty. Fatherhood. At his core, Cole-like Waters-had struggled to live up to the John Wayne/Henry Fonda images that their fathers had revered and tried hard to inculcate in their sons. Yes, Cole might sell a pumping unit for quick cash when he was in a bind. But what he had said at the country club still resonated. I’d go down with my legs broken and a bullet in my head before I’d do something to hurt you or your family. It might be naive, but Waters believed in the ultimate goodness of his best friend. If that was stupidity, he was willing to pay the price for it.

And Penn knew nothing of Lily beyond her public face. He could not know that before she had her miscarriages, Lily had been an attentive wife and lover, but not a gifted or accomplished one. Even if she were trying to convince Waters that she was Mallory reincarnated, Lily could never separate love and lust enough to handle him in the brutally physical manner that she had last night. It simply was not in her.

Across the cemetery, the dark knot of mourners began to break up and return to their cars. Gravediggers would soon lower Eve Sumner’s body into the ground. But whatever she really was-whatever made her Eve-had vacated her body three nights ago in the Eola Hotel, if not long before. Who was the woman he had made love to for two weeks? If he was right about Cole and Lily, the answer to that question was something no one would ever believe. Not Penn Cage. Not Tom Jackson. Not anyone who hadn’t lived through what Waters himself had. Not without proof.

“I have to know,” he said aloud. “Once and for all.”

The mourners’ cars pulled out of the cemetery like a slow train with a big black Cadillac hearse for a caboose. As he watched them go, Waters knew there was only one place he could go to get the answer he needed. Home.

Walking back toward his Land Cruiser, he glanced at his watch. It was 2:24 P.M. His heart stuttered. The sight of Eve’s burial had made him lose track of time. Annelise would be dismissed from school in six minutes. Lily could be waiting in line right now to pick her up.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and he broke into a run.

Chapter 15

Waters ran a red light and accelerated to sixty-five as fear poured like corrosive acid through his veins. He’d missed Annelise at school. One cell phone call to the elementary school office had determined that Rose had picked her up, and Rose’s cell phone wasn’t switched on. Which meant Annelise might already be home with Lily. The implications of this were almost more than he could stand. At the cemetery he’d decided he trusted his wife and his best friend. That meant there was no conspiracy to drive him crazy or frame him for murder. Which meant everything “Eve Sumner” had told him was true. He had never even met the real Eve, except perhaps in the panicked seconds before he lost consciousness in the hotel. Yet while he “slept,” his hands had strangled the life out of her, guided by the twisted soul of Mallory Candler. And now Mallory was alone with Annelise, hidden in Lily’s unsuspecting mind.