he needed to do next, he could not do now. He threw himself off the bed, grabbed his pants, and ran for the hallway.
“Johnny!” yelled the voice behind him.
He pulled on his pants by the back door and buttoned his shirt as he ran outside. He saw Annelise and Rose at the swing set, Rose pushing Annelise with the steady rocking motion of an oil-well pump. The moment Rose saw his face, she grabbed the chains of the swing and stopped it.
“What’s the matter, Mr. John? Where’s your shoes?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Lily’s too tired for supper. I’m going to take Ana to her grandmother’s for a while.”
Concern filled the maid’s eyes. “Are you sure everything’s all right? Lily don’t usually sleep like that. Maybe you should give Dr. Cage a call.”
“No, it’s-”
“Mama!” cried Annelise. “Daddy said you were sleeping.”
Waters whirled and saw Lily walking down the back porch steps. He ran toward her with his arms out.
“You need to rest, honey! You said you were dizzy.”
Lily squinted at him and shook her head. “I’m not dizzy. I want to see Annelise.”
“No,” Waters said firmly. “You need to lie down.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s still daylight.”
“Go back inside!”
“Daddy?” called Annelise. “Why are you yelling at Mom?”
Waters turned and saw his daughter walking up behind him. “Mama’s sick, baby. You stay right there.”
“Sick?” Ana’s voice cracked. “Sick how?”
Waters turned and saw Rose staring at him as if he had lost his mind.
Annelise began to cry.
Lily looked back at him with such a hurt expression that he felt like a Nazi storm trooper. But was she really upset? Or was Mallory reveling in a role she’d been waiting ten years to play?
“Mr. John,” Rose said in an indignant voice, “I think you the one needs to go back inside. Get yourself a drink and sit down for a while.”
Lily’s eyes remained on Waters, pleading for some explanation.
Lily burst into tears, then turned and ran back up the steps. Behind him, Annelise began to wail. Waters turned and saw Rose kneeling with the child in her arms, comforting her with soft words. But over Annelise’s shoulder, the maid glared at him with eyes that could melt steel.
“Keep Ana out here,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”
He ran up the back steps and started down the hall toward the master bedroom. As he walked, he cut his eyes left and right, half expecting some kind of attack from his blind side. Mallory had done such things before, and he sensed danger now.
Finding the bedroom door closed against him, he began to doubt himself. What if Lily
“Lily?” he called.
No reply.
“Lily!”
Still nothing.
“Lily, open the door,” he called in a reasonable voice. “I need to talk to you.”
The silence mocked him. He looked down at the brass knob. There was a tiny hole at its center. Annelise had picked the lock many times with a paper clip. He was about to go in search of one when he heard a soft click from the knob. When nothing else happened, he grabbed the knob and threw open the door.
Lily sat cross-legged at the center of the bed, her palms upturned in the manner of a Hindu in meditation, her wide-open eyes burning with a light that rooted Waters to the floor.
She smiled serenely. “Close the door.”
“You can’t do this,” Waters told her.
“It’s already done. Come in and close the door, Johnny. I’ll do the talking.”
Waters did as she said.
“I want to tell you how my father died,” Lily said. “Do you remember what I told you about him?”
Waters said nothing. He felt as though someone had injected him with the most powerful hallucinogen on the planet. To hear the voice of his wife speak Mallory’s inmost thoughts-and in Mallory’s diction-pushed him into a realm beyond fear. It inverted his sense of reality, so that the familiar engendered horror rather than affection, and dread replaced love.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
For some reason an image of Penn Cage behind his desk filled Waters’s mind. “That he abused you?”
“Mmm-hmm. You never believed me about that, did you?”
He tried to guess where she was going. “Why do you think that?”
Lily shook her head in reproof. “Because I was
“Did it really happen?”
“Maybe not like you imagine. But it happened. From the time I was about ten, I started to feel uncomfortable around my father. He said things to me he shouldn’t have said. He noticed things about me. It started as compliments, but the older I got…he talked about my beauty, all the time, of course. But then it was my body. And my ‘way,’ he called it. My ‘beguiling’ way. He’d walk into the bathroom when I was using it. Or trick me into coming into the bathroom when he was in there without clothes on.”
“Did he touch you?”
“He wanted to. My friends knew it too. Some of them. He did the same kinds of things to them. Too much time with us instead of with the grown-ups. Touches that lingered too long. It was only lack of nerve that stopped him from doing something physical.”
“If he never touched you, how do you know that’s true?”
“I’ll tell you. About fourteen months ago, when I first got back to Natchez, I wanted desperately to get into my old house. I wanted to remember what it was like, and to get some of my old things, if they were still there. I didn’t want to risk it when I was in Danny. But once I got into Eve, I felt confident enough. I took the key from under the rock in the flower bed where they’d always hidden it, and slipped inside.”
Lily’s eyes glazed with the power of memory. “I had no idea what it would be like. I found my room exactly as I’d left it. It was like a shrine. My old clothes, my posters, my photos. My cheerleading uniform. Everything. It was like going to Graceland and seeing Elvis’s old costumes on mannequins. They actually had my Miss Mississippi gown on a mannequin in the corner.” She shuddered. “I had never felt as dead as I did in that room. Anyway, I took a few small things. Some snapshots. A cross my grandmother had given me. A scarf I’d had when you and I were together. In moments like that, you know which things are important. The things you can’t live without.”
“Your diaries?”
She nodded. “That’s what I really wanted. I expected them to be in my drawer, but they weren’t. I searched the whole house, but I couldn’t find them. Then I went into the attic. We had a walk-in attic on the second floor. Remember? I found the diaries in a glass-topped box by the back wall. There was light up there, so I started reading them.”
Waters thought he saw tears welling in her eyes.
“Reading what I’d written so long ago…it was the opposite of how I’d felt in my room. I felt more alive then-more myself-than I had since the night I was raped in New Orleans. There was my true soul, right there on the page. As I sat reading, I noticed something odd about the wall. The edge of a board was sticking out. But it wasn’t like a warp. The board was propped there. I pulled it away and found a space. There was a book inside it. A big one. It was a photo album.”
“What was in it?”
