Sleep No More

looked up in surprise, and he put his forefinger over his lips. Then he slipped into the conference room and called Linton Hill.

“Waters residence,” Rose said.

“It’s John, Rose. I need to talk to Lily.”

“Lily gone swimming, Mr. John.”

“Okay, thanks.” He clicked off and dialed Lily’s cell phone. It rang five times, and then a recorded message told him “the subscriber” was either unavailable or out of the service area. Desperate now, he hung up and walked down the hall toward Cole’s office. Cole had said to come to him if he needed help, and Waters definitely needed it now. Cole might not believe his story about Mallory being in Lily, but at bottom, that didn’t really matter. Because Cole would do what Waters asked, even if he thought he was crazy. But when he opened the door, he found Cole’s office empty.

“He hasn’t come in today,” Sybil said from behind Waters. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Shit.”

Sybil looked genuinely worried, and not about Cole. “Is there something I can do to help you, John?”

“I wish you could, but no.” He squeezed her arm, then walked back to his office.

Penn was standing at the center of the room, examining a dragonfly trapped in amber and mounted on a black pedestal.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“A little. Penn, we have to talk, and I mean for real.”

The lawyer looked up, concern in his face. “What is it? Have you been holding something back?”

“In a way. Last night, Lily told me she was Mallory. She told me that.”

“What did she tell you? Exactly?”

“That the theory I put to you yesterday is true. That she moved from Eve, through me, into Lily.”

Penn rolled his eyes. “John, we’ve been over this.”

“Please try to listen with an open mind. Last night I secretly videotaped Lily and me in bed. She’s doing things on that tape she’s never done in her life.”

“And you want to show this tape to me?”

“No, because you don’t have any frame of reference to judge it by. You don’t know what she was like before. I’m talking about kinky stuff, though. Bondage, handcuffs.”

Penn cleared his throat. “Handcuffs aren’t that kinky, John.”

“In Lily’s mind, handcuffs belong on felons, nowhere else.”

“As far as you know. Tell me what else happened.”

“Lily threatened Annelise’s life.”

Penn drew back, incredulous. “How?”

“She held a fucking butcher knife over her head!”

“Well…did Annelise see this?”

“No.”

“What else did Lily say to you?”

“Too much to remember. Penn, I know you think I’m psychotic, but it’s her. It’s Mallory! She told me she killed her father!”

“That’s crap. Ben Candler died of a heart attack.”

“Yes, but do you know what caused it? Remember you told me some people had told you Ben was a little strange? What word did you use? Pervy?”

“Pervy. Perverted.”

Waters quickly related Mallory’s tale of the secret photos and the gunpoint confrontation with her father. As Penn listened, his expression changed from skepticism to fascination.

“Jesus,” he said when Waters finished. “It’s hard to imagine Cole Smith making up that story. Maybe Danny Buckles, the child molester, did something like that, and Eve or Lily modified the story to use on you. We know Eve knew Buckles, because she warned you about his abuse at the school.”

“Are you kidding me?” Waters asked. “You’re grasping at straws!”

Penn walked over to Waters’s desk and sat behind it. “I don’t think so. And Ben’s heart attack…maybe Cole and Eve were trying to shake him down the same way they did you. They tried to convince him Mallory was alive, and it killed him.”

“You still see a conspiracy behind all this? Do you really think Lily would threaten her own daughter with a butcher knife?”

“I’m afraid so. By doing something a loving mother would never do, Lily convinces you beyond all doubt of the fantasy they want to sell you. She’s not Lily anymore. It’s like Eve cutting herself. That’s the only rational explanation for the events you’ve described.”

“There’s one other possibility.”

“What?”

“Eve was telling the truth from the start!”

The lawyer slammed his hand down on Waters’s desk. “For God’s sake, wake up! You’re about to be at the center of the biggest murder case this town has seen since I reopened the Del Payton case. You could go to prison for life. You could get the death penalty! And you’re so far down in denial, you can’t see anything. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you do!”

Waters threw up his hands to show he understood the obvious. “I don’t want to go to prison. But compared to a threat to my wife and daughter, prison is nothing. I can’t ignore what all my instincts tell me is true.” Waters put his hands on the front of his desk and leaned toward Penn. “You were a prosecutor, right? What happens when human beings have sex? Biologically. The seventh-grade sex-ed version.”

The lawyer shook his head in exasperation. “The male deposits sperm in the vagina of the female.”

“Exactly. An exchange of bodily fluids.”

“From male to female,” Penn clarified.

“You don’t think anything goes the other way? Forget intercourse. Just think about kissing. That old expression, swapping spit? That’s exactly what you’re doing. And scientists can do DNA tests on cells in saliva.”

“What are you getting at, John?”

“What do we really know about human consciousness? The top neuroscientists in the world can’t tell you what it is. Where in the brain is consciousness located? What if there’s consciousness in every strand of DNA in your body? Or what if your consciousness is at least linked to every strand of DNA in your body?

We know our individual consciousness grows out of our DNA maps. It has to. That’s where our brains come from. Do you dispute any of that?”

Penn waved his hand impatiently. “If we were sitting in a bar or a college seminar, I’d love to bat this around with you. But you’re in real trouble, and you’re proposing as an explanation something that defies all physical laws.”

“Known physical laws. Every Sunday, people go to church and pray for their immortal souls. Is there an immortal soul, Penn? If you believe so, you’re saying it survives past death. If that’s the case, who’s to say that in certain situations-extreme situations of violence or desire for survival-that the soul can’t move into another person the way Mallory said hers did?”

Penn sighed but did not argue.

“Mallory said the transfer can happen only during sex. And not just any sex, but during orgasm, when the individual self is blanked out. That creates a window of opportunity for the incoming soul-or consciousness-to gain a foothold. Do you deny that your conscious self, your identity even, basically blanks out during orgasm? Isn’t that how it feels to you?”

“In a way, yes. But this idea of soul transfer…it’s like some crazy blend of New Age science and Eastern mysticism.”

“That’s what quantum physics sounds like too, if you read much of it. Penn, have you ever slept with two