Sleep No More

would you pick?”

“Mallory suggested Sybil.”

“Your receptionist?”

“Cole’s already sleeping with her. Or was, until recently.”

Disgust wrinkled Lily’s face. “How in God’s name does Jenny stay with him?”

“How are you going to stay with me?”

“That’s different. You did what you did because…I’ve been less than a wife to you for far too long.”

“That’s no excuse.”

She folded her arms across her chest and looked at the floor. “I never thought I’d say this, but it’s a mitigating circumstance.”

Her forgiving attitude stunned him, but before he could fully absorb it, she grabbed his arm and said, “Wait! What if we found someone who wasn’t innocent?”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. Like that Danny Buckles character who molested the little girls at school.”

Waters thought about it. “He’s in jail. And he’s a man.”

“Okay. But you know what I mean.”

“I don’t know any female criminals. Even if I did…who are we to decide that someone deserves to die? Even Danny Buckles?”

Lily flipped away his comment with an angry hand gesture. “I’m not saying anyone deserves to die. But if I had to throw someone out of a sinking lifeboat to keep it afloat, and my choice was between Sybil Sonnier and Danny Buckles, I’d throw out Danny.”

The steel in her voice sent a shudder along his spine. Lily was not really talking in hypothetical terms. She had accepted the necessity. If murder was required to save her family, she would do it.

“We’re going to do it,” Waters said. “Aren’t we? We’re going to take an innocent life.”

Lily nodded soberly. “The only question is who.”

He closed his eyes as the reality sank into the marrow of his bones.

“You should pick someone we don’t know,” Lily said. “That way the guilt wouldn’t feel so personal. It would just be this anonymous person.”

“An anonymous person that I killed.”

“We killed.”

“Okay, we. But after you read the newspapers for a week, you’d feel like you knew her. And how do you think we’re going to kill her? From a mile away? There’s no way to soft-pedal this. If we decide to do it, it’s going to be bad. We’ll never get over it. The only real choice is whether it’s Cole, Sybil, or some other woman.”

“You can’t kill Cole. You couldn’t live with that.”

Waters had given this question a lot of thought. “Let me tell you something about Cole. His life is already in danger. He’s borrowed heavily from loan sharks to pay his gambling debts, far more than he can ever pay back. He keeps a pistol at the office now. They may literally send someone to kill him.”

Lily shook her head. “You’d never let that happen. You’d pay his debts yourself. Don’t kid yourself that you wouldn’t.”

“Normally, I’d agree. But it’s a lot of money, Lily. Over six hundred thousand dollars. And if the EPA rules against us, I won’t have the money to pay that debt.”

Her mouth fell open.

“So. Even if we pick Sybil or someone else, Cole could still be murdered. If he doesn’t come up with that money, I mean. And where’s he going to come up with it, except from us?”

“And we may not have it,” Lily said. She knit her brow and walked slowly around the room. “I don’t care. If you killed Cole, you’d be like that pathetic Poe character who heard the heart beating under the floorboards. You’d go crazy.”

“And I won’t be like that with Sybil?”

“Not as bad. You don’t really know her.” Lily stopped in midstep. “Do you?”

Despite her professed forgiveness, his affair with Eve had irreparably damaged her trust in him. “No,” he said. “She’s nice, but all I really know is that she’s a South Louisiana divorcee who needed a job. One of thousands.”

“Does she have children?”

“No.”

This seemed to settle the matter for Lily. “Cole has three children, and we know them all. Do you want to see those kids’ faces when they hear their father has been murdered? Knowing it was you who did it?”

Despite all his ruthless theorizing, Waters could not imagine that reality.

“When are you supposed to tell Mallory who to go into?”

“She was pressuring me when I saw Cole this afternoon.”

Lily’s cold eyes and set jaw showed the depth of her resolve. “Tell her tomorrow,” she said. “Tell her your answer is Sybil. And tell her not to waste time. You’ve been thinking about Sybil all night, and you want her.”

“Why the hurry?”

“The murder investigation. From what you told me, you could be arrested before supper tomorrow.”

“What if Cole sleeps with Sybil tomorrow? Will we be ready to deal with it?”

Lily sat on the bed in a posture of absolute concentration. He imagined this was how she looked when she knocked the top out of the CPA exam. “We’ll be ready,” she said. “It’s just a job. Like doing an audit. Drilling a well. We’ll plan every step. Then we’ll execute those steps in the safest, most efficient way possible. We’ll overlook nothing.”

Waters thought of Sybil Sonnier’s sincere eyes and her desire to please. Then he remembered a Nietzsche quote from college: In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man. Looking at his wife’s face, a study of moral detachment chiseled in ice, he believed it. And for the first time, he sensed that he had come face-to-face with Mallory Candler’s match.

Chapter 18

The morning sun was already high when Waters started up the back stairs to his office, his eyes burning from fatigue. After their discussion the night before, he and Lily had decided to put Annelise in their bed, and her constant shifting made sleep almost impossible. Likewise, Lily had decided to keep Ana home from school for the day. She didn’t want her vulnerable to Mallory in any way while Waters tried to manipulate Mallory into Sybil.

Waters paused at his office door, started to go down the hall to Cole’s, then went into his own. If he went into Cole’s office and found only his friend and partner, he did not know if he could keep his emotions in check. To see Cole unaware of the dark presence submerged beneath his conscious mind would be like talking to a friend who did not know he was dying of inoperable cancer.

Waters walked to his desk but did not sit down. Turning to the picture window, he opened the door that led to the balcony and went outside. The river flowed gunmetal gray today. Usually a rusty brown, it now looked dead and deep, like it could swallow anything dropped into it without a trace. The twin bridges moved with desultory traffic, log trucks and big diesels mostly. Some steel was being replaced on the eastbound span. Antlike workers crawled over the girders with surprising speed, and for fifty yards there was nothing but a makeshift guardrail to keep you from dropping eighty feet to the river below if you drifted over the line.

That’s what I’ve done, Waters thought. Drifted over the line. And now I’m a few short steps from prison. That he had been pulled over the line would be a fact only in his own mind, not those of the jurors who would convict him. All that his recitation of the “facts” as he saw them might accomplish would be to get him sentenced to the state mental hospital at Whitfield rather than to Parchman Prison in the Delta.

“Johnny?”

He whirled and found Cole standing three feet behind him, clean-shaven and dressed in wool trousers, a custom-tailored shirt, and a silk tie. This and his use of “Johnny” made Waters think he was facing Mallory, but he