those cuffs, but she couldn’t do it. If she’d been an animal, she would have gnawed my hand right off. Then the water went over my head.”
Lily told the story as though she had observed the event rather than lived it, but her voice belied the shock in her eyes.
“I saw things, John. Not white light or anything like that. Just things from my life. Images.”
“What images?”
She looked up at him with sudden urgency, her eyes wet. “My father. Our wedding. Annelise…the baby we lost.”
He tried to lean over and hug her, but she shook her head.
“And I knew then,” she said, “that I couldn’t give up my life.
Waters could scarcely imagine his wife doing this, but his awe was displaced by fear that had still not been put to rest.
“What happened to Mallory?”
Lily reached for the remote control that operated the bed, and raised her upper body until her head was only a little below his. Her blue eyes had a provocative glint.
“She’s right here.”
Waters took a step back.
“I told you. She’s still inside me.”
He didn’t know what to say.
Lily’s eyes held something like pity. “I know you’re wondering what to do. That’s what men wonder: what do I
Waters started to speak, but Lily cut him off.
“
He stepped close to the bed and stroked the hair over her ear. “You know I believe that. But what about Mallory? What if I wake up one night and find her looking at me through your eyes?”
“It could happen, John. Tonight. Or five minutes from now.” She took a slow, deep breath like someone testing their lungs, and he suddenly remembered that some of her ribs were broken. “But I don’t think it will,” she said. “When Mallory first came into me, I had no idea she was there. I had no idea my family was at risk. Or my life. Now I do. And after the bridge…and the river…she knows how strong I am. I don’t think she’ll ever control me again. She’ll be like a tumor I carry with me, an inoperable tumor that reminds me just how precious life is.”
Waters leaned down to hug her, but the door opened behind him, and Penn Cage came in.
“I’m afraid your time’s up, John.”
“Can I have just one minute?”
Penn sighed and shook his head. “They’re going to arrest you. I wasn’t going to say anything in front of Lily, but I’ll need her signature on some papers to arrange bail, so…”
Waters closed his eyes and tried to marshal whatever emotional resources he had left. As he looked down at Lily, she smiled with a serenity he had not seen on her face since Mallory was last inside her.
“Go on,” she said, taking his hand. “It’s going to be all right. I know it is.”
Waters hugged her, then followed Penn into the hall. Tom Jackson waited there, his face heavy with the burden of duty.
“John Waters,” he said, “I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Evie Ray Sumner. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney…”
Waters felt Penn’s hand squeeze his shoulder, but the rest of Jackson’s words blurred into nothingness as Barlow walked up and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
Chapter 22
Six Weeks Later
John Waters slowed his Land Cruiser, then turned off the gravel onto a dirt road that had not existed a week ago. Lily sat in the passenger seat, wearing blue jeans and a straw hat. Annelise was strapped into the backseat. The river was still half a mile away, but he could smell it already.
“Where’s the oil derrick, Daddy?” Annelise asked, scanning the nearly bare trees and brown fields.
“There’s no derrick yet. Just a stake in the ground. This is a location, baby. A prospective well.”
“That’s no fun.”
“I think it’s pretty fun.”
Lily laughed and rolled down her window, letting in a blast of cold air. “That feels better. The heater was giving me claustrophobia.”
He was glad she could laugh. Waters had not laughed much in the past six weeks. During that time, he had been free on bail, but “free” was a misleading term. The daily routine of life was illusory, a mock reality that could be snatched away by the jury that would be selected in less than a week. Still, he had worked hard to keep his family’s spirits up and his oil company alive.
Two weeks after Lily’s accident, the EPA had determined that the salt water that destroyed the Louisiana rice farm had leaked from another company’s well. The relief this judgment brought was undercut by the effects of Waters’s arrest for murder and the scandal caused by the revelation of his affair with Eve Sumner. The faces he met on the street were cold, and loyal investors stopped taking his calls. Even Cole’s less reputable moneymen seemed to want to steer clear of the company. Waters spent two weeks doing nothing but damage control, but with his shattered reputation, there was little he could do.
He had paid off Cole’s gambling debts to the tune of $658,000. In exchange, Cole signed an agreement by which Waters would recoup his money out of newly discovered oil production. The question was, would there ever be any new Smith-Waters wells? The first issue was personal. Cole had not once mentioned having sex with Lily while Lily was under Mallory’s influence. But he had done it, and done it knowingly. Yet Mallory herself had admitted that she plied Cole with a fifth of Johnnie Walker during the seduction, and it was possible that he had no memory of the event. Beyond this, Waters had some doubt as to whether Cole would have yielded to Lily, had she been herself. God only knew what Mallory had done to draw Cole into having sex with her. Waters had thought long and hard about the situation, and in the end he’d decided that forgiveness was his only option. Cut off from his friendship and aid, Cole would become a shell of himself, and spiral down into depression, possibly even suicide. With the support Waters had shown him, Cole had joined AA and was now thirty-one days sober. Waters had no illusions about his friend’s strength of character, but he did have faith.
The second issue was lack of investor support for the company. After two weeks of total rejection of their latest prospective well, Waters told Cole he was going to drill a well “straight up”-which meant he would fund the cost entirely out of his own pocket. And he was not going to drill the prospect they had been marketing. He was going back to Jackson Point, to the dry hole they had drilled just before he started seeing Eve. If he moved the site six hundred feet to the south, he believed, he would hit the reservoir he had missed on that unlucky night.
“Slow down!” Lily said, as the Land Cruiser bounced over a giant pothole.
“Sorry. My mind’s somewhere else.”
“I know. Remember, one day at a time.”