Sleep No More

He blew air from his cheeks and tried not to show his irritation. There were guys in Parchman Prison repeating the same mantra, and they would die behind those walls.

Waters jumped when his cell phone rang. In the current social climate, it didn’t ring often, and the chirp still reminded him of Eve. He took the phone out of a plastic tray under the dash and looked at the ID. PENN CAGE. He pressed SEND and heard a burst of static.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello!”

More static. “John? Can you hear me?”

“Barely! You’re in and out, Penn. What’s going on?”

“I just got a call from the D.A. They got the DNA analysis back.”

Waters wished he hadn’t answered the call. The DNA match of his blood and the semen taken from Eve Sumner would be the final nail that crucified him in court.

“Are you there, John?”

“I wish I wasn’t!”

“The test was negative.”

“Well, we knew that.”

“No! The samples didn’t match. Did you hear me?”

The static was bad, but Waters had heard. “How can that be?”

Lily was looking at him strangely, as though she expected tragic news.

“I don’t know,” Penn yelled through the static. “Maybe Eve slept with someone else that day. But the lab says it wasn’t”-static drowned the lawyer’s words-“didn’t show genetic evidence of two different men. And neither sample was corrupted either. Not your blood or the semen…DNA simply didn’t match.”

“You’re breaking up!”

“…exact words? They said, ‘Close but no cigar.’ You believe that?”

Penn’s last words had come through clearly, so Waters stopped the Land Cruiser in the middle of the dirt road. “What does this mean for the trial?”

“Are you kidding? To convict you, the D.A. has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His own DNA test proves that an unknown man had sex with Eve on the night she died! That’s reasonable doubt right there. I’ll be surprised if the D.A. even goes to trial now. I really will.”

Lily took hold of his hand, and Waters realized he was shaking. “But…” He wanted to continue but could not.

“Who cares how it happened?” Penn exulted. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. This is the second miracle you’ve got in a very short time. Take it and run, buddy. Hug your wife and daughter. Live your life.”

Waters put a quivering hand to his face and tried to hold the tears of relief in his eyes. He couldn’t do it. “I have to go, Penn. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He clicked off.

“Daddy, what’s wrong?” Ana asked.

“Nothing, punkin. I just got some good news.”

“What is it?” Lily whispered.

“The DNA didn’t match. Penn says there’s no way I’ll be convicted without it. There may not even be a trial.”

Lily closed her good hand into a fist and brought it to her mouth, then shut her eyes in what appeared to be a prayer of thanks. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it would work out.”

“I didn’t. Not like this. This is impossible.”

Lily shook her head. “After what we went through, how can you say anything is impossible? Let’s go to the well, John. Drive on and don’t look back.”

He glanced back at Annelise, who looked more than a little afraid. “It’s all right, baby,” he assured her, putting the Land Cruiser back in gear. “Everything’s okay.”

As the Land Cruiser trundled over the last few hundred yards to the location, Waters pondered Penn’s news. He was a scientist, and he was not prepared to accept what he had heard on faith. The DNA match should have been automatic. A formality. The semen taken from Eve had come from him-of that he had no doubt. How would it not match the blood he’d given at the pathology lab? Barring gross error on the part of the lab, there was only one conclusion he could see. Something had genetically altered either his blood or his semen in the time that separated the taking of those two samples.

That “something” could only be Mallory Candler.

Mallory had passed from Eve’s body into him during the moment of his climax with Eve. His semen had obviously been produced prior to Mallory entering him. The vast majority of blood cells taken from his arm four days later would also have been produced before Mallory entered him, but with one difference. They had remained in his body during the roughly twenty-four hours that Mallory had possessed him.

That’s got to be it, Waters thought. I’m genetically different now, and I have been ever since Mallory entered me. The semen I left in Eve had my old DNA signature. The blood they took from my arm had the new one. The same alteration must have happened to Lily-and to Cole and Eve and Danny Buckles and all the rest.

“John? Is that Cole?”

As they approached the well location, Waters saw Cole’s silver Lincoln Continental parked low in the shadow of a stand of pine trees. Dressed in jeans, a Polo shirt, and Red Wing boots, Cole strode away from the car with a long wooden stake in his hand. A red cloth fluttered from the stake like a knight’s battle standard.

When Waters parked, Annelise leaped out yelling Cole’s name, but Waters took a moment to hug his wife. Things had been difficult for the three of them during the past weeks, though Lily was slowly thawing toward Cole, who remembered nothing of the time he spent under Mallory’s influence, and seemed to have no memory of yielding to “Lily’s” seduction. In public they were treated like disgraced citizens. The first couple of times Waters and Lily tried to dine out, the restaurants had fallen silent when they entered. When Cole heard this, he insisted on taking them to the Castle, the first-class restaurant behind Dunleith, and when the dining room fell silent and everyone stared, Cole hugged his wife to his side and bellowed, “What’s the matter? You people never seen class before?” Then he led them to the best table in the house.

“I’m okay,” Lily promised. “Go talk to him.”

Waters got out and went to greet Cole, who was already dancing a jitterbug with Annelise.

“All right, Rock!” he cried. “You ready to stake this baby?”

“More than ready. Where do you want to put it?”

“You’re paying for the well. You decide where the stake goes.”

Waters accepted the stake and surveyed the ground. Mostly sand and dirt, it stretched flat and unbroken to the broad brown expanse of river. At this point, it didn’t much matter where the stake went, give or take fifty feet.

“Ana?”

His daughter looked up from a puddle she had been studying twenty yards away.

“You want to stake the well?”

Her face lit up, and she ran to him and took the pointed stake from his hands. “Anywhere I want?”

“Within reason. Anywhere in a fifty-foot circle of where we are now.”

She scrunched up her face, then began marching away from the river like a conquistador with an imperial flag.

Waters turned toward the Land Cruiser to check on Lily. She was standing by the hood, staring fixedly at the river. He was about to call to her when she lifted her right hand to the short locks of hair at her neck and twisted a strand tightly around her finger. His blood pressure dropped like a stone.

“Hey, Lily!” Cole yelled. “What do you think about this well?”

She looked vaguely toward them, but her eyes seemed blank, and the finger stayed in her hair.

“She’s still not over the accident,” Cole said under his breath. “What do you think about this puppy, Rock? We gonna go big-time again?”

His eyes locked on Lily’s twisting finger, Waters tried not to show his anxiety. “It’s a good play. But that oil is either there or it’s not. And it’s-”