Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“Thanks, Tom. You know where to find me.”

Jackson told “Danny Buckles” he was going to place him under arrest. The janitor started crying again, then moaned something about how horribly he’d been abused in jail. Waters walked calmly out of the office and climbed into his Land Cruiser. He drove slowly away from the school, but as soon as he reached the highway, he accelerated to seventy and headed toward the Mississippi River Bridge. Eve Sumner’s office was on the bypass that led to the twin spans, and if he pushed it, he could be there in less than five minutes.

Eve Sumner’s office building stood a thousand yards from the Mississippi River Bridge. A false front of brick and wood molding had been grafted onto its front, but one glance would tell any passerby that it was an aluminum box. The familiar logo of a national brokerage company decorated the SUMNER SELECT PROPERTIES sign outside, and expensive cars crowded the asphalt parking lot. Waters remembered from newspaper ads that eight or ten agents worked for Sumner. He couldn’t believe there were enough houses changing hands in Natchez to support those ten agents, much less the hundred or so whose pictures he saw in the newspaper every week. For the last six months, everything seemed to be for sale, but nobody was buying.

He parked in a reserved space by the front doors, then got out and pushed into a large open-plan office with two lines of desks and some partitioned cubicles against the right wall. Several women and two men sat at the desks, the women dressed to the nines and looking bored, the men reading newspapers. A receptionist with too much blue eye shadow sat near the door, half blocking the corridor created by the cubicles. Everyone looked up when the door banged open, and nobody went back to what they were doing.

“May we help you?” asked the receptionist.

“I’m here to see Eve Sumner.”

“Umm…okay. She’s with somebody right now.”

“This can’t wait.”

“Can I have your name?”

“That’s John Waters, Debbie,” called one of the men in the cubicles. “Hi, John.”

Waters didn’t recognize the man, but he gave a half wave as Debbie picked up her phone and spoke softly.

“She said to go on back,” Debbie said in a startled voice.

As though on cue, a door opened in the back wall and two female voices rode the air to Waters, one low and throaty, the other high and ebullient. Waters started toward the door, and two women emerged. One was Eve Sumner, wearing a blue skirt suit, a cream silk blouse, and heels; the other was a fiftyish woman in a bright blowsy dress. Eve tried to introduce Waters to her older guest, but he didn’t slow down. He walked past them into the private office and closed the door behind him.

The room held a metal desk, glass shelves lined with real estate textbooks and photos of a junior high school-age boy, and a framed map of the city as it had appeared in 1835. Waters sat behind the desk and waited.

It didn’t take long. Eve walked in, closed the door, and stood looking down at him, her eyes more curious than surprised. Before coming in, she had swept her dark hair up from her neck and loosely pinned it, which gave her a rakish air, and the generic skirt suit could not hide the sensual curves beneath it. Lily had guessed her age at thirty-two, but Eve’s figure said twenty-five. She probably spent hours in the gym, but she clearly had genetics on her side. And she knew it.

“I thought you were going to call me,” she said.

“The police just arrested Danny Buckles. You’ve got thirty seconds to explain how you knew about him before I get a detective over here to do the same to you.”

Eve leaned back against the door. “Why didn’t you bring one with you?”

Waters said nothing.

“It’s because of Mallory, isn’t it?”

Waters reached for the phone.

“What can you tell the police?” Eve asked.

“The truth. And Cole Smith can back me up.”

“Cole needs a little backup himself these days.” Her eyes gently mocked him. “I called you about a house I have for sale. I also have a buyer for Linton Hill. That’s all we talked about.”

“There a connection between you and Danny Buckles. There has to be. The police will find it.”

Eve slowly shook her head. “No one could ever find it, Johnny. I advise you to trust me on that.”

For some reason, he believed her.

“Besides, I saved Annelise a terrible experience. Why would you want to hurt me?”

“What are you really up to? This has to be about money. So let’s go ahead and get to the bottom line.”

She looked genuinely hurt. “I don’t care about money. I want to talk to you. That’s all.”

“Talk.”

She licked her lips as though about to confide in him, but then she shook her head. “Not here.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I have to say can’t be heard by anyone. Especially anyone here. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together, and we don’t want people suspicious from the start.”

She was speaking to him like a fellow conspirator, and her low, confiding tone gave him a surreal feeling of complicity. “You’re out of your mind, lady.”

Eve glanced at the door and whispered, “Look, this one time, we could go to my house.”

“Your house?”

“A house on the market, then. An empty house? That’s perfect cover.”

He couldn’t believe her persistence. “Whatever you have to say, say it right here. Right now.”

She took a step closer to the desk. Her proximity made his skin tingle. Here was a woman he had never really met, yet he felt as though they already shared the invisible connection of secret lovers.

“I’m not who you think I am, Johnny.”

“Danny Buckles wasn’t who anyone thought, either. Who are you? And don’t tell me Mallory Candler.”

Eve’s dark eyes became liquid. “I’m the girl you first said ‘I love you’ to under the Faulkner quote on the front of the library at Ole Miss.”

Waters’s mouth fell open. Who knows that? he asked himself. Who the hell knows that? Someone, obviously.

She smiled at his reaction. “I’m the girl you first made love to at Sardis Reservoir.”

His hand slipped off the desktop. “Who the hell are you, lady?”

“You know who I am. Johnny, I’m Mal-”

“Shut up!”

“ Please keep your voice down. We have to figure out what to do.”

He tried to think logically, but her knowledge of his intimate past had somehow short-circuited his reason. “I’m leaving,” he said, and stood.

“Please don’t. I’ll meet you anywhere. You name the place. Somewhere we used to go.”

“Where would that be?”

“The Trace?”

Waters couldn’t believe it. He and Mallory had spent countless hours on the Natchez Trace, a wooded highway crossed by dozens of beautiful side roads and creeks. “Anybody could have guessed that. Lots of kids went there.”

“Did they go to the creek under the wooden suspension bridge? Where we went skinny-dipping?”

Waters’s skin went cold.

“Or we could go to the cemetery. Behind Catholic Hill, where the big cross is.”

“ Stop. ” He realized that he had whispered, that he too was now trying to keep those outside from hearing their exchange.

Eve leaned across the desk. Perfume wafted to him as her silk blouse parted, revealing the deep cleft between her breasts. “Take it easy, Johnny. Everything’s all right.”

Waters shivered at the familiar way she said his name.

“It just takes some getting used to,” she went on. “It’s really simple, once you understand. Like all profound things. Like gravity.”