Greg Iles - Sleep No More

At 2:00 A.M., Mallory knocked at his window, and he learned that she hadn’t told Denton anything. Thus began a two-month period of secrecy that nearly caused both of them to fail the semester. When they returned to Ole Miss, they camped for a weekend at Sardis and made love for the first time. But they did not go out together in public. They frequently drove the hour to Memphis to avoid prying eyes, and even there they spent most of their time in hotel rooms. When they returned to Natchez for the Thanksgiving holiday, Mallory accepted only one date with Denton, and that night she made excuses and went home early, so that later-as she had every other night-she could slip out to meet Waters and make love in his car. It was a ridiculous situation, but Waters couldn’t bear the idea of hurting the man who had helped him so unselfishly during high school. Beyond this, he knew that Mallory’s parents would be enraged when they learned she had cheated on their ideal suitor to “go in the street” with a boy from the wrong side of town. But as the Christmas holidays approached, Natchez students started to gossip at Ole Miss, and it was only a matter of time before Denton heard what was going on.

It took an almost unbearable irony to bring things to a head. Three days before Christmas, Denton called Waters and asked him to accompany him to an antebellum home to look at a piano. The doctor was thinking of buying an antique Bosendorfer brought from Berlin to Natchez during the 1850s. Driven by a desire to maintain the illusion of normalcy-and not least by morbid curiosity-Waters agreed. As he and Denton examined the piano and discovered dry rot inside, Denton asked him what he thought of Mallory Candler. Waters swallowed and said he thought she was a “great girl,” which was the ultimate Ole Miss stamp of approval. Did Waters see Mallory much in Oxford? With his nerves stretched to maximum tension, Waters replied that it was a small school, and everyone saw everyone pretty regularly. Denton said he was only asking because Mallory had been acting a bit distant, but he thought he knew the reason. Mallory Candler was the kind of girl who didn’t get too involved with a man unless she knew the relationship was more than a passing affair. Then he smiled and confided that he planned to ask her to marry him on Christmas Eve. She was a little young, Denton conceded, but Mallory’s father was all for it, and he was sure Mallory would be too. As Waters sat frozen, his heart thundering in his chest, Denton said he’d just wanted to make sure he wasn’t reading Mallory wrong, that there wasn’t another man in her life. Waters almost confessed everything then, but he stopped himself. That was Mallory’s duty, not his. Besides, if Denton was considering a marriage proposal, maybe Mallory had been encouraging him more than she let on to Waters.

When Waters recounted this conversation to Mallory, she turned white. That night, she went to Denton’s house and told him she was in love with another man. Yes, it was someone he knew. She elided some details, such as the rendezvous behind the stables, but for the most part she told him everything. At two that morning, Waters, his mother, and his brother awoke to a pounding on their front door. Waters answered in his underwear, and found a drunken David Denton on the front porch, his BMW idling in the street behind him. Denton greeted Mrs. Waters with a rant against her “worthless” son, and Waters asked her to go back to bed. He listened to Denton’s railing for as long as he could. Then he looked at the doctor and said, “David, I’m sorry it happened the way it did. We should have told you from the start. But the woman chooses in these things. Okay? The woman chooses, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

“You could have done the decent thing!” Denton yelled. “You could have been a friend! And if not that, you could at least be a goddamn gentleman!”

This wounded Waters deeply, but he’d only begun to wallow in his guilt when Denton added, “I should have known better though. You’re no gentleman. You’re trash. That’s why you live over here with the rest of the goddamn trash. I ought to kick your ass.”

All his guilt forgotten, Waters clenched his quivering hands into fists. In his mind he saw his father, and he felt as though Denton had just called his father trash. In a barely audible voice he said, “Go ahead, if you think you can. But you’d better be ready to kill me.”

Denton took a wild swing, and Waters easily ducked it.

“You’re drunk, David,” he said, trying to restrain himself.

Denton punched him in the stomach. As Waters drew back his fist to throw a punishing right, he saw his mother silhouetted in the window behind him.

“Go home!” he shouted. “And don’t come back!”

Denton blinked in confusion, mumbled something unintelligible, then turned around and stumbled back to his BMW, cursing and sobbing as he went. When Waters walked back inside, his mother shook her head.

“Is this over that Candler girl?” she asked, her face tight and vulnerable without makeup.

Waters nodded.

“She’s no good, John. I know you won’t listen to me, but that girl’s not right, not for you or anybody else.”

He asked what his mother knew about Mallory, but she just turned away and went back to bed. That night was the beginning of his public relationship with Mallory, a brief window of bliss during which all seemed golden, when the horrors to come still lay out of sight.

Now-driving down the deserted road by the paper mill-he thought again of Mallory at Denton’s party, but this time, when she pulled down her mask by the stables, he saw not her face but Eve Sumner’s. He tried to push the image from his mind, but the harder he tried, the clearer Eve became. He could not see Mallory’s face. It made him crazy, like trying to remember the name of a familiar actor whose face was right in front of him on television. Frustration built in him with manic intensity, like the feedback loops he’d read about in obsessive-compulsive people. He had to see Mallory’s face.

He swung onto Lower Woodville Road and sped up to sixty. He kept a rented storeroom less than a mile away, a climate-controlled cubicle filled with furniture and boxes from his mother’s house and his own. His mother saved everything, and somewhere in that cubicle was a footlocker containing whatever junk was left from his Ole Miss days.

He turned into the storage company lot, punched a code into the security gate, and parked by a long aluminum building. The room was near the end of the inside corridor, the PIN code for its lock his social security number. When he opened the door, the musty smell surprised him, but he felt for the light switch, flicked it, and went inside.

Furniture and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Plastic bags held old clothes-some his father’s-and broken lamps sat on all available flat surfaces. Even his father’s old power tools were here, saved like the instruments of a renowned surgeon. Another time, Waters might have stopped to go through some of the stuff, but tonight there was only one thing on his mind.

He found the old footlocker behind some boxes of books. It wasn’t locked, and he tore open the lid like a heart-attack victim searching for nitroglycerin. Here lay several chapters of his past, deposited in no particular order and with no particular intent. He found football programs, grade reports, the tassel from his graduation cap, love letters with a rubber band around them, geological specimens, a guitar pick from a Jimmy Buffett concert, a box of snapshots from Ole Miss and another from his summers working the pipeline in Alaska. He was about to go through the photos when he saw a banded portfolio near the bottom. Something clicked in his mind. Inside the portfolio he found everything dating from the time he spent with Mallory-everything that had survived, anyway. At some point he must have grouped it all together, but he didn’t remember doing it.