Greg Iles - Sleep No More

This was as good an opening as Waters was likely to get to question Cole about his financial problems, but for once he wasn’t in the mood. “I’ve got a couple of prospects in West Feliciana Parish that look good. One’s a close-in deal. If you really want to sell something, I could probably have that ready in a week.”

Cole’s face lit up. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“You been holding back on me, Rock!”

Waters stood. “I’m going to my office to do some mapping on it right now.”

Cole grinned. “Don’t let me stop you. Get Evie Ray’s ass off your mind and start thinking crude oil. I’ll have lunch sent to your office.”

Waters took an envelope from his pocket and laid it on Cole’s desk. Inside was a check for fifty thousand dollars.

“That’s what we talked about yesterday.”

Cole started to reach for the envelope, then seemed to think better of it. “John…”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in a while.” He picked up his briefcase and went down the hall to his door.

Entering his own space was a relief after Cole’s chaotic office. When they remodeled the two-story warehouse, Waters had taken the office with the most frontage on the bluff. Now he had two massive windows that gave an unsurpassed view of the Mississippi River, and unlike Cole, he had planned his sanctum sanctorum around it. He’d even added an outdoor balcony, fighting the Historical Preservation Commission all the way.

People were always surprised by the modernity of the room, but living in an antebellum home was all the nostalgia Waters could stand. During his years of postgraduate work-often living in tents on volcanic slopes-he had learned an economy of materials that stayed with him to this day. He liked his lines clean and sharp, his artificial lighting indirect, his corners empty. Four large skylights allowed natural light to fall onto the original heart pine floors, and tasteful displays of rare rocks in unexpected places gave a zenlike quality to the space. Each geological specimen represented a chapter in his life, and each had two provenances: one that chronicled its origin and life, and covered millions of years; the other much briefer, the story of Waters’s discovery and analysis of the specimen. On the walls hung framed satellite photos of global regions he had worked, river deltas and volcanoes and oceans, their unusual colors blending into abstract art to the untrained eye.

He set his briefcase on his desk and went to his drafting table, where a map showing 252 square miles of West Feliciana Parish awaited his attention. On a normal day, he would sharpen his colored pencils and go straight to work. But today was not normal. When he looked at the map, he felt no inclination to study it.

He walked back to his desk, opened his briefcase, and took out the portfolio he’d found in the storage room. Inside was the newspaper reporting Mallory’s Miss University win. There was also a copy of The Clarion-Ledger , trumpeting her victory in the Miss Mississippi pageant. Mallory had never entered a pageant before the Miss University contest, and she had only entered that because her sorority sisters begged her to do it. This was during one of the darkest times in her life: Waters was in Alaska, and she had just left there one step ahead of the state police. When her sorority and family pleaded with her to advance to the Miss Mississippi pageant, she entered it only to prove to Waters that she was sane enough to handle something “normal.” She acted stunned when she won the crown, but he wasn’t surprised in the slightest. By that time, he knew she could play her chosen role with the world falling in flames around her.

He set aside the newspapers and looked at a bundle of her letters. The handwriting on the envelopes evoked only dread. He was not yet ready to delve into the circular logic of Mallory Candler’s unhinged mind. He might never be ready for that. But he could not resist the boxes of photographs. One was filled with Ole Miss scenes: Waters and Cole drinking Coors at the annual shrimp boil; tailgating in the Grove during homecoming; mugging for the camera at a football game, their hands wrapped around bourbon and Cokes. There were also some night shots from a gonzo road trip to Vanderbilt, when Cole had driven Waters’s Triumph right through the campus on its brick sidewalks (and later told the police he’d thought they were narrow streets). The snapshots showed Waters just how much kinder the years had been to him than to his partner. Cole had lost hair and gained weight, while Waters’s lean build had hardly changed. And mercifully, Waters had received his mother’s genes where hair was concerned. But the most profound changes in Cole were subtler. Waters couldn’t put his finger on it; perhaps it was merely the air of dissipation that had hung around Cole for the past few years. But strangers tended to guess Cole was closer to fifty than forty, while many thought Waters was in his mid-thirties.

He slid aside a photo from a fraternity party and looked into Mallory’s incomparable face. The copper streak in her dark hair shone in the light of the flashbulb, and the stark intensity in her eyes pierced him to the core. The next thirty pictures were all of Mallory, some taken in and around Oxford, others shot on the shoestring vacations they’d taken together. Crested Butte, Chaco Canyon, the Yucatan, Zihuatenejo, points in between. Seeing her in such varied settings-laughing in the snow, dancing in the surf, crouching outside a kiva in New Mexico-buttressed rather than diminished his memories of her beauty. The adjectives that New York models struggled to bring to life in their faces, Mallory conjured with effortless grace. With each flip of a photo she was by turns haughty, warm, insouciant, sentimental, naive, knowing, a little cold, a little mad. Every image brought back a vignette from their early lives together, but none more so than one taken in the mountains of Tennessee: Mallory standing nude beneath a sparkling waterfall. It had not been posed; Waters had simply turned the camera on her as she washed her hair in the falls, and her radiant smile had filled the lens with its power. Nothing in the image linked it to the modern world; it could have been shot ten thousand years before, had someone possessed a camera. Here is a twenty-one-year-old woman coming into the full flower of her sexuality, fully conscious of the process. She stands naked in the wilderness with no more embarrassment than a doe would feel drinking at the pool beneath the falls. Looking at her standing in the glittering mist, Waters felt a bittersweet awe, a faint echo of what it had felt like to hold that remarkable body in his arms. To be inside her. To look into eyes so alive with… life . He was staring entranced at the picture when Sybil pushed open his door and walked toward his desk.

“I’ve got some papers from the Oil and Gas Board,” she said. “You need to sign the last page.”

He slid a newspaper over the nude photo just as Sybil set the papers on his desk; he couldn’t be sure if she’d seen it or not. Sybil was no prude, but the woman in the snapshot was clearly not Waters’s wife, and he didn’t want his receptionist getting the wrong idea. He signed the papers, then picked up a remote control and switched on the small Sony television he kept behind his desk to monitor market reports and news crises. As Sybil walked slowly to the door, he flipped through the channels. At sixty, the numbers began to recycle. When he hit channel four, he lifted his thumb, his chest tightening. Eve Sumner was staring at him from the television screen. Her sudden appearance disoriented him, but he soon realized he was watching Natchez’s local cable access channel. A real estate program. Eve was leading viewers on a tour of an antebellum home that was on the market. Waters watched her with fascination.