Greg Iles - Sleep No More

She was wearing the navy suit skirt again, with nude hose and high heels. Her alto voice and precise diction intrigued Waters; Evie Ray may have come from rural Louisiana, but somewhere along the way she had sweated blood to free herself from redneck syntax. Using her hands gracefully, she pointed out various attributes of a “thoroughly modern” kitchen, then began walking backward toward a door. As she led the cameraman into the dining room, Waters went rigid in his chair.

Pausing in the doorway, Eve had twisted a strand of hair around her right forefinger, tightened it, and begun pulling. As he stared, she popped her finger out, leaving the strand momentarily curled. It was an automatic gesture, probably developed in childhood, but it betrayed a touch of self-consciousness that let you know Eve was not quite so confident as she seemed. In that moment, she became Mallory Candler. For all Mallory’s beauty and self-possession, when she was under close scrutiny, she had twisted her hair in exactly that way. A lot of women probably did the same thing, but some gestures are uniquely one’s own; in this way we recognize family members or loved ones from behind. That unconscious twisting of hair was Mallory to the life, and in her it symbolized a more private and dangerous habit, one whose memory deeply unsettled Waters.

Rotating his chair back to the desk, he looked down at the photos spread across his desk. Then he turned to his computer keyboard and looked up Eve Sumner’s real estate company on the Web. Without pausing to second-guess himself, he called and asked to speak to her, giving the receptionist the name of a local surgeon.

Eve came on the line brimming with enthusiasm. “Dr. Davis? This is Eve Sumner. How may I help you?”

“You mean Evie Ray Sumner, don’t you?”

Silence. “Who is this?”

Waters did not reply.

“Johnny?” A whisper. “Is that you?”

“I’m watching you on TV right now.”

She exhaled with obvious relief. “God, I knew you’d call. I look awful on that show. It’s the lighting or something.”

“I want to ask you some questions.”

“Ask away.”

“Where did I take a nude picture of you?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Well…the bedroom, of course.”

He started to pounce on her response, then stopped. They had taken some photos in his bedroom, but he had destroyed those long ago. “Outside, I mean.”

“Outside? Let me think. Oh. Fall Creek Falls State Park? In Tennessee?”

He couldn’t speak. No one else knew about that. No one.

“My God,” Eve said softly. “You don’t still have that picture, do you?”

He pushed on, his face uncomfortably warm. “How many men did you sleep with before me?”

“Two.”

“Why did you have to leave Alaska the year you won the pageants?”

“Because I threatened your Alaskan girlfriend.”

“I didn’t have an Alaskan girlfriend.”

“French girlfriend, then. Or French Canadian or whatever the slut was.”

Real anger in her voice, enough to send a chill down his back. “What else did you do to her?”

“I put sugar in her gas tank and stranded her on the tundra. She nearly froze to death.”

He shook his head. Eve’s cadence and pronunciation were nothing like those of the woman on television. But for the timbre of her voice, she could be Mallory. “How did you get back to the lower forty-eight without the police getting you?”

“I chartered a private plane.”

“What kind?”

“Um…a Piper Saratoga.”

Confusion settled over Waters like a fog. Some of these details he may have confided in Cole, but not all. Close to desperation, he searched his mind for something that no one but Mallory could possibly know.

“What did we do behind the stables at David Denton’s party?”

“ You didn’t do anything.” Eve’s voice sultry now. “I went down on you.”

He could go no further.

“Johnny, I want to see you.”

“No.”

“I know you want to see me. You wouldn’t have called if you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Ask me more questions, then. Anything. Eventually you’re going to believe me, because there’s nothing I don’t know.”

He sat silent for half a minute, listening to her breathing. “How did you try to kill me?”

He thought the phone had gone dead.

“Johnny…I’m so sorry for that.”

For the first time, he sensed evasion. “How did you try to kill me?” he asked in a harsher voice. “What did you use? You don’t know, do you?”

“The first time? A gun. The other time, your car.”

He was gripping the phone so hard his hand hurt. Cole knew about the time with the car, but not about the gun. No one knew about the gun. The phone squawked on the desktop, and he realized he had dropped it.

“Johnny? Are you there?”

“Here.”

“I want you to meet me somewhere. You know where Bienville is, right? The antebellum home? The Historic Foundation owns it, and it’s for sale. I can get the key. I’m going to be there in twenty minutes, waiting for you.”

“I’m not coming.”

“I’m leaving now. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

“Eve-”

She had rung off.

He sat numb at his desk. She had answered so damn quickly. Any hesitation could be attributed to surprise. Mallory herself might have paused in the face of some of those questions. Waters looked back at the television, where Eve was concluding her presentation. He could not put that face and body with the voice he had spoken to on the telephone.

He didn’t know what to do. He did know that the last thing he should do was drive across town to Bienville. With anxiety turning to panic in his chest, he picked up the phone and called Linton Hill. Rose answered. In a barely controlled voice, he asked to speak to Lily. He didn’t know what he was going to say to his wife, only that he needed to hear her voice.

“Lily gone with her walking group,” Rose replied. “And she left her cell phone right here on the counter.”

Waters hung up and went to his drafting table. The wavy substructure lines and numbers on the map looked as foreign to him as they would to a layman. He turned away and began pacing out the perimeter of his office. The room was more than a thousand square feet, but today it felt like a cage.

Opening a subtly concealed door, he stepped out onto his balcony and inhaled the cool air blowing up off the river. He looked south toward the bend that led to Baton Rouge and New Orleans, then north up the stretch that led to Memphis and St. Louis. He could see Weymouth Hall from here, an antebellum mansion with a widow’s walk sitting on a promontory a mile upriver. Across the street from Weymouth Hall stood Jewish Hill, and under the oaks below that hill lay Mallory’s grave. Mallory’s corpse.

So who in God’s name was waiting for him at Bienville?

He put the photos and newspapers back into the portfolio and locked it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he took his keys from his pocket and walked to the back stairwell of the office. Sybil gave him a questioning look, but he said nothing.

He couldn’t even manage a lie.

Sited on half a city block on the north side of town, Bienville was a world unto itself. The foundation of the Greek Revival mansion had been laid into a hill twenty feet above the street, and high stucco walls rising from the sidewalk presented a blank face to passersby. Only a narrow gravel drive that tunneled off Wall Street through thick foliage led up to the terraced gardens behind the mansion, a sun-dappled world of spreading oaks, shrubs, azaleas, jasmine, and banana trees.