Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“Yes. I’m talking clock you with a closed fist, and she was a strong girl. She’d try to claw my eyes out. The subtext of it all was, ‘You don’t really love me. You’re going to leave me the first chance you get.’ And this was the most beautiful woman in the state.”

“Her fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. When did the violence start?”

“Toward me? After the abortion. I don’t think I understood how deeply the maternal desire is embedded in the female psyche. Even in women you might think wouldn’t feel it so much-gung ho career women-it’s there. And in Mallory…I think terminating that pregnancy so violated her fundamental nature that it snapped something in her mind. She loathed herself for doing it. And she projected that hatred onto me.”

“I think you’re right. And obviously, you couldn’t stand that kind of pressure for long.”

“No. That’s when I lost all the weight. My grades went to hell. I felt like I was holding Mallory’s mind together by sheer force of will. I started talking to a girl in one of my classes, just from a desire for simple contact. It was such a relief, talking to a normal person. It was like coming out of a cave. And I knew then that I had to end it with Mallory.”

“Is this when she became suicidal?”

“How did you know she attempted suicide?”

“When I asked about the violence, you said, ‘Toward me?’ That told me she’d probably done violence to herself.”

“She tried with pills first,” Waters told him. “In my apartment, so I was almost certain to find her when I got back from class. I carried her to the ER again, and they pumped her stomach. That scared the shit out of me.”

“Which was exactly what she wanted.”

“Yes, but it didn’t stop me. She was smothering me. I had to get free. I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events after that, but the fights became unendurable. One night, she tried to run me over with my car. I jumped off a fifteen-foot embankment to avoid being hit.”

“Do you really think she would have hit you?”

“Absolutely. Looking back, I don’t think she would ever have killed her self . Deep down, she was too selfish for that. But me? No doubt about it. The same goes for any woman I was with. Mallory could have killed any of them under the right circumstances.”

“You sound like you have evidence of that.”

“I do.” Waters looked at his watch. “Jesus, I’ve talked for over an hour and I haven’t told you anything yet. She tried to kill me twice, herself four or five times. She attacked a girl I was riding in the car with in Jackson. She almost killed a girlfriend of mine in Alaska, and that was the year she won Miss Mississippi. She even got pregnant again, on purpose.” Waters heard hysteria in his voice, but he couldn’t seem to control it. “All this is so mixed up in my mind…her insanity, the secrets I’ve kept, the things Eve said-”

“John?” Penn dropped the foam basketball and came around the desk and squatted by Waters’s chair. “Hey. Take it easy.” Penn waited a moment. “I have a theory. But you haven’t told me enough yet to be sure about it. I need to know everything you know, and now’s the time for you to tell me. After today, we could be talking to each other at the jail.”

His casual mention of this reality shook Waters to the core of his being.

“I don’t think that will happen,” Penn went on, “but we have to be realistic. The odds of carrying on an affair like you and Eve did without anyone knowing about it are very small. Even if it only lasted two weeks. Someone always knows. Lovers confide in friends. Neighbors are nosy. It’s almost inevitable.”

“So what do I do?”

Penn got up and went back to his seat. “I need you to give me the basics of the other stuff you mentioned. You said Mallory tried to kill you again after the time with the car?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about that.”

“I had a hunting rifle in my apartment, a Winchester thirty-thirty. During one of her ‘You’re going to leave me’ fits, she got hold of it and threatened to kill herself. I figured the best thing to do was walk out of the room. Remove her audience, you know? She ran after me, held the barrel below her chin, and got her finger inside the trigger guard. I was more worried about her killing herself by accident than by design, so I grabbed the barrel and we fought for the gun. She screamed that she’d kill me if I didn’t let her kill herself. I let go and yelled, ‘Go on and do it, then!’ She stuck the barrel under her chin and went for the trigger. I grabbed the rifle again, and this time it wound up jammed into my side. I saw something happen in her eyes, a kind of crazy triumph, and then she yanked the trigger. I felt that pull all the way into my bones.”

“It wasn’t loaded?”

“It was loaded. The lever had gotten half cocked in the struggle, so when she pulled the trigger, the action wouldn’t operate. That’s the only time I ever hit her. When I realized she’d meant to kill me, I backhanded her across the face. She laughed. She wanted me to hit her.” Waters’s mouth was dry. “God, it was so twisted by then.”

“What about the thing in Alaska?” Penn asked. “She almost killed a girl?”

“You remember I worked the pipeline in the summers. I had a French-Canadian girlfriend named Marie. Mallory flew up and followed us for a few days before I even knew she was there. She put sugar in Marie’s gas tank and stranded her in a blizzard. It was a miracle she was saved. Mallory barely got out of the state without being arrested. Alaska tried to extradite her, but her father pulled some juice in Jackson and got that quashed.”

“Jesus. And you said Mallory got pregnant a second time. Was that by you?”

“Yes.”

“Before or after she was Miss Mississippi?”

“Just after she gave up the crown.”

Penn shook his head in amazement. “God, the things that stay hidden in small towns. The women in Natchez would snap their garters if they heard this. How did the next pregnancy happen? I thought you were trying to leave her.”

“I was. I spent most of the year she was Miss Mississippi trying to stay away from her. Her duties made it a little easier, but she spent a lot of terrible nights alone in hotel rooms. I talked her through a lot of them on the phone. But eventually the bad episodes got farther apart, and she came to realize I wasn’t going back to her.

“After she gave up her crown, she took a job in Dallas at one of the TV stations. Some political big shot had arranged it for her. Well, she didn’t have a car. Since she had completely alienated her parents by this time, I agreed to drive her the three hours down to the New Orleans airport. She told me she was scheduled to fly out at seven p.m., so I got her there at five-thirty. That’s when I found out her plane had left at five. She said she’d made a mistake, but that was bullshit. I should have made her show me the tickets. There was no flight to Dallas until the next morning.”

“You spent the night together?”

“We got a hotel in the Quarter. We went to dinner at Galatoire’s, and the waiter just had to tell us what a perfect couple we were. Mallory asked where in the Quarter we could go dancing. He said we were too nice for the Quarter. Go to the old Roosevelt Hotel, the Blue Room. So we did. What else were we going to do? Go back to the hotel and stare at each other? We danced to a piano and bass. It was poignant, because I really thought that was the end of it all, and I was proud of her for leaving. Soon we were the only two people left in the place. The pianist played ‘As Time Goes By,’ and Mallory reminded me how we saw Casablanca together at the Hoka in Oxford, and how the first person you see Casablanca with is supposed to be the person you’re going to marry, and…shit, you can guess the rest.”