Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“Keep Ana out here,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”

He ran up the back steps and started down the hall toward the master bedroom. As he walked, he cut his eyes left and right, half expecting some kind of attack from his blind side. Mallory had done such things before, and he sensed danger now.

Finding the bedroom door closed against him, he began to doubt himself. What if Lily had snapped back to herself after he fled the bedroom? He put his ear to the cypress face of the door but heard nothing. Testing the knob, he found it locked.

“Lily?” he called.

No reply.

“Lily!”

Still nothing.

“Lily, open the door,” he called in a reasonable voice. “I need to talk to you.”

The silence mocked him. He looked down at the brass knob. There was a tiny hole at its center. Annelise had picked the lock many times with a paper clip. He was about to go in search of one when he heard a soft click from the knob. When nothing else happened, he grabbed the knob and threw open the door.

Lily sat cross-legged at the center of the bed, her palms upturned in the manner of a Hindu in meditation, her wide-open eyes burning with a light that rooted Waters to the floor.

She smiled serenely. “Close the door.”

“You can’t do this,” Waters told her.

“It’s already done. Come in and close the door, Johnny. I’ll do the talking.”

Waters did as she said.

“I want to tell you how my father died,” Lily said. “Do you remember what I told you about him?”

Waters said nothing. He felt as though someone had injected him with the most powerful hallucinogen on the planet. To hear the voice of his wife speak Mallory’s inmost thoughts-and in Mallory’s diction-pushed him into a realm beyond fear. It inverted his sense of reality, so that the familiar engendered horror rather than affection, and dread replaced love.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

For some reason an image of Penn Cage behind his desk filled Waters’s mind. “That he abused you?”

“Mmm-hmm. You never believed me about that, did you?”

He tried to guess where she was going. “Why do you think that?”

Lily shook her head in reproof. “Because I was inside you, Johnny. I know your thoughts now. Your memories.”

“Did it really happen?”

“Maybe not like you imagine. But it happened. From the time I was about ten, I started to feel uncomfortable around my father. He said things to me he shouldn’t have said. He noticed things about me. It started as compliments, but the older I got…he talked about my beauty, all the time, of course. But then it was my body. And my ‘way,’ he called it. My ‘beguiling’ way. He’d walk into the bathroom when I was using it. Or trick me into coming into the bathroom when he was in there without clothes on.”

“Did he touch you?”

“He wanted to. My friends knew it too. Some of them. He did the same kinds of things to them. Too much time with us instead of with the grown-ups. Touches that lingered too long. It was only lack of nerve that stopped him from doing something physical.”

“If he never touched you, how do you know that’s true?”

“I’ll tell you. About fourteen months ago, when I first got back to Natchez, I wanted desperately to get into my old house. I wanted to remember what it was like, and to get some of my old things, if they were still there. I didn’t want to risk it when I was in Danny. But once I got into Eve, I felt confident enough. I took the key from under the rock in the flower bed where they’d always hidden it, and slipped inside.”

Lily’s eyes glazed with the power of memory. “I had no idea what it would be like. I found my room exactly as I’d left it. It was like a shrine. My old clothes, my posters, my photos. My cheerleading uniform. Everything. It was like going to Graceland and seeing Elvis’s old costumes on mannequins. They actually had my Miss Mississippi gown on a mannequin in the corner.” She shuddered. “I had never felt as dead as I did in that room. Anyway, I took a few small things. Some snapshots. A cross my grandmother had given me. A scarf I’d had when you and I were together. In moments like that, you know which things are important. The things you can’t live without.”

“Your diaries?”

She nodded. “That’s what I really wanted. I expected them to be in my drawer, but they weren’t. I searched the whole house, but I couldn’t find them. Then I went into the attic. We had a walk-in attic on the second floor. Remember? I found the diaries in a glass-topped box by the back wall. There was light up there, so I started reading them.”

Waters thought he saw tears welling in her eyes.

“Reading what I’d written so long ago…it was the opposite of how I’d felt in my room. I felt more alive then-more myself-than I had since the night I was raped in New Orleans. There was my true soul, right there on the page. As I sat reading, I noticed something odd about the wall. The edge of a board was sticking out. But it wasn’t like a warp. The board was propped there. I pulled it away and found a space. There was a book inside it. A big one. It was a photo album.”

“What was in it?”

“When I opened it…I saw pictures of a naked girl. I thought it was just regular pornography at first. Then I saw that the girl was me.” Disgust rippled through Lily’s body. “ Me, Johnny. I was about twelve, and I was in the bathroom. My own bathroom. I flipped the pages and saw more pictures of myself, from age eleven to about twenty. I was always naked or partly naked, and always in the bathroom. They were all shot from the same angle. Later, I found the hole in the wall that he’d shot them through. There were pictures of my friends too. Anyone who had come over to spend the night with me. When I saw those pictures…I knew that everything I’d felt when I was a child was true. Things I’d punished myself for thinking about my father…do you understand? I felt raped. By my own father. And I knew what he did with that book. He sneaked up there all those years and…you know what he did. It makes me want to throw up.”

Waters remembered Benjamin Candler’s odd combination of arrogance and smarmy glad-handing.

“Don’t you remember how he took pictures of everything?” Lily asked. “Every football game, every pep rally, every school play. But those weren’t the pictures he really wanted.”

“What did you do with the book?”

“I put it back where I found it.”

“Why?”

“I went back to Eve’s house and thought about it. Let it sink in. And then, three days later, I went back. But that time I took a gun.”

Waters’s stomach tightened. “Why?”

“I knew he’d deny it. I went on my mother’s bridge day. That was his afternoon off. I waited for him in the kitchen. When he walked in, he saw Eve Sumner, realtor, standing there with a gun.”

“What did he do?”

“‘What’s the matter, Ms. Sumner?’” Lily cried in a hysterical voice. “‘Are you in trouble? Is someone chasing you?’ I laughed and said, ‘No, I just want to talk to you.’ He asked what about. ‘Your daughter,’ I told him. ‘My daughter’s dead,’ he said. ‘Are you sure about that?’ I asked. He said that wasn’t appropriate conversation. He asked me to leave his house. I refused. I said, ‘I want to talk to you about why you molested your daughter.’”

“Jesus.”

“He looked stunned, but he didn’t kick me out. He asked what the hell I was talking about. I told him I knew about the pictures he’d been taking all those years. His face went white, Johnny. I was like the ghost of Christmas past. He told me to get the hell out, but you should have seen him staring at me. I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I was one of those other girls who’d come to spend the night. He said he’d call the police if I didn’t get out. I dared him to do it. He told me I couldn’t prove anything about him. Then I opened the drawer next to me and took out the photo album. I’d gotten it from the attic before he came home. That was all it took. He turned gray, like there was no blood going to his face. Then he started to cry. He asked me who I was.”