Sleep No More

FIVE

Eve Sumner’s office building stood a thousand yards from the Mississippi River Bridge. A false front of brick and wood molding had been grafted onto its front, but one glance would tell any passerby that it was an aluminum box. The familiar logo of a national brokerage company decorated the SUMNER SELECT PROPERTIES sign outside, and expensive cars crowded the asphalt parking lot. Waters remembered from newspaper ads that eight or ten agents worked for Sumner. He couldn’t believe there were enough houses changing hands in Natchez to support those ten agents, much less the hundred or so whose pictures he saw in the newspaper every week. For the last six months, everything seemed to be for sale, but nobody was buying.

He parked in a reserved space by the front doors, then got out and pushed into a large open-plan office with two lines of desks and some partitioned cubicles against the right wall. Several women and two men sat at the desks, the women dressed to the nines and looking bored, the men reading newspapers. A receptionist with too much blue eye shadow sat near the door, half blocking the corridor created by the cubicles. Everyone looked up when the door banged open, and nobody went back to what they were doing.

“May we help you?” asked the receptionist.

“I’m here to see Eve Sumner.”

“Umm … okay. She’s with somebody right now.”

“This can’t wait.”

“Can I have your name?”

“That’s John Waters, Debbie,” called one of the men in the cubicles. “Hi, John.”

Waters didn’t recognize the man, but he gave a half wave as Debbie picked up her phone and spoke softly.

“She said to go on back,” Debbie said in a startled voice.

As though on cue, a door opened in the back wall and two female voices rode the air to Waters, one low and throaty, the other high and ebullient. Waters started toward the door, and two women emerged. One was Eve Sumner, wearing a blue skirt suit, a cream silk blouse, and heels; the other was a fiftyish woman in a bright blowsy dress. Eve tried to introduce Waters to her older guest, but he didn’t slow down. He walked past them into the private office and closed the door behind him.

The room held a metal desk, glass shelves lined with real estate textbooks and photos of a junior high school-age boy, and a framed map of the city as it had appeared in 1835. Waters sat behind the desk and waited.

It didn’t take long. Eve walked in, closed the door, and stood looking down at him, her eyes more curious than surprised. Before coming in, she had swept her dark hair up from her neck and loosely pinned it, which gave her a rakish air, and the generic skirt suit could not hide the sensual curves beneath it. Lily had guessed her age at thirty-two, but Eve’s figure said twenty-five. She probably spent hours in the gym, but she clearly had genetics on her side. And she knew it.

“I thought you were going to call me,” she said.

“The police just arrested Danny Buckles. You’ve got thirty seconds to explain how you knew about him before I get a detective over here to do the same to you.”

Eve leaned back against the door. “Why didn’t you bring one with you?”

Waters said nothing.

“It’s because of Mallory, isn’t it?”

Waters reached for the phone.

“What can you tell the police?” Eve asked.

“The truth. And Cole Smith can back me up.”

“Cole needs a little backup himself these days.” Her eyes gently mocked him. “I called you about a house I have for sale. I also have a buyer for Linton Hill. That’s all we talked about.”

“There a connection between you and Danny Buckles. There has to be. The police will find it.”

Eve slowly shook her head. “No one could ever find it, Johnny. I advise you to trust me on that.”

For some reason, he believed her.

“Besides, I saved Annelise a terrible experience. Why would you want to hurt me?”

“What are you really up to? This has to be about money. So let’s go ahead and get to the bottom line.”

She looked genuinely hurt. “I don’t care about money. I want to talk to you. That’s all.”

“Talk.”

She licked her lips as though about to confide in him, but then she shook her head. “Not here.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I have to say can’t be heard by anyone. Especially anyone here. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together, and we don’t want people suspicious from the start.”

She was speaking to him like a fellow conspirator, and her low, confiding tone gave him a surreal feeling of complicity. “You’re out of your mind, lady.”

Eve glanced at the door and whispered, “Look, this one time, we could go to my house.”

“Your house?”

“A house on the market, then. An empty house? That’s perfect cover.”

He couldn’t believe her persistence. “Whatever you have to say, say it right here. Right now.”

She took a step closer to the desk. Her proximity made his skin tingle. Here was a woman he had never really met, yet he felt as though they already shared the invisible connection of secret lovers.

“I’m not who you think I am, Johnny.”

“Danny Buckles wasn’t who anyone thought, either. Who are you? And don’t tell me Mallory Candler.”

Eve’s dark eyes became liquid. “I’m the girl you first said ‘I love you’ to under the Faulkner quote on the front of the library at Ole Miss.”

Waters’s mouth fell open. Who knows that? he asked himself. Who the hell knows that? Someone, obviously.

She smiled at his reaction. “I’m the girl you first made love to at Sardis Reservoir.”

His hand slipped off the desktop. “Who the hell are you, lady?”

“You know who I am. Johnny, I’m Mal—”

“Shut up!”

“Please keep your voice down. We have to figure out what to do.”

He tried to think logically, but her knowledge of his intimate past had somehow short-circuited his reason. “I’m leaving,” he said, and stood.

“Please don’t. I’ll meet you anywhere. You name the place. Somewhere we used to go.”

“Where would that be?”

“The Trace?”

Waters couldn’t believe it. He and Mallory had spent countless hours on the Natchez Trace, a wooded highway crossed by dozens of beautiful side roads and creeks. “Anybody could have guessed that. Lots of kids went there.”

“Did they go to the creek under the wooden suspension bridge? Where we went skinny-dipping?”

Waters’s skin went cold.

“Or we could go to the cemetery. Behind Catholic Hill, where the big cross is.”

“Stop.” He realized that he had whispered, that he too was now trying to keep those outside from hearing their exchange.

Eve leaned across the desk. Perfume wafted to him as her silk blouse parted, revealing the deep cleft between her breasts. “Take it easy, Johnny. Everything’s all right.”

Waters shivered at the familiar way she said his name.

“It just takes some getting used to,” she went on. “It’s really simple, once you understand. Like all profound things. Like gravity.”

“Listen to me,” Waters hissed. “I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want you to call me. If you come around my daughter, I’ll have you arrested. And if you try to hurt her …”

Eve opened her mouth, feigning shock. “You’ll what? You’ll kill me?”

“You said that, not me.”

“But you thought it.”

He had thought it. That was the level of threat he felt in the presence of this woman. “Yes, I did. So … now you know the rules.”

The mocking smile again. “I was never one for rules, was I, Johnny?”

He had to get out of the office. As he came around the desk, he half-expected her to try to stop him, but she didn’t. She stepped aside and watched him, letting her eyes do their work. He felt an almost physical tug as he broke her gaze, and then he was in the main office again, storming past the staring realtors and pushing into the sun of the parking lot.

He felt strangely grateful for the familiarity of the Land Cruiser, which he started and pointed up the bypass toward the bridge. As he turned right at Canal Street, toward his office, he punched Cole’s number into the cell phone. Sybil answered and put him straight through.

“What’s up, John?” Cole asked. “Is Annelise okay?”

“Yeah. But I want you to do me a favor. You still have a good relationship with your law school buddies in New Orleans?”

“More or less.”

“They have investigators on their payroll, right?”

“Sure.”

“I want a copy of Mallory’s death certificate.”

A pregnant silence.

“I also want to see the newspaper accounts of her murder. The Times–Picayune, The Clarion-Ledger, anyone who covered it. And if it’s possible, I want to talk to the homicide detective who handled her case.”

More silence. Then Cole said, “Okay, Rock. I think you’ve lost it, but if that’s what you want, you got it.”

“And I want everything there is on Eve Sumner. I mean everything. Pull out all the stops.”

“What the hell did she tell you? Have you seen her?”

“I’ll call you tonight and explain.”

“You’re not coming back to the office?”

Waters had intended to go back to work, but he was already passing the turn on Main Street, headed toward the north side of town. Can you handle things for the rest of the day?”

“No problem, amigo.”

“Thanks. And look, about that loan …”

“Forget it, man, I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“Bullshit. I’ll cut you a check in the morning.” Lily would kill him for doing this, but she didn’t need to know about it.

“Thanks, buddy,” Cole said softly. “You don’t know how big a favor this is.”

“I have a feeling I do. And when the mood strikes you, I want you to tell me what the hell is going on.”

Cole gave a noncommittal grunt, and Waters clicked off.

Three minutes later, he found himself driving along Cemetery Road, looking off the bluff at the river. When he came to the third gate of the cemetery, he turned in. Why he had come back, he wasn’t sure. The open space and the silence had always drawn him when he had things on his mind, but something else had brought him here today. He parked atop Jewish Hill, but instead of walking to the edge of its flat summit, where the river view was spectacular, he walked toward the line of oaks that shaded Mallory’s grave. Even from a distance it stood out, the imposing black marble amid a field of plebeian white and gray. Today he swung to the left of her grave and veered down one of the narrow asphalt lanes between cedar-shaded hills, into the depths of the cemetery.

Long beards of moss hung from the oaks, and a thin sprinkling of reddish-brown leaves dotted the grass. He passed ornate wrought-iron fences, markers for Confederate soldiers, countless metal plaques reading PERPETUAL CARE. Some days the cemetery was alive with the drone of push mowers and Weed Eaters, but today all was still but for an occasional breath of wind in the trees. The absence of sound heightened his senses. He felt the wind pulling at his shirt like invisible fingers, but what dominated his mind was his emotional state.

He’d been away from Eve Sumner for twenty minutes, yet the sense of being close to her had not left him. She had disturbed him on a level far deeper than that of reason. Against his will, she had reincarnated the feeling he’d had whenever he was close to Mallory Candler. He had no idea what subtle chemical signals were transmitted and detected by lovers – pheromones, or whatever the scientists called them these days – but whatever they were, he and Mallory had shared them, and Eve Sumner emitted exactly the same ones. And she knew it. She had known that her mere presence was working on him in a way that her secret knowledge of his past never could.

“It’s some kind of scam,” he murmured, as images of Mallory rose in his mind. “It has to be.”

And yet, for a brief moment after leaving the real estate office, he had wondered if Eve Sumner might in fact be Mallory Candler. If Mallory might somehow have survived the attack that supposedly killed her. The two women had facial similarities; no one would deny that. And their bodies were not dissimilar, though Eve seemed bigger-boned than Mallory had been, and her features not quite as fine. But Eve Sumner was thirty-two at most, and looked ten years younger; Mallory would be forty-two now. What other explanation could there be? Could Mallory be alive and helping Eve to deceive him? For this to be true, there would have to have been a case of mistaken identity at Mallory’s murder scene. He’d heard of cases like that before. Only it could not have happened in Mallory’s case. He possessed few details of her murder, but he did know there had been little or no facial disfiguration, because Mallory – against her oft-stated wishes – had been given an open-casket funeral. Her parents’ vanity had outweighed their loyalty to their daughter, and for once Mallory wasn’t there to argue.

Waters started at a moving shadow, then ducked to avoid a quick beating sound above his head. When he straightened, he saw a large black crow light on a tree limb only a few feet above him. A female, he guessed. She must have a nest nearby. But fall was the wrong time of year for that. The crow stared back at him in profile, its solitary eye blinking slowly at the lone man standing in the narrow lane. Looking away from the bird, he realized he was practically in the shadow of the great cross on Catholic Hill. The ornate monument – easily fifteen feet tall – marked one of the secret meeting places he and Mallory had used before their affair became public in the town.

Catholic Hill wasn’t actually much of a hill, just a few feet high at the front, but at the back it dropped off about eight feet at some places, where a cracked masonry wall held in the old graves. Between this wall and the kudzu-filled gully behind it was a narrow strip of grass, maybe fifteen feet wide, where a couple could lie in the shade on a hot day, shielded from the eyes of cemetery visitors, the only risk of discovery coming from the grass-cutters or another couple seeking privacy.

Waters walked up the steps and past the massive cross to a wooden gazebo built over an old cistern. Here the black men who eternally battled the cemetery grass and made good on the promise of “perpetual care” ate their baloney sandwiches from paper bags. The cistern was filled now with Frito bags and RC Cola cans. Waters walked beneath the gazebo to the back of the hill and looked down at the grassy strip where he had lain so many hours with Mallory all those years ago. Nothing had changed. A few masonry cracks had deepened, a few more bricks had fallen. All else remained the same. What had he expected? The sun shone, the rain fell, the grass grew, the mowers came, the dead stayed dead.

He glanced to his left and felt a fillip of excitement. Across the lane, shaded by drooping tree limbs, lay two low-walled rectangles that bordered very old graves. Behind one of those walls Waters had once buried a mason jar beneath six inches of earth. If he or Mallory arrived late at a rendezvous – or early and had to leave – they would leave the other a message in the jar. Sorry I missed you. I love you SO much. Or I’ll come back at 3:30. PLEASE try to be here. I need you. All the infantile gushing and obsessive logistics of clandestine lovers. He wondered if the jar was still there.

“What the hell,” he said. He strode across the hill and down into the deep shade below the overhanging limbs.

He heard a scuttling in the undergrowth as he approached, probably a possum or armadillo startled by the drumbeat of his feet. A faint scent of flowers hung in the air, and as he stepped over the low wall, he had the sensation of entering a dimly lit room. Leaning over the far wall, he saw a thickly tangled web of weeds covering the ground. Though it had been almost twenty years, his hand went to the exact spot where he’d dug the hole, and in the act of reaching, he felt the same thrill he’d felt years before, the delicious anticipation of reading a declaration of love or a frank expression of lust. He also felt fear. He had nearly been bitten by a coral snake here, a beautiful harbinger of death sunning itself in the weeds beside the wall. You almost never saw coral snakes in Mississippi, but they were here, and far more lethal than the moccasins and rattlesnakes you bumped into during summer if you spent much time in the woods.

Beneath the weeds, Waters’s fingers found a depression in the cool earth, like the shallow bowls that form over decomposing stumps. He drove his forefinger down through moist soil until it hit something flat and hard. Widening the hole with his finger, he scraped away some dirt, gripped the round lid, and pulled. The mason jar slipped easily from the ground, a translucent thing coated with a brown layer of soil, its once shiny brass lid now an orange-brown cap of rust. He was smiling with nostalgia when he saw a piece of paper lying in the bottom of the jar. Not a moldy yellow scrap, but a neatly folded piece of blue notepaper that could have been put there yesterday.

Powder blue paper …

His heart began to pound, and he whipped his head around, suddenly certain that he was being observed. More frightening, he had the sensation that he was following a trail of bread crumbs laid out by someone four steps ahead of him, someone who was pulling him along by the twin handles of his guilt and regret. If so, that person knew all his secrets, and Mallory’s too. At least he knew she always used blue notepaper. He peered anxiously up at Catholic Hill, but he saw only gravestones, empty lanes, and gently swaying trees.