“Oh, yes you do. I heard about Jackson Point. Drown your sorrows, buddy. Go for it.”
When Waters turned back to the gallery, Eve Sumner was gone. He looked to his left, toward the rear steps, but she was not among the guests there. He glanced to his right, at the northeast corner of the house, but saw only shadows on that part of the gallery. He was about to look away when Eve Sumner stepped around the shadowy corner, raised her drink in acknowledgment, then receded into the shadows like a fading mirage. Waters stood mute, a metallic humming inside him, as though someone had reached into his chest and plucked wires he had not even known were there.
“What can I get you?” asked a white-jacketed bartender. “Another Bombay Sapphire?”
“Yeah,” Waters managed to get out. “Hit it hard.”
“You got it.”
Eve had known he was looking for her. Not only that. It was as if she had known the precise moment he would look up at the corner that concealed her. She could have been peeking around it, of course – spying on him – but that would have looked odd to anyone standing nearby. Yet one moment after he’d looked that way, she’d stepped from behind the wall and saluted the precise spot he occupied.
He took a bitter pull from his drink and glanced around for his wife. Lily wasn’t the paranoid type, despite their troubles in the bedroom, but she did tend to notice the kind of eye contact Eve Sumner had just given him.
This time she hadn’t. Before he could go looking for her, Lily appeared at the top of the courtyard steps, coming up from the rear grounds with the manager of Dunleith’s bed and breakfast. She’d obviously been taking a tour of the new construction. A dozen women at the party would have liked to see it; trust Lily to simply walk up and ask the manager for a private tour. She caught her husband’s eye and silently communicated that she was ready to leave. Though separated by only fifteen yards, Waters knew it would take her ten minutes to cross the space between, as she would be stopped by at least three people on her way. He sipped his gin and looked up at the crowded gallery.
The liquor had reached the collective bloodstream of the party. The Dixieland band launched into a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and several couples began a chain dance. Most of the women wore sequined dresses and glittering masks that reflected the lamplight in varicolored flashes, and their voices rose and echoed across the courtyard in a babel of excitement. The men spoke less but laughed more, and tales of hunting deer in nearby forests mixed with quieter comments about various female guests. Waters felt out of place at these times. He hunted a rarer thing than animals, inanimate but maddeningly elusive. Sometimes he hunted in libraries rather than the field, but that didn’t lessen the thrill of the chase. With three drinks in him, though, he felt the old wistful dream of getting back to Alaska or New Guinea, choppering over glaciers and rappelling into volcanoes. With this dream came a memory of Sara Valdes, but suddenly her guileless face morphed into the seductive gaze of Eve Sumner, and a wave of heat warmed his skin. Then Eve’s face wavered and vanished, leaving the archetypal visage of Mallory Candler. Mallory had been gone ten years, but not one person at this party would ever forget her—
“Stop,” he said aloud. “Jesus.”
He set his drink on a table and rubbed his eyes. He felt foolish for letting Eve get to him this way. What was so strange about her behavior, anyway? Both Lily and Cole had told him she was sexually adventurous, and for some reason, she had picked him as her next conquest. Anything beyond that was his imagination. She likes married guys, Cole had said. Fewer complications …
“John? Hey, it’s been a while.”
Waters turned to see a man of his own age and height standing beside him, a wineglass in hand. Penn Cage was an accomplished prosecutor who had turned to writing fiction and then given up the law when he hit best-seller status. Penn and Waters had gone to different high schools (Penn’s father was a doctor, so he had attended preppy St. Stephens, like Cole and Lily and Mallory), but Penn had never shown any of the arrogance that other St. Stephens students had towards kids from the public school. Penn had been in the same Cub Scout pack as Waters and Cole, but only Penn and Waters had gone all the way to Eagle Scout before leaving for Ole Miss. They hadn’t seen each other much since Penn moved back to Natchez from Houston, where he’d made his legal reputation, but they shared the bond of hometown boys who had succeeded beyond their parents’ dreams, and they felt easy around each other.
“It has been a while,” Waters said. “I’ve been working on a well.”
“I’m working on a book,” Penn told him. “Guess we both needed a break tonight.”
Waters chuckled. “I already got my break. Dry hole. Two nights ago. Seems like everybody knows about it.”
“Not me. I’m a hermit.” Penn smiled, but his voice dropped. “I did hear about your EPA problem, though. Are you guys going to come out all right on that?”
“I don’t know. When the EPA tells us whose well is leaking salt water, we’ll know if we’re still in business or not.”
“The cleanup costs could put you under?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Waters thought of the unpaid liability insurance. “But hey, I started with nothing. I can make it back again if I have to.”
Penn laid a hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes I think we wish for some catastrophe, so we could fight that old battle again. Prove ourselves again.”
“Who would we be proving ourselves to?”
“Ourselves, of course.” Penn smiled again, and Waters laughed in spite of the anxiety that the author’s mention of the EPA had conjured. Penn inclined his head at someone on the gallery. Two men leaning on the wrought-iron rail parted, and Waters saw Penn’s girlfriend, Caitlin Masters, looking down at them. She was lean and sleek, with jet-black hair and a look of perpetual amusement in her eyes. Ten years younger than Waters and Cage, she’d come down from Boston to knock the local newspaper into shape, and because her father owned the chain, a lot of Natchezians had groused about nepotism. But before long, nearly everyone admitted that the quality of reporting in the Examiner had doubled.
“Caitlin seems like a great girl,” Waters observed.
“She is.”
While Penn watched Caitlin tell a story to two rapt lawyers on the gallery, Waters studied his old scouting buddy. Penn had become famous for writing legal thrillers, but he’d also written one “real novel” called The Quiet Game. Set in Natchez, the book’s cast of characters was drawn from the people Waters had grown up with, and the hidden relationships that surfaced in that book had left him in a haze of recollection for a week. Livy Marston – the femme fatale of The Quiet Game – had been inspired by Lynne Merrill, one of the two great beauties of her generation (the other was Mallory Candler), and Penn had clearly felt haunted by Lynne the way he himself was haunted by Mallory. Had Penn had an experience similar to his own at the soccer field? he wondered. Had The Quiet Game been an exorcism of sorts?
“Where’s Lynne Merrill these days?” he asked.
The smile froze on Penn’s face, but he recovered quickly and tried to play off his surprise. “In New Orleans for a while, I think.”
After an awkward moment, Waters said, “I’m sorry I said that. I was … trying to figure something out.”
The author looked intrigued. “Something besides whether Lynne was the basis for Livy Marston in my book?”
“I knew that from the moment I saw her on the page. No, I wanted to know if you ever get over something like that. An affair like that. A—”
“A woman like that?” Penn finished. He looked deep into Waters’s eyes, his own glinting with the power of