on, babe … she just looked familiar.”
“Eve Sumner.” A definite chill in the voice. “She’s a real estate agent.”
Now he remembered. Cole Smith, his partner, had mentioned Eve Sumner before. In a sexual context, he thought, but most of what Cole mentioned had a sexual context, or a sexual subtext.
“I think Cole’s mentioned her.”
“I’ll bet he has. Evie really gets around, from what I understand.”
Waters looked over at his wife, wondering at the change in her. A few years ago, she never made this sort of comment. Or maybe she had – maybe it was her tone that had changed. It held a bitterness that went along with the now-perpetual severity in her face. Four years ago, the smiling girlish looks that had lasted to thirty-five vanished almost overnight, and the bright eyes dulled to an almost sullen opacity. He knew the date by heart, though he didn’t like to think about the reason.
“How old is she?” he asked.
“How old did she look to you?”
Potential minefield. “Um … forty-two?”
Lily snorted. “More like thirty-two. She probably wants to sell our house out from under us. She does that all the time.”
“Our house isn’t for sale.”
“People like Eve Sumner think everything has a price.”
“She sounds like Cole.”
“I’m sure they have a lot in common.” Lily cut her eyes at him in a way that as much as said, I’m sure Cole has slept with her. Which was a problem for Waters, since his business partner was – nominally at least – a happily married father of three. But this was a problem he was accustomed to dealing with. Cole Smith had been cheating on his wife since the honeymoon ended, but he’d never let it interfere with his marriage. Cole’s chronic philandering was more of a problem for Waters, who not infrequently found himself in the position of having to cover for a friend and partner whose actions he deplored. On another day he might have given a token grunt of skepticism in response to Lily’s assumption, but his patience with his partner had worn thin of late.
He swung the Land Cruiser around a dawdling log truck on Highway 61 and tried to clear his mind. There was a low-grade buzz deep in his brain, a hum of preoccupation set off by Eve Sumner’s smile but which had nothing to do with Eve Sumner. The smile on her face had risen straight from Waters’s past; the word she’d silently spoken echoed in a dark chamber of his heart. Soon …
“Damn,” he said under his breath.
“What is it?” asked Lily.
He made a show of looking at his watch. “The Jackson Point well. Cole called and said it may come in about three in the morning. I’m probably going to have to log it tonight.” Logging a well was the task of the geologist, who read complex measurements transmitted by an instrument lowered to the bottom of a newly drilled well in order to determine whether there was oil present. “There’s some stuff I need to do at the office before I go out to the rig.”
Lily sighed. “Why don’t you swing by now and pick up your maps and briefcase? You can make your phone calls from home.”
Waters knew she had made this suggestion without much hope. Whenever he logged wells, he had a ritual of spending time alone. Most geologists did, and he was thankful for that today.
“I won’t be more than an hour,” he said, a twinge of guilt going through him. “I’ll drop you guys off and be home as quick as I can.”
“Daddy!” objected Annelise. “You have to help with my homework.”
Waters laughed. His daughter needed no help with homework; she just liked him sitting close by in the hour before bedtime. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“I know what that means.”
“I promise,” he insisted.
Annelise brightened. Her father kept his promises.
Lily and Annelise waved as Waters pulled away from Linton Hill, the house that was not for sale, an antebellum home he’d bought five years ago with the proceeds from a well in Franklin County. Linton Hill wasn’t a palace like Dunleith or Melrose, but it had four thousand square feet with detached slave quarters that Waters used as a home office, and many small touches of architectural significance. Since they moved in, Lily had been leading a one-woman campaign to have the house placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and victory seemed close. Having grown up in a clapboard house less than a mile from Linton Hill, Waters usually felt pride when he looked at his home. But today, watching his rearview mirror, he barely saw the place. As soon as Lily led Annelise up the steps, his mind began to run where it had wanted to for the past ten minutes.
“I imagined it,” he murmured.
But the old pain was there. Dormant for two decades, it remained stubbornly alive, like a tumor that refused to metastasize or to be absorbed. Waters gave the Land Cruiser some gas and headed downtown, toward the north side, where live oaks towered overhead like the walls of a great tunnel. Most houses here were tall Victorian gingerbreads, but there were also plain clapboards and even shotgun shacks. Natchez was a lot like New Orleans on this side: half-million-dollar mansions stood yards away from crumbling row houses that wouldn’t bring thirty thousand.
Waters turned right, onto Linton Avenue, a shaded street of middle-aged affluent whites that terminated near the Little Theater, where Maple Street rose sharply toward the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. There he would break out of the warren of one-way streets and into the last real light of the day. Like biblical rain, the sunlight fell upon the just and unjust alike, and in this deceptively somnolent river town, the last rays always fell upon the tourists standing on the bluff, the drunks sipping whiskey at the Under-the-Hill Saloon, and upon the dead.
In 1822, the old town burial ground had been moved from the shadow of St. Mary’s Cathedral Church to a hundred acres of hilly ground on the high bluff north of town. Over the next century, this became one of the most beautiful and unique cemeteries in the South, and it was through its gates that John Waters finally pulled his Land Cruiser and slowed to a near idle. Some of the stones he passed looked new, others as though they’d been cut centuries before, and probably were. Remains from the old cemetery had been disinterred and transferred here, so tombstones dating to the 1700s were not uncommon. Waters parked the Land Cruiser on the crest of Jewish Hill, climbed out, and stared down four breathtaking miles of river.
In Natchez, the dead have long had a better view than the living. The view from Jewish Hill always stirred something deep within him. The river affected everyone who lived near it; he had heard uneducated roughnecks speak with halting eloquence of its mythic pull. Yet he saw the muddy river differently from most. The Mississippi was an ancient river, but it had not spent its life cutting its way into the continent like the Colorado. The Mississippi had built the very land that now tried in vain to hem it in. Two hundred and fifty million years ago this part of America – from the Gulf Coast to St. Louis – was an ocean called the Mississippi Embayment, but somewhere north of Memphis the nameless proto-Mississippi River was already dumping millions of tons of sediment into that ocean, creating a massive delta system. That process went inexorably on until the ocean was filled, and 35,000 feet of soil covered the bedrock. It was from the upper layers of those deposits that Waters took his family’s living, from the oil-bearing strata just a few thousand feet down. Tonight, thirty miles downriver, he would pull up core samples that would tell a tiny part of what had been happening here 60 million years ago. Compared with these notions of time, the vaunted “history” of his hometown – going back a respectable three hundred years in human terms – was as nothing.
Yet even in geological terms, Natchez was unique. The bluff that supported the antebellum city had not been built by the river but by the wind; aeolian deposition, it was called, or loess, according to the Germans. The city shared this rare phenomenon with parts of China and Austria, and drew scientists from around the world to