True Evil

“She seems down.”

Of course she is. She’s dying. And she’s doing it alone. “Tell her I’ll call back later,” Alex whispered.

“She’s been saying you might be coming back to Mississippi soon.”

I’m already in Mississippi. Alex shut her eyes against the guilt of the necessary lie. “I may be, but I’m stuck in Charlotte for now. Are the doctors checking on her regularly?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please call me if there’s any change.”

“I’ll make sure someone does.”

“Thank you. Good-bye.”

Alex shoved her Glock into her waistband at the small of her back, flipped her shirttail over its butt, then picked up Meggie and walked outside to the parking lot. Room 125 faced the pool, which was empty at this hour. She felt like swimming some laps, but she hadn’t packed a bathing suit, nor had she thought to buy one when she was at Wal-Mart. The lobby building of the Days Inn was styled after an antebellum mansion, in imitation of Natchez’s primary tourist attractions. Beyond the lobby and a one-story line of rooms, an ancient tennis court lay beneath a rectangle of oak trees. Alex scratched Meggie’s ears and walked toward it.

She had planned to register at the Eola Hotel downtown, which she remembered from a childhood visit to Natchez, but she’d found she couldn’t hack the rate. The Days Inn was fifty-nine bucks a night, Meggie’s fee included. Its parking lot led right onto Highway 61. Turn left and you were headed to New Orleans; turn right, Chicago. I’m losing it, Alex thought. Get a grip.

She stepped onto the cracked green surface of the tennis court and sniffed the air. She smelled a heavy potpourri of verdant foliage: forest leaves, kudzu, and pine needles laced with honeysuckle, azalea, and sweet olive. She smelled water, too, real running water, not the sterile pool behind her. Somewhere nearby, a creek was winding its way through the forested city toward the mighty river that rolled only a mile to the west.

Alex had only been to Natchez three times in her life, but she knew one thing: it was different from everywhere else. Most Americans considered Mississippi unique in their experience, but Natchez was unique in Mississippi. An arrogant city, to her way of thinking, though a certain amount of arrogance could be justified, especially about the past. The oldest city on the Mississippi River, Natchez had grown fantastically wealthy before the rich Delta upriver had even been cleared. Governed by England, France, and Spain in turn, the city had absorbed the style, manners, and architecture of those European powers and thus quite naturally saw herself as superior to the rest of the state of which she was nominally a part. This won Natchez few supporters outside her borders, but her cotton-rich leaders cared so little that they surrendered the magnificent city without firing a shot. It was for this reason that Alex, growing up in Jackson, had occasionally heard hisses when Natchez was mentioned in conversation. Yet that bloodless surrender had allowed the city to survive the terrible war intact, much like Charleston and Savannah, and Natchez remained a world unto itself, seemingly immune to history, outside of time.

As the fertile soil surrounding Natchez was depleted, the cotton business moved north to the Delta, yet Natchez did not die. Decades later, travelers from around the world began making pilgrimages to the pristine jewel of the Old South, to see decadent opulence preserved as though by divine intervention (though in fact its beauty was maintained by the free labor of countless society ladies). Even the hard-shell Baptists in rural Mississippi had a grudging fascination with the river city whose bars stayed open all night and whose black-owned whorehouse was known by name in Paris. The discovery of oil beneath the old cotton fields resurrected the city’s vital spirit for another forty years, and some of its celebrated wealth returned. As a young girl visiting to take part in the Confederate Pageant, Alex had briefly been sucked into a social tornado that only old blood, new money, and simmering racial tension could generate. But by the time she visited again—during college with a sorority sister—the city had seemed a faded image of itself, everything smaller in scale, less vivid in color.

During the past five days, Alex had read the Natchez Examiner from front to back every morning while following Thora Shepard on her runs. What she saw in those pages was a city still wrestling with the demons of its past. Half-black and half-white, this former capital of the plantation South could not seem to find its place in the modern world. Alex wondered what had brought a man like Chris Shepard back here after a topflight performance in medical school. Maybe the city sang a siren song that only its natives could hear.

She walked back to the pool and set Meggie down at the shallow end. As the cat perched gracefully on the edge and lapped up the placid water, Alex thought of Chris Shepard in his white coat. After five weeks of frenetic investigation, her fate—and Jamie’s—lay in the doctor’s hands. She planned to give Shepard some time to think about today’s meeting, but not too much. During their next visit, she’d feed him more facts—just enough to set the hook. He’d been intrigued by that first nibble, she could tell. Who wouldn’t have been? She’d presented him with a classic murder mystery: Alfred Hitchcock brought to life. The problem was, it was Chris Shepard’s life. And Shepard’s wife. In the end, of course, the doctor’s decision about whether to help her would be based upon factors Alex could never know: the secret realities of his marriage, unfathomable currents of emotion that no investigator could ever plumb. But she was betting that he would help.

She’d been following Thora for five days now, and she was certain that Thora was leading a secret life. On some level, her husband had to know that. But would he consciously acknowledge it? People saw only what they wanted to see, and only when they were ready to see it. Reality might be painfully obvious to others, but in love, everything was veiled. By hope, by fear, and most of all by trust. Alex’s father had struggled to teach her this, but it had taken personal experience to etch the truth into the marrow of her bones.

Trust only your blood.

She picked up Meggie and walked back toward her room. A few miles to the south, Chris Shepard was probably lying wide-awake in bed, wondering if he knew the woman beside him at all. Alex was sorry for pulling his world inside out, but she didn’t regret it. Left to the mercy of his wife, Shepard probably wouldn’t have survived the month. As she reached for the doorknob, she realized that she had made her decision about the Charlotte apartment.

“Sayonara,” she said softly.

She bolted the door behind her and sat down at her computer. Jamie still wasn’t online. Her watch read 11:25 p.m. Alex’s chest and throat began to tighten, as though she were breathing noxious fumes. She badly needed sleep, but she would wait until Jamie’s icon turned green, no matter how long it took. She rubbed her eyes, fished a pink Tab Energy drink from her ice chest, sat back down, and drank half the can in a few seconds. By the time she burped, she could already feel the rush of caffeine absorbed through her tongue.

“Come on, baby,” she murmured. “Come on. Talk to Aunt Alex.”

Jamie’s icon remained red.

SIX (#ulink_c1a6d231-7361-5ea3-85dc-f00cdb31d225)

Chris had never been a good liar. His father hadn’t either. Buddy Shepard never earned much money, but he had earned respect wherever he worked, and he’d passed his integrity on to his son. Integrity wasn’t an easy thing to maintain, Chris had found, in a world that ran according to the laws of human nature.

Walking down the dark path between his house and the remodeled barn behind it, he wasn’t even sure what the right thing was. His tread was heavy, and he took no joy in his surroundings, which had always been a source of pride. After moving to Natchez, he had used a chunk of his savings to buy a large house sited on twenty acres of the former Elgin plantation, an estate south of town that predated the Civil War. Despite its isolation, the house was only five minutes from Ben’s school and less than ten minutes from both Natchez hospitals. Chris couldn’t see how this situation could be improved upon, but Thora had long wanted to move to Avalon, a trendy new subdivision springing up farther south. Red Simmons had always resisted this desire, but after several months of discussion Chris had finally given in, conceding that in the new neighborhood Ben would have more friends living nearby.

Their house in Avalon—he privately called it the McMansion—was three-fifths finished. Thora was personally overseeing construction, but Chris rarely visited the site. He had been raised in a series of rural towns (his father had worked for International Paper, and they were transferred every couple of years), and he believed that growing up in the country had played a large part in forging his self-reliance. He knew that Ben would benefit from a similar environment, and for this reason he had privately decided not to sell this land when they moved to Avalon.

A large building appeared before him in the darkness, but its rustic exterior belied its real purpose. Chris had remodeled this barn himself, converting it into a video production studio to house the technology of his avocation—his “camera hobby” as Thora called it, which bothered him more than he admitted. He unlocked the door and walked into his main production room, a haven of blond maple and glass, spotlessly clean and kept at sixty-five degrees for the health of the cameras, computers, and other equipment. Simply entering this room elevated his mood. Booting up his Apple G5 did even more. In this room he could leave the thousand importunities of daily life behind. Here, he actually had control over what he was doing. And deep down, he felt that he was doing something great.

Chris had gotten into filmmaking during college, where he’d worked on several documentaries, two of which had won national awards. During medical school, he produced a documentary called A Day in the Life of a Resident. Shot with a hidden camera, this digital video had almost ended his medical career before it began. But after a fellow student sent the tape to a national news network, it had ultimately contributed to the limiting of work hours for medical residents. Once Chris began practicing medicine for real, though, he’d found that he had little time for filming anything. Medicine offered many rewards, but spare time wasn’t one of them.

But last year, after associating with Dr. Tom Cage, an old-time general practitioner in Natchez, Chris had discovered a way to combine his vocation with his avocation. After close observation of his new partner, Chris began work on a documentary about the decline of traditional primary-care medicine. And Mississippi, which was ten years behind the rest of the country in most things, was the perfect place to do that.

Tom Cage was one of those doctors who would spend a full hour listening to a patient, if a sympathetic ear was what that patient needed most. Seventy-three years old, Tom suffered from several serious chronic diseases; and as he often admitted, he was sicker than many of his patients. But he still worked eighty-hour weeks, and when he wasn’t working, he was reading journals to stay up on the latest standards of care. Dr. Cage frequently touched patients during his exams, and he paid close attention to what he felt. Most important, he questioned patients deeply about not only their specific symptoms, but also other areas of their lives that might yield clues to their general health. He thought about his fees in terms of trying to save his patients money (and thus he was not rich), and he never thought about the dozens of patients—many of them walk-ins—waiting to see him. Tom Cage stayed at his office until the last patient was seen, and only then did he declare his workday done.

For Chris, who had begun his private-practice career in a group of internists his own age, Dr. Cage’s methods had come as a profound shock. To physicians of Chris’s generation, a good practice meant high pay, short working hours, and an abundance of partners to take call, so that one night a week was the most you had to worry about phone calls from patients. Chris’s former partners practiced defensive medicine, ordering every lab test remotely relevant to every patient’s symptoms, but spending as little time as possible with those patients, all in the hallowed name of gross income. This kind of practice was anathema to Tom Cage. A system geared toward the convenience and gain of the physician was the tail wagging the dog. Dr. Cage saw medicine as a life of service: a noble calling, perhaps, but still a life of service. And that, Chris believed, was worth documenting for posterity.

Deep down, he shared a lot of Tom’s feelings about modern medicine. His own ideas of service had cost him his first wife, and he had been cautious in love after that. Only after Thora Rayner entered his life had Chris felt emboldened to take such a risk again. For this reason, Agent Morse’s visit had disturbed him more than it might have another man. Chris had fundamentally misjudged his first wife, and to admit that he might have done the same thing a second time would be hard. In fact, he reflected, the niggling worries that had surfaced during baseball practice were just that—inconsequential peeves. Every adult went through personality changes, and the first year of a marriage was always a time of adjustment. That Thora had started spending more money than she used to, or wearing tighter clothes, meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chris opened the studio’s refrigerator, poured a nearly freezing shot of Grey Goose, and drank it off. Then he sat down before his G5, opened Final Cut Pro, and began reviewing some scenes he’d filmed last week. Shooting directly to hard drives from his Canon XL2S meant that he wasted no time dumping footage from tape to his computer. Unfolding before him now was an interview with Tom Cage and a black woman who had been his patient since 1963. That woman now had a great-great-granddaughter, and that little girl was playing at her feet. Tom preferred not to treat children anymore, but this woman had refused to take her “grandchild” to any other doctor. Chris had more recent experience with pediatrics than Tom did, and he’d been proud to help in evaluating the child’s high fever (which Tom had feared might be meningitis).

As the old woman spoke about Dr. Cage traveling to her home one night during the blizzard of 1963, Chris felt a strange tide of emotion moving through him. Until this morning, when Agent Morse had subversively entered his life, he’d felt more content than he had since childhood. His father had been a good man, but he’d rarely pondered life’s deeper mysteries. In Tom Cage, Chris had found a mentor with a wealth of knowledge to pass on, but who did so without pretense or didacticism, almost like a Zen master. A trenchant question here, a small gesture while a patient’s attention was elsewhere—in this unassuming way, Tom had been turning Chris into more than a first-class internist: he was turning him into a healer.

But a career isn’t enough to sustain a man, Chris thought, feeling the vodka cross his blood-brain barrier. Not even if it’s a passionate calling. A man needs someone to engage his deepest emotions, to relieve his drives, to soften his obsessions, to accept the gifts he feels compelled to give, and maybe most important, to simply be with him during the thousands of small moments that in aggregate compose a life.

For almost two years, Chris had believed that Thora was that person. Along with Ben, she had closed some magic circle in his life. Before he married Thora, Chris had not understood how acting as a father to Ben would affect him. But in less than a year, with Chris’s patient attention, the boy had blossomed into a young man who amazed his teachers with his attitude and schoolwork. He was no slouch on the athletic field, either. The pride Chris felt in Ben had stunned him, and he’d felt it a solemn duty—even a privilege—to adopt the boy. Given what he felt for Ben, Chris could hardly imagine what having his own biological child might do to him. He almost felt guilty for asking more of life than he already had. Every week he watched men die without the things he now possessed, either because they had never found them or because they had foolishly cast them away. Yet now … everything had changed somehow. Alexandra Morse had released a serpent of doubt into his personal Eden, forcing him to wonder if he truly possessed any of the gifts he had believed to be his.

“Goddamn it,” he murmured. “Goddamn woman.”

“Did I mess something up?” asked a worried voice.

Chris looked over his shoulder and saw Thora standing behind him. She wore a diaphanous blue nightgown and white slippers with wet blades of grass on them. He’d been so absorbed in the footage and his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her enter the studio.

“You were pretty late getting home from the hospital,” she said diffidently.

“I know.”

“You have a lot of admissions?”

“Yeah. Most of them are routine stuff, but there’s one case nobody can figure out. Don Allen consulted Tom about it, and Tom asked for my opinion.”

A look of surprise widened Thora’s eyes. “I can’t believe Don Allen consulted with anybody.”

Chris smiled faintly. “The patient’s family pressured him into it. It killed Don to do it, I could tell. But if somebody doesn’t figure out what this guy has, he could die.”

“Why not ship him up to Jackson?”

“Don already talked to all the specialists at UMC. They’ve seen the test results, and they don’t know what to think either. I think the family figured Tom has seen almost everything in almost fifty years of practicing medicine, so they wanted him consulted. But Tom is stumped, too. For now, anyway.”

“My money’s on you,” Thora said, smiling. “I know you’ll figure it out. You always do.”

“I don’t know, this time.”

Thora moved closer, then leaned down and kissed Chris’s forehead. “Turn back around,” she said softly. “Toward the monitor.”