Greg Iles 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, The Devil’s Punchbowl. Greg Iles
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Once I even considered donning scuba gear to salvage it, so that I could ship it to Livy as a gift. (I’m pretty sure I conceived this madness on the night I heard she was getting married.) I’m not much for symbolism, but that unopened bottle of red wine fills the bill if ever anything did. Inside it is a road unwalked, a life unlived. And today, I suspect, Livy means to find it. An impossible task, probably. But impossible is a word she never paid much attention to. Her attitude is simple: where Livy Marston goes, the rules do not apply.
“Stop!” she cries. “I think you passed it.”
I hit the brakes, skid a few yards through the gravel, then back up until Livy says stop. An autumnal sadness suffuses me when I see the overgrown track, a desolate path through the trees that none would take but a killer looking for a place to dump his victim.
“Pull in,” orders Livy.
I nose the Spyder into the trees, and she climbs out without opening the door and starts through the waist-high weeds. I put up the top of the convertible as quickly as I can and follow.
Five minutes’ hard walking brings us to the edge of the swamp. The old pumping unit is still here, its great black arm frozen in place like a broken limb, the oil-bearing sands beneath the swamp long since depleted. The smell of stale crude permeates the air, and the cypress trees have no tops, casualties of salt water leaking from the well. The swamp itself is a scummy greenish-brown, swarming with breeding mosquitoes and obscured by a head-high wall of swamp grass. Our enchanted pool is gone.
“Well,” I say philosophically. “I guess it’s true.”
“What?”
“You can’t go home again.”
Livy stares at the mess as though willing it back to its former beauty. I stand mute, waiting for her to face reality. But she won’t. Why should she? Reality never stopped her before. She strips off her shirt and jeans, revealing a white one-piece bathing suit underneath. Then she hops onto a fallen tree that angles off through the hissing grass and walks like a gymnast down the rotting trunk. I call out for her to stop, but she pays no attention.
I have little choice but to follow.
When I get to the end of the trunk, I find myself stranded in a snaky morass with Livy nowhere in sight.
“Penn?” she calls from a jungle of foliage to my left. “Come here.”
“Where are you?”
“There’s a stump just below the surface of water. That will take you to the next trunk.”
Sighting the half-submerged stump, I leap onto it, catching myself just before I tumble headfirst into the slime. From here I can jump to the next fallen tree. Landing on the end of that one, I find myself peering down a green tunnel of leaves.
Livy stands at the other end, a motionless figure silhouetted by dazzling sunlight. Her body is still remarkable, not in the willowy way of a model or the lush way of a pinup girl, but somewhere in between. Her breasts are small but beautifully shaped, her wrists and ankles slim, her hands graceful. Yet the predominant impression she projects is of strength. She could be Artemis, more at home in the forest than among people. In this moment I cannot imagine her in a courtroom.
“Here,” she beckons, stretching out her hand, her voice laced with mystery.
I teeter out to the end of the trunk like a drunken riveter working high steel, then perform the tightly pleasant maneuver of edging around Livy. She holds my waist from behind and whispers: “Oh, ye of little faith.”
The Cold Hole sparkles like a diamond on brown velvet, a pristine world in the midst of decay. The swamp must have risen over the years, its edge creeping ever nearer the oil well, but our spring-fed pool is where it always was. You just have to work a little harder to find it. Livy points high into the trees, and I follow her line of sight. Even the diving platform has survived, though damaged by the growth of the cypress. Once we spent hours kissing and touching each other up there, quivering like dryads in the high branches.
Without warning, Livy dives off the tree trunk and swims to the foot of the ladder. She climbs four planks high, then turns and motions for me to follow. I strip to my underwear and dive after her. The climb requires the negotiation of many rotten and missing steps, but before long we are perched forty feet above the water, breathing hard and laughing. From here the pool looks translucent, bottomless, like a hole in the floor of the world.
“Do you think it’s still there?” she asks.
“It can’t be.”
“The pool is.”
“Storms … the current from the spring … that bottle could be a mile away by now.”
She shakes her head. “It’s down there in the mud and the plants. And I’m going to find it.”
“Livy—”
Before I can argue, she arcs down to the pool like a falling arrow, lands dead center with scarcely a splash, and surfaces laughing. She waves and submerges again. I consider going down to help her, but I don’t think she wants that. She wants to prove to me that she can find the bottle alone.
She searches with systematic diligence, diving to the bottom and probing the mud and plants in ever widening circles, surfacing for air, then diving again, her movements supple and efficient. It’s like watching a Japanese pearl diver, except that Livy looks as unlike a Japanese woman as one can get. She is archetypally Western—Aryan even—like a hawk that has plummeted a thousand feet to penetrate the water and seize its prey. After fifty minutes by my watch, she surfaces and begins treading water, her face lifted to mine.
“I can’t find it!”
I hold up my hands in commiseration and call down to her. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t resurrect the past with a bottle of wine.”
She gives me an insouciant smile and dives again, so deeply that I lose sight of her. When she surfaces, she is at the edge of the pool, holding something in her hand. Not the wine. Her bathing suit. She drapes the white lycra over a cypress knee, then with a graceful roll pushes away from the stump and, floating effortlessly on her back, drifts to the center of the pool. This vision is more potent than any wine; it is my dream made flesh: Livy’s hair floating in a corona around her face, her arms loose at her sides, her breasts little rose-tipped islands, her abdomen a submerged reef stretched to the rise of her pubis with its twist of burnished gold. The sight of her heats the backs of my eyes. As I gaze down, she raises a hand to block the sun and calls out:
“Don’t you swim anymore?”
I scoot to the edge of the platform and drop forty feet through space, plunging deep into the pool. When I float to the surface, I find Livy treading water beside me. She splashes me playfully and says: “I really thought I could find it.”
“Even if you had, it wouldn’t make things like they were before. We have to talk about what happened.”
She looks off through the silver cypress trunks. “I can’t. Not yet.” She stops treading and lies back, half floating, gazing into the hazy blue sky. “I’ve thought about that bottle sometimes. Over the years.”
“Me too. During low times. Four o’clock in the morning, wondering if I ever made a single right choice in my life.”
She seems amused by this. “Not me. I thought about it during good times. Or times that were supposed to be good. I thought about it on my wedding night.”
“Your wedding night?”
She turns her head slightly, watching me as she floats. “There I was, supposed to feel some profound completion as a woman, and all I could think was that I was closing off forever an option I’d always thought I had.”
“And you did.”
Her eyes narrow. “You hadn’t exactly made me feel wanted the last time we’d seen each other.”
I look away, unwilling to explain my