Dead Sleep by Greg Iles Page A

studio out of our house and shooting snaps for the Oxford Eagle in whatever spare time I had. Our lives improved. I was paying the light bill and buying the groceries, and because of that, I could pretty much do what I wanted.”
    Lenz nods encouragement. “And what did you want?”
    â€œMy own life. Oxford’s a college town, and I rode all over it on my ten-speed bicycle, watching people, shooting pictures. Sony introduced the Walkman in my junior year of high school, and from the moment I got one, I lived with a sound track pouring into my ears and a camera around my neck. While Jane and her friends were dancing to the Bee Gees, I listened to homemade tapes of my father’s records: Joni Mitchell, Motown, Neil Young, the Beatles, and the Stones.”
    â€œIt sounds like an idyllic childhood,” Lenz says with a knowing smile. “Is that what it was?”
    â€œNot exactly. While other girls my age were riding out to Sardis Reservoir to fumble around in backseats with guys from the football team, I was doing something a little different.”
    A deep stillness settles over Lenz’s body. Like a priest, he has heard so many confessions that nothing could surprise him, yet he waits with a receptivity that seems to pull the words from my mouth.
    â€œThe first week of my senior year, our history teacher died. He was about seventy. To fill his shoes, the school board hired a young alumnus named David Gresham, who was teaching night classes at Ole Miss. Gresham had been drafted in 1970, and served one tour in Vietnam. He came back to Oxford wounded, but his wounds weren’t visible, so the school board didn’t notice them. After a few days in his class, I did. Sometimes he would stop speaking in midsentence, and it was clear that his mind was ten thousand miles away. His brain had skipped off track, jumped from our reality to one my classmates couldn’t even guess at. But I could. I watched Mr. Gresham very closely, because he’d been to the place where my father vanished. One day after school, I stayed to ask him what he knew about Cambodia. He knew a lot—none of it good, except the beauty of Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat. When he asked why I was interested, I told him about my father. I hadn’t meant to, but when I looked into his eyes, my pain and grief poured out like a river through a broken dam. A month later, we became lovers.”
    â€œHow old was he?” asks Lenz.
    â€œTwenty-six. I was seventeen and a half. A virgin. We both knew it was dangerous, but there was never any question of him seducing an innocent child. Yes, there was a void in my life because of my father’s death; yes, he was a sympathetic older man. But I knew exactly what I was doing. He taught me a lot about the world. I discovered a lot about myself, about my body and what it could do. For me and for someone else. And I gave some peace to a boy who had been broken in some fundamental way that could never be corrected, only made less painful.”
    â€œIt’s amazing that you found each other,” Lenz says without a trace of judgment in his eyes. “This did not end well, of course.”
    â€œWe managed to keep our relationship secret for most of the year. During that time, he opened up about Vietnam, and through his eyes I experienced things my father must have seen as well. Seen, but kept out of his letters. Even out of his photographs. In April, one of David’s neighbors saw us kissing at the creek behind his house—with my flannel shirt open to the waist, no less—and took it on himself to report it to the school board. The board called a special meeting, and during something called ‘ex ecutive session’ gave David the option of resigning and leaving town before they opened an investigation that would destroy both our futures. To protect him, I denied everything, but it didn’t help. I offered to leave town with him, but he told me that