Delusion Page 3

The house was silent. Nell went to the table, saw the fruit was rotten. She was in the garage, dumping it into a trash barrel, when she heard the front doorbell. Nell walked back into the house, stepped over the mail, opened the door.

  Lee Ann Bonner stood outside, although Nell didn’t recognize her for a moment. She’d never seen her wearing glasses before, and these were of some new, distracting design. They made her eyes look more intelligent than humanly possible, as though her IQ were three or four hundred.

  “Oh, good,” Lee Ann said. “I was hoping you’d be back.”

  “How did you know I was gone?” Nell said. A question that came blurting out without any thought on her part, but a sharp one.

  “Called One Marigot.” One Marigot was the address of police headquarters, finally habitable again—the reason Clay and Nell had been able to get away. “The chief’s whereabouts is posted on the daily sheet.”

  “Oh,” said Nell; maybe not a sharp question after all.

  “You’re looking good,” Lee Ann said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I like your hair that way.”

  “I like yours, too.”

  Lee Ann patted her own hair; she had a spiky cut, pretty edgy for Belle Ville. “Still with the museum?”

  Nell nodded; she was assistant curator at the Belle Ville Museum of History and Art. “But we’re closed until the insurance comes through.”

  “Any damage to the paintings and stuff?”

  “No. We lost one of the pieces in the sculpture garden, that’s all.”

  “Which one?”

  “Cloud Nine.”

  “Cloud Nine? With those arches?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s my favorite.”

  “Mine, too.”

  Behind those strange glasses, Lee Ann’s eyes narrowed. “Wasn’t it made of metal?”

  “Bronze.”

  “How does something like that get washed away?”

  “It was stolen,” Nell said. “In all the chaos.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “We paid twenty thousand dollars, but his stuff has gone up.”

  “Christ,” said Lee Ann. She took off her glasses, didn’t seem quite so intimidating. “How’s Norah?”

  “Good.”

  “At Duke, right?”

  “Vanderbilt.”

  “Always did have a head on her shoulders.”

  “And Layla?” Nell said.

  “Partying her ass off at LSU. I only hear from her when she wants money.”

  Nell remembered then that Lee Ann had gotten divorced somewhere along the way. A bee came buzzing by. Lee Ann blinked.

  “Speaking of the hurricane,” she said, “I wondered whether you could help me out on a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “This business with Alvin DuPree.”

  “I told you on the phone, Lee Ann—I really don’t know anything about it.”

  “But you must—” The bee, or another one, whizzed right between two of those spiky tufts on Lee Ann’s head. “Ooo,” she said, ducking away. “I hate bees—swell up like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “We can’t have that,” Nell said, stepping aside.

  Lee Ann laughed and went in.

  They sat in the sunroom, looking out on the lap pool, and drank lemonade.

  “This is nice,” Lee Ann said. “Reminds me of the old days, when the girls were little. They were so different—Layla such a chatterbox, Norah so quiet. Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was a deep one, I could see it,” Lee Ann said. “Bet she’s at the top of her class.”

  “Not quite.” In fact, Norah was on academic probation.

  “Gets those smarts from you,” Lee Ann said. “No disrespect to your husband, of course.” Nell didn’t correct her on any of that. Lee Ann reached into her bag, took out a spiral notebook. “I really think the story here, the crux of it, the human story, is your reaction,” she said. “How would you describe it?”

  “For the third time, Lee Ann. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “But the simple fact that he’s being freed, that he didn’t do it, must—”

  “He did it.” Nell’s voice rose in anger, taking her by surprise.

  Lee Ann nodded, wrote something in her notebook.

  “You’re writing that down?” Nell said.

  “For accuracy,” said Lee Ann.

  “But I don’t want you to.”

  “You don’t want me to be accurate?”

  Nell shook her head. “It’s not that. But I can’t be quoted in the paper. Is that what you’re planning?”

  Lee Ann smiled. “I am a reporter. And this is shaping up to be a big story.”

  “It is?”

  “An innocent man in jail for twenty years and all of a sudden exculpatory evidence comes floating up out of One Marigot? Sounds like a big story to me.”

  “Exculpatory?” Nell stumbled a little over the word, a word she knew but had never spoken before. “That’s impossible. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  Lee Ann’s pen was moving, although her eyes, now behind those glasses again, were on Nell. “You’re referring to the murder?”

  “Yes. But I’m not going to talk about it. There’s obviously some big mistake—and I’m sure my husband is straightening it out right now.”

  Lee Ann’s pen stopped in midstroke. She closed the notebook, put it away. “Fair enough,” she said. “But how about a little chat on background?”

  Background? “Meaning?”

  “Off the record. No quotes, no reactions, no story in the paper. Just so I can understand better.”

  “I don’t know,” Nell said. But what harm could there be? The story—her part, at least—must have been a matter of record.

  “It would be a big help to me,” Lee Ann said. “I was still in Atlanta back then.” She raised her lemonade glass, took a sip. “Mmm,” she said. Just a little thing, but the atmosphere in the room changed, became more social. “I’ve forgotten whether you’re from here or not.”

  “From Dallas originally,” Nell said. “But we moved here when I was six or seven. My dad took a job at Mercy.”

  “He’s a doctor?”

  “Was. They’re retired now, living in Naples.”

  “Yeah? My dad’s in Sarasota, with wife number four. She’s five years older.”

  “That’s not too bad.”

  “Than me,” Lee Ann said.

  Nell laughed, drank some of her lemonade.

  “I take it,” said Lee Ann, “that the victim—the original victim—was your boyfriend?”

  Nell put down her glass. “Yes,” she said, wondering what Lee Ann meant by original victim.

  “John Blanton?”

  “Everyone called him Johnny.”

  “Was he from Belle Ville?”

  “New Orleans,” Nell said. “We met at UNC. He was writing his Ph.D. thesis.”

  “Art history, like you?”

  “Geology,” Nell said. “And I actually didn’t even complete my master’s. We were spending that summer here, but I never went back.”

  “The summer of the murder?”

  Nell nodded. One of the biggest regrets of her life, not going back, abandoning her studies, but she kept that to herself, always had; a minor matter, after all, compared with what happened to Johnny.

  “Do you ever regret that?” Lee Ann said. “Not going back?”

  “No,” Nell said. It hit her for the first time—why now?—that going back to Chapel Hill, finishing the degree, was what Johnny would have wanted her to do.

  “But you ended up with a good job anyway,” Lee Ann said, as though she’d been following Nell’s thoughts.

  “I love the museum,” Nell said.

  “Best thing in the whole town, if you ask me,” Lee Ann said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “No? You like it here? Don’t find B Ville a bit slow?”

  “I like it. Especia
lly the way it used to be.”

  “Before the murder?”

  Nell paused. That wasn’t what she’d meant, but it sidetracked her. “Before the hurricane,” she said. “The goddamn hurricane.”

  “It wasn’t just the hurricane that did us in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nîmes got hit just as hard and they had barely any flooding at all.”

  “But aren’t they higher up?” A long-ago conversation with Johnny, something about the geology of the region, stirred in her mind.

  “Not much,” Lee Ann said. “We’ll have to wait for the report.”

  “Report?”

  “From the Army Corps of Engineers—the levees, the Canal Street floodgates, what went wrong and why, et cetera, et cetera. And who knows how long that’ll take?” A cell phone rang in Lee Ann’s bag. She took it out, glanced at the number, frowned, put it back. “What can you tell me about the murder?”

  “It was horrible.”

  “You were an eyewitness?”

  “Yes.”

  “The only eyewitness?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  Nell took a deep breath. All at once she felt nervous, as though about to take a big test, or give a speech. At the same time, she found she wanted to talk about it, a desire she hadn’t had in years, maybe not since the trial. “Just south of Magnolia Glade,” she said. “We—Johnny and I—were living in my parents’ guesthouse for the summer.” One odd thing about that summer: hot, like all Gulf summers, but for some reason the humidity never came, making for soft, warm nights, one after another. “Johnny spent the days on his thesis—he’d reached the writing stage. I was teaching swimming at the Y camp. At night we went for long walks, sometimes all the way to the levee.”

  “Levee?”

  “The old Sunshine Road levee. It all got changed after they built the canal.” Their favorite spot in Belle Ville: from up on the levee, they’d had a clear view of the Gulf, with the lights of the shrimpers and the freighters moving slowly in the darkness.

  Lee Ann’s phone rang again. “Damn,” she said, ignoring it. “Go on.”

  Suddenly Nell had a clear memory of the moon that night, a full moon, very bright, and how Johnny had explained that the moon had probably once been part of the earth. What had he said? It’s like a little ghost brother stuck up there. He’d had a head full of thoughts like that, rocked her with them once in a while, the way he’d rocked her in the pool the first time they’d met. Love at first sight, no doubt about it. Falling in love with Clay had been different, longer, slower, perhaps sweeter; and darker, of course. But Lee Ann didn’t want to hear any of that.

  “We were on our way back,” Nell said. “Following the creek. Do you know the pier at the foot of Parish Street?”

  “Gone now,” said Lee Ann. “Bernardine.”

  Nell hadn’t known that. “We were just passing the pier when—”

  She paused. What was that? The front door?

  “When what?” said Lee Ann.

  At that moment, Clay walked in. He’d changed at the office, was wearing a dark suit—the one she’d got at the Brooks Brothers outlet—white shirt, blue tie. “Hi, baby,” he said, and then noticed Lee Ann, in the corner on the wicker chair.

  “You remember Lee Ann?” Nell said.

  “Wouldn’t take much of a memory,” Clay said. “Lee Ann was in my office not two hours ago.”

  Nell turned to Lee Ann, a little confused. Lee Ann’s face was expressionless, but she’d shifted her legs under the chair, as though about to rise.

  “Where I told her,” Clay went on, “I had no comment on the DuPree situation and that I didn’t believe my wife would either. So I assume what we have here is a social call.”

  Lee Ann was on her feet. “This is a big story, Chief,” she said. “There’s no way to keep it under wraps.”

  “Keeping things under wraps has never been my style,” Clay said, “as I think the Guardian knows.”

  “They’ve backed him in every election,” Nell said, unnecessary since Lee Ann had to know that, but it popped out anyway.

  “Then why this new approach?” Lee Ann said.

  “It’s not a new approach,” Clay said. “We always make sure we’ve got the facts before going public.”

  “Is it a fact that the D.A.’s going to oppose the motion to cut Alvin DuPree loose?” Lee Ann said.

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “I plan to.”

  “That’s your right,” Clay said. “Even your duty. We won’t keep you.”

  Lee Ann slung her bag over her shoulder, turned to Nell. “Good to see you,” she said.

  “I’ll walk you to the door,” said Nell.

  A silent walk. When Nell returned, she found Clay in the kitchen, buttering a cracker, his hands not quite steady.

  “Those are stale,” Nell said.

  Clay didn’t seem to hear. The cracker split in half. He reached in the box for another one. “What did you tell her?” he said.

  “Nothing,” said Nell. “I’ve got nothing to tell. What’s going on?”

  Clay sat at the counter, rubbed his eyes. “I wish I knew.” He kept rubbing them, much too hard.

  “Don’t,” said Nell. “You’ll hurt yourself.” She went over to him, pulled his hands away. His eyes still had that blurry look, and now they were bloodshot, too. She kissed his forehead. At the same time, she caught a whiff of that downtown stink that Bernardine had left behind, most noticeable when the breeze blew from the west. Had she left the front door open? She went to check. It was closed.

  CHAPTER 4

  A little ghost brother, going round and round?” said Nellie.

  “Yeah,” said Johnny Blanton. He took her hand. They walked along the Sunshine Road towpath, the road on one side, the bayou on the other, moon overhead. A breeze drifted by, leaving the air the way it had been, soft and warm, so strangely unoppressive for July, and now smelling of flowers. “There must be some great paintings of the moon,” Johnny said.

  “Starry Night,” said Nellie. But other than that she couldn’t think of a single one.

  “That’s it?” Johnny said.

  “Maybe painters didn’t want to do landscapes at night,” Nellie said.

  “Because it’s hard to see?”

  “And colder.”

  “Hey!” said Johnny. “Now you’re thinking like a scientist.” He stopped, faced her. She saw the moon in his eyes, reflected twice. “On the other hand,” he said, “it’s night and I can see you fine.” They kissed. “So that shoots your theory.”

  “Then let’s go home,” Nellie said. “And try getting practical.”

  “Like how?”

  “Maybe you can come up with something.”

  They walked back in the moonlight, unhurried. Nellie’s parents’ guesthouse stood in the farthest corner of the property; they had privacy and all the time in the world. A quiet summer night: nothing to hear but their footsteps, their breathing and the water, making sucking sounds in the bayou.

  “Tide’s coming in,” Johnny said.

  “There are tides in the bayou?”

  “Sure,” said Johnny. “This one anyway. And it’ll be a high one tonight.”

  “How come?”

  Johnny pointed at the moon. “Full,” he said. “Kind of poetic, if you think of it, the ghost brother still clinging on.”

  “Better explain the tides, Johnny.”

  Johnny explained the tides.

  “Who figured all this out?” Nellie said.

  “You mean what causes the tides, and the mathematical framework?” he said. “Newton.”

  “When was that?”

  “Sixteen-ninety, give or take.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow what?”

  “Think of all that time before, when people had no idea,” Nellie said.

  “That’s you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That r
eaction, imagining a whole vanished world. Me, I’m in 1689, trying to find what comes next.”

  She mussed his hair. “My very own Sir Isaac.”

  “Not even close—there’ll never be another Newton,” Johnny said. They were arm in arm now, the Parish Street Pier a dark slanting oblong in the distance. “Fact is, I’ve been thinking about tides a lot lately.”

  “For your thesis?” Nellie said, trying to see some connection to geology.

  “No,” Johnny said. “But being down here got me interested.”

  “In what way?”

  “Everyone knows how low the land is around here,” Johnny said. “But there hasn’t been much research on the topography of the sea bottom, especially as it relates to the shore contour. There are some obvious conclusions waiting out there, but no one seems in a hurry to—”

  “Topography?” Nellie said. “What’s that?”

  “Land shape,” said Johnny, “but I’m just interested in elevation differences on the sea bottom. Accurate data are a little hard to come by.”

  “But the charts must go way back.”

  He put his arm over her shoulder; she put hers behind his back; they fit together perfectly. Nellie loved the feel of his back, sinewy, the spine in a deep hollow between two long muscles, swimmer’s muscles. “They do,” he said as they came to the Parish Street Pier, a rickety old structure once used for launching little catfish boats, back when there’d been catfish in the bayou. “The problem is that the bottom changes over time—the whole earth’s so dynamic, that’s what keeps jumping out at—” He cut himself off. “Am I boring you?”

  “Never,” she said. “‘The bottom changes over time’ and therefore?”

  He smiled, his teeth pure white in the moonlight. “And therefore—I’ve actually done some modeling on this—let’s suppose you’ve got contours basically acting like a giant funnel, when along comes—”

  A man stepped out from behind a support post on the pier. The movement startled Nellie. Johnny’s hand tightened a little on her shoulder, strong and reassuring. The man came forward; a big, dark form.

  “Evening,” Johnny said.

  The man took another step then paused. There was something wrong with his face, something horribly misshapen. He took another step, turning slightly into the moonlight, and Nellie saw she was wrong about his face. It wasn’t misshapen, just covered by a bandanna pulled up to his eyes.