Nell awoke at
dawn. The breeze had died down, leaving the bedroom cool, almost cold, but she was hot, her face clammy, an actual sweat drop rolling into the hollow of her throat. She glanced at Clay. He lay on his side, his back to her, very still. Light, weak and milky, left most of the room in shadow, but it illuminated a vein in Clay’s neck, throbbing slowly.
Nell rose, saw herself in a mirror: her eyes were dark and worried. She went into the kitchen, dug through her purse, found her cell phone. No missed calls, specifically none from a 615 area code. That calmed her for a moment or two. She imagined Norah fast asleep in her dorm room, safe and sound. Then she began to find bad interpretations for the absence of a call, turn all the nonevidence upside down. She checked the time: 6:35. Too early to place a call of her own, not without appearing to be checking up, and Norah didn’t like that. Nell’s index finger trembled on the buttons. She made herself put the phone away.
A bird chirped in the flamboyant tree that stood near the back door.
Nell walked down the crushed-shell path to the beach side of the Cay.
The sea lay flat and motionless as it often did at dawn, more like jelly than water. Nell slipped off her nightgown and dove in, half expecting viscous resistance, but there was none. She found a nice rhythm right away, body riding flat and high, hips controlling everything, forearms loose, stroke soft on entry, speeding up at the end, and most important, feeling the water, mantra of her college coach. Feeling the water came naturally to Nell, was the reason she’d been drawn to swimming in the first place; and no water felt like this. Nell swam around Little Parrot Cay.
By the time she climbed back onto the beach, a light chop had ruffled up, as though her own motion had got things going. The sun, two or three handbreadths above the horizon, was already warm. Nell walked
D E LU S I O N
13
to the dock at the south end of the beach, turned on the hose and held it over her head, streaming the salt away, feeling fresh as this perfect morning.
The truth was that back in her racing days, despite her love of the water and how coachable all her coaches said she was, she’d never been quite fast enough—a winner of heats now and then, but never a champion. Johnny, on the other hand: she remembered how she actually rocked in the water when he flew by in the next lane. She took a deep breath. He’d rocked her in the water. Remnants of some kind of bad dream came to life in her brain.
The worried feeling, washed away, began to return. She turned off the hose, and was walking back up the beach to get her nightgown when she heard a faint drone in the sky.
A plane appeared in the west; a seaplane, floats glowing in the sun. The wings tilted and the plane came down in a long, curving arc. Nell put on her nightgown. The plane skimmed onto the water with a splash and coasted up to the dock, pushing a silver wave. The lettering on the tail read: DK INDUSTRIES. Nell went out to the end of the dock. The pilot’s door opened.
“Hi, darlin’,” said Duke Bastien. He threw her a line. Nell caught the end, looped it around a cleat. “Sorry to bust in,” he said.
“Duke,” she said. “It’s your place.”
“Bad manners is bad manners,” said Duke, stepping onto the dock.
Duke was a big guy; it trembled under his weight. “Clay up?” he said.
“I think he’s still sleeping.”
“You had one of your swims?”
Nell nodded, at the same time hiking up the shoulder strap of her nightgown, the fabric not transparent but very light. Duke was looking at her face, not her body; he actually did have good manners.
“Are you two going fishing?” Nell said. Duke had a thirty-two foot inboard with a tuna tower, tied up on the other side of the dock.
“Clay didn’t mention it.”
“’Fraid not,” said Duke. “Mind getting him for me?”
Nell walked up to the house. A warm breeze sprang up, blew some deep red blossoms out of the flamboyant tree and across her path. A phone rang as she went inside. Two cell phones lay on the kitchen counter, his and hers. It was Clay’s. She answered.
“Hello, ma’am. Sergeant Bowman here. The chief handy?”
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PETER ABRAHAMS
“One moment,” Nell said.
She went into the bedroom. Clay opened his eyes. He saw her and smiled. She knew that under the covers he was hard, all set for her to climb back in. That would have been nice. Nell covered the mouthpiece. “Sergeant Bowman’s on the phone. And Duke just flew in—he’s down at the dock.”
“Duke’s here?”
Clay sat up. He was one of those dark-haired, olive-skinned men who looked ten years younger than they were. The only sign of aging she could see on his face was a slight vertical groove on his brow, between the eyes. It deepened as he took the phone.
“Hey, Wayne,” he said. “What’s up?”
Clay listened for a second or two. “What the hell are you—” Then he went quiet, listened some more.
“Norah?” said Nell, moving closer. “Is it something about Norah?”
Clay shook his head, waved her away. He got out of bed, started pulling on a pair of shorts with his free hand, his erection deflating fast. Then he hurried out of the room. Nell followed.
Clay sped up. He was a very fast walker when he wanted to be.
Running after him down the crushed-shell path, she could barely keep up. His shoulder muscles stood out like ropes, rising to the base of his neck. He was still talking on the phone. She heard him say,
“Just sit tight.” And: “I’m on my way.”
“On your way where?” Nell called after him. “Is it Norah?”
He didn’t seem to hear. Duke watched from the dock, arms folded across his chest.
Nell ran faster, caught up to Clay, touched his back. “What?” she said. “Tell me.”
Clay stuffed the phone in his pocket, whirled around. “Nell,” he said. “Go on up to the house.”
“But—”
His voice rose. “Did you hear me?”
He’d never spoken to her like that, not in eighteen years. It stunned her. She stood on the path, frozen in place. Clay seemed frozen there, too, face flushed, mouth a little open. He started to say something, something quieter, but Duke, coming toward them, interrupted.
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15
“Just give us a minute or two, darlin’,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”
“Is Norah all right?”
Duke shot Clay a puzzled look. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
Clay reached out, squeezed her hand. “I told you. It’s got nothing to do with Norah.”
“Is it a business thing?”
“Yeah,” said Duke. “Kinda.”
They looked down at her, two big men, somehow reassuring just from the amount of space they occupied. Duke was an important businessman and one of Clay’s biggest supporters, went way back with him, but they weren’t in business together; Clay was the chief of police, not in business at all. Nell went back to the house, wondering what sort of business it could be.
Her phone was ringing. She grabbed it: not Norah; a Belle Ville number, slightly familiar although she couldn’t place it.
“Hello?”
“Nell? Lee Ann Bonner.”
Lee Ann Bonner, a reporter at the
Belle Ville Guardian,
had a daughter Norah’s age. They’d been sleepover friends in grade school, but Nell hadn’t talked to Lee Ann in years. She stepped onto the front terrace.
Clay and Duke were talking on the dock, their heads close together.
“Nell?”
“Yes?”
“I know this must be an . . . unsettling time,” Lee Ann said, “but I wondered if you had any comment at all, any reaction I could quote.”
“I don’t understand,” Nell said. “Reaction to what?”
Pause, a long one. A big fish jumped clear of the water, not far from the end of the dock, but neither man noticed. “You mean you haven’t heard?” Lee Ann said. “Alvin DuPree—they’re letting him go.”
Nell lost her balance, caught hold of a patio chair. Alvin DuPree was serving a life sentence without parole. “Letting him go?”
Lee Ann started in on a complicated answer Nell had trouble processing, all about something called the Justice Project, Hurricane Bernardine, FEMA, video cameras. Only the last sentence stuck in her mind, stuck like a fact sharpened at one end.
“He didn’t do it.”
The seaplane rose in a long semicircle. At first Little Parrot Cay was clear in Nell’s window. Then it got mixed up with other cays in the chain, and soon they were all just specks, and finally gone.
Up in the cockpit, Clay and Duke sat side by side. The backs of their heads had a similar shape, Clay’s perhaps a little finer in some way; although their faces were very different, from this angle they could have been brothers.
“What’s the Justice Project?” Nell said.
Because of engine noise, or the fact that both men were wearing headsets, they didn’t hear.
She spoke louder. “What’s the Justice Project?”
Clay turned, raising one earphone. “You say something?”
Nell repeated it once more.
“Lawyers,” Clay said. “Don’t know much about them.”
“But they’re wrong,” Nell said. “It’s all a mistake.”
Clay nodded. He had fine eyes, soft, gentle brown and normally very clear, but now they looked blurry, and no particular color at all.
“What kind of lawyers?” Nell said. “How did it happen?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Clay said, lowering the ear-piece back in place and turning away. The plane entered a cloud, first wispy, then thick. A dull grayness closed in, taking away all dimen-sions, driving her into herself.
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17
. . . .
“Did you get
a good look at him?”
“I was right there.” Which explained the blood on the front of her
white T-shirt.
The detective—she didn’t catch his name for the longest time—had a
gentle manner and a soft voice. “Think you could identify the killer?”
How could she not? She’d been right there.
Back in Belle
Ville, a squad car was waiting to take Clay to his office downtown. Duke drove Nell home. They—she, Clay and Norah, when school wasn’t in session—lived in the Heights, nicest neighborhood in Belle Ville next to Magnolia Glade. The route led through Lower Town, where the cleanup still went on, trucks, graders, front-end loaders—some bearing the DK Industries logo—clustered here and there. The stink of mud, rot, decomposition, hung in the air. Duke slid the windows up. From the porch of a lopsided house, the flood line halfway up the front door, a man watched them go by, his eyes expressionless but his posture accusatory, as though she or Duke, or people who rode in cars like Duke’s, were somehow to blame for all the destruction. She was seeing that posture more and more.
“How long will it take for things to be normal?” she said.
Duke frowned. “What things?”
She gestured out the window.
“Oh,” he said, frown fading. “Sewer piping goes in next month.
After that the sidewalks and then it should be pretty quick.”
Nell hadn’t been talking about sewers and sidewalks; she let it go.
Duke dropped her off a few minutes later.
Nell loved her
house: Mediterranean-style, not too big, at the end of a cul-de-sac called Sandhill Way. Her favorite features were the terrace in back—a loggia, according to the real-estate agent who’d sold them the place—overlooking state-protected woods, and of course the lap pool, a Christmas present from Clay years before. She went
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PETER ABRAHAMS
inside, stepped over piles of mail on the tile floor. The message light was blinking on the hall phone, the word
full
in the little window.
She entered the kitchen, noticed fruit flies hovering over a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. It wasn’t like her to go away without putting that bowl in the fridge. Maybe she had put it away, maybe someone—
“Norah?” she called. “Norah?”
The house was silent. Nell went to the table, saw the fruit was rot-ten. 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?”
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19
“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.”