Delusion (39 page)
PETER ABRAHAMS
surgeon in town came and stitched Nell up. The best radiologist took pictures of Norah’s head. Two hours later, they were back home on Sandhill Way.
They sat at the kitchen table: Nell, Norah, Clay. He made a full confession, admitting everything Nell already knew.
“And what happened on the reef?” she said.
“I didn’t realize,” he said. “There was no reason for him to do it.”
Nell believed him: the reason—sharing her plan to use hypnosis with Kirk—she’d concealed.
“Why didn’t they just build the gates properly in the first place?”
Norah said.
A smile, faint and quick, crossed Clay’s face: the smile of a proud dad with a bright kid. “Duke never knew anything about Johnny Blanton. Kirk kept it to himself. He decided there was no way they could afford to do it right. They’d be ruined.”
Silence fell. Nell still loved him with her heart, but not with her head. “I think you’d better leave,” she said.
Joe Don lay
in a coma. Norah visited every day. Nell started going with her. Each time, she would get the strange sensation that she could feel the love between the two of them, like something in the air.
She liked being around that feeling.
Norah told Nell that Joe Don had written a song for her, “Norah’s Song.” He’d laid down a simple track at a studio in Baton Rouge, just voice and rhythm guitar. Nell liked it. They took the CD to the hospital the next day.
“Listen to this, Joe Don,” Norah said.
He lay on the bed as always, motionless, intubated, eyes closed, head wrapped in bandages. Norah turned on the machine.
Saw your face
Down the hall
Nothin’ else
Matters at all.
D E LU S I O N
297
Joe Don made a soft sound, like a purr. One eye opened. It fastened on Norah. He smiled.
Clay resigned from
the force. No charges were brought. Duke, his face repaired as well as it could be, gave him the deed to Little Parrot Cay; everything he owned was threatened by lawsuits anyway. Clay moved down there and turned the place into a small resort for divers and fishermen.
A few tracks from Joe Don’s album leaked onto the Internet, caused a little buzz. Only a month or so after getting out of the hospital, he landed a gig at the Station Inn in Nashville. Norah went back to Vanderbilt in the fall. The three of them—Nell, Norah, Joe Don—had a nice Thanksgiving in Belle Ville. Nell made the corn bread from Clay’s grandmother’s recipe.
That might have been a mistake, because around that time she started missing him terribly. Maybe nothing would have come of it, if he hadn’t called. But he did call.
“I loved that essay,” he said.
“What essay?”
“Norah’s essay on Garibaldi. I hadn’t even heard of him, believe it or not.”
“She sent it to you?”
“I read it out loud to the guests.”
Nell could picture it. Picturing it gave her pleasure.
“Saw a big turtle this morning,” Clay said. “Loggerhead. Must’ve weighed a hundred and fifty pounds.”
She could picture that, too.
“You’d have liked it,” Clay said.
Nell ended up booking a flight. Even though there’d been no divorce, she’d stopped wearing her wedding ring. On the day of the trip, she didn’t put it on, or even bring it. She boarded the plane with no expectations.
Many thanks to my editor, David Highfill, my agent, Molly Friedrich, and my wife, Diana.
PETER ABRAHAMS
is the author of seventeen crime novels including
Nerve Damage, End of Story,
which was chosen as one of
Publishers Weekly
’s
“Top 100 Books of 2006,” and the Edgar Award–
nominated
Lights Out.
In addition, he’s written the Echo Falls mystery series for young adults, the first of which,
Down the Rabbit Hole,
was also nominated for an Edgar Award and won the Agatha.
He lives on Cape Cod. To learn more about him, visit www.peterabrahams.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Nerve Damage
End of Story
Oblivion
Their Wildest Dreams
The Tutor
Last of the Dixie Heroes
Crying Wolf
A Perfect Crime
The Fan
Lights Out
Revolution #9
Pressure Drop
Hard Rain
Red Message
Tongues of Fire
The Fury of Rachel Monette
For Younger Readers
Down the Rabbit Hole
Behind the Curtain
Into the Dark
Designed by Renato Stanisic
Jacket design by Eric Fuentecilla
Jacket photograph by John Ross/Untitled
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DELUSION. Copyright © 2008 by Pas de Deux. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader February 2008
ISBN 978-0-06-163361-4
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Document Outline
- Title Page
- Dedication Page
- Contents
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty
- Chapter Twenty-One
- Chapter Twenty-Two
- Chapter Twenty-Three
- Chapter Twenty-Four
- Chapter Twenty-Five
- Chapter Twenty-Six
- Chapter Twenty-Seven
- Chapter Twenty-Eight
- Chapter Twenty-Nine
- Chapter Thirty
- Chapter Thirty-One
- Chapter Thirty-Two
- Chapter Thirty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Peter Abrahams
- Credits
- Copyright Notice
- About the Publisher
- Chapter One
Table of Contents