Read Delusion for Free Online

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.
    “Norah? Hi, it’s Mom. Everything good? Give me a call. When you get a chance.”
    Clay came out of the bedroom. He’d changed out of his dark 28
    PETER ABRAHAMS
    suit, wore shorts, flip-flops, a polo shirt. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
    “A walk?” Nell said. They never went for walks; on the beach at Little Parrot Cay, maybe, but not at home.
    “It’s nice out,” Clay said.
    They went outside. It didn’t seem that nice to Nell. A wind blew from the north, driving a line of clouds across the sky, and the temperature was falling. Clay took her hand as they walked around the circle at the end of the street and followed Sandhill Way’s gentle downward slope. His hand was so much bigger than hers; she thought of her father walking her up to the diving board at the Y, long ago.
    The neighborhood was quiet, parents at work, kids at school; a dog barked in someone’s backyard, and a gardener leaned on his rake, touching the buttons on a handheld device with a toothpick.
    “Haven’t got much to tell you yet,” Clay said.
    “But this tape,” Nell said, “or picture, or whatever it is—it has to be a fake.” A statement, but her voice rose a little at the end, on its own.
    “Goes without saying. But how it happened, who made it—I’m not getting anywhere on that. All we know is some FEMA worker found the tape in a locked file cabinet that got sprung open, or that somebody sprung open, in a basement storage room at One Marigot.
    From there it gets to these justice people, by steps unknown.”
    Nell gave her head a little shake, as though that might unscramble things, restore order. “Anybody could have made the tape,” she said.
    “Anybody with the right kind of know-how.”
    Clay glanced down at her, looked away. “It’s not just the tape,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “There was a note along with it.”
    “What kind of note?”
    They came to the cross street, Blue Heron Road, turned right. The mail truck appeared, the driver waving as she went by. “Purports to be from the guy who sent the tape, Napoleon Ferris, owner of the liquor store.”
    “What did it say?”
    D E LU S I O N
    29
    Clay took a deep breath, let it out slowly. When he spoke his voice was so low she could hardly make out the words. “Something to the effect of ‘You’ve got the wrong guy.’”
    Nell squeezed his hand. They passed the tennis club, all the courts deserted. A small lizard lay on the baseline on court one, flicking its tongue. “Does this man, Napoleon, does he have some grudge against . . .” She left the sentence unfinished, having no idea how a grudge might explain what was going on. Was this some kind of conspiracy? Her mind didn’t work well in areas like that.
    “Be nice to know what he was up to,” Clay said. The wind rose.
    “First we have to find him.”
    A raindrop struck Nell’s face. “I don’t understand.”
    “Looks like he’s a refugee.” There were hundreds of Bernardine refugees, gone to Houston and Atlanta, and many of them hadn’t returned. “No one’s seen him since the hurricane and