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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.”
    D E LU S I O N
    21
    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.
    22
    PETER ABRAHAMS
    “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. Especially 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