Depth Perception by Linda Castillo

bottle of wine on the table between them and took the chair across from her. "Are you okay?"
    She nodded but figured both women knew she was a long way from being okay.
    "How's your mama?" Faye asked. "She still living in New Orleans?"
    Nat's smile was sardonic. "She's good at pretending everything is all right. I think she's in denial. She doesn't talk about it." Analise Jennings was the quintessential southern belle. Appearances were everything, and she worked hard to maintain them, sometimes at the cost of facing reality.
    "People deal with grief in different ways," Faye said. "She lost a grandson. She almost lost you." She paused. "Does she know you're here?"
    "No." Nat gave her a hard look. "I want to keep it that way."
    "Why are you here, Natty? Of all the places you could have gone, why did you come back to a place that holds so much pain?"
    To find a killer.
    The words flitted through her mind, but Nat didn't voice them. She didn't trust Faye enough to tell her the truth. She figured the less people knew about why she was back, the better her chances of succeeding. "I just ... needed to face some old demons so I can put this behind me and move on with my life."
    Faye nodded, but Nat didn't miss the instant of hesitation, and she knew the other woman suspected there was more to her arrival in Bellerose than the need for closure.
    Because she didn't want the conversation to go in that direction, Nat moved quickly to change the subject. "Do you know Nick Bastille?"
    Faye looked startled by the question. "I know enough about him to know he's trouble."
    "How so?"
    "Well, he's an ex-con, for one. A shame, considering he's so damn good to look at. Talk about a waste of man-flesh. I saw him pumping gas the other day out at Ray's Sunoco, and he really is something to look at, if you like the dangerous type, anyway. Emma down at the diner told me he took a job at The Blue Gator."
    "I wonder why he came back to Bellerose," Nat said, thinking aloud. "I mean, there aren't many opportunities here, especially for an ex-con."
    "Maybe he didn't have anywhere else to go." Faye's eyes narrowed. "Any particular reason you're asking about Nick Bastille?"
    Nat lifted her shoulder, let it fall. "I had a run-in with him earlier," she said vaguely. "He was rude."
    "Yeah, well, from what I hear, he's not the kind of guy you want to piss off. He went to prison for murder, you know." She lowered her voice. "Jenny Lee told me he has all sorts of shady friends down in New Orleans. He might even have ties to the Mob. You definitely don't want to run into him in a dark alley. When Nick Bastille showed back up, folks around here started locking their doors."
    But Nat knew all too well about small towns and gossip. She knew how a story got bigger and more vicious every time it was told. And because she herself had been a favorite topic among Bellerose's gossipmongers, she resolved not to pass judgment on Nick Bastille.
    "I drove up to see you a few times when you were in the hospital, you know," Faye said after a moment.
    Nat didn't even try to hide her surprise. "I didn't know."
    "You were still in a coma."
    "If I hadn't been, I probably would have told you to leave."
    Faye smiled, bur it looked sad on her face. "The first time was a week or so after ... you went in. At that point, the doctors didn't know if you were going to come back"
    Some days Nat still couldn't believe she'd spent over two years in a coma. Months that had passed in the blink of an eye and were lost forever. She didn't remember much about the night she'd tried to commit suicide. Ward and Kyle had been dead for a week and life had seemed too bleak to bear. Nat had been sitting in a jail cell, and it had seemed as if her very soul had been ripped from her body. Her heart torn to bits and trod upon. She knew slitting her wrists had been a cowardly thing to do, but at the time she'd been too shattered inside to care ...
    "I read to you mostly," Faye said.
    Nat contemplated her,