The Hellfire Club (3 page)

6

SOMETIME LATER SHE
came groggily awake with her head in Davey’s lap. A wide-shouldered man with crinkly eyes and a heroic beard was carrying the boy through an enormous wooden door. The soundtrack, all shining violins and hallooing trombones, applauded. This stage of events was coming to an end. Nora remembered a sense of resolve, but could not remember what she had resolved to do. With the memory of her own determination came the return of renewed strength. She had resolved to act.
Time to wake up.
She and Davey would turn their backs on Westerholm and move the forty crucial miles into New York City. It was time to be a nurse again.

Or if not that, she immediately thought, something else. Nora’s last experiences of nursing were a radioactive substance too hot to touch. Until the final month, the radioactivity had expressed itself privately, in nightmares, stomach problems, sudden explosions of temper, depressions. The gleeful demons had put in occasional appearances. Neither Nora nor Davey had connected this stream of disorder to her work at Norwalk Hospital until her last month, when Nora herself had become radioactive. An improperly considered but nonetheless necessary action had for a time brought her into the orbit of the police. Of course she had not committed a crime. She had behaved morally, not immorally, but recklessly. After she had agreed, naturally to the regret of all, to “take a sabbatical,” she had signed half a dozen papers and left the hospital too unhappy to pick up her final paycheck.

Nora’s reckless but moral action had at first resembled kidnapping. The year-old son of a prominent man had been brought in with a broken leg and bruising around the chest. A fall downstairs, the mother said. She had not seen it, but her husband had. Sure did, said the husband, a sleek item in a Wall Street suit. His skin had an oily shine, and his smile was amazingly white. Took my eye off the kid for a second, and when I looked back, bam, almost had a heart attack. Half an hour after the child was admitted, both parents left. Three hours later, stuffed bunny under his pin-striped arm, back came smiling Dad. Into the private room he went, came out fifteen minutes later, even oilier, smiling hard. Nora checked on the child and found him all but unconscious.

When she reported what she had seen, she was told that the father could not be responsible for any injuries to the child. The father was a wizard, a financial genius, too noble to beat his own child. The next day Mom and Dad came in at eight. Dad left after half an hour, Mom went home at noon. At six, just as Nora was leaving, Dad returned alone. When Nora checked in on the child the next day, she learned that he had suffered a mysterious “failure” the previous evening but was now recovering. Once again she reported her suspicions to her superiors, once again she was rebuked. By this time, two or three other nurses silently agreed with her. The parents had been in again at eight, and these nurses had observed that the wizard seemed to be merely
acting
the role of a worried parent.

When the father returned that evening, Nora, after an hour railing in vain at administrators, planted herself in the child’s room until Dad asked to be left alone with his baby, at which point she left long enough to make three telephone calls—one to an acquaintance who ran the Jack and Jill Nursery School on the South Post Road in Westerholm, another to the chief of pediatrics, the third to Leo Morris, her lawyer. She said,
I am saving this child’s life.
Then she reported back to the room. The irritated wizard said that he was going to file a complaint and bustled out. Nora wrapped up the child and walked out of the hospital. She drove to the Jack and Jill Nursery, delivered the child into her friend’s care, and returned to face the storm she had created. Four months after the turmoil had subsided, the wizard’s wife issued a statement to the press saying that she was seeking a divorce on the grounds that her husband regularly beat both herself and their son.

“At least they got one thing right,” Davey said. “The Green Knight really
does
look like a grown-up Pippin. But you can’t tell that
Pippin
realizes it.”

On the screen, electronic manipulation was transforming the bearded man’s face, stripping away years by smoothing wrinkles, shortening his hair, drawing in the planes of his cheeks, leaving the beard as only a penumbra around a face almost identical to the boy’s.

“You need the words.
His own salvation lay within himself. Pippin had come to the great truth behind his journey through vast darkness. Life and death stirred beneath his own hands, and his hands commanded them.
” Davey recited the words unemotionally but without hesitation.

“Oh, of course,” Nora said. “Absolutely.”

For less than a second, the boy’s face shone out from within the shadow of the man’s, and then the wild hair, frothing beard, and hard planes of the forehead and cheekbones locked back into place. The man carried the boy down a grassy slope. Sunlight gilded his hair and the tops of his arms. On the hill behind the man and the boy stood a huge door in a dark frame, like a mirage. Before them in the fold of a valley at the bottom of the hillside, oaks the size of matches half-hid a white farmhouse.

She turned her head to Davey and found him looking not at the screen but down at her with a suggestion of concern in his eyes.

“Kind of pretty,” she said.

“So it’s completely wrong.” His eyes darkened. “That’s not Mountain Glade. Does it look like there’s a secret in that place? Mountain Glade isn’t pretty, but it contains the great secret.”

“Oh, sure.”

“It’s the whole point,” Davey said. His eyes had moved backward into his head.

“I better go back to bed.” Nora pushed herself upright without any assistance from Davey. “Isn’t it almost over, anyhow?”

“If it
is
over,” he said.

Onscreen, the bearded man faded toward transparency. When she stood up and took an undecided step away from the sofa, he vanished altogether. The boy sprinted toward the farmhouse, and then the cast list obliterated his image.

Nora took another step toward the door, and Davey gave her a quick, unreadable glance. “I’ll be there in a little while,” he said.

Nora climbed the stairs, again reflexively checking that the front door was locked and the security system armed. She slid back into bed, felt the night sweat soak through her nightgown, and realized that she had to convince Davey that her desire to leave Westerholm had nothing to do with Natalie Weil or the human wolf.

Half an hour later, he entered the bedroom and felt his way along the wall until he found the bathroom. Without really being aware that she had fallen asleep, Nora opened her eyes from a dream in which Dan Harwich had been looking at her with colossal, undimmed tenderness. She rolled over and pushed her head deep into the pillow. For a long time Davey brushed his teeth while the water ran. He washed his face and yanked a towel off the rack. He spoke a few reproachful words she could not make out. Like his mother, when alone or unobserved he often conducted one-sided conversations with some person not present, a habit which Nora thought could not technically be described as talking to yourself. The bathroom light clicked off, and the door opened. Davey groped toward the bed, found the bottom of the mattress in the dark, and felt his way up his side to pull back the duvet. He got in and stretched out along his edge of the bed, as far from her as he could get without falling off. She asked if he was all right.

“Don’t forget about lunch tomorrow,” he answered.

Once during her period of radioactivity, Nora had forgotten that they were due at the Poplars for a meal. Usually, Davey’s reminders of this distant error struck her as unnecessarily provocative. Tonight, however, his remark suggested a way to put her resolution into effect.

“I won’t,” Nora said.

She could help them by drawing nearer to Daisy Chancel” she could soften the blow before it fell.

7

A FEW MINUTES
after they had wandered out onto the Poplars’ terrace early the next afternoon, Nora left Davey and Alden holding Bloody Marys as they looked out at the sun-dazzled Sound. The announcement that she was going upstairs to see Daisy had met only a token resistance, although Davey had seemed disgruntled to be left alone with his father so soon after their arrival. Davey’s father had seemed pleased and even gratified by Nora’s words. Alden Chancel had grown into a handsome, unruffled old age by getting everything he had ever wanted, and while he had certainly wanted his son to get married, he had never imagined that Davey would marry someone like Nora Curlew.

Nora quickly traversed the downstairs living room, came out into the marbled entrance, and turned to mount the wide staircase. On the landing she paused in front of the huge mirror. Instead of changing into her usual jeans and top after her morning run, Nora had dressed in white trousers and a loose, dark blue silk blouse. In the mirror these clothes looked nearly as appropriate for lunch on the Poplars’ terrace as they had at home.

She pushed at her hair without significantly rearranging it and started up the remaining steps to the second floor. A door closed, and the Italian girl, Maria, the short gray-haired woman who decades ago had replaced the famous Helen Day, called the Cup Bearer, at other times referred to more mysteriously as O’Dotto, came out of Daisy’s studio carrying an empty tray. The Cup Bearer, whom Davey had loved, had made legendary desserts, seven-layer cake and floating island; Maria was serviceable, not legendary, and in Nora’s experience prepared excellent French and Italian meals.

Maria smiled at her and gave the tray a short, emphatic slap against the air, as if to say,
So! Here we are!

“Hello, Maria, how’s Mrs. Chancel today?”

“Very fine, Mrs. Nora.”

“How are you?”

“Exactly the same.”

“Would she mind company?”

Maria shook her head, still smiling. Nora knocked twice, then pushed open the door.

Seated at the far end of a long, cream-colored couch facing a glass coffee table and a brick fireplace, Daisy raised her head from the paperback in her hands and gave Nora a bright look of welcome. The white oak desk at her shoulder, placed at the top of the couch like the crossbar of a capital T, was bare except for an electric typewriter and a jar of yellow pencils” the glass table held a tall vase crowded with fleshy-looking, white Casablanca lilies, a pack of low-tar cigarettes, a gold lighter, a stone ashtray brimming with butts, books in stacks, and a tumbler filled with ice and pale red liquid. Mint green in their own shadows, white aluminum blinds were canted against the sun.

“Nora, oh goody, what a treat, come in and join me, where’s your drink?”

“I must have left it on the terrace.” Nora stepped into Daisy’s atmosphere of flowers and cigarette smoke.

“Oh no, mustn’t do that, let’s have the Italian girl fetch it.” She slid a postcard into the book.

“No, no, I don’t—”

Daisy had already leaned forward and taken a little bell off the table. It uttered an absurdly soft, tinkling ring. “Maria,” she said in a conversational voice.

As if summoned out of the air, Maria opened the door and stepped inside. “Mrs. Chancel?”

“Will you be a sweetie and bring up Nora’s drink? It’s on the terrace.”

Maria nodded and left, closing the door behind her.

Daisy patted the creamy couch and set the paperback,
Journey into Light
, Hugo Driver’s second posthumous book, on the glass table.

“I’m not interrupting anything?”

In the mid-fifties, newly married, forty pounds lighter, Daisy Chancel had published two novels, not with Chancel House, and ever since she had supposedly been writing another.

Nora had nearly, but not quite, ceased to believe in this book, of which she had never seen any evidence on her infrequent visits to the studio. Davey had long ago refused to talk about it, and Alden referred to it only euphemistically. Daisy’s manner at evening meals, rigid and vague, suggested that instead of working she had been drinking martinis supplied by the Italian girl. Yet once there must have been a book, and that Daisy maintained the pretense of work meant that it was still important to her.

“Not at all,” Daisy said. “I thought I’d read Driver again. Such an inspiring writer, you know. He always inspires
me,
anyhow. I don’t know why people never took to
Journey into Light.
” She gave Nora a mystical smile and leaned forward to tap the book approvingly with her thick fingers. Her hand drifted sideways to capture the tumbler and carry it to her mouth. She took a good swallow, then another. “You’re not one of those people who think
Journey into Light
is a terrible falling off, are you?” Daisy set down the drink and snatched up the cigarettes and lighter.

“I never thought of it that way.”

Daisy lit a cigarette, inhaled, and as she expelled smoke waved it away. “No, of course not.” She tossed the pack onto the table. “You couldn’t, not with Davey around. I remember when
he
read it for the first time.”

Someone knocked at the door. “Your potion. Come in, Maria.”

The maid brought in the Bloody Mary, and when she proffered it to Nora her eyes sparkled. She was pleased to see Daisy enjoying herself.

“When will things be ready?”

“Half an hour. I make fresh mayonnaise for the lobster salad.”

“Make lots, Davey likes your mayonnaise.”

“Mr. Chancel, too.”

“Mr. Chancel likes everything,” Daisy said, “unless it interferes with sleep or business.” She hesitated for a moment. “Could you bring us fresh drinks in about fifteen minutes? Nora’s looks so
watery.
And have Jeffrey open the wine just before we come down.”

Nora waited for Maria to leave the room, then turned to find Daisy half-smiling, half-scrutinizing her through a murk of cigarette smoke. “Speaking of Hugo Driver, is there some kind of trouble with his estate?”

Daisy raised her eyebrows.

“Davey got up in the middle of the night to watch the movie of
Night Journey.
He said that Alden wanted him to take care of some kind of problem.”

“A problem?”

“Maybe he said it was a nuisance.”

At these words Daisy lowered her eyebrows, lodged the cigarette in her mouth, and picked up her glass. She nodded slowly several times before withdrawing the cigarette, blowing out smoke, and taking another mouthful of the drink. She licked her lips. “I always enjoy your visits to my little cell.”

“Did you ever meet Hugo Driver?”

“Oh no, he was dead before Alden and I were married. Alden met him two or three times, I believe, when he came here for visits. In fact, Hugo Driver slept in this room.”

“Is that why you use it?” Nora glanced around the long, narrow room, trying to imagine it as it had been in the thirties.

“Could be.” Daisy shrugged.

“But is your own work like Driver’s—is that the kind of thing you’ve been working on?”

“I hardly know anymore,” Daisy said.

“I guess I’m a little curious.”

“I guess I am, too!”

“Has anybody ever read what you’ve been writing?”

Daisy sat up straight and glanced at the bookshelves next to the fireplace, giving Nora a view of soft, flat white hair and the outline of a bulging cheek. Then she turned to look at her in a way unreadable but not at all vague. “A long time ago, my agent read a couple of chapters. But over the years, we
. . . drifted . . .
away from each other. And it’s changed a lot since then. Several times. You’d have to say it changed completely, several times.”

“Your agent wasn’t very helpful.”

Daisy’s cheeks widened in a brief, cheerless smile. “I forgave him when he died. It was the least both of us could do.” She finished off her drink, dragged on the cigarette, and blew out a thin shaft of smoke that bounced like a traveling cloud off the vase.

“And since then?”

Daisy tilted her head. “Are you asking to read my manuscript, Nora? Excuse me. I should say, are you offering to read it?”

“I just thought . . .” Nora did her best to look placating. Her mother-in-law continued to examine her out of eyes that seemed to have become half their normal size. “I just wondered if . . . if a reader might be helpful to you. I’m hardly a critic.”

“I hardly want a
critic.
” Daisy leaned forward over her stomach and stubbed out the cigarette. “It might be interesting. Fresh pair of eyes and all that. I’ll think about it.”

A rap sounded at the door, and Maria came in with two tall drinks on a tray. She removed Daisy’s empty glass and placed Nora’s second beside her nearly untouched first. “I give you extra jar mayonnaise to take home, Mrs. Nora.”

Nora thanked her.

“Are the boys doing all right down there, Maria?”

“Doing beautiful.”

“No shouts? No threats?” Nora had rarely seen this side of Daisy.

Maria smiled and shook her head.

“Are they talking about anything interesting?”

Maria’s smile went rigid.

“Oh, I see. Well, if they ask, which they won’t, you can tell them that
everything
we’re talking about is interesting.”

It struck Nora that the closest relationship Daisy had was with Maria.

Daisy surprised her again by winking at her. “Isn’t that right, dear?” This bright, lively Daisy had appeared immediately after Nora had suggested looking at her manuscript.

Nora said yes, it was interesting, and Maria beamed at her before leaving.

“What do you think they’re talking about downstairs?”

“Want to make a publisher’s heart go
trip trap, trip trap,
like the baby goat walking over the bridge? Show him a nice, juicy crime, what he would call a ‘true crime.’ ” Daisy smiled another mirthless smile and took a swallow of the fresh drink. “Don’t you love that term? I think I’ll commit a true crime. Right after I commit a nonfiction novel.
Trip trap, trip trap, trip trap.
” She opened her mouth, rolled up her eyes, and patted her heart in mock ecstasy. “I know, I’ll commit a true crime by writing a nonfiction novel about Hugo Driver!” Daisy giggled. “Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all these years! Maybe Alden will give me a million dollars and I’ll go away to Tahiti!”

“Maybe I’ll come with you,” Nora said. It would be fun going to Tahiti with this Daisy Chancel.

Daisy wagged a fat forefinger. “No, you won’t. No, you won’t. You can’t go away and leave Davey all alone.”

“I suppose not,” Nora said.

“No, no, no,” Daisy said. “Nope.”

“Of course not,” Nora said. “Are you really writing a non-fiction novel?”

The older woman was nearly gloating, as if she knew secrets so outlandish that she could hint eternally without ever divulging them. Nora took in her shining, slightly filmy eyes and understood that Daisy was going to let her read her manuscript.