The Hellfire Club (16 page)

33

NORA PULLED HER
Volvo into the empty garage. That she would not have to explain herself to Davey came as a relief mixed with curiosity about what he was doing. At first she thought that he must be visiting his parents, but as she moved to the back door, she realized that Holly Fenn might have called with news of Natalie. A vision of her husband murmuring endearments to Natalie Weil made her feel like getting back into the Volvo and lighting out for some distant place like Canada or New Mexico. Or home, her lost home, in upper Michigan. She had friends back in Traverse City, people who would put her up and protect her. The notion of protection automatically evoked the image of Dan Harwich, but this false comfort she pushed away. Dan Harwich was married to his second wife, and neither groom nor bride would be likely to welcome Nora Chancel into their handsome stone house on Longfellow Lane, Springfield, Massachusetts.

She glanced into the family room and continued on upstairs. She wondered if Davey had gone out to look for her. The most likely explanation for his absence was that he had been summoned to the police station, in which case he would have left a note. She went to the usual location of their notes to each other, the section of the kitchen counter next to the telephone, where a thick pad stood beside a jar of ballpoint pens. Written on the top sheet of the pad were the words “mushrooms” and “K-Y,” the beginning of a shopping list. Nora went to the second most likely place, the living room table, which held nothing except a stack of magazines. Then she returned to the kitchen to inspect the table and the rest of the counter, found nothing, and went finally to the fourth and least likely message drop, the bedroom, where she found only the morning’s rumpled sheets and covers.

Feeling as if she should have become the irresponsible Nora who had disappeared into New York, she was moving toward the living room when the telephone rang.

She lifted the receiver, hoping in spite of herself to hear Davey’s voice. A woman said, “I made up my mind, and I want you to do it.”

“You have the wrong number.”

“Don’t be silly,” said the woman, whom Nora now recognized as her mother-in-law. “I want to go ahead with it.”

“Is Davey there?”

“Nobody’s here. I can shoot right over and give it to you. I’ve been alone with the thing so long, I think it’s
crucial
that you read it. I won’t be able to sit still until I hear from you.”

“You want to bring your book over here?” Nora asked.

“I want to get out and around,” Daisy said, misunderstanding Nora’s emphasis. “I haven’t been out of this house in I don’t know how long! I want to see the streets, I want to see everything! Ever since I made up my mind about this, I’ve been absolutely
exalted.
”

“You’re sure,” Nora said.

“I bless you for offering, I bless you twice over. You can bring it back to me Tuesday or Wednesday, when the men are at work.”

“You’re going to drive?” Daisy had not undertaken to pilot a car as far as the end of the driveway in several decades.

Daisy laughed. “Of course not. Jeffrey will drive me. Don’t worry, Jeffrey is
completely
dependable. He’s like the
Kremlin.
”

Nora gave up. “You’d better do it fast. I don’t know when Davey’s coming home.”

“This is so
exciting
,” Daisy said. She hung up.

Nora released a moan and slumped against the wall. Davey could never know that she had seen his mother’s book. The entire transaction would have to be conducted as if under a blanket in deepest night. Daisy would give her the manuscript, and after a few days, she would give it back. She did not have to read it. All she had to do was give Daisy the encouragement she needed.

Nora straightened up and went to the living room window, not at all comfortable with the idea of treating Daisy so shabbily.

When she thought that Daisy’s car would soon be turning into Crooked Mile Road, she left the house and walked down to the end of the drive. A Mercedes came rolling toward her. Daisy began to open the door before the car came to a stop, and Nora stepped back. Daisy leaped out and embraced her. “You darling genius! My salvation!”

Daisy leaned back to beam wildly at Nora. Her eyes were wet and glassy, and her hair stood out in white clumps. “Isn’t this wonderful, isn’t this wicked?” She gave Nora another wild grin and then turned around to wrestle from before her seat a fat leather suitcase bound with straps. “Here. I place it in your wonderful hands.”

She held it out like a trophy, and Nora gripped the handle. When Daisy released her hands from the sides, the suitcase, which must have weighed twenty or thirty pounds, dropped several feet. “Heavy, isn’t it?” she said.

“Is it finished?”

“You tell me,” Daisy said. “But it’s close, it’s close, it’s close, and that’s why this is such a brilliant idea. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. My God!” Her eyes widened. “Do you know what?”

Nora thought that Daisy had read about Dick Dart in the morning paper.

“They’ve gone and put up this hideous
fortress
on the Post Road, right where that lovely little clam house used to be!”

“Oh,” said Nora. Daisy was talking about a cement-slab discount department store which had occupied two blocks of the Post Road for about a decade.

“I think I should write a letter of complaint. In the meantime, Jeffrey is going to expand my horizons by driving me hither and yon, as you are going to do, also, my dear, by talking to me about my book. While I’m taking in the sights, you’ll be peering into my
cauldron.
”

“Enjoy yourself, Daisy,” Nora said.

“You must enjoy yourself, too,” Daisy said. “Now I think Jeffrey and I had better make our getaway. I will be calling you this evening for your first impressions. We need a code word, to announce that the coast is clear.” She closed her eyes and then opened them and beamed. “I know, we’ll use what you said when I called you. If Davey’s in the room, you say ‘wrong number.’ That’s perfect, I think. I do have a gift for this sort of thing. Perhaps I should have been a spy.” She climbed back into the car and whispered through the open window,
“I can’t wait.”

Nora bent down to see what Jeffrey made of all this. His face was rigidly immobile, and his eyes were dark, shining slits. He leaned forward and said slowly, “Mrs. Chancel, I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but if I can ever do anything for you, call me. My last name is Deodato, and I have my own line.”

Nora stepped back, and the car moved forward. Daisy had turned around in her seat, and Nora tried to return her smile until Daisy’s face was only a pale, exulting balloon floating away down the street.

34

NORA HOISTED THE
case onto the sofa and undid the straps. Scuffed and battered, variously darkened by stains, the suitcase appeared to be forty or fifty years old. When Nora finally yanked the zipper home, the top yawned upward several inches, the mass of pages beneath it expanding as if taking a deep breath.

Thousands of pages of different sizes, colors, and styles rose up. Most of these were standard sheets of white typing paper, some of them yellow with age; some of the remainder were standard pages shaded ivory, gray, ocher, baby blue, and pink. The rest, amounting to about a third, consisted of sheets torn from notebooks, hotel stationery, Chancel House invoice and order forms used on their blank sides, and the sort of notepaper that is decorated with drawings of dogs and horses.

Where could she hide this monstrosity? It would probably fit under the bed. She knelt to get her arms under the bottom of the case, lifted it off the sofa, and staggered backwards, barely able to see over the top. A faint odor of dust and mothballs hung about the weight of paper and leather in her arms.

The first sheet floated along in front of her and resolved itself into a title page which had never managed to make up its mind. Over the years Daisy had considered an ever-growing number of titles, adding new inspirations without rejecting the old ones.

In the bedroom Nora cautiously made her way toward the couch, then bent down to lower the case onto an outflung leg of a pair of jeans and a blouse she had been intending to iron. Holding her breath, she put one hand on top of the suitcase while with the other she tugged the jeans to one side, the blouse to the other. Then she sat beside it. She looked at it for a moment, regretting that she had ever offered to read this unwieldy epic, then grasped it front and back and lowered it to the floor. Yes, it might just, it probably would, fit under the bed.

Nora regarded the bright double window in the wall to her left. She stood up to raise the bottom panes as far as they would go and returned to the couch. She looked down at the untidy stack of pages at her feet, sighed, picked up sixty or seventy pages, turned over the title, or nontitle, page, and read the dedication. Typed on a yellowing sheet with the letterhead of the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, complete with an idealized front elevation of the building, it read:
For the only person who has ever given me the encour
agement necessary to any writer, she who alone has been my com
panion and without whose support I would long ago have abandoned this endeavor, myself.

On the next page, also liberated from the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, was an epigraph attributed to Wolf J. Flywheel.
The world is populated by ingrates, morons, assholes, and those beneath them.

Nora began to enjoy herself.

PART ONE: How the Bastards Took Over.

She began reading the first chapter. Through a maze of crossed-out lines, arrows to phrases in the margins, and word substitutions, she followed the murky actions of Clementine and Adelbert Poison, who lived in a decrepit gothic mansion called The Ivy in the town of Westfall. A painter whose former beauty still shone through the weight she had put on during the course of an unhappy marriage, Clementine drank a bit, wept a bit, pondered suicide, and had a peculiarly ironic, distant relationship with her son, Egbert. Adelbert made and lost millions playing with the greater millions left him by his tyrannical father, Archibald Poison, and seduced waitresses, secretaries, cleaning women, and the Avon Lady. When he was home, Adelbert liked to sit on his rotting terrace scanning Long Island Sound through a telescope for sinking sailboats and drowning swimmers. Egbert was a boneless noodle who spent most of his time in bed. Some vague but nasty secret, possibly several vague but nasty secrets, fouled the air.

When she reached the end of the first chapter, Nora looked up and realized that she had been reading for half an hour. Davey had still not returned. She looked back at the page, the last line of which was
“You know very well that I never wished to reclaim Egbert,” said Adelbert.
Reclaim him? Egbert did resemble something reclaimed, like a lost dog.

The telephone rang. Hoping to hear her husband’s voice, Nora picked it up and said, “Hello?”

“Goody goody, you didn’t say ‘Wrong number,’ so you can talk.” Daisy’s voice, slightly slurred. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s interesting,” Nora said.

“Poop. You have to say more than that.”

“I’m enjoying it, really I am. I like Adelbert and his telescope.”

“Alden used to spend hours looking for topless girls on sailboats. How far are you?”

“The end of chapter one.”

“Umph.” Daisy sounded disappointed. “What did you like best?”

“Well, the tone, I suppose. That sort of black humor. It’s like Charles Addams, in words.”

“That’s because you’ve only read the first
chapter
,” Daisy said. “After that it goes through all kinds of changes. You’ll see, you’re in for a real treat. At least I
hope
you are. Go on, go back to reading. But you really like it so far?”

“A lot,” Nora said.

“Whoop-de-do!” Daisy said. “Stop wasting time talking to me and
surge ahead.
” She hung up.

Nora went back to the couch and began the second chapter. Adelbert stood beside a tall, bony, blond woman and signed a hotel register under a false name. In their room Adelbert ordered the woman to undress.
Honey, can’t we have a drink first?
He said,
Do what I say.
The woman undressed and embraced him. Adelbert pushed her away. The woman said she thought they were friends. Adelbert took a revolver from his jacket pocket and shot her in the forehead.

Nora read the line again.
Adelbert raised the revolver, squeezed the trigger, and put a bullet through her stupid fore
head.
This was a new side of Adelbert. Nora smiled at the idea of Daisy’s turning Alden into a murderer. She was killing off her husband’s conquests.

The telephone rang again. Groaning, Nora got up and answered it by saying, “Daisy, please, you have to give me more time.”

A male voice asked, “Who’s Daisy?”

“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “I thought you were someone else.”

“Obviously. I hope she gives you all the time you need, whoever she is.”

“Holly,” Nora said. “Chief Fenn, I mean. How embarrassing. I’m glad you called, actually. You must have some news.”

“It’s Holly, and the reason I’m calling is that we don’t have any news yet. We finally got Mrs. Weil’s doctor off the golf course, and he shot her full of sedatives and put her in Norwalk Hospital. According to him, the earliest we can get a straight story out of her is probably Monday morning. I thought I’d pass that along, so you can relax for one night, anyhow.”

She thanked him and said, “I guess if I’m going to call you Holly, you ought to start calling me Nora.”

“I already do,” he said. “I’ll be in touch Monday morning around nine, ten at the latest.”

A wave of relief loosened the muscles in Nora’s back. Holly Fenn assumed her innocent of whatever had happened to Natalie, that sow. Holly Fenn wanted to
clear things up.

She returned to Daisy’s epic. Adelbert parked in front of his crumbling mansion and went inside to pull Egbert out of bed. Egbert got off the floor, crawled back into bed, and pulled the covers over his head. Adelbert went downstairs to order a cringing servant to bring a six-to-one martini to the library. By the time the servant appeared with his drink, Adelbert was deep into a volume called
The History of the Poison Family in America.

A new chapter, apparently from a much older version of the novel, began. On yellowed pages, the letters rose above and sank beneath the level of the lines, every
e
tilting leftwards, every
o
a bullet hole. After a battle with the style, far more congested than that of the first two chapters, Nora saw that Adelbert was reading about the history of his father during the period immediately after the birth of Egbert. A secret Nazi sympathizer, Archibald had made millions by investing in German armament concerns and was presently diverted from his covert attempts to consolidate a group of right-wing millionaires into a Fascist movement by a maddening personal problem. After rereading several pages three times over, Nora gathered that Adelbert and Clementine had perhaps produced the grandson Archibald passionately desired. Either the child had died or they had put him up for adoption. Archibald’s tirades, lengthily represented, had not convinced them to repair the loss. When his orders and ultimatums came to nothing, Archibald informed his son that he would be cut out of his will if he did not provide an heir.

All of this lay half hidden beneath a furious explosion of exclamation points, tangled grammar, and backwards sentences. Archibald’s fantasies about American Fascism clouded whole pages with descriptions of Nazi uniforms and other regalia. Hitler appeared, confusingly. She could not be certain if the new child had been reclaimed, adopted, or even resurrected.

Nora turned to a page typed on a sheet of Ritz-Carlton stationery and skimmed through three paragraphs before the first two sentences chimed in her head. She went back and reread them and then reread the sentences again.
Adelbert’s shoes were crosshatched with scuff marks. Indeed, Adelbert’s were not the shoes of a fastidious man, and such secret stains and stinks per
meated his entire character.

“Oh, my God,” Nora said. “It was Daisy.”