The Hellfire Club (38 page)

Nora stared at him. Then she gave a wild look across the table at Jeffrey, who had evidently seen where all this was going sometime before. “You think Lincoln Chancel murdered your father and Creeley Monk. And Merrick Favor and Austryn Fain, too.”

“I think Chancel pushed him out of the window and tore his manuscript to bits, just like Favor’s.”

“Maybe this is obvious, but why would he do it?”

“I suppose he had something to hide,” said Tidy.

“The real authorship of
Night Journey.
”

“Of course,” said Jeffrey. “Monk knew that Driver was a thief. He told Merrick Favor, and both your father and Fain overheard, but nobody believed him. Later Favor told them both that Monk was right. He was convinced he’d seen Driver steal something from Katherine Mannheim. Everybody knew that Driver was having trouble with whatever he was writing, but six months later he produces this stupendous book, and gives the copyright to Chancel House.”

“There you are,” Tidy said. “Chancel was as ruthless with Driver as with everyone else. All he had to take care of was the possibility that Katherine Mannheim had spoken about her work to one of the other guests.”

“He made these confidential appointments,” Nora said, “and canceled them. Then he showed up on their doorsteps and waited for them to turn their backs.”

For a second, the three people in the room at the top of the library said nothing.

“Now what?” Nora asked.

“It seems the rest is up to you,” said Tidy.

72

“WHAT AM I
supposed to do?” Nora asked. “I can’t prove that Davey’s grandfather murdered four people fifty-five years ago. It makes sense to Everett Tidy and you and me, but who else is going to believe all this?”

“I think Ev meant that you should continue what you’re already doing.” The sky was still bright, and vibrant green fields lay on either side of the long, straight road to Northampton. Warm wind streamed into Nora’s face and ruffled her short hair while seeming to slip past Jeffrey without touching him.

“What am I doing?”

“Taking one step after another.”

“Brilliant. After all that, do you think that Katherine Mannheim wrote
Night Journey
?”

“I think it’s more likely than I did this morning.”

“Why is it so important for me to meet your mother?”

“I always forget how pretty this part of Massachusetts is.”

He would not be drawn. “All right. Let’s try another subject. What did your father do?”

“He was a cook, or maybe I should say chef. My whole family, on that side anyhow, were all great cooks. My great-grandfather was the head chef at the Grand Palazzo della Fonte in Rome. His brother was the head chef at the Excelsior. Despite the handicap of not being Italian, my mother was as good as all the rest of them. Before my father died, they were going to open a restaurant. She still loves it, in fact.”

“And now she keeps herself busy cooking for the Trustees’ Banquet and the President’s Reception.”

Jeffrey gave her a sidelong look.

“Your aunt Sabina said something about it.”

“You have a good memory.”

“Is Sabina your mother’s sister?”

Jeffrey tugged the Eton cap an eighth of an inch lower on his forehead. For the first time, the breeze buffeting Nora seemed also to touch him.

“I see. That’s the end of the line. Can you at least tell me about Paddi?”

“I can tell you part of it, but the rest will have to wait. You remember how Sabina feels about the Chancels. She blames them for a lot of things, but the main one is what happened to her daughter. She was a nice girl before she went off the tracks. Maybe she was a little like me, and that was why I liked her. Patty, which was her name then, was a lot younger than I, but I always enjoyed her company. Of course, I was gone a lot, so I wasn’t around when she discovered
Night Journey.
The book took over her life. She changed the spelling of her name. Sometimes she pretended to be other characters in the book. I guess Patty got deeper and deeper into her obsession, to the point where she would disappear from home to visit other Driver people. There was a lot of drug abuse, fights at home, her entire personality changed, she wouldn’t spend time with anyone who wasn’t capable of spending day after day talking about nothing but Driver and the book, and when she was sixteen she ran away.

“One Driver person told her about another, and she floated through this seedy underworld devoted to Pippin Little, living in Driver houses. These people spend their lives acting out scenes in the book. Nobody knew where she was. A couple of years later, she managed to fake her way into the Rhode Island School of Design, I can’t imagine how, and Sabina sent her money, but Patty refused to see her. She was there maybe a year, then she vanished again. Sabina got one postcard from London. She was in another art school and living in another Driver house. Lots of drugs. Then she moved to California—same situation—and wound up in New York, moving back and forth between the East Village and Chinatown, completely submerged in this crazy Driver world. That must have been when she zeroed in on Davey. Anyhow, she took off again, and nobody knew where she was until she died of a heroin overdose in Amsterdam and the police got in touch with Sabina.”

There had been less decoration in Davey’s story than Nora had thought. “Thanks for telling me,” she said. “But I still don’t understand why she was so fixated on the manuscript and Katherine Mannheim.”

“Stop asking questions, and tell me about your childhood or how you met Davey. Tell me what you think of Westerholm.” He would go no further.

“I can’t stand Westerholm, I met Davey in a Village bar called Chumley’s, and my father used to take me on fishing trips. Jeffrey, where am I going to sleep tonight?”

“There’s a nice old hotel in Northampton. You can stay there as long as you like.”

A few minutes later they passed beneath the highway and came into Northampton from the east. Rows of shops and grocery stores lined the street. At the bottom of a hill, the buildings became taller and more substantial, and the MG moved slowly amid a lot of other cars. They passed beneath a railway bridge, and young people moved along the broad sidewalks and stood in clusters at the immense intersections. Jeffrey pointed down a wide, curving street at the Northampton Hotel, an imposing brown pile with a flowery terrace before a glassy new addition.

“When we’re all through at my mother’s place, I’ll bring you back, get you a room. Over the next couple of days we can talk about what you ought to do. We can probably have lunch and dinner together most of the time, if you like.”

“This great cook doesn’t feed you?”

“My mother isn’t very domestic.”

Nora looked out at pleasant, pretty Main Street with its lampposts and restaurants advertising wood-fired brick oven pizzas, tandoori chicken, and cold cherry soup” at galleries filled with Indian art and imported beads” at the pretty throngs and gatherings of the attractive young, mostly women, strapped into backpacks in their sawed-off jeans and halter tops or T-shirts” and said to herself:
What am I doing here?

“Almost there,” Jeffrey said, and followed a flock of young women on bicycles out of the traffic into a quieter street running alongside a tract like a parkland where dignified oaks grew alongside well-seasoned brick buildings connected by a network of paths. The young women on bicycles swooped down a drive with a Smith College plaque. Jeffrey executed a smooth U-turn in front of a large, two-story, brown clapboard building with a roofed porch wide enough for dances on the front and left side. It looked like a small resort hotel in the Adirondacks. A sign set back from the sidewalk said
HEAVENLY FOOD
&”
CATERING.

Jeffrey turned to her with an apologetic smile. “Just let me go in and prepare her, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

“She doesn’t know I’m coming?”

“It’s better that way.” He opened his door and put one leg out of the car. “Five minutes.”

“Fine.”

Jeffrey got out, closed the door, and leaned on it for a moment, looking down at her. If he had been tempted to say something, he decided not to.

“I won’t run away,” she said. “Go on, Jeffrey.”

He nodded. “Be right back.” He went up the long brick walkway, jumped up the steps, and glanced back at Nora. Then he walked across the porch and opened the front door. Before he went inside, he took off his cap.

Nora leaned back, stretched her legs out before her, and waited. An insect whirred in the grass beneath the sign. Across the street a dog woofed three times, harshly, as if issuing a warning, then fell silent. The air had begun faintly to darken.

After five minutes, Nora looked up at the porch, expecting Jeffrey to come through the door. A few minutes later, she looked up again, but the door remained closed. Suddenly she thought of Davey, at this moment doing something like arranging his compact discs on Jeffrey’s shelves. Poor Davey, locked inside that jail, the Poplars. She got out of the MG and paced up and down the sidewalk. Could she call him? No, of course she couldn’t call him, that was a terrible idea. She looked up at the porch again and felt an electric shock in the pit of her stomach. An extraordinarily beautiful young black woman with a white scarf over her hair was looking back at her from the big window. The young woman turned away from the window and disappeared. A moment later, the door finally opened and Jeffrey emerged onto the porch.

“Is there a problem?” Nora asked.

“Everything’s all right, it’s just sort of hard to get her
attention.
”

“I saw a girl in the window.”

He looked over his shoulder. “I’m surprised you didn’t see a dozen.”

She preceded him up the slightly springy wooden steps and walked across the breadth of the porch to the front door. Jeffrey said, “Here, let me,” and leaned in front of her to pull it open.

Nora walked into a big open space with a computer in front of an enormous calendar on the wall to her right, and a projection-screen television and two worn corduroy sofas on its other side. At the far end a wide arch led into an even larger space where young women in jeans bent over counters and other young women carried pots and brimming colanders to destinations farther within. One of the pot carriers was the striking black woman she had seen in the window. A slender blonde in her mid-twenties who had been watching a cartoon looked up at Nora and said, “Hi!”

“Hello,” Nora said.

“You’re the first woman Jeffrey ever brought here,” the blonde said. “We think that’s cute.”

On the other side of the arch, ten or twelve young women chopped vegetables and folded dumplings on both sides of two butcher-block counters. Copper pots and pans hung from overhead beams. In front of two restaurant ranges, more women, most of them in white jackets and head scarves, attended to simmering pans and bubbling vats. One briskly stirred the contents of a wok. A stainless-steel refrigerator the size of a Mercedes stood beside a table at which two young women were packing containers into an insulated carton. Beyond them, a long window looked out onto an extensive garden where a woman in a blue apron was stripping peas. All the women in the kitchen looked to Nora like graduate students—the way graduate students would look if they were all about twenty-five, slim, and exceptionally attractive. Some of the women at the counters glanced up as Jeffrey led her toward the cluster in front of the nearest range.

Slowly, like the unfolding of a great flower, they parted to reveal at their center a stocky woman in a loose black dress and a mass of necklaces and pendants stirring a thick red sauce with a wooden spoon. Her thick, iron-gray hair had been gathered into a tight bun, and her face was unlined and imposing. She looked at Jeffrey, gave Nora an appraising, black-eyed glance, and turned to the woman Nora had seen at the window. “Maya, you know what to do next, don’t you?”

“Hannah’s mushrooms,
then
the other ones, and then it all goes into the pot with Robin’s veal, five minutes, and bang, out the door.”

“Good.” She slapped her hands together and took two steps away from the range. “Let’s get Sophie doing something useful. How’s the packing going?”

“Almost done with this one,” said one of the girls at the table.

“Maribel, get Sophie to help you carry them out to the van.” A tall, red-haired girl with round horn-rim glasses moved toward the arch. The older woman looked at her watch. “Jeffrey picked a busy day to drop in. We’re doing the Asia Society at nine, and a dinner party in Chesterfield just before that, but I
think
everything is running on schedule.” She made another quick inspection of her troops and turned to Nora. “So here you are, the woman we’ve all been reading about. Jeffrey says you want to talk to me about Katherine Mannheim.”

“Yes,” Nora said. “If you can spare me some of your time.”

“Of course. We’ll get out of here and sit in the front room.” She held out her hand and Nora took it. “Welcome. I gather that you may have to conceal yourself for a time. If you like, you could pitch in here. I can’t give you a room, but you could sleep on a sofa until we find something nicer for you. I can always use another hand, and the company’s enjoyable for the most part.”

“I think I’ll get her a room at the Northampton Hotel,” Jeffrey said.

Jeffrey’s mother had not taken her eyes off Nora. “Do whatever you please, of course, but if you’re at loose ends, you can always pitch in here.”

“Thank you. I’ll remember that.”

“I’d be happy to help the woman who married Davey Chancel.”

Nora looked in surprise at Jeffrey, and his mother said, “I take it that my son left the explanations to me.”

“Would I dare do anything else?” Jeffrey asked.

Sophie and Maribel had paused on their way to the table to help themselves to Swedish meatballs from a steaming platter, and the older woman said, “Pack the van, my little elves.” Chewing, they hurried across the kitchen. “Let’s go to the front room and sit down. I’ve been on my feet all day.”

She gestured toward the sofa where Sophie had sprawled in front of the television. Nora sat, and Jeffrey put his hands in his pockets and watched his mother switch off the set. She placed herself at the end of Nora’s sofa and rested her hands on her knees. “Jeffrey didn’t introduce us, and I gather that you have no idea of who I am, apart from being this person’s mother.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t,” Nora said. “You knew Katherine Mannheim? And you know the Chancels, too?”

“Naturally,” she said. “Katherine was my older sister. I met Lincoln Chancel at Shorelands, and before I knew what was what, he hired me to work for him. I was still there when your husband was just a little boy.”

Nora looked from the older woman to Jeffrey.

Jeffrey cleared his throat. “Mr. Chancel disliked the sound of Italian names.”

“When Mr. Chancel hired me, I was Helen Deodato, but you may have heard of me as Helen Day,” his mother said. “I got so used to it that I still call myself Helen Day. When Alden Chancel and his wife took over the house, they used to call me the Cup Bearer.”