Authors: Peter Straub

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The Hellfire Club (57 page)

BOOK: The Hellfire Club

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Nora’s third errand brought her to Redcoat Road. Natalie Weil’s house was still in need of a fresh paint job, but the crime scene tapes had been removed. She pulled up in front of the garage door, walked up the path to Natalie’s front door, and pressed the bell. A friendly female voice called out, and footsteps ran down the stairs to the door. As soon as Natalie saw her, she immediately tried to slam the door, but Nora thrust herself inside and backed Natalie toward the stairs. “I want to talk to you,” she said.

“I suppose you do,” Natalie said. She seemed aggrieved and reluctant, which did not displease Nora. “I know how you feel, but all of a sudden three new listings showed up, and I have to show my boss I can still do my job, besides which there’s a little problem with the police, some crap about drugs, but that won’t stick, so what the hell, right? Come upstairs and have a beer.”

“You’re calmer than I expected,” Nora said.

“You win some, you lose some. I’ll have a beer, even if you’re not going to.”

Nora went up the stairs and waited for Natalie. Despite her Westerholm weekend uniform of a faded denim shirt and khaki shorts, she looked wary and defensive, and though not as ancient as she had appeared on Barbara Widdoes’s couch, older than Nora remembered her. She pulled her refrigerator open, took out a bottle of Corona, and popped the cap. “Come on in, sit down, we’ve known each other a long time, what’s a little husband fucking between old friends? I can’t blame you for being mad at me, but it was hardly a big deal, if you want to know the truth.”

“Yes,” Nora said. “I do.” She came into the kitchen and sat opposite Natalie at her kitchen table. “That’s exactly what I want to know.”

“Join the crowd.” Natalie drank from the beer bottle and gently put it down. Her eyes looked bruised. “Hey, at least for the time being, I’m still in the real estate business. You know what that means? We sell dreams. Truth is what you say it is. Right?”

“A lot of people think so,” Nora said. The handcuff photo-graphs had been taken off the corkboard, and the refrigerator magnets had been thrown away.

Natalie took another swallow of Corona. “How do you like being famous? Is it neat? I wouldn’t mind being famous.”

“It isn’t neat.”

“But you killed Dick Dart. You wasted the bastard.” The beer in front of Natalie was not her first.

“So they say,” Nora answered.

Natalie toasted her with the Corona bottle. “You and Davey all right?”

“He moved back in with his father and I’m leaving town. So, yeah, we’re probably all right.”

“God, he’s going back to Alden.” Natalie twisted her mouth into a half smile. “I heard Daisy took off. About time. That guy is bad news, and he always was. I mean, you make mistakes, but Alden was about the worst mistake I ever made. Well, let’s drop that subject.”

“Let’s not,” Nora said. “After all, you and Alden caused me a lot of trouble. I was about to be arrested when the wonderful Dick Dart abducted me.”

“Nobody’s perfect. For what it’s worth, Nora, I’m sorry.” Natalie was having trouble looking at her. “Sometimes you do things for the wrong reasons. It’s a lousy deal, you know? You get strapped, you agree to stuff you’d never do otherwise. I never wanted to get you into trouble—shit, I
like
you. I always liked you. The whole thing was Alden’s idea in the first place. It was just business.”

“Bid’ness is bid’ness,” Nora said.

Natalie made a wry face. “Know how many houses sold here last year? Exactly nineteen. And not precisely at my end of the market, no siree, I get the top of the bottom end, like your place, no offense, but the office doesn’t give me the two-million-dollar properties.” She swallowed more beer and put down the bottle. “Alden’s a jerk, but he’s willing to put cash on the table, I’ll say that for him. And I got you off the hook, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Nora said. “But you almost got me arrested for kidnapping.”

Natalie took another swallow of Corona. “It was never supposed to get that far, Nora. He just wanted to jerk Davey around, that’s all. He was pissed off. We didn’t know that whole thing with Dick Dart was going to happen, who could know that?”

“Tell me about the blood in your bedroom.”

Natalie smiled at her like a conspirator. “One of Alden’s brilliant ideas. He wanted to get everybody worked up, tie my thing into the murders. Stir the pot, you know? He got this pig blood from a butcher and wrecked my bedroom. But you’re okay now, aren’t you? I went through my act, it’s all over, what’s the difference?”

“If you don’t know, I’ll never be able to explain it to you,” Nora said.

Natalie turned her head away.

“Natalie,” Nora said, and Natalie looked at her again. “You disgust me. Alden
bought
you, and you ruined my life.”

“You didn’t like your life anyhow. How could you, married to that baby?”

“How much did he pay you?” Nora asked.

“Not nearly enough,” Natalie said. “Considering what’s probably going to happen to me. I’d like you to leave my house, if you don’t mind. I think we’re done. If you ask me, I did you a favor. You came out of this deal a lot better than I did.”

“I didn’t volunteer,” Nora said. “I was drafted.”

An unfamiliar car was nosed in toward Nora’s garage door, and thinking it belonged to yet another reporter or to one of the unknown men who had proposed to her, she nearly drove on to the end of Crooked Mile Road until she saw Holly Fenn get out of the car and walk toward her front door. Nora turned into her drive-way, and Fenn waved at her and started moving slowly back to the garage. She pulled in beside his car, got out, and walked toward him. He needed a haircut, he was wearing the ugliest necktie she had ever seen, and there were weary bags under his eyes. He looked great.

“So there you are,” he said. “I called a couple of times, but all I got was your machine.”

“I’m not answering my phone all that much.”

“I bet. Anyhow, I wanted to see you, so I thought I’d take a chance and come by.” He tucked in his chin, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and looked at her from under his eyebrows. A spark of feeling jumped between them. “I have something to tell you, but mainly I just wanted to see how you were.”

“How am I?”

“Holding up pretty good, I’d say. I like your new hair. Cute.”

“Thanks, but you’re lying. You liked it better the old way. I did, too. I’m going to let it grow out.”

Fenn nodded slowly, as if agreeing with her on a matter of great importance. “Good. You getting your life back together okay?”

“I’m taking it apart pretty well, so I guess I am, yes. It isn’t the same life, that’s all. Holly, would you like a cup of coffee or something?”

“Wish I could. I have to be somewhere in five minutes. But I thought you ought to know something I learned about that old nursery school on the South Post Road. It occurred to me that I didn’t know who held the lease on that building, so I checked. The lease is made out to a guy in New York named Gerald Ambrose. I called him up, and he told me that a citizen here in Westerholm rented it from him for the rest of the summer.”

“Ah,” Nora said. “You’re a good cop, Holly.”

“Yeah, maybe, but I turn out to be a little on the slow side. If I’d checked this out before, I could have saved you a lot of trouble.”

She smiled at him. “I don’t blame you, Holly. Who rented the building?”

He smiled back. “Do I get the feeling you already know, or am I making that up?”

“I have an idea, but tell me.”

“The citizen who rented the building is a big-time publisher who told Ambrose he needed temporary storage for some overstock. Are you on good terms with your father-in-law?”

“My soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law and I have a long history of mutual loathing.” She remembered Alden Chancel stroking her arm and saying
I’d like to get to know you better.
“Holly, if you stop in on Natalie Weil, she’ll probably tell you an interesting story. I just saw her, and she’s sort of killing time until her world caves in.”

Fenn wiped his hand over his sturdy mustache and nodded, taking in both the remark and Nora. “Your friend put on a pretty good show.”

“She even fooled Slim and Slam.”

Fenn’s eyes crinkled. “I gather some money changed hands.”

“Not enough, according to Natalie.”

Fenn grinned at the driveway, marveling at the ingenuity of the human capacity for committing serious error. “And you called me a good cop.”

“I think you’re pretty good all the way around,” Nora said. “You stuck by me.”

“Yeah, well, I tried.” He gave her a rueful glance which managed to encompass compassion for what she had endured and anger at having been unable to spare her from it. “Anyhow,” he said, “I better get going.”

“If you must.” She walked him to his car.

“Look, maybe this is none of my business, but did you say that you were leaving your husband?”

“I already left.”

Fenn looked away. “Are you going to stay in town?”

“I think I’ll go to Northampton for a while. I can work with a woman who runs a catering business for a couple of weeks. I want to get away from the telephone and clear my head. After that, who knows?”

Fenn nodded his big, shaggy head, taking this in. “After I’m through with Mrs. Weil and your soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, do you suppose I could come back here and take you out for coffee or something?”

“Holly, are you asking me for a date?”

“I’m too old for dates,” he said.

“Me, too. So come back later and we won’t have a date, we’ll just knock around together. I want to hear about your encounter with Alden. You can tell me all your favorite war stories.”

Fenn smiled at her with every part of his face. “And I promise not to ask to hear yours.”

“Or tell me any lies.”

“I wouldn’t know how to lie to you.”

“Then it’s a deal,” Nora said.

“Well, okay.” He lowered himself into his car, winked at her through the windshield, and backed away from the garage. A few seconds later, he was gone.

More praise for
THE HELLFIRE CLUB

“
The Hellfire Club
scares you bad, and that’s good.”

—
New York Daily News

“A complex literary puzzle brimming with old-fashioned clues and red herrings.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“Intricately layered, fiendishly complex.”

—
The Miami Herald

“
The Hellfire Club
is one hell of a novel. Peter Straub has done a brilliant job in creating two unforgettable characters: a terrific dame and a hair-raising monster. Wow, did I lose sleep over this one!”

—S
USAN
I
SAACS

“Peter Straub is a national treasure.”

—L
AWRENCE
B
LOCK

“
The Hellfire Club
is a generous novel, rich in character, voluptuous in storytelling, lit by sympathy and a dangerous humor.”

—D
ONALD
E. W
ESTLAKE

“This is the scariest, goriest, creepiest, sickest, most twisted novel I’ve read in over ten years. It made me afraid to go to sleep at night and I loved every word—loved it, loved it, loved it.”

—C
AROLYN
S
EE

“Straub’s sure-to-be-a-bestseller is anything but tame, and aficionados will enjoy its intricacy.”

—
Detroit News

“[A] richly nuanced thriller . . . Dart is a memorable villain, funny, bold, charming. . . . Straub’s own characters are ‘colorful and involved, full of danger, heroism and betrayal’—as is this supple exciting book.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Unforgettable.”

—
The Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star

“Gripping . . . So scary and yet so riveting the reader is torn between closing the cover or turning the page.”

—
The Anniston Star

“Chilling . . . At the center of the story is one of the most wonderfully realized female characters that I have encountered in a long time.”

—
Wichita Eagle

“Riveting . . . [Straub] has mined the darkest regions of the psyche to come up with Dick Dart, who, so candid and persistent in his evil, marks a new genus of villain, one for whom terms like
satanic
,
depraved
, and
malevolent
seem saccharine. This is a harrowing, spellbinding novel.”

—B
RADFORD
M
ORROW

“[A] page-turner of a book . . . Straub can write circles around most of the authors topping bestseller lists these days.”

—
Booklist

“Peter Straub is a fine storyteller.”

—
The Washington Post

By Peter Straub:

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UNDER VENUS

JULIA

IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW

GHOST STORY