The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  Davey nodded slowly, as if trying to decide if he agreed with his father.

  Alden fixed Nora with a glance and took a sip of wine. “Planning something with Daisy?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Davey flicked his hair out of his eyes and looked from Nora to his father and back again.

  “Call it an impression.”

  “I’d like to spend more time with her. Go shopping, have lunch someday, things like that.” Alden’s gaze made her feel as though she were lying to a superior.

  “Terrific,” Alden said, and Davey relaxed back into his chair. “I mean it. Nice thought, my two girls having fun together.”

  “Mom’s been working hard?”

  “Well, if you ask me, something’s going on up there.” He looked at Nora in an almost conspiratorial fashion. “Was that your impression, Nora?”

  “I didn’t see her working, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ah, Daisy’s like Jane Austen” she hides all the evidence. When she was writing her first two books, I never even saw her at the typewriter. To tell you the truth, sometimes this voice in my head would whisper, What if she’s just making it all up? Then one day a box came from one of my competitors, and she whisked it away into her studio and came back out and handed me a book! Year after that, the same thing happened all over again. So I just let her do her thing. Hell, Davey, you know. You grew up in this crazy system.”

  Davey nodded and looked across the table as if he, too, wondered whether Nora possessed secret information.

  “All my life, I’ve dealt with writers, and they’re great—some writers anyhow—but I never understood what they do or how they do it. Hell, I don’t think even they know how they do it. Writers are like babies. They scream and cry and bug the hell out of you, and then they produce this great big crap and you tell them how great it is.” He laughed, delighted with himself.

  “Does that go for Hugo Driver, too? Was he one of the screaming babies?”

  Davey said, “Nora—”

  “Sure he was. The difference with Driver was, everybody thought his dumps smelled better than the other brats’.” Alden no longer seemed so delighted with his metaphor.

  “Daisy said you met him a couple of times. What was he like?”

  “How should I know? I was a kid.”

  “But you must have had some impression. He was your father’s most important author. He even stayed in this house.”

  “Well, at least now I know what you and Daisy were talking about up there.”

  She ignored this remark. “In fact, Driver was responsible for—”

  “Driver wrote a book. Thousands of people write books every year. His happened to be successful. If it hadn’t been Driver, it would have been someone else.” He struggled for an air of neutral authority. “You have a lot to learn about publishing. I say that respectfully, Nora.”

  “Really.”

  Davey was combing his hair off his forehead with his fingers. “What you say is true, but—”

  His father froze him with a look.

  “But it was a classic collaboration,” Davey continued. “The synergy was unbelievable.”

  “I’m too old for synergy,” Alden said.

  “You never told me what you thought of him personally.”

  “Personally I thought he was an acquaintance of my father’s.”

  “That’s all?”

  Alden shook his head. “He was this unimpressive little guy in a loud tweed jacket. He thought he looked like the Prince of Wales, but actually he looked like a pickpocket.”

  Davey seemed too shocked to speak, and Alden went on. “Hey, I always thought the Prince of Wales looked like a pickpocket, too. Driver was a very talented writer. What I thought of him when I was a little boy doesn’t matter. What kind of guy he was doesn’t matter either.”

  “Hugo Driver was a great writer.” Davey uttered this sentence to his plate.

  “No argument here.”

  “He was.”

  Alden smiled meaninglessly, inserted another section of lobster into his mouth, and followed it with a swallow of wine. Davey vibrated with suppressed resentment. Alden said, “You know my rule: a great publisher never reads his own books. Gets in the way of your judgment. While we’re on this subject, do we have anything for our friend Leland Dart?”

  This was the most exalted of their lawyers, the partner of Leo Morris in the firm of Dart, Morris.

  Davey said he was working on it.

  “To be truthful, I wonder if our friend Leland might be playing both ends against the middle.”

  “Does this have something to do with the Driver estate?” Nora asked.

  “Please, Nora,” Davey said. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Did I just become invisible?”

  “You know what’s interesting about Leland Dart?” Alden asked, clearly feeling the obligation to rescue the conversation. “Apart from his utter magnificence, and all that? His relationship with his son. I don’t get it. Do you get it? I mean Dick—I sort of understood what happened with the older one, Petey, but Dick just baffles me. Does that guy actually do anything?”

  Davey was laughing now. “I don’t think he does, no. We met him a month or two ago, remember, Nora? At Gilhoolie’s, right after it opened.”

  Nora did remember, and the memory of the appalling person named Dick Dart could now amuse her, too. Dart had been two years behind Davey at the Academy. She had been introduced to him at the bar of a restaurant which had replaced a mediocre pizza parlor in the Waldbaum’s shopping center. Men and women in their twenties and thirties had crowded the long bar separating the door from the dining room, and the menus in plastic cases on the red-checked tables advertised drinks like Mudslides and Long Island Iced Teas. As she and Davey had passed through the crowd, a tall, rather fey-looking man had turned to Davey, dropped a hand on his arm, and addressed him with an odd mixture of arrogance and diffidence. He wore a nice, slightly rumpled suit, his tie had been yanked down, and his fair hair drooped over his forehead. He appeared to have consumed more than a sufficient number of Mudslides. He had said something like I suppose you’re going to pretend that you don’t remember our old nighttime journeys anymore.

  During Davey’s denial, the man had tilted back his head and peered from one Chancel to the other in a way that suggested they made an amusing spectacle. Nora had endured ironic compliments to her “valiant” face and “lovely” hair. After telling Davey that he should come around by himself some night to talk about the wild rides they’d enjoyed together, Dart had released them, but not before adding that he adored Nora’s scent. Nora had not been wearing a scent. Once they reached their table, Nora had said that she’d make Davey sleep in the garage if he ever had anything to do with that languid jerk. Give me a break, Davey had said, Dart’s trying to get in your pants. He gets it all from old Peter O’Toole movies. More like old George Sanders movies, Nora answered, wondering if anyone ever got laid by pretending to despise the person he wanted to seduce.

  Midway through the tasteless meal, Nora had looked up at the bar and seen Dart wink at her. She had asked Davey what his old pal did for a living, and Davey had offered the surprising information that Dick was an attorney in his father’s firm.

  Now Davey said to his father what he had explained to Nora at Gilhoolie’s, that Dick Dart lived off the crumbs that fell from the tables of Dart, Morris’s wealthier clients” he took elderly widows to lunch in slow-moving French restaurants and assured them that Leland Dart was preserving their estates from the depredations of a socialist federal government.

  “Why does he stay on?”

  “He probably likes the lunches,” Davey said. “And I suppose he expects to inherit the firm.”

  “Don’t put any money on it,” Alden said. Nora felt a chill wind so clearly that it might have blown in off the Sound. “Old Leland is too smart for that. He’s been the back-room boy in Republican politics in this state since the days of Ernest Forrest Ern
est, and he’s not going to let that kid anywhere near the rudder of Dart, Morris. You watch. When Leland steps down, he’ll tell Dick he needs more seasoning and pull in a distinguished old fraud just like himself.”

  “Why do you want Davey to know that?” asked Nora.

  “So he’ll understand our esteemed legal firm,” Alden said.

  “Maybe Leland’s wife will have her own ideas about what happens to Dick,” Nora said.

  Alden grinned luxuriantly. “Leland’s wife, well. I wonder what that lady makes of her son going around romancing the same women her husband seduced forty years ago. Leland took them to bed to get their legal business, and Dick sweet-talks them to keep it. Do you suppose our boy Dick climbs into bed with them, the same way his daddy used to do? It’d be a strange boy who did that, wouldn’t you think?”

  Davey stared out at the Sound without speaking.

  “I suppose you think the women are grateful,” said Nora.

  “Maybe the first time,” Alden said. “I don’t imagine Dick gives them much to be grateful for.”

  “We’ll never know,” Davey said, smiling strangely toward the Sound.

  Alden checked the empty places as if for leftover bits of lobster. “Are we all finished?”

  Davey nodded, and Alden glanced up at Jeffrey, who drifted sideways and opened the door. Nora thanked him as she walked past, but Jeffrey pretended not to hear. A few minutes later, Nora sat in Davey’s little red Audi, holding a Mason jar of homemade mayonnaise as he drove from Mount Avenue into Westerholm’s newer, less elegant interior.

  10

  “ARE YOU UPSET?” she asked. Davey had traveled the entire mile and a half of Churchill Lane without speaking.

  It was a question she asked often during their marriage, and the answers she received, while not evasive, were never straightforward. As with many men, Davey’s feelings frequently came without labels.

  “I don’t know,” he said, which was better than a denial.

  “Were you surprised by what your father said?”

  He looked at her warily for about a quarter of a second. “If I was surprised by anybody, it was you.”

  “Why?”

  “My father gets a kick out of exaggerating his point of view. That doesn’t mean he should be attacked.”

  “You think I attacked him?”

  “Didn’t you say he was disgusting? That he cheapened every-thing?”

  “I was criticizing his ideas, not him. Besides, he enjoyed it. Alden gets a kick out of verbal brawls.”

  “The man is about to be seventy-five. I think he deserves more respect, especially from someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the publishing business. Not to mention the fact that he’s my father.”

  The light at the Post Road turned green, and Davey pulled away from the oaks beside the stone bridge at the end of Churchill Lane. Either because no traffic came toward them or because he had forgotten to do it, he did not signal the turn that would take them down the Post Road and home. Then she realized that he had not signaled a turn because he did not intend to take the Post Road.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to see something,” he said. Evidently he did not intend to tell her what it was.

  “This might come as a surprise to you, but I thought your father was attacking me.”

  “Nothing he said was personal. You’re the one who was personal.”

  Nora silently cataloged the ways in which she had felt attacked by Alden Chancel and selected the safest. “He loves talking about my age. Alden always thought I was too old for you.”

  “He never said anything about your age.”

  “He said I was the oldest person at the table.”

  “For God’s sake, Nora, he was being playful. And right then, he was giving you a compliment, if you didn’t notice. In fact, he complimented you about a hundred times.”

  “He was flirting with me, and I hate it. He uses it as a way to put people down.”

  “That’s crazy. People in his generation all give out these heavy-handed compliments. They think it’s like offering a woman a bouquet of flowers.”

  “I know,” Nora said, “but that’s what’s crazy.”

  Davey shook his head. Nora leaned back in the seat and watched the splendid houses go by. Alden had been right about one thing: in front of every estate stood a metal plaque bearing the name of a security company. Many promised an ARMED RESPONSE.

  He gave her a brief, flat glare. “One more thing. I shouldn’t have to say this to you, but apparently I do.”

  She waited.

  “What my mother does up in her studio is her business. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, Nora.” Another angry glare. “Just in case you didn’t get what Dad was telling you. Pretty damn tactfully, too, I thought.”

  More dismayed than she wished to appear, Nora inhaled and slowly released her breath as she worked out a response. “First of all, Davey, I wasn’t interfering with her. She was happy to see me, and I enjoyed being with her.” In Davey’s answering glance she saw that he wanted to believe this. “In fact, it was like being with a completely different person than who she was at lunch. She was having a good time. She was funny.”

  “Okay, that’s nice. But I really don’t want you to wind up making her feel worse than she already does.”

  For a moment, Nora looked at him without speaking. “You don’t think she does any work up there, do you? Neither does your father. Both of you think she’s been faking it for years, and you go along because you want to protect her, or something like that.”

  “Or something like that.” Some of his earlier bitterness put an edge on his voice. “Ever hear the expression ‘Don’t rock the boat’?” He glanced over at her with an unhappy mockery in his eyes. “You believe she goes up there to work? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think she’s writing something, yes.”

  He groaned. “I’m sure that’s nice for both of you.”

  “Wouldn’t you like your mother and me to be, maybe not friends, but more like friends than we are now?”

  “She never had friends.” Davey thought for a second. “I suppose she was friends, as close to it as she could get, with the Cup Bearer. Then she quit, and that was that. I was devastated. I didn’t think she’d ever leave. I probably thought Helen Day was my real mother. The other one certainly didn’t spend much time with me.”

  “I wish you could have seen the way she was with me. Sort of . . . lighthearted.”

  “Sort of drunk,” Davey said. “Surprise, surprise.” He sighed, so sadly that Nora wanted to put her arms around him. “For which, of course, she has a very good reason.”

  Alden, Nora thought, but Davey would never blame the great publisher for his mother’s condition. She tilted her head and quizzed him with her eyes.

  “The other one. The one before me, the one who died. It’s obvious.”

  “Oh, yes.” Nora nodded, suddenly seeing Davey, as she had a hundred times, seated in the living room under a lamp from Michaelman’s with Night Journey in his hands, staring into pages he read and reread because, no less than the killers Leonard Gimmel and Teddy Brunhoven, in them he found the code to his own life.

  “You think about that a lot, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He checked to see if she was criticizing him. “Kind of—thinking about it without thinking about it, I guess.”

  She nodded but did not speak. For a moment Davey seemed on the verge of saying more. Then his mouth closed, his eyes changed, and the moment was over.

  The Audi pulled up at a stop sign before a cluster of trees overgrown with vines that all but obscured the street sign. Then across the street a gray Mercedes sedan rolled toward the intersection, and as Davey flicked on the turn signal before pressing the accelerator and cranking the wheel to the left, the name of the street chimed in her head. He had taken them to Redcoat Road, and what he wanted to see was the house in which the wolf had taken Natalie
Weil’s life and caused her body to disappear.

  11

  BESIDE NATALIE’S DRIVE was a metal post supporting a bright blue plaque bearing the name of a local security firm more expensive than the one the Chancels had chosen. Natalie had taken account of the similarities between herself and the first victims and spent a lot of money for state-of-the-art protection.

  Davey left the car and walked up along the grassy verge of Redcoat Road toward the driveway. Nora got out and followed him. She regretted the Bloody Mary and the single glass of wine she’d taken at lunch. The August light stung her eyes. Davey stood facing Natalie’s house from the end of the driveway, his trousers almost brushing the security system plaque.

  Set far back from the road, the house looked out over a front yard darkened by the shadows of oaks and maples standing between grassy humps and granite boulders. Yellow crime scene tape looped through the trees and sealed the front door. A black-and-white Westerholm police car and an anonymous-looking blue sedan were parked near the garage doors.

  “Is there some reason you wanted to come here?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He glanced down at her, then looked back toward the house. Twenty years ago it had been painted the peculiar depthless red-brown of information booths in national parks. Their own house was the same shade of brown, though its paint had not yet begun to flake. In design also Natalie’s house replicated theirs, with its blunt facade and row of windows marching beneath the roof.

  A white face above a dark uniform leaned toward a window in the bedroom over the garage.

  “That cop’s in the room where she was killed,” Davey said. He started walking up the driveway.

  The face retreated from the window. Davey came to the point where the yellow tape wound around a maple beside the drive, and continued in a straight line toward the house and garage. He put out his hand and leaned against the maple.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m trying to help you.” The policeman came up to the living room window and stared out at them. He put his hands on his hips and then swung away from the window.