The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “Maybe this is crazy, but do you think that you wanted to come here because of what you were talking about in the car?”

  He gave her an uncertain look.

  “About the other one. The other Davey.”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  Again the Chancel tendency to protect Chancel secrets. The policeman opened the front door and began moving toward them through the shadows on Natalie Weil’s lawn.

  12

  NORA WAS CERTAIN that Davey’s fascination with Night Journey, a novel about a child rescued from death by a figure called the Green Knight, was rooted in his childhood. Once there had been another David Chancel, the first son of Alden and Daisy. Suddenly the infant Davey had died in his crib. He had not been ill, weak, or at risk in any way. He had simply, terribly, died. Lincoln Chancel had saved them by suggesting, perhaps even demanding, an adoption. Lincoln’s insistence on a grandson was a crucial element of the legend Davey had passed on to Nora. An adoptable baby had been found in New Hampshire” Alden and Daisy traveled there, won the child for their own, named him after the first infant, and raised him in the dead boy’s place.

  Davey had worn the dead Davey’s baby clothes, slept in his crib, drooled on his bib, mouthed his rattle, taken formula from his bottle. When he grew old enough, he played with the toys set aside for the ghost baby. As if Lincoln Chancel had foreseen that he would not live to see the child turn four, he had purchased blocks, balls, stuffed bunnies and cats, rocking horses, electric trains, baseball gloves, bicycles in graduated sizes, dozens of board games, and much else besides” on the appropriate birthdays these gifts had been removed from boxes marked DAVEY and ceremoniously presented. Eventually Davey had understood that they were gifts from a dead grandfather to a dead grandson.

  Ever since the night drunken Davey had careered around the living room while declaiming this history, Nora had begun to see him in a way only at first surprising or unsettling. He had always imagined himself under the pitiless scrutiny of a shadow self—imagined that the rightful David Chancel called to him for recognition or rescue.

  13

  THE DETECTIVE SKIRTED a dolphin-colored boulder and came forward, regarding Nora with a combination of official reserve and private concern. She could not imagine how she could have mistaken his blue suit and ornate red necktie for a police uniform. He had a heavy, square head, a disillusioned face, and a thick brown mustache that curved past the ends of his mouth. When he came close enough for her to notice the gray in the Tartar mustache, she could also see that his dark brown eyes were at once serious, annoyed, solicitous, and far down, at bottom, utterly detached, in a way that Nora assumed was reserved for policemen. Some portion of this man reminded her of Dan Harwich, which led her to expect a measure of sympathetic understanding. Physically he was not much like Harwich, being blocky and wide, heavy in the shoulders and gut, a Clydesdale instead of a greyhound.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, which corresponded to her unconscious expectations, and when she nodded, he turned to Davey, saying, “Sir, if you’re just being curious, I’d appreciate your getting this lady and yourself away from here,” which did not.

  “I wanted to see Natalie’s house again,” Davey said. “My name is Davey Chancel, and this is my wife, Nora.”

  Nora waited for the detective to say, I thought you were brother and sister, as some did. Instead he said, “You’re related to the family on Mount Avenue? What’s that place? The Poplars?”

  “I’m their son,” Davey said.

  The man stepped closer and held out a large hand, which Davey took. “Holly Fenn. Chief of Detectives. You knew Mrs. Weil?”

  “She sold us our house.”

  “And you’ve been here before?”

  “Natalie had us over a couple of times,” Nora said, for the sake of including herself in the conversation with Holly Fenn. He was a hod carrier, a peat stomper, as Irish as Matt Curlew. One look at this guy, you knew he was real. He leveled his complicated gaze at her. She cleared her throat.

  “Five times,” Davey said. “Maybe six. Have you found her body yet?”

  Davey’s trait, that which had caused Nora second and third thoughts about the man she had intended to marry, was that he stretched the truth. Davey did not lie in the ordinary sense, for advantage, but as she had eventually seen, for an aesthetic end, to improve reality.

  Davey was still nodding, as if he had gone over their visits and added them up. When Nora added them up for herself, they came out to three. Once for drinks, a week after they started looking at houses” the second time for dinner” the third time when they had dropped in to pick up the keys to the house on Crooked Mile Road.

  “Which is it?” Fenn asked. “A couple of times, or six?”

  “Six,” Davey said. “Don’t you remember, Nora?”

  Nora wondered if Davey had visited Natalie Weil by himself, and then dismissed the thought. “Oh, sure,” she said.

  “When was the last time you were here, Mr. Chancel?”

  “About two weeks ago. We had Mexican food and watched wrestling on TV—right, Nora?”

  “Um.” To avoid looking at the detective, she turned her head toward the house and found that she had not been mistaken after all. The uniformed policeman she had seen earlier stood in the bedroom window, looking out.

  “You were friends of Mrs. Weil’s.”

  “You could say that.”

  “She doesn’t seem to have had a lot of friends.”

  “I think she liked being alone.”

  “Not enough she didn’t. No offense.” Fenn shoved his hands in his pockets and reared back, as if he needed distance to see them clearly. “Mrs. Weil kept good records as far as her job went, made entries of all her appointments and that, but we’re not having much luck with her personal life. Maybe you two can help us out.”

  “Sure, anything,” Davey said.

  “How?” Nora asked.

  “What’s in the jar?”

  Nora looked down at the jar she had forgotten she carried. “Oh!” She laughed. “Mayonnaise. A present.”

  Davey gave her an annoyed look.

  “Can I smell it?”

  Mystified, Nora unscrewed the top and held up the jar. Fenn bent forward, took his hands from his pockets, placed them around the jar, and sniffed. “Yeah, the real thing. Hard to make, mayonnaise. Always wants to separate. Who’s it for?”

  “Us,” she said.

  His hands left the jar. “I wonder if you folks ever met any other friends of Mrs. Weil’s here.”

  He was still looking at Nora, and she shook her head. After a second in which she was tempted to smell the mayonnaise herself, she screwed the top back onto the jar.

  “No, never,” Davey said.

  “Know of any boyfriends? Anyone she went out with?”

  “We don’t know anything about that,” Davey said.

  “Mrs. Chancel? Sometimes women will tell a female friend things they won’t say to her husband.”

  “She used to talk about her ex-husband sometimes. Norm. But he didn’t sound like the kind of guy—”

  “Mr. Weil was with his new wife in their Malibu beach house when your friend was killed. These days he’s a movie producer. We don’t think he had anything to do with this thing.”

  A movie producer in a Malibu beach house was nothing like the man Natalie had described. Nor was Holly Fenn’s manner anything like what Nora thought of as normal police procedure.

  “I guess you don’t have any ideas about what might have happened to your friend.” He was still looking at Nora.

  “Nora doesn’t think she’s dead,” Davey said, pulling another ornament out of the air.

  Nora glanced at Davey, who did not look back. “Well. I don’t know, obviously. Someone got into the house, right?” she said.

  “That’s for sure. She probably knew the guy.” He turned toward the house. “This security system is pretty new. Notice it the last time you were here?”

  “No,” Dav
ey said.

  Nora looked down at the jar in her hands. What was inside it resembled some nauseating bodily fluid.

  “Hard to miss that sign.”

  “You’d think so,” Davey said.

  “The system was installed a little more than two months ago.”

  Nora looked up from the jar to find his eyes on hers. She jerked her gaze back to the house and heard herself saying, “Was it really just two weeks ago we were here, Davey?”

  “Maybe a little more.”

  Fenn looked away, and Nora hoped that he would let them go. He must have known that they had not been telling him the truth. “Do you think you could come inside? This isn’t something we normally do, but this time I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  “No problem,” Davey said.

  The detective stepped back and extended an arm in the direction of the front door. “Just duck under the tape.” Davey bent forward. Fenn smiled at Nora, and his eyes crinkled. He looked like a courteous frontier sheriff dressed up in a modern suit—like Wyatt Earp. He even sounded like Wyatt Earp.

  “Where are you from, Chief Fenn?” she asked.

  “I’m a Bridgeport boy,” he said. “Call me Holly, everybody else does. You don’t have to go in there, you know. It’s pretty bloody.”

  Nora tried to look as hard-bitten as she could while holding a quart jar filled with mayonnaise. “I was a nurse in Vietnam. I’ve probably seen more blood than you have.”

  “And you rescue children in peril,” he said.

  “That’s more or less what I was doing in Vietnam,” she said, blushing.

  He smiled again and held up the tape as Davey frowned at them from beside a bank of overgrown hydrangeas.

  14

  ONE OF THOSE men who expand when observed close-up, Holly Fenn filled nearly the entire space of the stairwell. His shoulders, his arms, even his head seemed twice the normal size. Energy strained the fabric of his suit jacket, curled the dark brown hair at the back of his head. The air inside Natalie’s house smelled of dust, dead flowers, unwashed dishes, the breath and bodies of many men, the reek of cigarettes dumped into wastebaskets. Davey uttered a soft sound of disgust.

  “These places stink pretty good,” Fenn said.

  A poster of a whitewashed harbor village hung on the wall matching the one covered by their Chancel House bookshelves. In the living room, three men turned toward them. The uniformed policeman for whom Nora had mistaken Holly Fenn came into the hall. The other two wore identical gray suits, white button-down shirts, and dark ties. They had narrow, disdainful faces and stood side by side, like chessmen. Nora caught the faint, corrupt odor of old blood.

  Davey came up the last step. Abnormally vivid in the dim light, his dark eyes and dark, definite brows made his face look white and unformed.

  Fenn introduced them to Officer Michael LeDonne, and Mr. Hashim and Mr. Shull, who were with the FBI. Hashim and Shull actually resembled each other very little, Mr. Hashim being younger, heavier, in body more like one of Natalie’s wrestlers than Mr. Shull, who was taller and fairer than his partner. Their posture and expressions created the effect of a resemblance, along with their shared air of otherworldly authority.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Chancel were friends of the deceased, and I asked them if they’d be willing to do a walk through here, see if maybe they notice anything helpful.”

  “A walk through,” said Mr. Shull.

  Mr. Hashim said, “A walk through,” and bent over to exam-ine his highly polished black wing tips. “Cool.”

  “I’m glad we’re all in agreement. Mike, maybe you could hold that jar for Mrs. Chancel.”

  Officer LeDonne took the jar and held it close to his face.

  “These people were here recently?” asked Mr. Shull, also staring at the jar.

  “Recently enough,” said Fenn. “Take a good look around, folks, but make sure not to touch anything.”

  “Make like you’re in a museum,” said Mr. Shull.

  “Do that,” said Mr. Hashim.

  Nora stepped past them into the living room. Mr. Shull and Mr. Hashim made her feel like touching everything in sight. Cigarette ash streaked the tan carpet, and a hole had been burned in the wheat-colored sofa. Magazines and a stack of newspapers covered the coffee table. Two Dean Koontz paperbacks had been lined up on the brick ledge above the fireplace. On the walls hung the iron weathervanes and bits of driftwood Natalie had not so much collected as gathered. The FBI men followed Nora with blank eyes. She glared at Mr. Shull. He blinked. Without altering her expression, Nora turned around and took in the room. It seemed at once charged with the presence of Natalie Weil and utterly empty of her. Mr. Shull and Mr. Hashim had been right: they were standing in a museum.

  “Natalie make any phone calls that night?” Davey asked.

  Fenn said, “Nope.”

  It occurred to Nora as she tagged along into the kitchen that she did not, she most emphatically did not, wish to see this house, thanks anyhow. Yet here she was, in Natalie’s kitchen. Davey mooned along in front of the cabinets, shook his head at the sink, and paused before the photographs pinned to a corkboard next to the refrigerator. For Natalie’s sake, Nora forced herself to look at what was around her and recognized almost instantly that no matter what she did or did not want, a change had occurred. In the living room, a blindfold of habit and discomfort had been anchored over her eyes.

  Now, blindfold off, traces of Natalie Weil’s decisions and preferences showed wherever she looked. Wooden counters had been scarred where Natalie had sliced the sourdough bread she liked toasted for breakfast” jammed into the garbage bin along with crumpled cigarette packets were plastic wrappers from Waldbaum’s. Half-empty jam jars crowded the toaster. Smudgy glasses smelling faintly of beer stood beside the sink, piled with plates to which clung dried jam, flecks of toast, and granules of ground beef. A bag of rotting grapes lay on the counter beside three upright bottles of wine. Whatever Norman Weil and his new wife were drinking on the deck of their beach house in Malibu probably wasn’t Firehouse Golden Mountain Jug Red, $9.99 a liter.

  Blue recycling bins beside the back door held wine and Corona empties and a dead bottle of Stolichnaya Cristall. Tied up with twine in another blue bin were stacks of the New York and Westerholm newspapers along with bundles of Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, and Wrestlemania.

  “I wish my men looked at crime scenes the way you do.”

  Startled, Nora straightened up to see Holly Fenn leaning against the open door to the hallway.

  “Notice anything?”

  “She ate toast and jam for breakfast. She was a little sloppy. She lived cheap, and she had kind of down-home tastes. You wouldn’t know that by looking at her.”

  “Anything else?”

  Nora thought back over what she had seen. “She was interested in horror movies, and that kind of surprises me, but I couldn’t really say why.”

  Fenn gave her a twitch of a smile. “Wait till you see the bedroom.” Nora waited for him to say something about murder victims and horror movies, but he did not. “What else?”

  “She drank cheap wine, but every now and then she splurged on expensive vodka. All we ever saw her drink was beer.”

  Fenn nodded. “Keep on looking.”

  She walked to the refrigerator and saw the half-dozen magnets she remembered from two years before. A leering Dracula and a Frankenstein’s monster with outstretched arms clung to the freezer cabinet” a half-peeled banana, a hippie in granny glasses and bell bottoms dragging on a joint half his size, an elongated spoon heaped with white powder, and a miniature Hulk Hogan decorated the larger door beneath.

  Holly Fenn was twinkling at her from the doorway. “These have been here for years,” she said.

  “Real different,” said Fenn. “Your husband says you don’t think Mrs. Weil is dead.”

  “I hope she isn’t.” Nora moved impatiently to the corkboard bristling with photographs. She could still feel the blood heating her face and wished that the d
etective would leave her alone.

  “Ever think Natalie was involved in drugs?”

  “Oh, sure,” Nora said, facing him. “Davey and I used to come over and snort coke all the time. After that we’d smoke some joints while cheering on our favorite wrestlers. We knew we could get away with it because the Westerholm police can’t even catch the kids who bash in our mailboxes.”

  He was backing away before she realized that she had taken a couple of steps toward him.

  Fenn held up his hands, palms out. They looked like catcher’s mitts. “You having trouble with your mailbox?”

  She whirled away from him and posted herself in front of the photographs. Natalie Weil’s face, sometimes alone, sometimes not, grinned out at her. She had experimented with her hair, letting it grow to her shoulders, cropping it, streaking it, bleaching it to a brighter blond. A longer-haired Natalie smiled out from a deck chair, leaned against the rail of a cruise ship, at the center of a group of grinning, white-haired former teachers and salesclerks in shorts and T-shirts.

  Some drug addict, Nora thought. She moved on to a series of photographs of Natalie in a peach-colored bathing suit lined up, some of them separated by wide gaps, at the bottom of the corkboard. They had been taken in the master bedroom, and Natalie was perched on the bed with her hands behind her back. Uncomfortably aware of Holly Fenn looming in the doorway, she saw what Natalie was wearing. The bathing suit was one of those undergarments which women never bought for themselves and could be worn only in a bedroom. Nora did not even know what they were called. Natalie’s clutched her breasts, squeezed her waist, and flared at her hips. A profusion of straps and buttons made her look like a lecher’s Christmas present. Nora looked more closely at the glint of a bracelet behind Natalie’s back and saw the unmistakable steel curve of handcuffs.

  She suppressed her dismay and stepped toward Fenn. “Probably this looks wildly degenerate to you,” he said.

  “What does it look like to you?”