by Peter Straub
66
JEFFREY DID NOT speak until they were out of Holyoke and accelerating onto I-91. With her legs stretched out before her and the rest of her body tilted back at a surprisingly relaxed angle, Nora felt as if she were being carried along on a conveyance more like a flying carpet than an ordinary car.
“I was worried about you back there.” Jeffrey shifted gears to overtake a moving van bulling along at a mere ten miles over the limit, and the magic carpet lengthened out and sailed into the wind.
“Me, too.”
“I didn’t recognize you. This . . . transformation. It’s quite a surprise.”
“There have been a lot of surprises lately.”
“I must say, if you’re anything to go on, more women ought to be—”
“Don’t. Please? Just don’t.” Jeffrey looked abashed, and to mollify him she said, “I’m glad you didn’t yell my name.”
“All I really meant was, it’s a relief to see you like this. You know, apart from the . . .” He drew a circle around his face with an index finger.
“The transformation.”
“Better disguise than a hat and a pair of dark glasses.”
“Dick Dart has strong feelings on the subject of cosmetics.” Saying his name out loud made her chest feel tight. “He’s still out there somewhere.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Pretty sure. The cop who was questioning me while you were being so sensible said they were looking for an old dame with brown hair. No, he didn’t, don’t look dismayed. But Dart couldn’t have told them about the new me, or right now the FBI would be dragging me away in leg irons.”
Jeffrey nodded while levitating into a new lane. “I noticed Hashim and Shull, those two human andirons. Charming couple.”
“They were at Mount Avenue?”
“For a couple of hours yesterday and this morning, while they were setting up the phone equipment and talking to Mr. and Mrs. Chancel—and your husband.” He glanced at her with the consciousness of introducing a new and difficult subject. “The old manse has been a little chaotic the past few days.”
For the moment, she avoided the topic of her husband. “Weren’t you afraid they’d see you?”
“I would have been if they’d ever seen me. Mr. Chancel had me bring him lunch in the library because he had to do a lot of business over the phone. The andirons were in the kitchen, so I just got a glimpse of them as I went past the door.”
“Tell me about Davey. Is he moving back to the Poplars because the FBI wanted him there?”
“Or was it his father’s idea, you mean? A little of both. The agents did want to keep an eye on him, and Mr. Chancel was after him to help take care of his mother. To tell you the truth, I did wonder if Mr. Chancel was getting rid of us in order to pressure Davey back into the Poplars.” Jeffrey looked over at Nora to see if this had been too critical of his employer.
“Could you put your radio on, Jeffrey?”
“Sorry.” He reached for the dial. “I should have thought of that earlier.”
With another smooth change of gears, the magic carpet flew around a brace of plodding cars. An announcer with a buttery voice said it was a glorious evening in Hampden, Hampshire, and Berkshire counties, and proceeded to go into details.
“How bad is Daisy?” Nora asked.
“She discovered All My Children, and it seems to have cheered her up. Someone named Edmund kidnapped someone named Erica in Budapest and kept her in a wine cellar, but then the Erica person decided she wanted to stay kidnapped in order to get back at someone named Dmitri. My aunt told me all about it. I gather that Mrs. Chancel feels that your story is similar to the Erica person’s. You’re a romantic heroine.”
“Lovely.”
“She’s reconsidered whatever you said to her about her book. My aunt has been bringing her sections, and she rewrites them, propped up in bed.”
“Before and after All My Children.”
“During, too. It’s inspirational.”
“Is Alden helping her?”
“Mr. Chancel isn’t allowed in her room.” Jeffrey paused” apparently he had said all he wished to say about the Chancels. “Could you tell me why you claimed to be writing a book about Shorelands?”
“Dick Dart has this mission. He wants to keep anybody from proving that Hugo Driver didn’t write Night Journey, so he wants to eliminate people connected to writers who were at Shorelands that summer. The man I talked to left for Cape Cod right after he called Merle Marvell, so he’s safe, but that still leaves one. A professor in Amherst. I’d better get in touch with him soon. Dart has his address.”
“You said two men. The writers they had connections to were . . . ?”
“Creeley Monk and Bill Tidy. Why?”
“Not Katherine Mannheim.”
“No, but her sisters started all the trouble, I guess.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Would you fill me in on this mission of Dart’s, and tell me whatever you know about Shorelands and Night Journey?”
“Jeffrey, who are you? Why do you care?”
“I’m taking you to someone who’ll be able to answer most of your questions, and I don’t want to say anything first. I can tell you about me, though, if you’re interested, but I’m not very important.”
“Who are you taking me to?” An entirely unforeseen possibility occurred to her. “Katherine Mannheim?”
He smiled. “No, not Katherine Mannheim.”
“Did she write Night Journey?”
“To tell you the truth, I hope she didn’t. I’m one of the few who can resist that book.”
“I never even gave it a serious try until a couple of hours ago.”
“And?”
“Jeffrey, I’m not going to say any more until you tell me about yourself. You’ve always been such an enigma. How can someone like you be happy working for Alden and Daisy? Did you really go to Harvard? What’s your story?”
“My story, well.” He looked more self-conscious than she had ever seen him. “It’s a lot less interesting than you make out. My mother wasn’t prepared to raise a child after my father died, so I was raised by my father’s relatives, all those Deodatos on Long Island. For a couple of years, I was moved around a lot—Hempstead, Babylon, Rockville Centre, Valley Stream, Bay Shore. I saw my real mother on her holidays, but I had plenty of other mothers, and they all doted on me. Went to Uniondale High School. Got a scholarship to Harvard, which was a big deal, majored in Asian studies, got halfway proficient in Chinese and Japanese, graduated magna cum laude. Instead of going to graduate school, I disappointed everybody and enlisted in the army. After I got through officers’ training and the Vietnamese course in Texas, I pulled a lot of strings and got into the military police in Saigon. I did some good there, and the work was interesting. Continued the karate lessons I started in Cambridge.
“When I came back, I took the test for the Long Beach police and got in despite being ridiculously overqualified. One of my uncles was a detective in Suffolk County, and that helped. For three years I did that, took more Japanese at Hofstra, private calligraphy lessons, got my black belt, took a lot of cooking classes, and then I sort of fell apart. Quit the force. Did nothing but kill time on the boardwalk and sit in my apartment. After six or seven months, I took all my money out of the bank and went to Japan to polish up my Japanese and live in a Zen monastery. It took two years, but I was accepted into a monastery—long story—and stayed there about eighteen months. Very satisfying, but I had this problem: I wasn’t Japanese and never would be. I came back so broke that I had to teach karate on a cruise liner for my passage. No idea what I was going to do. I decided to take the first job anyone offered me and devote myself to it as selflessly as possible. When my aunt told me the Chancels wanted to hire a male housekeeper, I moved to Connecticut and tried to do the best job I could.”
Nora was gaping at him in unambiguous astonishment. “And you say that’s not interesting? My God, Jeffrey.”
“It’s
just a series of anecdotes. Spiritually I never got anywhere until I moved in with the Chancels. I have no actual ambitions, obviously, apart from that, and helping the Chancels was a lot more satisfying than a lot of other things I could have done.”
Nora, who had been marveling at the disparity between her fantasies about Jeffrey and his reality, suddenly heard what the announcer was talking about and turned up the volume on the radio. “I have to hear this.”
Jeffrey seemed startled but not at all offended. “Certainly.”
What had snagged in her ear was an account of a fire in Springfield. “. . . as we have been informed, no fatalities have been reported as yet, though according to our most recent reports, the blaze has spread to several other houses in the exclusive Oak Street residential area.”
“It’s him,” Nora said.
“Him?”
“Shh.”
“To repeat, arson is now assumed to be the cause of the fire in Springfield’s Oak Street region first reported shortly after five o’clock this evening by neighbors of Dr. Mark Foil, in whose residence the blaze originated. Area residents are advised to keep in touch with the Fire Department’s emergency hotline, which is providing minute-by-minute—”
Nora turned off the radio. “Do you know who Mark Foil is?”
“I’m completely in the dark.”
“Mark Foil is the man who called Merle Marvell.” Jeffrey still did not quite seem to take it all in. “Which was why Marvell called Alden.” The appalled expression on Jeffrey’s face made it clear that he understood what had happened.
“You’re convinced it was Dart who torched that house.”
“Of course it was him.”
Jeffrey looked at his watch, made some rapid mental calculations, then hauled down on the steering wheel and without bothering to signal rocketed across two lanes of moderately heavy traffic. Horns blared. He spun the car into Exit 18 at the last possible second. The MG squealed down the ramp and blasted through a stop sign to turn right on King Street in Northampton.
Nora unclenched her hands from the door handle. “What the hell was that all about?”
Jeffrey pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. “I want you to explain why Dick Dart is willing to murder people and burn down houses in order to protect Hugo Driver’s reputation. Start at the beginning and end at the end.”
“Yes, sir,” Nora said.
67
ONCE NORA BEGAN, she found that talking to Jeffrey Deodato was very different from telling the same story to Harwich. Jeffrey was listening to her. By the time she finished, she felt as if her story, initially as confused as Daisy’s novel, had in the act of telling reshaped itself into a coherent pattern, at least within Jeffrey.
“I see,” he said, with the sense of having seen more than she had. “So now that Dick Dart has done what he could to hurt Dr. Foil, he’ll move on to Everett Tidy. And he probably has a car.”
“Cars sort of give themselves to him.”
“We’d better see Professor Tidy. All I need is a telephone.”
“You’re going to call him?”
Jeffrey pulled away from the curb. “I’m going to call a friend of his.”
“You know him?”
“I’ve known him forever.” Jeffrey turned right at the end of the block and rolled up to a telephone. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, and jumped out of the car, fishing in his pocket for change.
Nora watched him dial a number and speak a few sentences into the receiver. He turned his back on her and spoke another few inaudible sentences. He hung up and came back.
“Who was that?” Nora asked, and Jeffrey smiled but did not answer. He spun the MG around in a tight circle and zipped back out onto King Street. “How do you know Bill Tidy’s son?”
“I met him a long time ago.”
“Now where are we going?”
“Amherst, where else?” Jeffrey turned right into a parking lot and continued straight through it into another parking lot, from which he emerged onto Bridge Street and accelerated back toward the distant parade of cars and trucks on the highway. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, “do you remember if Davey told you the name of that girl who was so interested in Hugo Driver? The one who did or did not work for Chancel House, and was or was not a member of something called the Hellfire Club?”
“Paddi Mann.”
“I was afraid of that.”
It took her a moment to gather herself. “You know Paddi Mann, too?”
“Paddi’s dead now, but I used to know her. Her real name was Patricia, but she turned into Paddi after she fell in love with Hugo Driver. The person we’re going to see in Amherst, the one who knows Everett Tidy, is Sabina Mann, her mother.”
“How do you know Sabina Mann? Why do you know Sabina Mann?” Nora wailed. “What is going on?”
Jeffrey would not answer.
Davey had not made up the whole story. It had really happened, but five years earlier, in New Haven. Or it had happened twice.
“Don’t tie yourself into knots,” Jeffrey said.
“And you won’t tell me how you know them.”
“First we’ll take care of Everett Tidy.”
“Then tell me who you were taking me to in Northampton. I’m going to be meeting him anyhow when we leave Amherst.”
“Not him,” he said. “Her.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s about time you met my mother,” Jeffrey said.
68
ON THE WAY into Amherst, Nora idly inspected a bronze sign and saw that the comfortable-looking two-story brick house on a little rise had been the residence of Emily Dickinson. She heard Dick Dart saying, “We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are—” and her mouth went dry and goose pimples rose on her arms.
Uphill into a commercial section with bookstores and restaurants, left past a pretty commons like a green pool, uphill again past Amherst College’s weathered brown and red buildings.
Jeffrey turned into a side street lined with handsome old houses, some of them surrounded by white fences, others nearly hidden by gardens of vibrant, nodding lilies and lush hydrangeas. He pulled up in front of a house barely visible behind its front garden.
Nora followed him up a path through waving pink and yellow lilies as high as her head. Three brick steps led up to a gleaming wooden door with a brass bell. The perfume of the lilies surrounded her and drifted off in a breeze she could barely feel. When the door swung open, a tall, gray-haired woman in half-moon glasses and a loose, long-sleeved smock the yellow of daffodils gave her a spine-stiffening glance and pulled Jeffrey into an embrace.
“Jeffrey, you horrible beast, sometime I hope you’ll give me more than fifteen minutes’ warning before you decide to favor me with a visit. I suppose you’re staying with your mother, that’s the only reason I ever get to see you!”
“Hello, Sabina, now let go of me before you break something.”
She stepped back and grasped his upper arms. “You look very dashing in that cap.”
“You look wonderful yourself, but you always do.”
“I trust your mother’s fine? She’s so busy all the time, I never get to talk to her. I know she did the Trustees’ Banquet at the start of the summer, and of course the reception at the President’s House, but that’s nothing to her, food for two hundred, is it?”
“Piece of cake. Lots of pieces of lots of cakes.”
“And how are things with you?” She had kept her grip on his arms. “Still happy working for your inferiors?”
“I’m fine. Sabina, this is my friend Nora.”
She released him and extended a hand to Nora. “You’re the mysterious person who had to see Ev Tidy?”
Nora took Sabina Mann’s hand and met her intelligent, commanding eyes, a few shades bluer than glacier water. “Yes, thank you, I hope I didn’t put you to any trouble.”
“No trouble, Ev came right over. Jeffrey knows he can get anything he wants.
The only problem is he doesn’t want enough.” Sabina Mann was making rapid assessments of Nora’s age, mari-tal status, social position, and role in Jeffrey’s life. “I’m sworn to silence and secrecy, Jeffrey won’t tell me why, but I suppose I might be allowed to ask if you have known him long?”
Nora thought that she had been given a passing grade on the first test. “I’ve known Jeffrey for a couple of years, but actually I hardly know him at all.”
Sabina Mann continued her silent assessment. She was far more annoyed than she would let Jeffrey see. “Let’s explore what our mutual friend has told you. I suppose you know about that ridiculous job he’s so pleased with, but has he told you about—”
“Now, now, Sabina.”
“Indulge me, dear. Has our friend mentioned his wonderful success at Harvard?”
“He has.”
“Good. Do you know about the Silver Star and Bronze Star he got in Vietnam, or his tenure in a monastery in Japan?”
“No to the first, yes to the second,” Nora said with a glance at Jeffrey.
“Since you have been so favored, you must know that he’s fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, but I wonder if he’s told you—”
“Please, Sabina, be fair.”
“Has Jeffrey ever told you, my dear, that he has written two plays which were produced off Broadway?”
Nora turned to stare at him.
“Pseudonymously,” he said. “Weren’t nothin’.”
“Now I know something about you, Nora.”
“Don’t, Sabina.”
“Be quiet, Jeffrey. You’re using my house for your own private reasons, so I’m entitled to all the information I can unearth. And what I have unearthed is that this lovely young woman is an employee at Chancel House, because that awful Mr. Chancel is the person from whom you most wanted to keep that particular secret. I’m sure she shares my distaste for your employer and his entire family, including his peculiar wife, his useless son, and the son’s unsuitable wife, sufficiently to keep it safe. Isn’t that right, my dear?”
“I didn’t know the son’s wife was as bad as the rest of them,” Nora said.
