The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  After Nora had finished, Tidy slid a file box forward and said, “I’m grateful to you for sharing your information with me.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, waiting to hear what the story had meant to him.

  “My father did distrust Creeley Monk, and I should explain that first. He simply did not believe Monk’s story of being a working-class boy from Springfield, the son of a barkeep, and so on. Monk had attended Harvard and wore expensive clothes, and my father, who was almost completely self-taught, thought he was being laughed at. Almost everything about Shorelands made him uncomfortable. He would not have accepted Georgina’s invitation at all if he had not seen it as a way through his difficulties with his second book. He knew he’d made a mistake almost as soon as he got there, but he thought he had no choice but to stick it out. He was not a person at ease with the notion of giving up.”

  “I understand,” Nora said.

  “He was depending on the book to earn enough so that he would never have to drive a cab again. And within a day, he knew that Lincoln Chancel was coming, presumably to scout out writers for his new publishing house.”

  Nora wanted to steer the conversation toward whatever had aroused the enormous quantity of feeling beating away within this disciplined man, a matter presumably related to Katherine Mannheim, but one question about the admirable Bill Tidy troubled her. “Didn’t he more or less abandon your mother and you when he went to Shorelands?”

  Tidy shook his head vehemently. “There was no question of abandonment. We had a standing invitation to Key West, where an old friend of my father’s named Boogie Ammons owned a small hotel. When the invitation to Shorelands came, my father arranged for my mother and me to stay there. That entire month, we lived better than we would have at home. We missed him, of course, but he wrote two or three times a week, so we had some idea of what he was doing.”

  “Did you keep the letters?”

  “I have most of them. They tend to be noncommittal about his stay there. It wasn’t until years after his death that I could face reading his journals, and then I learned how much he had hated Shorelands.”

  Tidy opened the file box and took out a dark green, clothbound volume. “I also saw how uncomfortable he was with himself. Do you understand? He was on a kind of high wire, gambling that he wouldn’t fall.”

  “I don’t think I do understand,” Nora said.

  Tidy nodded. “Think of his situation. My father was really struggling with a new book. If everything worked, he would finally be set free to do nothing but write. Lincoln Chancel was a crude, grasping monster, but he represented a way out. My father was so desperate that he could not keep himself from playing up to the man. Against his own moral sense. Unfortunately for him, another guest was even more desperate. Hugo Driver capitalized on the accident of being in the same house as Chancel by turning himself into a human barnacle.”

  “So he must have envied Driver,” Nora said.

  “Which made him feel even worse about himself. He couldn’t trust his own instinctive dislike of the man. Therefore, my father never joined the group on the terrace, where Chancel appeared almost every afternoon, because Hugo Driver would be there. And, because he questioned his antipathy toward Driver, he forced himself to suspend judgment when he heard gossip, all the more so since he distrusted the source.”

  “He already thought Creeley Monk was a liar,” Nora said.

  “Monk struck him as exactly the sort of person who made up stories about other people. Especially if it might help his own cause. In this instance, with Merrick Favor.”

  Here at last was a chance to move into the center of his concerns. “What did your father think of Katherine Mannheim?”

  Everett Tidy puzzled her by looking across the table at Jeffrey, who shrugged. He ran his fingers across the top of the book in front of him, clearly considering his words.

  “Mostly for the reasons I’ve explained, my father actually had little contact with the other guests. The other part of his isolation was physical. Georgina put him in Clover House, off in the woods behind Monty’s Glen, so far away from Main House that poachers sometimes wandered through in the middle of the night. He heard poachers even on the night Miss Mannheim vanished.”

  Tidy fell silent, and Nora waited for him to work out a way to speak of whatever had ignited him.

  “There’s nothing in my father’s journals to suggest that Driver stole a manuscript from Miss Mannheim.”

  “I see,” Nora said, feeling that she did not at all see.

  “But you ask me what my father made of Miss Mannheim, and this information might still be useful to you—and through you, to me. My entire life, I can say, has been haunted by whatever happened at Shorelands that summer.” His mysterious excitement seemed to intensify. “There is still one great matter to discuss, and it may be as critical to you as it is to me. If it’s at all possible, will you let me know whatever you manage to discover?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you. Now to Katherine Mannheim.” He said this with the air of deliberately postponing his “great matter.” “Clearly she was an attractive, interesting presence, utterly self-reliant. She could be intentionally rude, I gather, but what really struck my father, apart from her independence, was what he called her serenity.”

  “Serenity?”

  “That surprises you, doesn’t it? He meant a combination of self-confidence, instinctive goodness, courage, and compassion. Initially her prickliness, her willingness to be indifferent to conventional manners, misled him, but after the first week, he began to see these other qualities.”

  Tidy opened the journal. “Listen to this.

  “I have been thinking about this curious person, Katherine Mannheim. She has never had any money and lives simply and without complaint. Where she seems bohemian and reckless, she is utterly focused. She writes slowly, with great care, publishing little, but what is published shines. To her, recognition, acclaim, every sort of public reward, mean nothing. I wonder if I would be as foolish as Merrick and Austryn if I were not so gladly married to my darling Min.”

  “Min and Bill?” asked Nora. “Wasn’t there a movie—”

  “Family joke,” said Tidy. “My mother’s real name was Leonie.

  “Even the monstrous Lincoln Chancel, thirty years older than Katherine, and who wears his gluttony on his face, desires her. Merrick and Austryn are attracted to her inner being but imagine they want her body, so do not see that Katherine is chaste. It is not warm, this chastity” it is icy and determined.

  “Katherine Mannheim never expected to live to old age. All her life she was aware of her weak heart, but she refused to live like an invalid except in this one regard. What I’ve always imagined is that where she considered activities like bicycle riding, drinking wine, and taking long walks potentially dangerous, she was certain that sex could kill her. And in any case, her instincts led her to a modest way of life.”

  “Did your father know what she was working on?” asked Nora.

  “Not at all. What Georgina called the Ultimate, a kind of end-of-term tradition, should have explained it, but she didn’t play along.”

  “What was the Ultimate?”

  “At the end of the third week of their stay, all the writers met at dusk for a kind of round-robin in Monty’s Glen, inside the ring of standing stones known as the Song Pillars. The gardener who had created the clearing, Monty Chandler, had noticed that a number of boulders dug out of a nearby field were all roughly twelve feet high, flat on both ends, and he had gone to a lot of trouble to upend them in the clearing. The guests sat in a circle inside the pillars. Georgina delivered some set pieces about Shorelands’ history. When she finished, the guests described what they were working on, how it was developing, and so on. Of course, they were expected to pay tribute to Georgina’s hospitality and describe the ways in which Shorelands had inspired them. They were also supposed to be amusing. Georgina Weatherall expected to be entertained as well as praised. As yo
u might expect, Katherine Mannheim refused to play the game.”

  He turned over a few more pages. “Here it is.

  “After Merrick’s song of praise to Miss Weatherall’s hospitality, the wonders of Shorelands, and his own talents, it was Katherine Mannheim’s turn to speak. She smiled. She was sure, she said, that we would understand her decision to obey her usual practice of choosing not to speak of work in progress. Those who had preceded her were braver and less superstitious than she, qualities for which she admired them greatly. As for Shorelands, its magnificence was so great as to defy description, but she was pleased to mention the services of Agnes Brotherhood, the maid who every morning cleaned her kitchen and made her bed. Upon leaving Shorelands, she would sorely miss the domestic assistance of Miss Brotherhood.”

  “She refused to talk about her work and thanked the maid,” Nora said. “Sounds like she knew she was going to be asked to leave.”

  “Or wanted to be,” said Tidy. “Georgina was outraged. Here’s what my father says:

  “Miss Weatherall tugged her layers of purple and crimson around her shoulders. Her face turned bright red beneath her makeup. She muttered that she would convey Miss Mannheim’s compliments to the maid. Hugo Driver, next in line, began by praising Miss Weatherall’s generosity and went on to speak at such length of the meals, the gardens, the conversations, that by the time he finished with a panegyric to our hostess, a genius whose greatness lay in this, that, and the other, no one noticed that he had never bothered to mention his writing.

  “As a result,” Tidy concluded, “we don’t actually know what either one of them was working on during that summer.”

  “Driver saw a chance to hide behind a smoke screen,” Nora said.

  “Maybe because he wasn’t making much progress, which would mean that he was more and more dependent on Lincoln Chancel. Anyhow, when it was my father’s turn, he spoke as much to Chancel as to Georgina Weatherall. My father continued to hold out hope even after he came back home.”

  “Did he ever finish his book?” Nora asked.

  Tidy inhaled sharply, then swiveled his chair to face her with all of his suppressed intensity visible in his eyes. “Let me ask you this. Have you been told what happened to the novel Merrick Favor was working on?”

  “It was torn to pieces.”

  “As was my father’s book. Shredded, carbon and all.”

  Jeffrey spoke for the first time since they had come into the library. “What are you saying, Ev?”

  With what seemed to Nora a deliberate and momentary relaxation of his iron self-control, Tidy looked up at his father’s photograph. “So here we are, at the serious matter.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” Jeffrey said.

  “I’ll try not to.” Tidy glanced at Nora, then back up at the photograph. “The winter after he came back from Shorelands, my father told my mother that he was pretty sure he could finish his book in two or three weeks if he could work without interruptions. The upshot was that we were invited back to Key West—when my father was done, he was invited down, too, to celebrate. Boogie Ammons said, ‘It’s worth a few hamburgers to finally get that book out of you.’ A little more than two weeks later, a policeman came to the hotel and told my mother that my father had killed himself.

  “I couldn’t read anything he wrote until I was teaching here and had a family of my own. His journals were in a trunk in my basement. One night when everyone else was in bed, I drove to this library, took out Our Skillets, brought it home, opened a bottle of cognac, and stayed up until I finished the book. It was an incredi-bly emotional experience. Then I had to read his journals. When I finally felt strong enough to face the last one, I found something completely unexpected. A week before we went to Florida, his agent had written to tell him that he’d been approached by Lincoln Chancel, who was interested in making a confidential exploration of my father’s situation. Chancel had liked what he’d heard of the new book, wondered how close the book was to completion and whether my father might be willing to consider his publishing it. My father wrote back, saying that he was close to finishing the book and wanted to show it to Chancel. He didn’t mention any of this to my mother.

  “About a week later, he got some exciting news. Since he was writing for himself, he wasn’t very specific about this in his journal. See what you make of this.

  “I left my typewriter to answer the telephone. I spoke my name. What a great change came then. There is to be a royal visit. The Royal Being will come alone. I am to tell no one, and if I violate this condition by so much as hinting about this matter, even to my wife, all is off. Only He and I are to be present. The great event is to take place in three days. I don’t know what I expected, but THIS, well, THIS beats all.”

  He looked over at Nora. “Well?”

  “It’s like Creeley Monk,” she said. “Was the visit called off?”

  “Here’s the last thing my father wrote.

  “Cancellation. No explanation. I can hardly pick myself up off the floor. Can I continue? Do I have a choice? I have no choice, but how can I continue when I feel like this?

  “It’s exactly what happened to Creeley Monk a few days later. Do you think it can be a coincidence?”

  “I guess not,” Nora said, “but that would mean . . .”

  “That Monk got the same kind of call as my father. Doesn’t it seem likely that Merrick Favor and Austryn Fain were approached in the same way? And doesn’t it seem even likelier that the person who arranged a private meeting and then canceled it was Lincoln Chancel?”

  “Good God,” Jeffrey said. “You think it was a setup.”

  “It would have taken more than rejection from Lincoln Chancel to make my father throw in the towel.”

  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.