The Hellfire Club

PETER STRAUBTHE HELLFIRE CLUB

For Benjamin and Emma

Hallucinations are also facts.

LOUIS ALTHUSSER, The Future Lasts Forever

SHORELANDS, JULY

An uncertain Agnes Brotherhood brought her mop, bucket, and carpet sweeper to the door of Gingerbread at nine-thirty in the morning, by which hour its only resident, the poet Katherine Mannheim, should have been dispatching a breakfast of dry toast and strong tea in the ground-floor kitchen. Agnes selected a key from the thick bunch looped to her waist, pushed it into the door, and the unlocked door swung open by itself. More uncertain than ever, Agnes bit her tongue and braved the interior.

She put her hands on her hips and bawled out the poet's name. No response came from anywhere in the cottage. Agnes went into the kitchen and was dismayed to find on the floor an enormous coffee stain which had dried during the night to a tough brown skin. She attacked the stain with mop and bucket. When she had worked her way upstairs, she aired out the unused bedrooms and changed the linen on the poet's rumpled but unoccupied bed.

On her way to Rapunzel and its two terrible occupants, one a penniless ferret, the other a pitted bull toad with wandering hands, Agnes ignored a Shorelands commandment and left Gingerbread's door unlocked.

An hour after lunch, the novelist Mr Austryn Fain carried a chilled bottle of Shorelands' best Puligny Montrachet to the same door, knocked, tried the knob, slipped in, and peered into every room before taking the bottle back home to Pepper Pot. There he swigged half of the wine and hid the remainder in his closet to protect it from his more successful fellow novelist Mr Merrick Favor, Pepper Pot's other inhabitant.

After dinner the following night, the Shorelands hostess, Georgina Weatherall, led a deputation of anxious guests across the lawn from Main House and up the path to Gingerbread. Georgina trained her flashlight on the keyhole and declared the door unlocked. Directly behind her, Mr Fain wondered how she could tell this from a merely visual inspection. Georgina banged the door open, stamped into Gingerbread, and threw on all the lights.

The search party found some of Miss Mannheim's clothes in her closet, her toothbrush and other intimate things in the bathroom on the landing, a photograph of two small girls, pens, nibs, and ink bottle on the bedroom table, a few books stacked beside the bed Agnes had made up the previous morning. Over the coverlet lay a slate-gray silk robe, ripped about the arms. Georgina lifted the robe with two fingers, pursed her mouth, and let it drift back down onto the bed. 'I am sorry to say,' she announced, not at all sorry, 'that Miss Mannheim appears to have jumped the wall'

No manuscript complete or incomplete was ever found, nor were any notes. Agnes Brotherhood never spoke of her misgivings until the early 1990s, when a murderer and a kidnapped woman were escorted into her invalid's room on the second floor of Main House.

BOOK I

BEFORE DAWN

In a time just before this time, a lost boy named

Pippin Little awoke to deep night.1

At three o'clock in the morning, a woman named Nora Chancel, soon to be lost, woke up from the usual nightmares with the usual shudder and began for the thousandth time to check her perimeter. Darkness; an unknown room in which she dimly made out two objects which could have been chairs, a long table mounted with a mirror, invisible pictures in frames, a spindly, inexplicable machine out of Rube Goldberg, and a couch covered in striped fabric. Not only was none of this familiar, all of it was wrong. Wherever she was, she was not safe.

Nora propped herself up on an elbow and groped for an illicit handgun on permanent loan from a neurosurgeon named Harwich, who had rotated back to a world neither one of them could actually remember. She missed Dan Harwich, but of that one did not think. (Good old Dan Harwich had once said, A bullet in the brain is better than a bullet in the belly.) Nora's fingers slid across the sheet and rifled beneath pillow after pillow until bumping against the mattress seam at the other end of the bed. She rolled over and sat up, having just heard the sound of distant music.

Music?

Her own dark shape stared back from the mirror, and the present returned in a series of almost instantaneous recognitions. At home with her chairs, pictures, striped couch, and her husband's unused Nordic-Track, Nora Chancel had again murdered the demons of the past by scrambling out of sleep in her bedroom on Crooked Mile Road in Westerholm, Connecticut, a fine little community, according to itself a completely dandy community, thank you, except for one particular present demon who had murdered a number of women. Someday, she hoped someday soon, this would end. Her husband had spent hours reassuring her that it would end. As soon as the FBI and the Westerholm police did their job, life would go back to normal, whatever that was. The demon would turn out to be an ordinary-looking man who sold bug zappers at the hardware store, who trimmed hedges and skimmed pools on Mount Avenue, who came to your house on Christmas morning and waved away a tip after fixing your gas burner. He lived with his mother and worked on his car in his spare time. At block parties, he was swell behind the grill. As far as Nora was concerned, half a dozen oversized policemen were welcome to take turns jumping up and down on his ribs until he drowned in his own blood. A woman with a wide, necessarily secret knowledge of demons, she had no illusions about how they should be treated.

The music downstairs sounded like a string quartet.

Davey was up, trying to fix things by making endless notes on a yellow pad. He would not or could not take the single action which would fix those things that could be fixed: he refused to confront his father. Or maybe he was lying down on the family room sofa, listening to Beethoven and drinking kummel, his favorite author's favorite drink. Kummel smelled like caraway seeds, and Hugo Driver must have reeked of caraway, a fact unmentioned in the biographies.

Davey often reeked of caraway on the nights when he climbed late into bed. Last night, it had been two when he made it upstairs; the night before, three thirty. Nora knew the hours because both nights the familiar nightmares had sent her galloping out of sleep in search of an automatic pistol she had dropped into a latrine one blazing June day twenty-three years before.

The pistol lay rusting at the bottom of what was by now probably a Vietnamese field. Dan Harwich had divorced and remarried, events for which Nora considered herself partially responsible, without ever having stirred from Springfield, Massachusetts. He might as well have been rusting beneath a field, too. You couldn't fall in love that way twice; you couldn't do anything the same way twice, except in dreams. Dreams never gave up. Like tigers, they simply lay in wait until fresh meat came along.2

Davey had known Natalie Weil, too. Half of Westerholm had known Natalie Weil. Two years ago, when she had sold them the three-bedroom raised ranch with downstairs 'family room' on Crooked Mile Road, Natalie Weil had been a small, athletic-looking blonde perhaps ten years younger than Nora, a woman with a wide white smile, nice crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and a former husband named Norm. She smoked too much and drew spirals in the air with her hands when she talked. During the time when Nora and Davey were living in the guest wing of the Poplars on Mount Avenue with Alden and Daisy, the older Chancels, Natalie Weil had intuited the emotional atmosphere within the big house and invited her grateful charges for dinner at her own raised ranch house on Redcoat Road. There Nora and Davey had eaten chili and guacamole, drunk Mexican beer, and half-attended to wrestling matches on cable while Natalie anatomized, to their delight, the town where Nora's new husband had grown up. 'See, you're from Mount Avenue, Davey, you see this town the way it was about fifty years ago, when everybody dressed for dinner and everybody stayed married forever and nobody knew any Jews. Forget it! These days they're all divorced or getting divorced, they move in and out of town when their company tells them to, they; don't think about anything except money - oh my God, there's Ric Flair, one day I am going to humiliate myself and write him a really lurid fan letter. And we have three synagogues, all booming. Ric sweetie, could you be true to me?'

After selling them the house on Crooked Mile Road - a house paid for by Alden and Daisy Chancel - Natalie took them for lunch at the General Sherman Inn, advised them to fill the family room with babies as soon as possible, and disappeared from their lives. From time to time, Nora had seen her spiraling one hand in the air as she steered two new prospects up the Post Road in her boatlike red Lincoln. Six months ago, she had come across Natalie dumping frozen pizzas into a shopping cart already piled with six-packs of Mexican beer and Diet Coke, and for ten minutes they caught up with each other. Natalie had said yes, she was seeing someone, but, no, it wouldn't amount to anything, the guy was a prune. She would call Nora, you bet, it would be great to get away from the Prune.

Two nights before, Natalie Weil had disappeared from a blood-soaked bedroom. Her body had not been left behind, like those of the other four women, but Natalie was almost certainly as dead as they. Like Natalie, they were divorced businesswomen of one kind or another, and they lived alone. Sophie Brewer was an independent broker, Annabelle Austin a literary agent, Taylor Humphrey the owner of a driver-service company, Sally Michaelman the owner-operator of a lighting-supplies company. All these women were in their mid to late forties. The younger Chancels had installed a security system soon after they moved into their new house, and after the first two deaths, on nights Davey came home late Nora punched in the code that turned it on before she went to bed. She kept all the doors locked when she was in the house. After Taylor Humphrey's murder, she began hitting the buttons as soon as it got dark.

Nora had heard about Sally Michaelman from an immaculate twenty-something two places in front of her at a checkout counter in Waldbaum's, the supermarket where she had last come across Natalie Weil. Nora first noticed the young woman because she had put on drop-dead makeup and a loose but perfectly fitted linen outfit to visit a supermarket at ten in the morning. She might have been drifting past fluted columns in an advertisement for a perfume named something like Arsenic.

In the baggy shorts and old blue shirt she had changed into after her morning run, Nora leaned over her cart to see what the twenty-something had put on the belt: thirty cans of gourmet cat food and two bottles of Swedish water, now joined by a third.

'Her cleaning woman called my cleaning woman' she was saying to the woman behind her, also an armored twenty-something. 'Can you believe this crap? It's that woman from Michaelman's, and I was in there last week, looking for a, you know -'

'That thing in your entry, that thing just inside the door.'

'For something like you have. Her cleaning woman couldn't get in, and with all the, you know-'

She took in Nora, glared, and swooped into her cart to drop a bag of plums on the moving belt. 'We might as well be living in the South Bronx.'

Nora remembered that woman from Michaelman's; she didn't know her name, but the woman had persuaded her to go ahead and buy the halogen lamp she wanted for the family room. She had been down-to-earth and handsome and comradely, the kind of person Nora instinctively thought of as a fellow traveler. Her first impulse was to defend this terrific woman to the two self-centered idiots in front of her, but what had they done besides call her that woman from Michaelman's? Her second impulse, almost simultaneous with the first, was to panic about whether or not she had locked the back door on her way to the car.

Then Nora had seen the bloody corpse of the terrific woman from the lamp store. This figure instantly mutated into that of a boy soldier on a gurney, his belly blown open and his life slipping out through his astonished eyes. Her knees turned to water, and she dropped her head, breathing hard until the twenty-somethings had moved away from the register.

The dying young man and others like him inhabited her better nightmares. The worse ones were much worse.3

Nora dismissed the nightmare, decidedly of the worse variety, and got out of bed. Because she wanted to look more in control of herself than Davey was likely to be, she rubbed her hands over her forehead and wiped her palms on her nightgown. Out in the hallway, the music no longer sounded like a string quartet. It had a wilder, more chaotic edge; Davey had put on one of the Mahler symphonies he had taught her to enjoy.

Nobody who did not enjoy classical music could stay married to Davey Chancel, who fled into music when troubled. Nora, the pride of the Curlews, had decided to marry Davey during his second proposal, six months after they met, one year after Springfield and her never-to-be-thought-of reunion with Dan Harwich.

Nora padded past a case filled with Chancel House books and reached the stairs to the front door. Beside it, the red light glowed reassuringly above the keypad of the security system. Nora went quietly down the stairs and checked that the door was still locked. When she started down the second set of stairs to the family room, the music came into focus. Indistinct voices sounded. She had been hearing a soundtrack. Davey, who never watched anything except the news, had turned on the television. She went down the last of the stairs, her sympathy hardening into anger. Again, Alden had again publicly humiliated his son.

She opened the family room door and leaned in. Startled but in no obvious distress, wide-eyed Davey stared at her, wearing a lightweight robe of Thai silk over his pajamas and holding a pencil upright over an open notebook. The surprise in his face echoed her own. 'Oh, honey,' he said, 'did I wake you up?'

'Are you all right?' Nora padded into the room and glanced at the screen. A ragged old man waved his staff in front of a cave. Pippin! Remember to be brave! You must be brave!

Davey aimed the remote control at the set, and the soundtrack disappeared. 'I didn't think you'd hear, I'm sorry.' As neat as a cat in the even light of the halogen lamp, he placed the remote on top of the notebook and looked at her with what seemed like real remorse. 'Today we ran into a problem, some nuisance Dad asked me to handle, and I thought I should watch this thing.'

'It wasn't the TV. I woke up.'

He tilted his head. 'Like last night?' The question may not have been perfectly sympathetic.

This business about Natalie - you know…' Nora cut herself off with a wave of a hand. 'All the hags in Westerholm have trouble sleeping these days.' She turned back to the television. A bedraggled boy of eight or nine shouldered a sack through a dripping swamp. Twisted, monstrous trees led into gleaming haze.

'And most of them have no more to worry about than you do.'

Last night Davey had listed the reasons why Nora should not worry: she did not live alone or run a business; she did not open the door to strangers. If anyone suspicious turned up, she could push the panic button above the keypad. And, though this remained tactfully unstated, wasn't she overreacting, letting the old problems get to her all over again?

'I wondered where you were,' she said.

'Well, now you know.' He tapped his pencil against the notebook and managed to smile. Faced with a choice, he chose kindness. 'You could watch this with me.'

She sat beside him on the sofa. Davey patted her knee and focused on the movie.

'What is this?'

'Night Journey. You were making so much noise I got out of bed, and when I looked at the paper, I saw it was on. I have to see the thing anyhow, so I might as well do it now.'

'You have to take notes on Night Journey?'

'We're having some trouble with the Driver estate.' He pointed the remote at the screen and raised the volume. Distant in the hazy swamp, wolves howled. More peeved than she wished to be, Nora watched the boy make his way beneath the monstrous trees. 'It'll be okay,' Davey said. For an instant he took her hand. She squeezed it and tucked up her legs and rested her head on his shoulder. Davey twitched, signaling that she was not to lean on him.

Nora slid away and propped her head on the back of the sofa. 'What kind of trouble?'

'Shh.' He leaned forward and picked up the pencil.

So she was not to speak. So she was a distraction. For some reason Davey had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to take notes on the film version of Night Journey, Hugo Driver's wildly successful first novel and the cornerstone of Chancel House, founded by Lincoln Chancel, Davey's grandfather and Hugo Driver's friend. Davey, who took enormous pride in the association, had read Night Journey at least once a year since he was fifteen years old. Anyone less charitable than Nora might have said that he was obsessed with the book.4

Many were obsessed with Hugo Driver's first novel. One of Davey's occupations at Chancel House was answering the requests for photographs, assistance with term papers and theses, and other mail concerning the writer that flowed into the offices. These missives came from high school students, stockbrokers, truck drivers, social workers, secretaries, hairdressers, short-order cooks, ambulance drivers, people who signed their letters with the names of characters in the novel, also famous crazies and sociopaths. Leonard Gimmell, who had murdered the fourteen children in his second-grade class during an outing to the Smoky Mountains, wrote once a week from a state prison in Tennessee, and Teddy Brunhoven, who had appeared in front of a recording studio on West Fifty-fifth Street and assassinated the lead singer of a prominent rock and roll band, communicated almost daily from a cell in upper New York State. Both men continued to justify their crimes with complex, laborious references to the novel. Davey enjoyed responding to Hugo Driver's fan mail much more than the other duties, matters like crossword puzzles and paper plates, wished on him by his father.

Twice Nora had began Night Journey, but she never made it past the chapter in which the boy hero succumbed to an illness and awakened to a landscape meant to represent death. Bored by fantasy novels, she could smell the approach of trolls and talking trees.

Davey also revered Twilight Journey and Journey into Light, the less successful sequels, but had opposed the decision to sell the film rights to Night Journey. On the movie's release a year ago, he had refused to see it. Any movie of the novel would be a failure, a betrayal. You could make good movies of second-rate books; movies based on great books left an embarrassing stink. Whether or not this rule was generally true, it had applied to Night Journey. Despite forty million dollars' worth of special effects and a cast of famous actors, the movie had been greeted by hostile reviews and empty theaters. It disappeared after two weeks, leaving behind the stink Davey had predicted.5

Forbidden to speak, Nora slumped back and watched the disaster unfurl. All that money had bought unconvincing trees, tattered clothes, and a great deal of fog. The boy came through the last of the trees and found himself on a desolate plain. Here and there, plaster boulders floated up out of silver mist. Distant wolves howled,

Bent over his notebook, Davey frowned like an earnest student taking notes in a class he didn't like. Seriousness and concentration increased the accidental likeness between them. At forty, he still had the large, clear eyes and almost translucent skin that had both attracted and repelled her when they had first met. Her first coherent thought about him, after she had adjusted to the unexpected resemblance between them, had been that his version of her face was too pretty. Any man who looked like that had to be impossibly vain. A lifetime of being indulged, petted, and admired would have made him selfish and shallow. Added to these insurmountable failings was his age. Men about ten years younger than herself were still blind, ambitious babies with everything to learn. Most damning of all, an envelope of ease and carelessness surrounded Davey Chancel. Her father, a foundry worker and lifelong union man, had known that such people were the enemy, and nothing she had seen or experienced had taught her otherwise.

Eventually Nora had learned that only the last of her first impressions had been correct. It was true that he had been born into a wealthy family, but Davey was too insecure to be vain. He had been mercilessly criticized, not coddled, all his life. Oddly vulnerable, he was thoughtful; his ambitions had to do with pleasing others and publishing good books. He had one quality that might have been considered a flaw, even a serious flaw, but Nora had decided that this was a trait rather than a serious problem. He was imaginative, and imagination, everyone agreed, was an exceedingly Good Thing. And he needed her. It had been seductive, being needed.

'It's like they set out to trash the book. Every single thing is wrong.' He gave her an exasperated glance. 'Whenever they come to a big moment, they squash it flat. Pay attention, you'll see what I mean.'

Nora watched the boy trudge through the fog.

'The pace is all wrong, so is the tone. This should seem almost exalted. Everything should be filled with a kind of radiance. Instead of experiencing profound emotions, the kid looks like he's going out for a sandwich. I bet it's five minutes before we see Lord Night.'

Nora had no idea who Lord Night was and in fact thought that Davey had said Lord Knight.

'He's going to plod along forever, and in the meantime, the Stones of Toon look totally fake.' He made another note. 'You saw Gentle Friend, didn't you? When you first came in?'

Nora supposed that the old man in rags must have been Gentle Friend. 'I think so.'

That proves my point. Driver's Gentle Friend is a heroic aristocrat who has renounced the world, and this one's a dirty hermit. When he tells Pippin to be brave, you don't have the feeling that he knows any more about bravery than anyone else. But in the book… well, you know.'

'Sure.' Without ever telling an actual lie, Nora had allowed Davey to imagine that on her second attempt she had read the novel and seen that it was a masterpiece.

'Gentle Friend is passing on the central message of his life - that bravery has to be re-created daily. Because he knows it. Pippin can know it, too. In this travesty, the scene is pure cardboard. Okay, here comes Lord Night, completely wrong, of course.'

A big, brindled animal that could have been either a dog or a wolf leaped onto the boulder in front of the boy. In pairs, dogs or wolves appeared on the other boulders. The boy looked up at the animals with an absence of expression which might have been intended to represent determination.

'Duh, and who, I wonder, might you be? See, you don't have any idea that this is why Pippin had to really get it about bravery. He has to prove himself to Lord Night, and he's scared out of his wits. Would that mutt scare you?'

'Probably,' Nora said.

'Lord Night is scary, his teeth are like razors, he's magic. He's the reason for all the emotion that should have been, but wasn't, present at the start of this scene. We know we're supposed to meet this dangerous creature, and who shows up instead? Rin Tin Tin.'

To Nora, the animal staring down from the rock looked exactly like a wolf. It had been fed before the scene, but just in case, its trainer had been standing immediately off camera with a tranquilizer gun. The wolf was the best thing in the movie. Utterly real, it was a lot more impressive than what it was supposed to be impersonating. The boy had so little expression on his face because he was too scared to act. He was a sensible boy.

Then Nora saw that Davey was right; the movie wolf was only a dog. She had turned him into the Wolf of Westerholm, the unknown man who had stolen away the corpse of funny, desperate, appealing Natalie Weil and murdered four other women. And the boy playing Pippin Little wasn't scared or sensible, he was just a lousy actor. Looking at him, she had seen her own fear.

'Of course they screw up the dialogue,' Davey said. 'Lord Night doesn't say, "How are you called, child?" He knows his name. What he says is "Pippin Little, do you travel with us tonight?"

Some renegade part of Nora had overlooked the savagery of the unknown man to remark on his reality. The unknown man strolled here and there on Westerholm's pretty, tree-lined streets, delivering reminders. He was like Weir.

The animal in the movie opened his long mouth and said, 'Will you come with us tonight, Pippin Little?'

Davey slapped his forehead. 'I suppose they think that's an improvement.'

Nora supposed that when she caught herself finding valuable moral lessons in murder it was time to get out. Year after year, Westerholm proved that Natalie Weil had been charitable about its pretensions. Leo Morris, their lawyer by virtue of being Alden and Daisy's lawyer, had chartered the QE2, all of it, for his daughter's sweet-sixteen party. One of their neighbors had installed a bathtub made cf gold in the bathroom off the mister bedroom and regularly invited his guests to step in and check it out.

For at least a year, an idea had been growing within Nora, retreating in the face of all the objections to be made against it, also in the face of Dayey's certain rejection, and now this idea returned as a conviction. They had no business living here. They should sell the house and leave Westerholm. Alden and Daisy would bluster and rant, but Davey made enough money to buy an apartment in New York.

Yes, Nora said to herself, it is time to wake up. It was simple, it was true, it was overwhelming. The move would be difficult, a risk, a test, but if she could retain this sense of necessity, in the end their lives would improve.

She glanced over at Davey, almost fearful that he had heard her thoughts. Davey was giving her a look of shocked disbelief. 'Isn't that incredible?'

'What's incredible?'

He stared. 'You have to read the book again. They cut all of Paddy's tale and went straight to the Field of Steam. Which means that the; first whole set of questions and answers is out, and so are the rats. It's crazy.'

'Imagine it without the rats.'

'It's like The Wizard of Oz without the flying monkeys. It's like The Lord of the Rings without Sauron.'

'Like Huckleberry Finn without Pap.'

'Exactly,' Davey said. 'You can't change these things, you can't do it.'

We'll see about that, Nora said to herself.6

Sometime later she came groggily awake with her head in Davey's lap. A wide-shouldered man with crinkly eyes and a heroic beard was carrying the boy through an enormous wooden door. The soundtrack, all shining violins and hallooing trombones, applauded. This stage of events was coming to an end. Nora remembered a sense of resolve, but could not remember what she had resolved to do. With the memory of her own determination came the return of renewed strength. She had resolved to act. Time to wake up. She and Davey would turn their backs on Westerholm and move the forty crucial miles into New York City. It was time to be a nurse again.

Or if not that, she immediately thought, something else. Nora's last experiences of nursing were a radioactive substance too hot to touch. Until the final month, the radioactivity had expressed itself privately, in nightmares, stomach problems, sudden explosions of temper, depressions. The gleeful demons had put in occasional appearances. Neither Nora nor Davey had connected this stream of disorder to her work at Norwalk Hospital until her last month, when Nora herself had become radioactive. An improperly considered but nonetheless necessary action had for a time brought her into the orbit of the police. Of course she had not committed a crime. She had behaved morally, not immorally, but recklessly. After she had agreed, naturally to the regret of all, to 'take a sabbatical,' she had signed half a dozen papers and left the hospital too unhappy to pick up her final paycheck.

Nora's reckless but moral action had at first resembled kidnapping. The year-old son of a prominent man had been brought in with a broken leg and bruising around the chest. A fall downstairs, the mother said. She had not seen it, but her husband had. Sure did, said the husband, a sleek item in a Wall Street suit. His skin had an oily shine, and his smile was amazingly white. Took my eye off the kid for a second, and when I looked back, bam, almost had a heart attack. Half an hour after the child was admitted, both parents left. Three hours later, stuffed bunny under his pin-striped arm, back came smiling Dad. Into the private room he went, came out fifteen minutes later, even oilier, smiling hard. Nora checked on the child and found him all but unconscious.

When she reported what she had seen, she was told that the father could not be responsible for any injuries to the child. The father was a wizard, a financial genius, too noble to beat his own child. The next day Mom and Dad came in at eight. Dad left after half an hour, Mom went home at noon. At six, just as Nora was leaving, Dad returned alone. When Nora checked in on the child the next day, she learned that he had suffered a mysterious 'failure' the previous evening but was now recovering. Once again she reported her suspicions to her superiors, once again she was rebuked. By this time, two or three other nurses silently agreed with her. The parents had been in again at eight, and these nurses had observed that the wizard seemed to be merely acting the role of a worried parent.

When the father returned that evening, Nora, after an hour railing in vain at Administrators, planted herself in the child's room until Dad asked to be left alone with his baby, at which point she left long enough to make three telephone calls - one to an acquaintance who ran the Jack and Jill Nursery School on the South Post Road in Westerholm, another to the chief of pediatrics, the third to Leo Morris, her lawyer. She said, I am saving this child's life. Then she reported back to the room. The irritated wizard said that he was going to file a complaint and bustled out. Nora wrapped up the child and walked out of the hospital. She drove to the Jack and Jill Nursery, delivered the child into her friend's care, and returned to face the storm she had created. Four months after the turmoil had subsided, the wizard's wife issued a statement to the press saying that she was seeking a divorce on the grounds that her husband regularly beat both herself and their son.

'At least they got one thing right,' Davey said. 'The Green Knight really does look like a grown-up Pippin. But you can't tell that Pippin realizes it.'

On the screen, electronic manipulation was transforming the bearded man's face, stripping away years by smoothing wrinkles, shortening his hair, drawing in the planes of his cheeks, leaving the beard as only a penumbra around a face almost identical to the boy's.

'You need the words. His own salvation lay within himself. Pippin had come to the great truth behind his journey through vast darkness. Life and death stirred beneath his own hands, and his hands commanded them.' Davey recited the words unemotionally but without hesitation.

'Oh, of course,' Nora said. 'Absolutely.'

For less than a second, the boy's face shone out from within the shadow of the man's, and then the wild hair, frothing beard, and hard planes of the forehead and cheekbones locked back into place. The man carried the boy down a grassy slope. Sunlight gilded his hair and the tops of his arms. On the hill behind the man and the boy stood a huge door in a dark frame, like a mirage. Before them in the fold of a valley at the bottom of the hillside, oaks the size of matches half-hid a white farmhouse.

She turned her head to Davey and found him looking not at the screen but down at her with a suggestion of concern in his eyes.

'Kind of pretty,' she said.

'So it's completely wrong.' His eyes darkened. 'That's not Mountain Glade. Does it look like there's a secret in that place? Mountain Glade isn't pretty, but it contains the great secret.'

'Oh, sure.'

'It's the whole point,' Davey said. His eyes had moved backward into his head.

'I better go back to bed.' Nora pushed herself upright without any assistance from Davey. 'Isn't it almost over, anyhow?'

'If it is over,' he said.

Onscreen, the bearded man faded toward transparency. When she stood up and took an undecided step away from the sofa, he vanished altogether. The boy sprinted toward the farmhouse, and then the cast list obliterated his image.

Nora took another step toward the door, and Davey gave her a quick, unreadable glance. 'I'll be there in a little while,' he said.

Nora climbed the stairs, again reflexively checking that the front door was locked and the security system armed. She slid back into bed, felt the night sweat soak through her nightgown, and realized that she had to convince Davey that her desire to leave Westerholm had nothing to do with Natalie Weil or the human wolf.

Half an hour later, he entered the bedroom and felt his way along the wall until he found the bathroom. Without really being aware that she had fallen asleep, Nora opened her eyes from a dream in which Dan Harwich had been looking at her with colossal, undimmed tenderness. She rolled over and pushed her head deep into the pillow. For a long time Davey brushed his teeth while the water ran. He washed his face and yanked a towel off the rack. He spoke a few reproachful words she could not make out. Like his mother, when alone or unobserved he often conducted one-sided conversations with some person not present, a habit which Nora thought could not technically be described as talking to yourself, the bathroom light clicked off, and the door opened. Davey groped toward the bed, found the bottom of the mattress in the dark, and felt his way up his side to pull back the duvet. He got in and stretched out along his edge of the bed, as far from her as he could get without falling off. She asked if he was all right.

'Don't forget about lunch tomorrow,' he answered.

Once during her period of radioactivity, Nora had forgotten that they were due at the Poplars for a meal. Usually, Davey's reminders of this distant error struck her as unnecessarily provocative. Tonight, however, his remark suggested a way to put her resolution into effect.

'I won't,' Nora said.

She could help them by drawing nearer to Daisy Chancel; she could soften the blow before it fell.7

A few minutes after they had wandered out onto the Poplars' terrace early the next afternoon, Nora left Davey and Alden holding Bloody Marys as they looked out at the sun-dazzled Sound. The announcement that she was going upstairs to see Daisy had met only a token resistance, although Davey had seemed disgruntled to be left alone with his father so soon after their arrival. Davey's father had seemed pleased and even gratified by Nora's words. Alden Chancel had grown into a handsome, unruffled old age by getting everything he had ever wanted, and while he had certainly wanted his son to get married, he had never imagined that Davey would marry someone like Nora Curlew.

Nora quickly traversed the downstairs living room, came out into the marbled entrance, and turned to mount the wide staircase. On the landing she paused in front of the huge mirror. Instead of changing into her usual jeans and top after her morning run, Nora had dressed in white trousers and a loose, dark blue silk blouse. In the mirror these clothes looked nearly as appropriate for lunch on the Poplars' terrace as they had at home.

She pushed at her hair without significantly rearranging it and started up the remaining steps to the second floor. A door closed, and the Italian girl, Maria, the short gray-haired woman who decades ago had replaced the famous Helen Day, called the Cup Bearer, at other times referred to more mysteriously as O'Dotto, came out of Daisy's studio carrying an empty tray. The Cup Bearer, whom Davey had loved, had made legendary desserts, seven-layer cake and floating island; Maria was serviceable, not legendary, and in Nora's experience prepared excellent French and Italian meals.

Maria smiled at her and gave the tray a short, emphatic slap against the air, as if to say. So! Here we are!

'Hello, Maria, how's Mrs Chancel today?'

'Very fine, Mrs Nora.'

'How are you?'

'Exactly the same,'

'Would she mind company?'

Maria shook her head, still smiling. Nora knocked twice, then pushed open the door.

Seated at the far end of a long, cream-colored couch facing a glass coffee table and a brick fireplace, Daisy raised her head from the paperback in her hands and gave Nora a bright look of welcome. The white oak desk at her shoulder, placed at the top of the couch like the crossbar of a capital T, was bare except for an electric typewriter and a jar of yellow pencils; the glass table held a tall vase crowded with fleshy-looking, white Casablanca lilies, a pack of low-tar cigarettes, a gold lighter, a stone ashtray brimming with butts, books in stacks, and a tumbler filled with ice and pale red liquid. Mint green in their own shadows, white aluminum blinds were canted against the sun.

'Nora, oh goody, what a treat, come in and join me, where's your drink?'

'I must have left it on the terrace.' Nora stepped into Daisy's atmosphere of flowers and cigarette smoke.

'Oh no, mustn't do that, let's have the Italian girl fetch it.' She slid a postcard into the book.

'No, no, I don't-'

Daisy had already leaned forward and taken a little bell off the table. It uttered an absurdly soft, tinkling ring. 'Maria,' she said in a conversational voice.

As if summoned out of the air, Maria opened the door and stepped inside. 'Mrs Chancel?'

'Will you be a sweetie and bring up Nora's drink? It's on the terrace.'

Maria nodded and left, closing the door behind her.

Daisy patted the creamy couch and set the paperback, Journey into Light, Hugo Driver's second posthumous book, on the glass table.

'I'm not interrupting anything?'

In the mid-fifties, newly married, forty pounds lighter, Daisy Chancel had published two novels, not with Chancel House, and ever since she had supposedly been writing another.

Nora had nearly, but not quite, ceased to believe in this book, of which she had never seen any evidence on her infrequent visits to the studio. Davey had long ago refused to talk about it, and Alden referred to it only euphemistically. Daisy's manner at evening meals, rigid and vague, suggested that instead of working she had been drinking martinis supplied by the Italian girl. Yet once there must have been a book, and that Daisy maintained the pretense of work meant that it was still important to her.

'Not at all,' Daisy said. 'I thought I'd read Driver again. Such an inspiring writer you know. He always inspires me, anyhow. I don't know why people never took to Journey into Light.' She gave Nora a mystical smile and leaned forward to tap the book approvingly with her thick fingers. Her hand drifted sideways to capture the tumbler and carry it to her mouth. She took a good swallow, then another. 'You're not one of those people who think Journey into Light is a terrible falling off, are you?' Daisy set down the drink and snatched up the cigarettes and lighter.

'I never thought of it that way.'

Daisy lit a cigarette, inhaled, and as she expelled smoke waved it away. 'No, of course not.' She tossed the pack onto the table. 'You couldn't, not with Davey around. I remember when he read it for the first time.'

Someone knocked at the door. 'Your potion. Come in, Maria.'

The maid brought in the Bloody Mary, and when she proffered it to Nora her eyes sparkled. She was pleased to see Daisy enjoying herself.

'When will things be ready?'

'Half an hour. I make fresh mayonnaise for the lobster salad.'

'Make lots, Davey likes your mayonnaise.'

'Mr Chancel, too.'

'Mr Chancel likes everything,' Daisy said, 'unless it interferes with sleep or business.' She hesitated for a moment. 'Could you bring us fresh drinks in about fifteen minutes? Nora's looks so watery. And have Jeffrey open the wine just before we come down.'

Nora waited for Maria to leave the room, then turned to find Daisy half-smiling, half-scrutinizing her through a murk of cigarette smoke. 'Speaking of Hugo Driver, is there some kind of trouble with his estate?'

Daisy raised her eyebrows.

'Davey got up in the middle of the night to watch the movie of Night Journey; He said that Alden wanted him to take care of some kind of problem.'

'A problem?'

'Maybe he said it was a nuisance.'

At these words Daisy lowered her eyebrows, lodged the cigarette in her mouth, and picked up her glass. She nodded slowly several times before withdrawing the cigarette, blowing out smoke, and taking another mouthful of the drink. She licked her lips. 'I always enjoy your visits to my little cell.'

'Did you ever meet Hugo Driver?'

'Oh no, he was dead before Alden and I were married. Alden met him two or three times, I believe, when he came here for visits. In fact, Hugo Driver slept in this room.'

'Is that why you use it?' Nora glanced around the long, narrow room, trying to imagine it as it had been in the thirties.

'Could be.' Daisy shrugged.

'But is your own work like Driver's - is that the kind of thing you've been working on?'

'I hardly know anymore,' Daisy said.

'I guess I'm a little curious.'

'I guess I am, too!'

'Has anybody ever read what you've been writing?'

Daisy sat up straight and glanced at the bookshelves next to the fireplace, giving Nora a view of soft, flat white hair and the outline of a bulging cheek. Then she turned to look at her in a way unreadable but not at all vague. 'A long time ago, my agent read a couple of chapters. But over the years, we… drifted… away from each other. And it's changed a lot since then. Several times. You'd have to say it changed completely, several times.'

'Your agent wasn't very helpful.'

Daisy's cheeks widened in a brief, cheerless smile. 'I forgave him when he died. It was the least both of us could do.' She finished off her drink, dragged on the cigarette, and blew out a thin shaft of smoke that bounced like a traveling cloud off the vase.

'And since then?'

Daisy tilted her head. 'Are you asking to read my manuscript, Nora? Excuse me. I should say, are you offering to read it?'

'I just thought…' Nora did her best to look placating. Her mother-in-law continued to examine her out of eyes that seemed to have become half their normal size. 'I just wondered if… if a reader might be helpful to you. I'm hardly a critic.'

'I hardly want a critic.' Daisy leaned forward over her stomach and stubbed out the cigarette. 'It might be interesting. Fresh pair of eyes and all that. I'll think about it.'

A rap sounded at the door, and Maria came in with two tall drinks on a tray. She removed Daisy's empty glass and placed Nora's second beside her nearly untouched first. 'I give you extra jar mayonnaise to take home, Mrs Nora.'

Nora thanked her.

'Are the boys doing all right down there, Maria?'

'Doing beautiful.'

'No shouts? No threats?' Nora had rarely seen this side of Daisy.

Maria smiled and shook her head.

'Are they talking about anything interesting?'

Maria's smile went rigid.

'Oh, I see. Well, if they ask, which they won't, you can tell them that everything we're talking about is interesting.'

It struck Nora that the closest relationship Daisy had was with Maria.

Daisy surprised her again by winking at her. 'Isn't that right, dear?' This bright, lively Daisy had appeared immediately after Nora had suggested looking at her manuscript.

Nora said yes, it was interesting, and Maria beamed at her before leaving.

'What do you think they're talking about downstairs?'

'Want to make a publisher's heart go trip trap, trip trap, like the baby goat walking over the bridge? Show him a nice, juicy crime, what he would call a "true crime." Daisy smiled another mirthless smile and took a swallow of the fresh drink. 'Don't you love that term? I think I'll commit a true crime. Right after I commit a nonfiction novel. Trip trap, trip trap, trip trap.' She opened her mouth, rolled up her eyes, and patted her heart in mock ecstasy. 'I know, I'll commit a true crime by writing a nonfiction novel about Hugo Driver!' Daisy giggled. 'Maybe that's what I've been doing all these years! Maybe Alden will give me a million dollars and I'll go away to Tahiti!'

'Maybe I'll come with you,' Nora said. It would be fun going to Tahiti with this Daisy Chancel.

Daisy wagged a fat forefinger. 'No, you won't. No, you won't. You can't go away and leave Davey all alone.'

'I suppose not,' Nora said.

'No, no, no,' Daisy said. 'Nope.'

'Of course not,' Nora said. 'Are you really writing a non-fiction novel?'

The older woman was nearly gloating, as if she knew secrets so outlandish that she could hint eternally without ever divulging them. Nora took in her shining, slightly filmy eyes and understood that Daisy was going to let her read her manuscript.8

'Sure, every woman in Westerholm is frightened,' Alden said. They're supposed to be.'

'What do you mean, supposed to be?' Nora asked.

'You think I'm defending murder.'

'No, I just want to know what you meant.'

He surveyed the table. 'When Nora looks at me, she sees the devil.'

'A nonfiction devil,' said Daisy.

'Dad, I don't think I understand, either.'

'Alden wants people to think he's the nonfiction… true crime… devil.' Daisy had reached the stage of speaking with exaggerated care.

'The devil does, too,' Nora said, irritated.

'Exactly,' Alden said. 'Wherever this fellow goes, he's hot stuff. He gets his weekly copy of the Westerholm News, and he's on the front page.'

He helped himself to another portion of lobster salad and signaled Jeffrey, generally referred to as 'the Italian girl's nephew,' to pour more wine. Jeffrey took the bottle from the ice bucket, wiped it on a white towel, and went to the end of the table to refill Daisy's glass. He moved up the table, and Nora put her hand over the top of her glass. Jeffrey gave her a comic scowl before he went to the head of the table.

Nora had never known what to make of Jeffrey. Tall, of an age somewhere between forty-five and fifty five, his speech without accent, his fair brown hair thinning evenly across his crown, Jeffrey was an unlikely relative of Maria. Nora gathered that she had produced him some ten years before when Alden had begun to talk about hiring someone to answer phones, open doors, run errands. Jeffrey had clever eyes and a graceful, guarded manner that did not preclude playfulness. Some days he looked like a thug. Nora watched him offer the wine to Davey, turn away to twist the bottle into the ice, and return to his post at the edge of the terrace. In a close-fitting dark suit and black shirt, Jeffrey was having one of his good days. Daisy reminded her of her private theory about Jeffrey by saying, 'You're usually more… original… than that,' and tapping her fork on the table in rhythm with her words.

Jeffrey had been hired to cover for Daisy.

'I'm not finished, my dear.'

'Then please, please enlighten us.'

Alden smiled universally at the table. His perfect teeth gleamed, his white hair shone, a flush darkened the smoothly tanned broad face. In a blazer and snowy shirt, the top button opened over a paisley ascot, with bright, expressionless eyes and deep indentations like divots around his mouth, Alden looked just like the kind of person who hired someone like Jeffrey. Nora realized how much she disliked him.

'Think of how many Copies the Westerholm News is selling. People who never looked at it in their lives are buying it now. And this isn't true just of our rinky-dink little paper. The tabloids in New York jump up and salute every time another lady is slaughtered in her bed. And do you think the security system business in Fairfield County is having the usual August lull? What about the handgun business? Not to mention fencing, yard lights, and locksmiths? How about television reporters, the photographers from People?'

'Don't forget publishers,' Nora said.

'Absolutely. What's your best guess on how many books are being written about Westerholm at this minute? Four? Five? Think of the paper that will go into those books. The ink, the foil for the covers. Think of the computer disks, the laptops, the notebooks the fax machines. The fax paper. The pencils.'

'It's an industry,' Davey said. 'Okay.'

'A darn bloody industry, if you ask me,' said Daisy. Nora silently applauded.

'So was World War Two,' said Alden. 'And so was Vietnam, Nora, if you'll forgive me.'

Nora didn't think she would.

'Ah, if looks could kill - but did or did not unit commanders have a certain amount of shells they were supposed to fire on a daily basis - not officially, I mean, but pretty specific anyhow? Didn't we use up a tremendous amount of uniforms and vehicles over there, didn't we build bases and sell beer and buy tons of food? Wasn't somebody manufacturing body bags? Nora, I know I'm flirting with danger, but I love it when your eyes flash.'

He was flirting with her, not danger. She looked across the table at her husband and found him gazing at the napkin in his lap.

'Gee, I love it when your eyes flash, too, Alden,' she said. 'It makes you look so young.'

'Actually, Nora, you're the oldest person at this table.'

For both her husband's sake and Daisy's, Nora forced herself to relax.

'You were tempered in ways the rest of us were not, and that's why you're so beautiful! I've admired beautiful women all my life, beautiful women are the saviors of mankind. Just being able to see your face must have pulled a lot of guys through over there.'

She opened her mouth, closed it, and looked back at Alden. 'Aren't you sweet.'

'You must have had a great effect on the young children that passed through your hands.'

'I think your viewpoint cheapens everything,' Nora said. 'Sorry. It's disgusting.'

'If I could snap my fingers and make it so that you'd never gone to Vietnam, would you let me do it?'

'That would make me as young as you are, Alden.'

'Benefits come in all shapes and sizes.' He distributed a smile around the table. 'Is there anything else I can clear up for you?'

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Daisy said, 'Time for me to return to my cell. I'm feeling a little tired. Wonderful to see you, Davey. Nora, I'll be in touch.'

Alden glanced at Nora before pushing back his chair and getting up. Davey stood up a second later.

Daisy grasped the top of her chair and turned toward the door. 'Jeffrey, please thank Maria. Lovely lobster salad.'

Jeffrey's courtly smile made him look more than ever like a dapper second-story man disguised as a valet. He drifted sideways and opened it the door for Daisy.9

Alden and Davey took their chairs again. 'Your mother'll be right as rain after her nap,' Alden said. 'Whatever goes on in her studio is her business, but I have the feeling she's been working harder than usual lately.'

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, somethings 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 heard. '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 case:; 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 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 Ernest, 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 it. Alden gets a kick out him?'

'Didn't you say he was disgusting? That he cheapened everything?'

'I was criticizing his ideas, not him, Besides, he enjoyed 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 of 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, Noni 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… light-hearted.'

'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 to 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 the drive, and continued point where the yellow tape wound around a maple beside 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.

'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 selfimagined 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 grayhound.

'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 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 pocket, 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,' Davey 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.

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 Chance 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,' Mr Shull said.

Mr Hashim said, 'A walk through,' and bent over to examine his highly polished black wing tips. 'Cool.'

'I'm glad we're all in agreement. Mike, maybe you could hold that jar for Mrs Chance.'

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 weather-vanes 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 phonographs 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 of Time, Newsweek, Fangoria and Wrestlemania.

'I wish my men looked at crime scenes the way that you do.'

Startled, Nora straightened up to see Holly Fen leaning against the open door of 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 detective 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?'

'Harmless fun and games.' He moved aside, and she walked out into the hall.

'Harmless?'

Nora turned toward the bedroom, thinking that maybe the Chancels had a point after all, and secrets should stay secret. Murder stripped you bare, exposed you to pitiless judgment. What you thought you shared with one other person was… She stopped walking.

'Think of something?'

She turned around. 'A man took those pictures.'

'Kind of a waste if her sister took them.'

'But there aren't any pictures of him.'

'That's right.'

'Do you think there ever were?'

'You mean, do I think that at some point he was on the bed and she was holding the camera? I think something like that probably happened, sure. I took your picture, now you take mine. What happened to the pictures of the man?'

'Oh,' she said, remembering the wide gaps on that section of the board.

'Ah. I love these little moments of enlightenment.'

This little moment of enlightenment made her feel sick to her stomach.

'I'm kind of curious to hear what you know about her boyfriends.'

'I wish I did know something.'

'Guess you didn't notice the pictures, last time you were here.'

'I didn't go into the kitchen.'

'How about the time 'I don't remember if before that?'

' I don't remember if I went into the kitchen. If I did, I certainly didn't see those pictures.'

'Now comes the time when I have to ask about this,' Fenn said. 'Did you and your husband ever join in your friend's games? If you say yes, I won't tell Slim and Slam in there. Got any pictures at home with Mrs Weil in them?'

'No. Of course not.'

'Your husband's a good-looking guy. Little younger than you, isn't he?'

'Actually,' she said, 'we were born on the same day. Just in different decades.'

He grinned. 'You probably know where the bedroom is.'15

Through the open door Nora saw a rising arc of brown spots sprayed across an ivory wall. Beneath the spray, the visible corner of the bed looked as if rust colored paint had been poured over the sheets.

Fenn spoke behind her. 'You don't have to go in there if you don't feel like it. But you might want to reconsider the idea that she isn't dead.'

'Maybe it isn't her blood,' she said, and fumed at Davey for having made her say such a thing.

'Oh?'

She made herself walk into the room. Dried blood lay across the bed, and stripes and splashes of blood blotted the carpet beside it. The sheets and pillows had been slashed. Stiff flaps of cotton folded back over clumps of rigid foam that looked like the entrails of small animals. It all looked sordid and sad. The sadness was not a surprise, but the sense of wretchedness gripped her heart.

Slumped in the far corner beside Officer LeDonne, Davey glanced up at her and shook his head.

She turned to Fenn, who raised his eyebrows. 'Did you find a camera? Did Natalie have a camera?'

'We didn't find one, but Slim and Slam say all the pictures in there were taken with the same camera. One of those little Ph.D. jobs.'

'Ph.D.?'

'Push here, dummy. An auto-focus. Like a little Olympus or a Canon. With a zoom feature.'

In other words, Natalie's camera was exactly like theirs, not to mention most of the other cameras in Westerholm. The bedroom felt airless- hot, despairing. A lunatic who liked to dress women up like sex toys had finally taken his fantasies to their logical conclusion and used Natalie Weil's bed as an operating table. Nora wondered if he had been seeing all five women at the same time.

She was glad she wasn't a cop. There was too much to think about, and half of what you had to think about made no sense. But the worst part of standing here was standing here. .

She had to say something. What came out of her mouth was 'Were there pictures in the other houses? Like the ones in the kitchen?' She barely heard the detective's negative answer; she had barely heard her own question. Somehow she had walked across several yards of unspattered tan carpet to stand in front of four long bookshelves. Two feet away, Davey gave her the look of an animal in a cage. Nora fled into the safety of book titles, but she found no safety. In the living room Fenn had said something about Natalie's affection for horror novels and here was the proof in alphabetical order by authors name. These books had titles like The Rats and Vampire Junction and The Silver Skull. Here were They Thirst, Hell House, The Books of Blood, and The Brains of Rats. Natalie had owned more Dean Koontz novels than Nora had known existed, she had every Stephen King novel from Carrie to Dolores Clayborne, all of Anne Rice and Clive Barker and Whitley Stieber.

Nora moved along the shelves as if in a trance. Here was a Natalie Weil who entertained herself with stories of vampires, dismemberment; monsters with tentacles and bad breath, cannibalism, psychotic killers, degrading random death. This person waited fear, but creepy, safe fear. She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride.

At the end of the bottom shelf her eyes met the names Marietta Teatime and Clyde Morning above a sullen-looking crow, the familiar logo of Blackbird Books, Chancel House's small, soon-to-be-discontinued horror line. Alden had expected steady, automatic profits from these writers, but they had failed him. Gaudy with severed heads and mutilated dolls, the covers of their books came back from the distributors within days of publication. Davey had argued to keep the line, which managed to make a small amount of money every season, in part because Teatime and Morning never got more than two thousand dollars per book. (Davey sometimes frivolously suggested that they were actually the same person.) Alden dismissed Davey's argument that he had condemned the books by refusing to promote or publicize them; the beauty of horror was that it sold itself. Davey said that his father treated the books like orphaned children, and Alden said damn right, like orphaned children, they had to pull their own weight.

'Mrs Chancel?' said Holly Fenn.

Another title shouted at her from the bottom shelf. Night Journey protruded at a hasty, awkward angle from between two Stephen King encyclopedias as if Natalie had crammed it in anywhere before running to the door.

'Mr Chancel?'

She looked at the D's, but Natalie had owned no other Driver novels.

'Sorry I wasn't more helpful.' Davey's voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well.

'No harm in trying.' Fenn stepped out of the doorway.

Davey shot Nora another anguished glance and moved toward the door. Nora followed, and LeDonne came along behind. The four of them moved in single file toward the living room, where Slim and Slam faced forward, automatically shedding any signs of individuality. Davey said, 'Excuse me, I have to go back.'

Fenn flattened his bulk against the wall to let Davey get by. Nora and the two policemen watched him go down the corridor and swerve into the bedroom. LeDonne quizzed Fenn with a look, and Fenn shook his head. After a couple of seconds, Davey emerged, more distressed than ever.

'Forget something?' Fenn asked.

'I thought I saw something - couldn't even tell you what it was. But-' He spread his hands, shaking his head.

'That happens,' Fenn paid. 'If it comes back to you, don't be shy about giving me a call.'

When they turned to go down the stairs, the two FBI men split apart and looked away..16

'What did you think you saw?'

'Nothing.'

'You went back in the bedroom. You had something on your mind. What was it?'

'Nothing.' He looked sideways at her, so shaken he was white. 'It was a dumb idea. I should have just gone home.'

'Why didn't you?'

'I wanted to see that house.' He paused. 'And I wanted you to see it.'

'Why?'

He waited a second Before answering. 'I thought if you looked at it, you might stop having nightmares.'

'Pretty strange idea,' Nora said.

'Okay, it was a rotten idea.' His voice grew louder. 'It was the worst idea in the history of the world. In fact, every single idea I've ever had in my life was really terrible. Are we in agreement now? Good. Then we can forget about it.'

'Davey.'

'What?

'Do you remember when I asked if you were upset?'

'No.' He hesitated, then sighed again, and his glance suggested the arrival of a confession. 'Why would I be upset?'

Nora gathered herself. 'You must have been surprised by what your father said about Hugo Driver.'

He looked at her as if trying to recall Alden's words. 'He said he was a great writer.'

'You said he was a great writer.' After a second of silence she said, 'What I mean is his attitude.'

'Yeah,' Davey said. 'You're right. That was a surprise. He sort of jolted me, I guess.'

For Nora the next few seconds filled with a hopeful tension.

'I've got something on my mind, I guess I was worked up… I don't want to fight, Nora.'

'So you're not mad at me anymore.'

'I wasn't mad at you. I just feel confused.'

Two hours with his parents had turned him back into Pippin Little. If he needed a Green Knight, she volunteered on the spot. She had asked for a job, and here one was sitting next to her. She could help Davey become his successful adult self. She would help him get the position he deserved at Chancel House. Her other plans, befriending Daisy and moving to New York, were merely elements of this larger, truer occupation. Start, she commanded herself. Now.

'Davey,' she said, 'what would you like to be doing at Chancel House?'

Again, he seemed to force himself to think. 'Editorial work.'

'Then that's what you should be doing.'

'Well, yeah, but you know, Dad…' He gave her a resigned look.

'You're not like that disgusting guy who takes did ladies to lunch, you're not Dick Dart. What job do you want most?'

He bit the lining of his cheek before deciding to declare what she already suspected. 'I'd like to edit Blackbird Books. I think I could build Blackbird into something good, but Dad is canceling the line.'

'Not if you make him keep it.'

'How do I do that?'

'I don't know, exactly.But for sure you have to come at him with a plan.' She thought for a moment. 'Get all the figures on the Blackbird Books. Give him projections, give him graphs. Have lists of writers you want to sing up. Print up a presentation. Tell him you'll do it on top of your other work.'

He turned his head to gape at her.

'I'll help. We'll put something together that he won't be able to refuse.'

He looked away, looked back, and filled his lungs with air. 'Well, okay. Let's give it a try.'

'Blackbird Books, here we come,' she said, and remembered seeing the JDW of titles by Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime in Natalie's bedroom. Unlike Natalie's other books, these had not been filed alphabetically, but separated, at the end of the bottom shelf.

'You know, it might work,' Davey said.

Nora wondered if putting the books together meant they were significantly better. Maybe what was crude or worse than other horror novels about them was that they were published by Blackbird - Chancel House.

'I was thinking once we could do a line of classic books in the public domain.'

'Good idea,' Nora said. Looking back, she thought that the Blackbird Books on Natalie's shelf seemed uniformly new and unmarked, as if they had been bought at the same time and never read.

'If we can put together a serious presentation he will have to pay attention.'

'Davey…' A sense hope and expectancy filled Nora ,and the question escaped her before she could call it back. 'Do you ever think of moving out of Westerholm?'

He lifted his chin. To tell the truth I think about getting out of this hole just about every day. But I know how much living here means to you.'

Her laughter amazed him.

BOOK IIPADDY'S TAIL

The first thing Pippin saw was the tip of a little tail, no wider than four horsehairs bound together, but in search of the rest of the animal, he followed the tail around rocks, through tall weeds, in great circles, up and down great loops on the grass, and when at last he reached the end of the long, long tail, he found attached to it a tiny mouse. The mouse appeared to be dead. 17

Although Davey seemed moody and distracted, the following five days were nearly as happy as any Nora could remember. One other period - several weeks in Vietnam, in memory the happiest of her life - had come at a time when she had been too busy to think of anything but work. Looking back, she had said to herself, So that was happiness.

Her first month in the Evacuation Hospital had jolted her so thoroughly that by its end she was no longer certain what she would need to get her through. Pot, okay. Alcohol, you bet. Emotional calluses, even better. At the rate of twenty to thirty surgical cases a day, she had learned about debridement and irrigation - clearing away dead skin and cleaning the wound against infection - worms in the chest cavity, amputations, crispy critters, and pseudomonas. She particularly hated pseudomonas, a bacterial infection that coated burn patients with green slime. During that month, she had junked most of what she had been taught in nursing school and learned to assist in high-speed operations, clamping blood vessels and cutting where the neurosurgeon told her to cut. At night her boots left bloody trails across the floor. She was in a flesh factory, not a hospital. The old, idealistic Nora Curlew was being unceremoniously peeled away like a layer of outgrown clothes, and what she saw of the new was a spiritless automaton.

Then a temporary miracle occurred. As many patients died during or after operations, the wounded continued to scream from their cots, and Norma was always exhausted, but not as exhausted, and the patients separated into individuals.

To these people she did rapid, precise, necessary things that often permitted them to live. At times, she cradled the head of a dying young man and felt that particles of her own being passed into him, casing and steadying. She had won a focused concentration out of the chaos around her, and every operation became a drama in which she and the surgeon performed necessary, inventive actions which banished or at least contained disorder. Some of these actions were elegant; sometimes the entire drama took on a rigorous, shattering elegance. She learned the differences between the surgeons, some of them fullbacks, some concert pianists, and she treasured the compliments they gave her. At nights, too alert with exhaustion to sleep, she smoked Montagnard grass with the others and played whatever they were playing that day - cards, volleyball, or insults.

At the end of her fifth week in Vietnam, a neurosurgeon named Chris Cross had been reassigned and a new surgeon, Daniel Harwich, had rotated in. Cross, a cheerful blond mesomorph with thousands of awful jokes and a bottomless appetite for beer, had been a fullback surgeon, but a great fullback. He worked athletically, with flashes of astounding grace, and Nora had decided that, all in all, she would probably never see a better surgeon. Their entire unit mourned his going, and when his replacement turned out to be a stringy, lint-haired geek with Coke-bottle glasses and no visible traces of humor, they circled their wagon around Captain Cross's memory and politely froze out the intruder. A tough little nurse named Rita Glow said she'd work with the clown, what the hell, it was all slice 'n' dice anyhow, and while Nora continued her education in the miraculous under the unit's other two surgeons, one a bang-smash fullback, one a pianist who had learned some bang-smash tendencies from Chris Cross, she noticed that not only did geeky Dan Harwich put in his twelve-hour days with the rest of them but he got through more patients with fewer complaints and less drama.

One day Rita Glow said she had to see this guy work, he was righteous, he was a fucking tap dancer in there, and the next morning she swapped assignments to put Nora across the table from Harwich. Between them was a paralyzed young soldier whose back looked like raw meat. Harwich told her she was going to have to help him while he cut shell fragments from the boy's vertebrae. He was both a fullback and a pianist, and his hands were astonishingly fast and sure. After three hours, he closed the boy's back with the quickest, neatest stitches she had ever seen, looked over at Nora, and said, 'Now that I'm warmed up, let's do something hard, okay?'

Within three weeks she was sleeping with Harwich, and within four she was in love. Then the skies opened. Tortured, mangled bodies packed the OR, and they worked seventy-eight hours straight through. She and Harwich crawled into bed covered with the blood of other people, made love, slept for a second, and got up and did the whole thing all over again. They were shelled in the middle of operations and in the middle of the night, sometimes the same thing, and as the clarity of the earlier period shredded, details of individual soldiers burned themselves into her mind. No longer quite sane, she thrust the terror and panic into a locked inner closet.

After three weeks she was raped by three dumbell grunts who caught her as she came outside for a break.One of them hit her in the side of the head, pushed her down, and fell on her. The other kneeled on her arms. At first she thought they had mistaken her for a Vietcong, but almost instantly she realized that what they had mistaken her for was a living woman.'

The rape was a flurry of thumps and blows and enormous, reeking hands over her mouth; it was having the breath mashed out of her while grunting animals dug at her privates. While it went on, Nora was punched through the bottom of the world. This was entirely literal.The column of the world went from bottom to top, and now she had been smashed through the bottom of the column along with the rest of the shit. Demons leaned chattering out of the darkness.

The second grunt rolled off, the first grunt let go of her arms, and they sprinted away. She heard their footsteps and realized that now she was on the other side, with the gibbering demons; then she gathered the demons into her psychic hands and stuffed them into an inner container just large enough to hold them.

Nora did not tell Harwich what had happened until hours later, when she looked down at the blood soaking through her clothes, thought it was hers, and fainted. A grim Harwich accepted her refusal to report the incident but followed her out of the OR on a break to pass from his hands to hers a dead officer's handgun. This she kept as close as possible until her last morning in Vietnam, when she dropped it into the nurses' latrine. Even after Dan Harwich left Vietnam, vowing that he would write (he did) and that they had a future together (they didn't), she used her awareness of the gun beneath her pillow to fend off nightmares of the incident until she could almost think that she had forgotten it. And for years after Vietnam it was as if she really had forgotten all about it - until she had reached a kind of provisional, static happiness in Westerholm, Connecticut. In Westerholm, the ordinary, terrible nightmares of dead and dying soldiers had begun to be supplanted by the other, worse nightmares - about being pushed through the hole at the bottom of the world.

Long after, Nora sometimes looked back at that exalted period before the war slammed down on her and thought: Happiness comes when you are looking elsewhere, it is a byproduct, of no importance in itself.18

Every night that week, Nora and Davey delved into Blackbird Books, playing with figures and trying to work out a presentation that would convince Alden. Davey remained moody and remote but seemed grateful for Nora's help. To see what Blackbird Books were like, Nora read The Waiting Grave by Marietta Teatime and Blood Bond by Clyde Morning.

Davey sounded out agents; he and Nora drew up lists of writers who might sigh up with a revitalized Blackbird Books. They learned that Blackbird's greatest appeal was its connection to Chancel House, but that Chancel House had done even less with the line than Davey had imagined.

In 1977, its first year. Blackbird had published twelve paperback originals by writers then unknown. By 1979, half of the ten original writers had left in search of more promotion, higher advances, and better editing. In those days an assistant editor named Merle Marvell had handled the line. Marvell's secretary, shared with two other assistant editors, copyedited Blackbird novels for fifteen dollars a book. (Alden would not waste money on a professional copy editor.) Blackbird stubbornly refused to lay golden eggs, and by 1981 all of its original writers had moved on, leaving behind only Teatime and Morning, who had produced their first books. No longer an assistant editor, Merle Marvell bought one first novel that won an important prize and another that made best-seller list and thereafter had no more time for Blackbird. Since then, Blackbird's two stalwarts sent in their manuscripts and took their money. Neither had an agent. Instead of addresses, they had post office boxes -Teatime's in Norwalk, Connecticut, Morning's in midtown Manhattan! Their telephone numbers had never been divulged. They never demanded higher advances, lunches, or ad budgets. Clyde Morning had won the British Fantasy Award in 1983, and Marietta Teatime had been nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1985. They went on producing a book a year until 1989, when each of them stopped writing.

'Chancel House has been publishing these people for more than ten years, and you don't even know their telephone numbers?'

'That's not the weird part,' Davey said. They were devouring a sausage and mushroom pizza delivered by a gnome in a space helmet who on closer inspection had become a sixteen-year-old girl wearing a motorcycle helmet. Room had been made on the table for a bottle of Robert

Mondavi Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon and two glasses by shoving papers, printouts, and sheets torn from legal pads into piles. 'The weird part is what I found on a shelf in the conference room today.'

Like the old Davey, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, teasing her. Nora thought he looked wonderful. She liked the way he ate pizza, with a knife and fork. Nora picked up a slice and chomped, pulling away long strings of mozzarella, but Davey addressed a pizza as though it were filet mignon. 'Okay,' she said, 'what did you find on this shelf?'

'Remember I told you that every new manuscript gets written down in a kind of a ledger? Now all this is on a computer. Whatever happens to the submission gets entered beside the title - rejected and returned, or accepted, with the date. I was wondering if we might have rejected books by Morning or Teatime, so I went back to '89, the first year we used computers, and there was Clyde Morning. He submitted a book called Spectre in June '89, and the manuscript never left the house. It wasn't rejected, but it was never accepted, either. He didn't even have an editor, so no one was actually responsible for the manuscript.'

'What happened to it?'

'Precisely. I went down to the production department. Of course nobody could remember. Most of the scripts they work on are kept for a year or two after publication, why I don't know, and then get returned to the editor, who sends them back to the author. I looked at all of them, but I couldn't find Spectre. A production assistant finally reminded me that they sometimes squirrel things away on the shelves in the conference room. It's like the dead letter office.' Davey was grinning.

'And you went to the conference room' - he was nodding his head and grinning even more wildly - 'and you… you found the book?'

'Right there! And not only that…'

She looked at him in astonishment. 'You read it?'

'I skimmed it, anyhow. It's kind of sloppy, but I think it's publishable. I have to see if it's still available - I suppose I have to find out if Morning is still alive - but it could be the leadoff in our new line!'

She liked the our. 'So we're almost ready.'

'I want to go in on Monday.' He did not have to be more specific. 'He's still in a pretty good mood on Monday afternoons.' This was Friday! evening. 'I got a call back from an agent this morning, sounding me out about a couple of writers I'm sure we could get without breaking the bank.'

'You devil,' she said. 'You've been sitting on this ever since you came home.'

'Just waiting for the right moment.' He finished the last of his pizza. 'Do you to play around with the presentation some more or is there something else we could do?'

'Like celebrate?'

'If you're in the mood,' Davey said.

'I definitely feel a mood coming on,' Nora said.

'Well, then.' He looked at her almost uncertainly.

'Come on, big boy,' she said. 'We'll take care of the dishes later.'

Twenty minutes later, Davey lay with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the ceiling. 'Sweetie,' she said, 'I didn't say it hurt, I just said it was uncomfortable. I felt dry, but I'm sure that's just temporary. I have an appointment with my doctor next week to talk about hormone replacement. Look at it this way - we probably don't have to worry about getting pregnant anymore.'

'I have condoms. You have your… thing. Of course we don't have to worry about that.'

'Davey, I'm forty-nine. My body is changing. There has to be this period of adjustment.'

'Period of adjustment.'

That's all. My doctor says everything will be fine as long as I eat right and exercise, and probably I'll have to start taking estrogen. It happens to every woman, and now it's my turn.'

He turned his head to her. 'Were you dry last time?'

'No.' She tried not to sigh. 'I wasn't'

'So why are you this time?'

'Because this is the time it happened.'

'But you're not an old woman.' He rolled over and half-buried his face in the pillow. 'I know what's wrong. I got too excited or something, and now you're turned off.'

'Davey, I'm starting to go through menopause. Of course I'm not turned off. I love you. We've always had wonderful sex.'

'You can't have wonderful sex with someone who wakes up moaning and groaning almost every night.'

'It isn't…' This was not going to be a fruitful remark. Neither would it be fruitful to remark that you couldn't have sex with a man who would not come to your bed, or who left your bed to worry about work or Hugo Driver or whatever it was Davey worried about late at night.

'Well, a lot of nights, anyhow,' he said, taking up her unspoken comment. 'Maybe you need therapy or something. You're too young for menopause. When my mother went through it, she had a lot of white hair, she was over fifty, and she turned into a total bitch. She was impossible, she was like in a rage for at least a year.'

'People have different reactions. It's nothing to be afraid of.'

'People in menopause don't have periods. You had one a little while ago.'

'I had a period that lasted more than two weeks. Then I didn't have one for about six weeks.'

'I don't have to hear all the gory details.'

'The gory details are my department, right. But everything's going to be all right. This is temporary.'

'God, I hope so.'

What did Davey hope was temporary? Menopause? Aging? She moved across the sheet and put an arm over his shoulder. He turned his face away. Nora kissed the back of his head and slid her other arm beneath him. When he did not attempt to shrug her off or push her away, she pulled him into her. He resisted only a second or two before turning his head to her and slipping his arms around her.

His cheek felt wet against hers. 'Oh, honey,' she said, and see the tears leaking from his eyes. Davey wiped his face then held her close.

'This is no good.'

'It'll get better.'

'I don't know what to do.'

'Try talking about it,' Nora said, swallowing the words for a change.

'I sort of think I have to.'

'Good.'

Now he had a grudging, almost furtive look. 'You know how I've been kind of worried lately? It's because of this thing that happened about ten years before I met you.' He looked up at the ceiling, and she braced herself, with a familiar despair, for a story which would owe as much to Hugo Driver as to Davey's real history. 'I was having a rough time because Amy Randolph finally broke up with me.'

Nora had heard all about Amy Randolph, a beautiful and destructive poet-photographer-screenwriter-painter whom Davey had met in college. He had lost his virginity to her, and she had lost hers to her farther. (Unless this was another colorful embellishment.) After graduation they had traveled through North Africa. Amy had flirted with every attractive man she met and threw tyrannical fits when the men responded. Finally the two of them had been deported from Algeria and shared an apartment in the Village. Amy went in and out of hospitals, twice for suicide attempts. She photographed corpses and drug addicts. She had no interest in sex. Davey once said to Nora that Amy was so brilliant he hadn't been able to leave her for fear of missing her conversation. In the end, she had deprived him of her conversation by moving in with an older woman, a Romanian emigree who edited an intellectual journal. He had never explained to Nora how he had felt about losing Arny, or spoken of what he had done between the breakup and their own meeting.

'Well,' Nora said, 'whatever this is, it couldn't have been much stranger than life; with Amy.'

That's what you think,' Davey said.19

'It was about a month after Amy left. You know I think I was actually kind of happy for her. Some people acted like they thought I should be disturbed by what she did, but I didn't know why. Amy never liked sex anyhow, so it was more like getting worked up about who she wasn't doing it with than who she was, and that's ridiculous. Anyhow, after about a month, I repainted my apartment and put new posters on the walls, and then I got a really good stereo system and a lot of new records. Whenever I found anything that reminded me of her, I threw it out. A couple of times when she called up, I hung up on her. Because it was all over, right?'

'You were pretty angry,' Nora said.

Davey shook his head. 'I don't remember being angry. I just didn't see the point of talking to her.'

'Okay.' Nora reached over the side of the bed and picked her bra and blouse off the floor. She tossed the bra into the clothing bin and put on the blouse.

'I wasn't angry with Amy,' he said. 'Everybody kept telling me that I had to be, but I wasn't. You can't get angry at crazy people.'

Nora gave up and nodded.

'Anyhow, I was in a funny mood. After my apartment was all redone, I reread Hugo Driver - all three books - after I came home from work. Then I read Night Journey all over again. I felt like Pippin.'

In other words, Nora thought, he felt as though Amy had killed him.

'I couldn't stand being in the apartment by myself, but I hardly had any friends because Amy, you know, made that difficult. I didn't want to spend time with my parents because they hated Amy, and they loved telling me how lucky I was. I went through this weird period. Sometimes

I'd spend the whole night staring at the tube. I'd listen to one piece of music over and over, all weekend.'

'I guess you got into drugs,' Nora said.

'Well, yeah. Amy always hated drugs, so now that I was free… you know? A guy in the mailroom named Bang Bang sold stuff, which Dad didn't know about. So one day I saw this guy coming out of the mailroom on a break, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I followed him outside. I got some coke and some pot, and I pretty much did those for about a year. At work I stayed pretty straight, but when I got back to my apartment, boy, I poured myself a glass of Bombay gin on the rocks, did two big, fat lines, rolled a joint, and had a little party until I went to bed. Or didn't. I was thirty, thirty-one. I didn't need a lot of sleep. Just take a shower, shave, drop in some Murine, couple lines, fresh clothes, off to work.'

'And one day you met this Girl Scout,' Nora said.

'You sure you want to hear about this?'

'Why don't you just say, "Nora, once when I was fooling, around with drugs I had this messed-up girlfriend, and we got crazy together"?'

'Because it's not that simple. You have to understand where I was mentally in order to understand what happened. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.'

It occurred to Nora that whatever he had to say, strictly factual or not, would be instructive. Maybe Davey had been a weekend punk!

'This isn't just about a girl, is it?'

'Actually it's about Natalie Weil.' He pushed himself upright and pulled the sheets above his navel. 'Look, Nora, I didn't tell you the truth the other day. This is the real reason I wanted to get into Natalie's house.'

She tucked up her legs, leaned forward, and waited.20

'I was in a stall in the men's room one morning, feeling lousy because I'd stayed up all night. I snorted some coke, and my nose started to bleed. I had to sit on the toilet with my head back, holding toilet paper against my nose. Finally the bleeding stopped, and I decided to try to get through the day.

'I came out of the stall. Some little guy was going toward the sinks. I grabbed some towels and dried my hands, and this guy was messing with his hair, and I looked at his face in the mirror, and I almost had a heart attack.'

'The little guy was a girl.'

'How did you know that?'

'Because you almost had a heart attack.'

'She was in the art department. She had short hair and she wore men's clothes. That's all I knew. I didn't even know her last name. Her first name was Paddi.' He looked at her as if this were of enormous significance.

'Patty?'

'Paddi. Two d's and an i'. Okay, my nose started bleeding again. I grabbed another towel and held it up against my nose. Paddi was dumping two piles of coke on the sink in front of her. "Try this," she said. We're right in the middle of the men's room! I leaned over and snorted the stuff right off the sink, and bingo! I felt a thousand percent better. "Get it?" she said. "Always use good stuff."

' "What planet are you from?" I asked her.'

'She smiled at me and said, "I was born in a village at the foot of a great mountain. My father is a blacksmith."

'I almost passed out. She was quoting Night Journey. I said, "I wander far and sometimes get lost. I own a purpose greater than myself, the saving of children from the darkness."

'And she chimed in, "I conquer my own fear."

'We grinned at each other for a second, and I shooed her outside before someone came in. She was waiting for me across the hall. "I'm Paddi Mann," she said. "And you're Davey Chancel, of the famous Chancel House Chancels. Want to buy me a drink tonight?"

'Normally, assertive women put me off, and we're not supposed to go out with women from the office, but she could quote Hugo Driver!' I told her to meet me at six-thirty at Hannigan's, a bar a couple of blocks away, and she said no, we should go to the Hellfire Club down on Second Avenue, great place, and let's meet at seven-thirty so she could take care of some things she had to do. Fine, I said, and she came right up in front of me and tilted up her head and whispered, "His own salvation lay within himself."'

Nora had heard these words before, but she could not remember when.

'You know what? I thought I could learn things from her. It was like she had secrets, and they were the secrets I needed to know.'

'Sure,' Nora said. 'You needed to know the secret of how to score coke better than Bang Bang's.'

Davey had gone home and changed into jeans, a black sweater, and a black leather jacket before walking to Second Avenue. The Hellfire Club was between Eighth and Ninth, on the East Side. He reached the corner of Ninth and Second only a minute or two past seven-thirty and walked down the east side of the avenue, passing a fast-food restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and saw a bar farther down the block. He picked up his pace and went past a window that showed a few men huddled over a long, dark bar, put his hand on the door, and just below his hand saw the name MORLEYS.

He had managed to miss the club. He went back up the east side of the avenue checking the names on buildings, and missed it again.

A rank of three telephones stood only a few feet away.

The first had a severed cord instead of a receiver, the second did not provide a dial tone, and the third permitted six-sevenths of Davey's quarter into its slot and then froze.

Disgusted, Davey stepped away from the telephones and went to the corner to wait for the light to change. He glanced down the block and this time noticed a narrow stone staircase with wrought-iron handrails between Morley's bar and a lighting-goods shop. The stairs led to a dark wooden door, which looked too elegant for its surroundings. Centered in the door's top panel was a brass plate slightly larger than an index card.

The light changed, but instead of crossing the street, Davey walked to the foot of the stairs and looked up at a five-story brownstone wedged between two apartment buildings. On either side of the door were two curtained windows. The lettering on the plaque was not quite legible from the bottom of the stairs. He climbed two steps and saw that the plate read HELLFIRE CLUB and, beneath that, MEMBERS ONLY. He went up the stairs and opened the door. Across a tiny entry stood another door, glossy black. Three commands had been painted on a white wooden plaque fixed just beneath the level of his eyes:

DO NOT QUESTION.

DO NOT JUDGE.

DO NOT HESITATE.

Davey opened the black door. Before him was a hallway with a floral carpet which continued up a flight of stairs. To his left an elderly woman stood behind a checkroom counter beside the opening into a dim barroom. Past the bar, a wide leather armchair stood beside an ambitious potted fern. A white-haired concierge at a glossy black desk turned to him with a diplomatic half smile. To eliminate the preliminaries, Davey peered into the barroom and saw only prosperous-looking men in suits seated around tables or standing in clusters of three or four. He noticed a few women in the room, none of them Paddi. In the instant before the man at the desk spoke to him, he saw - thought he saw - a naked man covered to wrists and neck with elaborate tattoos beside a naked woman, her back to Davey, who had shaved her head and powdered or otherwise colored her body a flat, dead white.

'May 1 assist you, sir?

Startled, Davey looked at the concierge. He cleared his throat. 'Thank you. I'm here to meet a woman named Paddi Mann.' He glanced back into the bar and had the sense that the other people in the room had shifted their positions to conceal the surreal couple.

'Sir.'

Davey looked back at the concierge.

'That was Miss Mann?'

When Davey said yes, the concierge told him to be seated, please, and watched him proceed to the leather chair, which provided a view of nothing more provocative than the wide mahogany doors and a row of hunting prints on the opposite wall. The concierge opened a drawer and drew out a ribbon microphone at least fifty years old, positioned it squarely in front of him, and said, 'Guest for Miss Mann.' The words reverberated from the barroom, from rooms upstairs, and from behind the mahogany doors.

One of the mahogany doors opened, and a Paddi Mann who looked less raffish and more sophisticated than her office persona stepped smiling into the hallway. The dark suit into which she had changed looked more expensive than most of Davey's own suits. Her shining hair fell softly over her forehead and ears.

She asked why he was dressed that way.

He explained that he, thought he was going to meet her at a bar.

Bars were disgusting.: Why did he think she had invited him to her club?

He hadn't understood, he said. If she liked, he could go home and put on a suit.

She told him not to bother and suggested they swap jackets.

He took off his leather jacket and held it out. Paddi slipped off her suit jacket and twirled herself into his jacket so smoothly that he barely had time to notice that she was wearing suspenders.

'Your turn,' she said.

He was afraid he'd rip the shoulder seams, but the jacket met his back and shoulders with only a suggestion of tightness.

'You're lucky I like big jackets.'

Paddi opened the mahogany door to a lounge in which groups of chairs and couches were arranged before a window. He saw the backs of several male heads, a white gesticulating arm, newspapers and magazines on a long wooden rack. A waiter with a black bow tie, a black vest, and a shaven head held an empty tray and an order pad.

Paddi directed him to a pair of library chairs before a wall of books at the right of the room. Between the chairs stood a round table on top of which lay a portfolio-sized envelope with the Chancel House logo. The waiter materialized beside Paddi. She asked for the usual, and Davey ordered a double martini on the rocks.

He asked what the usual was, and she said, 'A Top-and-Bottom: half port and half gin.' It was an outsider drink, she told him.

While he pondered this category, Davey took in that the owner of the naked arm he had glimpsed from the hallway was a middle-aged man seated in a leather chair near the center of the room. The arms of the chair cut his midsection from view, but there were no clothes on his flabby upper body, and none on the thick white legs crossed ankle to knee in front of the chair. A leather strap circled his neck. From the front of the strap, a chain, an actual chain, said Davey to Nora, like you'd use on a dog if the dog weighed two hundred pounds and liked to munch babies, hung between him and the bearded guy in a three-piece suit holding the other end. The man wearing the chain swiveled his head to give Davey a do-you-mind? glare. Davey looked away and saw that while most of the people in the room were dressed conventionally, one man reading a newspaper wore black leather trousers, motorcycle boots, and an open black leather vest that revealed an intricate pattern of scars on his chest.

He wondered how Paddi could have objected to his clothing when at least one person in the club wore no clothing at all.

'In here,' she said, 'people wear whatever is right for them. What's right for you is a suit.'

'Some of these people must have a lot of trouble when they leave the club,' he said.

'Some of these people never leave the club,' she said.

'Is this stuff real?' Nora asked. 'Or are you making it all up?'

'As real as what happened to Natalie,' Davey said.

Paddi worked at Chancel House because it had published Night Journey. Her job gave her a unique connection to the book she loved above all others. And since she was on the subject, she drew out of the big Chancel House envelope a stiff, glossy sheet that Davey recognized as the reverse side of a jacket rendering.

'An idea of mine,' Paddi said, turning the sheet over to display a drawing it took Davey a moment to understand; when he did, he wondered why the idea had never occurred to him. Paddi had drawn the jacket for an annotated scholarly edition of Night Journey. (Her design was based on the famous 'GI edition' of the novel.) Every one of the hundred thousand Driver fanatics in America would have to buy it. Scholars would be able to trace the growth of the book over successive variations and discuss the meanings of the changes in the text. It was a great idea.

'But there was one problem,' Davey told Nora. 'In order to do it right, we needed the manuscript.'

'What's the problem with that?' asked Nora.

The problem, Paddi said, was that the manuscript seemed to have disappeared. Hugo Driver had died in 1950, his wife in 1952, and their only child, a retired high school English teacher, had said in an interview on the twentieth anniversary of the book's publication that he had never seen any manuscripts of his father's books. As far as he knew, they had never come back from Chancel House.

Davey said he would try to find out what had happened to the manuscript. Lincoln Chancel had probably installed it in a bank vault somewhere. It certainly couldn't be lost. Nothing so important could have slipped through the cracks - it was the manuscript of the first Chancel House book, for heaven's sake!

'That would be unfortunate in light of the rumors,' Paddi said.

'What rumors?'

'That Hugo Driver didn't really write the book,' Paddi said.

Where did this stuff come from? She knew what it was, didn't she? It was what happened whenever somebody great appeared, a bunch of weasels started trying to shoot holes in him. Davey ranted on in this fashion until he ran out of breath, at which point he inhaled hugely and declared that after all it all made perfect sense; Night Journey was such a brilliant book that the weasels couldn't cope with it. It happened all the time. Somewhere, someone was saying that Zelda Fitzgerald was the real author of Tender Is the Night.

'Zelda was the real author of Tender Is the Night,' Paddi said. 'Sorry. Just kidding.'

Davey asked her if she believed this crap.

'No, not at all,' she said. 'I agree with you. Hugo Driver should be on stamps. I think his picture should be on money. One of the reasons I like this club is that it seems, such a Hugo Driver-ish sort of place, doesn't it?'

Davey guessed that it did.

Would he like to see more of it?

'I wondered when we were going to get to this part,' Nora said.21

At the landing above the curved staircase, Paddi did not take him down the dark corridor but led him up another flight of stairs. An even narrower version of the staircase continued upward, but Paddi took him into a corridor identical to the one below. Davey felt as if he were following Paddi through a forest at night.

Then she vanished, and he realized that she had slipped through an open door. The shade had been pulled down, and the room was darker than the corridor. After they undressed she led him to a futon. Davey stretched out against her, his body as hot as an oven-warmed brick, hers as cool as a stone drawn from a river. He hugged her close, and her cool hands ran up and down his back. When his orgasm came, he yelled with pleasure. They lay quiet for a time, then talked. And when they had established that neither of them was seeing anyone else, Davey fell asleep.

He woke up an hour later, hungry, light-headed, uncertain of his surroundings. He remembered that he was lying on a floor in the East Village. He was suddenly, shamefully certain that Paddi had stolen his money. He sat upright, and his hand touched a girlish shoulder. He looked down and made out the shape of her head on the pillow. Pillow? He did not remember a pillow. A sheet covered both of them.

'We should get something to eat,' he said.

'I'll take care of that, isn't there something else you'd like to do first?'

He stretched out beside her and once more felt that he was as hot as a potbellied stove and she as cool as a substance just extracted from a river. Davey surrendered to sensation.

Unimaginably later, they lay side by side, staring up. Davey had forgotten where he was. A slight, high-pitched buzzing sounded in his ears. The woman beside him seemed completely beautiful. Paddi rolled over, picked up an instrument like the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone, and ordered oysters and caviar and other things he didn't quite catch and what sounded like a lot of wine.

Soon two young women entered the room carrying circular trays, from which they distributed around the futon a number of covered dishes. Two open bottles and four glasses appeared beside Davey's left shoulder. The women smiled at Paddi, who was sprawled on top of the sheet, but did not look at Davey. When they had put in place the last dish, they stood and turned to the door, where one of them said, 'Shall I?'

'Yes,' Paddi said. A low, rosy light spread through the room, and the women backed smiling through the door.

Plovers' eggs, dumplings, steaming sauteed mushrooms, eel, whitebait, rich finger-sized segments of duck, similar sections of roast pork, little steaming things like pizzas covered with fresh basil and glistening shreds of tomato, in a crisp transparent seal, round, pungent objects that must have been meatballs and tasted like single malt scotch, grapes, Clementines; an excellent white burgundy and a better red bordeaux. Taking almost nothing herself, Paddi brought plate after plate before him. Davey sampled everything, and together they emptied half of each bottle. Paddi kept him amused with tales of the art department and gossip about people who worked at Chancel House; she quoted Hugo Driver and wondered at the friendship between the author and Lincoln Chancel. Did Davey know where this unlikely pair had met?

'Sure, at Shorelands,' Davey said, 'this estate in Massachusetts. They were put up in the same cottage.' He thought that the owner of the place, Georgina Weatherall, who knew that Davey's grandfather was on the verge of starting a publishing company, had put them together in the hope that Lincoln Chancel would help Driver in some way. And exactly that had happened. Driver must have shown Chancel the manuscript of Night Journey, and Chancel had used it to make Driver's fortune and increase his own.

'Is that really how they met?' Nora asked Davey. 'In a sort of literary colony?'

'Shorelands was a private estate where the hostess liked to feel that she was encouraging works of genius, but yeah, that's more or less right. And whether Georgina Weatherall had anything in mind or not, she did put Driver together with my grandfather, and things fell into place. Neither one of them had been at Shorelands before, so they probably spent a lot of time together, like the new guys at school.'

A millionaire businessman and a penniless writer? Nora doubted that Lincoln Chancel, a ruthless acquirer of companies, had ever felt like a new boy in school. 'Who else was at Shorelands at the same time? I bet, afterward, they all wished that they'd been put together with your grandfather. Did he ever go back?'

'God, no,' Davey said. 'Haven't you ever seen that picture?'

Davey began to laugh.

'What's funny?'

'I just remembered something. There's a picture from when my grandfather was at Shorelands - a photograph of all these guys sitting on the lawn. Georgina Weatherall's in it, and Hugo Driver, and all the people who were there that summer. My grandfather's squeezed into this rickety lawn chair, and he looks like he's about to strangle someone.'

The rest of that night Davey lay with Paddi, sipping from a variety of drinks brought in by women he sometimes saw and sometimes did not, occasionally hearing music from the floors below, now and then catching a sob or a shout of laughter from rooms throughout the building.

And then, immediately it seemed, he was locking the door of his apartment, having showered, shaved, and changed clothes without any memory of returning home or performing these tasks. His watch said it was eight o'clock. He felt rested, sober, clearheaded. But how had he gotten home?22

He had pushed through the front doors of the Chancel Building with two appointments in mind, one still to be made, the other already fixed. At some time before he left the building today, he had to see his father to talk about Hugo Driver's manuscripts and doing a definitive edition of the novel, and this evening he was going back to the Hellfire Club. He was ready for both encounters. His father would welcome an idea sure to bring more prestige to the firm, and to his meeting with Paddi he could bring the good news from his father. If Alden Chancel had taken charge of the manuscript of Night Journey, Davey intended to take charge of its rebirth.

His ordinary duties devoured the morning until eleven, when he had to go to a meeting. After the meeting, he went up two floors to his father's office, where the secretary told him that Alden had left for lunch and would not be free until three-thirty.

At three twenty-five, Davey went back to see his father.

At first impatient, Alden grew interested in the project Davey described. Yes, it might be possible to publish such an edition as a paperback intended for classroom use. Yes, let's think about using the cover of the GI edition, we got a lot of mileage out of that. As for the manuscript, hadn't that gone back to Driver?

Davey said that an assistant in the art department, the person who had come to him with the idea, had already told him that Driver's son thought it was still with Chancel House. When he named the assistant, his father said, Paddi Mann, interesting, the meeting I just came from was about an idea of hers, using two different covers on the new paperback of Night Journey. Bright girl, this Paddi Mann.' But as for the manuscript, if the sole remaining Driver didn't know where it was, maybe it was lost.

For the next two hours, Davey searched the wrapped manuscripts on the conference room shelves and looked in broom closets and the windowless cubicles where copy editors toiled. He stopped only when he noticed that it was twenty minutes before he was to meet Paddi.

A low conversational buzz came from the bar, and Davey glanced through the arched opening as automatically as he had read the admonitions on the inner door. For a moment he thought he saw Dick Dart, but the man vanished behind the crowd. Dick Dart? Should he be in the Hellfire Club? Was Leland?

The voice of the concierge forced him to turn away iron the bar. 'May I assist you, sir?'

Davey placed himself in the chair beside the fern, the concierge opened the drawer, removed the heavy microphone, positioned it; with excruciating exactness, and uttered his sentence. Paddi came through the mahogany door. She had her Hellfire Club look, even though she seemed to be wearing exactly what she had worn to work. They ordered the same drinks from the same waiter. Davey described his searches, and Paddi told him it was important, crucial, to find the manuscript. Wasn't there a record somewhere of everything that came in and went out?

'Yes,' Davey said, 'but it didn't start until a month or two after the founding of the house. Before that, things were less formal.'

'We'll think of something,' Paddi said. Think - what did you forget?'

'The storage area in the basement,' Davey said. 'I don't think anybody knows what's down there. My grandfather never threw anything out.'

'Okay. What would you like to do tonight?'

'There were some new movies, how about a movie?'

'Or we could go upstairs. Would you like that?'

'Yes,' he said. I would.'23

After they dressed and left the room, their arms around each other's waists, Davey felt that his life had undergone a fundamental change. His days and nights had been reversed, and his daytime self, which did boring things at Chancel House, was merely the dream of the more adventurous night-self, which bloomed under the ministrations of Paddi Mann.

They unclasped at the staircase, too narrow to permit them to walk down side by side. Paddi went before him, and he placed his hands on her shoulders. His shirt rode up on his wrist, uncovering his square gold watch. It was a few minutes past six. He wondered what they would do when they reached the street - it was scarcely believable that an outer world existed.

Davey followed her down the last of the stairs, past the empty desk, and outside into a world far too bright. Noises clashed and jangled in the air. Taxis the color of brushfire charged along Second Avenue. A drunken teenage boy in jeans and a denim shirt three times his size lolled against a parking meter; poisonous fumes of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke came boiling through his skin and floated into Davey's nostrils.

'Davey-'

'Yes?'

'Keep looking for that manuscript. Maybe it's in the Westerholm house.'

A bus the size of an airplane whooshed up to the curb, displacing thousands of cubic feet of air and pulverizing a layer of rubble. Davey clapped his hands over his ears, and Paddi waved and glided away.

Alden must have looked into the unused office and seen him leafing through a stack of forgotten manuscripts, some so old they were carbons, because when Davey looked over his shoulder his father loomed behind him. Where the hell had he been the last two nights? His mother had been trying to get him out to Connecticut for the weekend, but the kid never answered his phone. What happened, had he found a new girlfriend or was he turning into a barfly?

Davey said he had been feeling antisocial. It had never occurred to him that it might be his parents who were calling. After all, he saw his father every day.

He was expected at the Poplars for the weekend, beginning Friday night. Alden turned and marched out of the little office, which had the dreariness of all empty spaces meant to be occupied by busy and productive people.

Paddi's trophy did not appear among the papers in the empty office. Davey took the elevator to the basement.

At two twenty-five, he emerged from the storage enclosure with blackened hands and smears of dust on his suit and his face. He had found boxes of letters from deceased authors to deceased editors, group photos of unknown men in square double-breasted suits and Adolphe Menjou mustaches, a meerschaum pipe, a badly tarnished silver cocktail shaker with a silver swizzle stick, but he had not found his trophy.

Two hours before he was to meet Paddi at an address she had printed on a slip of; paper now in his jacket pocket, he returned to the basement and again attacked the boxes. He unearthed a carton of Artie Shaw seventy-eights and a deerstalker hat once likely paired with the meerschaum. In a jumble of old catalogs he came across copies of his mother's two early novels, which he set aside. A fabric envelope tied with a ribbon yielded a copy of the photograph he had described to Paddi, and this, too, he set aside. Night Journey's precious manuscript declined to reveal itself. Paddi's final words came back to him, and he promised himself to have a good look through the closets and attic of the Poplars before coming back to town on Sunday.24

An element of disaster, however muted, was built into all of Davey's weekends at his parents' house. Daisy might appear for dinner too drunk to sit upright, or a lesser degree of intoxication might bring on a bout of weeping before the end of the soup course. Accusations, some so veiled Davey could not understand exactly who was being accused of what, might fly across the table. Even the uneventful weekends were tainted with the air of oppression, of mysterious but essential things left unsaid. This weekend, however, was an outright calamity.

The Italian girl's nephew, Jeffrey, had recently joined the Poplars household. At this point, his presence seemed an unnecessary affectation on Alden's; part. Until Davey arrived in Westerholm on Friday evening, he had expected a younger male version of Maria, a cheerful, smiling person with the stout physique of a tenor hurrying forward to snatch away his weekend bag. But once Davey and Alden came in through the front door, Jeffrey was revealed to be a tall, middle-aged man in a perfectly fitted gray suit who showed no signs of hurrying forward, snatching bags, or doing anything but nodding at them and continuing to pass through the rear of the hall, presumably on his way to the kitchen. His face seemed to suggest a quantity of thoughts and judgments held in check, and his eyes were hooded. Davey thought he must have been some foreign publisher his father had enticed into his web. Then Alden had introduced them, and the two had exchanged a look, Davey imagined, of mutual suspicion.

Friday's dinner had not been unusual. Alden had dominated the conversation, Daisy had agreed with everything he said, and Davey had been silent. When he mentioned the new edition of Driver's book, his father changed the subject. After dinner, Alden said that he hoped Davey would get some rest, he wasn't looking very good, to he frank. By ten, despite the coffee, he was asleep in his old bed.

To his surprise, Davey did not wake up until eleven on Saturday morning. By the time he left his room, it was eleven-thirty. The irregular tap of typewriter keys and the smell of cigarette smoke, along with the faint drone of a radio, came through the door of his mother's studio. For a moment he considered going back for the books he had brought along from the Chancel House basement, but he decided to surprise his mother with them at brunch on Sunday, as he had originally planned.

Maria poured steaming coffee into a mug, uncovered golden toast in a silver rack, and asked if he would like a small omelette. Davey said that toast and jam would be fine and asked if she knew where Mr Chancel was. Mr Chancel had gone out shopping. Then, because she seemed to be preparing to leave, he asked her about Jeffrey.

Jeffrey was the son of her sister-in-law. Yes, he did enjoy very much to work for the Chancels. Before he come here? Well, before he come here, he do many things. College student. Soldier. Yes, officer in Vietnam.

Where college?

Maria struggled to remember. Harterford? Haverford? Davey supplied, aghast. In Massachusetts, said Maria, badly mangling the name. A terrible possibility occurred to Davey. Harvard? Maybe, could be, Maria offered. She untied her apron, and left him to wonder.

With at least an hour to squander before either parent appeared, Davey searched the basement without any luck. When he came back upstairs, he found his father removing groceries of various kinds, including scotch and vodka, from bags bearing the name of Waldbaum's and Good Grape Harvest.

'Doesn't Jeffrey do that sort of thing?' he asked.

'Jeffrey has the weekend off,' his father announced. 'Like you. What were you up to down there, that you got so dirty?'

Trying to find some old books,' Davey said.

During lunch, Alden abandoned the usual monologue to question his son about Frank Neary and Frank Tidball, their longtime crossword-puzzle makers. For decades Neary and Tidball had dealt with the company through Davey's predecessor, an amiable old alcoholic named Charlie Westerberg. Soon after Charlie had staggered cheerfully off into retirement, Neary and Tidball hired an agent, with the result that they were now paid a slightly higher fee for their puzzles. Most of the increase went in the agent's commission, but Alden had never ceased to blame Davey for the insurrection. For half an hour, he was forced to defend the two old puzzle makers against his father's implications that they were past their prime and should be replaced. Alden's real but unadmitted objections lay in the discovery, made soon after Westerberg's departure, that the two men shared an address in Rhinebeck. Neary and Tidball would be more difficult to replace than his father understood!. There were only a few young crossword-puzzle makers, most of whom had adopted innovations undesirable to Chancel House customers, who did not long for clues about Moody Blues lyrics or the films of Cheech and Chong.

During this discussion, Daisy toyed with her food, at random intervals smiling to indicate that she was paying attention. As soon as Maria began clearing the plates, she excused herself in a little-girl voice and went back upstairs. Alden asked Davey a few questions about Leonard Gimmel and Teddy Brunhoven - he was always interested in the murderers - then wandered off to watch a baseball game on television. Within fifteen minutes, he would be dozing in his easy chair. Davey thanked Maria for the lunch and climbed the stairs to the attic.

The Poplars' attic was divided into three unequal areas. The old maid's rooms, the smallest of these, were a series of three chambers situated around a common bathroom and a narrow staircase at the north end of the house. These wretched rooms had been empty since early in the reign of Helen Day. (Davey's parents had ordered the construction of two large apartments over the garage, one for the Cup Bearer, the other for any overflow guests, and these apartments now housed Maria and her nephew.) The second, central portion of the attic, roughly the size of a hotel ballroom, had been floored and finished but otherwise unchanged. It was here that Lincoln Chancel's gifts to the first David Chancel had been preserved for the second, and for this reason the central section of the attic had always inflicted an oppressive, uncanny feeling of fraudulence upon Davey. The third section, reached by a door from the middle attic, had been floored but not otherwise finished.

Metaphorically holding his breath against the psychic atmosphere in the central portion of the attic, Davey walked through the jumble of old chairs, broken lamps, boxes upon boxes, and ratty couches to make sure that the old maid's rooms were as empty as he remembered.

The three little rooms contained nothing but spiderwebs, white walls blossoming with mildew, and dust-gray floors. Then he made another quick pass through the center of the attic to inspect the unfinished section. At last he could no longer postpone moving into the main area of the attic, jammed with Victorian furniture.

The old oppression came back to him in various forms as he lifted padded cushions and bent down to see far back into wardrobe closets. Davey experienced resentment. Why should he waste his time like this? Who was Paddi, anyhow, to set him prowling thieflike through his parents' house?

Davey's thoughts had reached this unhappy point when he heard footsteps on the stairs leading to the maid's quarters. He froze. His mind went empty, as though he were a burglar about to be discovered. He half-padded, half-ran to the light switch beside the main attic stairs, flicked it down, and crouched behind a Chinese screen in a heavy wooden frame.

The footsteps on the stairs reached the maid's rooms a few seconds after Davey had found shelter. Footsteps rang on the wooden floor. Peering around the side of the screen, Davey saw a line of light appear beneath the door separating the maid's quarters from the rest of the attic. He drew back. The footsteps advanced toward the door. He flattened his upper body over his knees and covered his head with his hands. The door swung open, and a shaft of light hurtled toward him. Then the entire room flared with light.

A voice he did not know called out, 'Who's here?'

Footsteps came toward him. Davey found himself on his feet, fists raised against the shadow whirling to meet him. The shadow grunted in shock and surprise and struck out. The blow drove Davey's right hand into the bridge of his nose. Blood spurted out onto his clothes, and a bright, clear wave of pain made the world go dark. The side of his head crashed into the frame of the screen.

A hand caught his hair and pulled sharply, painfully, upward. 'What the hell did you do that for?'

Puckered with consternation, Jeffrey's face stared down at him.

'I thought you were someone else,' Davey said.

'You attacked me,' Jeffrey said. 'You jumped up like a -'

'Wraith,' Davey said. 'I'm sorry.'

'So'm I,' said Jeffrey.

Davey clutched the standard of a tall lamp and tilted back his head. Sluggish blood ran down his throat. He said, 'I guess I got scared. How did you know someone was up here? I thought you had the weekends off.'

'I saw the lights go on from my windows.'

Davey groped in his pocket for his handkerchief and swabbed his face before holding it to his nose. 'Say, Jeffrey.'

'Yes?'

'Did you go to Harvard?'

'If I did, I hope nobody finds out,' Jeffrey said.

Davey swallowed. His entire face hurt.

He spent half an hour cleaning bloodstains from the attic floor, then went to his bathroom, washed his face and hands, and fell asleep stretched out on his covers with a cold cloth on the bruised parts of his face. He woke up in time to shower and put on fresh clothes for dinner. His nose was swollen, and a purple lump had risen on his right temple. When he explained at dinner that he had hit himself in the face with the bedroom door, his father said, Funny, when you have kids nobody ever tells you how many lies you're going to have to listen to over the next thirty or forty years.'

Daisy murmured, 'Oh, Alden.'

'If he hit himself in the face with his door, then he took a practice swing.'

'Did someone hit you in the head, darling?' asked his mother.

'Since you ask, yes. Jeffrey and I had a little misunderstanding.'

Alden laughed and said, 'If Jeffrey ever hit you in the head, you'd be in the hospital for a week.'

At twelve-thirty the next day, Davey brought down to the dining room the rescued copies of his mother's two novels and placed them under his chair. His father raised an eyebrow, but Daisy seemed not to notice. Unasked, Maria brought Bloody Marys to all three of them.

After the Bloody Marys came a bottle of Barolo and a soup in which streamers of egg, flecks of parsley, pesto sauce, and pasta circulated through a chicken broth. Davey took half a glass of the wine and nervously devoured the soup. A homemade mushroom and Gorgonzola ravioli followed the soup, and tender little fillets of beef and potato croquettes followed the ravioli. Maria announced that in honor of Mr Davey she had made a zabaglione, which would be served in a few minutes. Did they have these stupendous meals every weekend, did they eat this way every night? It was no wonder that Daisy was looking puffier than ever, although Alden seemed utterly unchanged. Davey said that he didn't remember the Italian girl's being such a great cook and Alden said, 'Vin ordinaire, my boy.'

The brief silence that followed his father's remark seemed the perfect time to produce his gift.

'Mom, I've got something for you.'

'Goody, goody.'

Unwilling to tell Alden that he had been prospecting in the Chancel House basement, Davey said that he had found two books in the Strand one day last week, and he hoped she would be pleased to see them again. He rose from his chair to bring the humble package down the table.

Daisy grasped the bag, tore out the books, smiled at their jackets, and opened them. Her eyes retreated into a band of red that appeared over her face like a mask. She set the books on the edge of the table and turned her face away. Still thinking that she was pleased by his gift, Davey said, 'They're in such good shape.' Daisy drew in a breath and let out a frightening sound that soon resolved into a wail. She shoved back her chair and ran from the room as the Italian girl entered with cups of zabaglione on a silver tray. Baffled, Davey looked inside the first of the two books and saw written in a hand more confident and decisive than his mother's, For my heart's darling, Alden, from his dazzled Daisy.25

At eight o'clock on the previous Thursday night, a flat package clamped under his left arm, Davey had stood uncertainly in front of a restaurant called Dragon Seed on Elizabeth Street, looking back and forth from the restaurant's front door to a slip of paper in his hand. A row of leathery ducks the color of molasses hung across the restaurant window. The black numerals beside the menu taped to the door matched the number, 67, Paddi had written on the piece of paper.

A delicious odor of roast duck and frying noodles met him when he opened the door. Davey stepped inside, stood at the end of the counter for a moment to look over the room, then went to the only empty table and sat down.

All the men in the: room ignored him. Davey looked around for the door that would lead to a staircase and saw two set into opposite ends of the rear wall, one of them marked RESTROOMS, the other PRIVATE. Then he was on his feet.

Two waiters in black- vests and white shirts watched him from across the room, and a third set a platter of noodles before four stolid men in suits and began cutting toward him through the tables.

Davey tried to wave him off, and said, 'I know it says Private, but it's all right.'

'Not all right.'

Davey put his hand on the knob, and the waiter's hand came down on his before he could open the door. 'You sit.'

The waiter pulled him away to his table and pushed him down. Davey placed his package on his lap and considered making a break for the door. He looked around and found that everybody in the restaurant was eying him.

The waiter came back through the tables carrying a tray with a teapot and a cup the size of a thimble. He set these before Davey and spun away, revealing a small man in a zippered jacket behind him who rotated a chair and straddled it, and gave Davey a horrible smile. 'You funny,' the man said.

'I was invited.' Davey withdrew from his pocket the paper on which Paddi had written her address and showed it to the man.

The man squinted at the paper. He looked straight into Davey's eyes, then back at the paper. Without any transition, he started laughing. 'Come,' the man said, and get on his feet. He led Davey to the front door, stepped outside, and motioned Davey to follow him, Davey came out. The man moved one step to his left and pointed at Dragon Seed's door. He pointed again, and this time Davey saw it.

Set back into the building between the entrance to Dragon Seed and a shop filled with souvenirs of Chinatown, at an angle that concealed it if you did not know it was there was a plywood door with the number 67 spray-painted on it in black.

Grinning, the man prodded Davey's chest with his forefinger. 'Dey go in, but dey don't come out.' Davey settled the package under his elbow and knocked on the spray-painted door, and a faint voice told him to come in.

He found himself at the foot of a tenement staircase. 'Lock the door behind you,' the voice called down.

He came upstairs and passed through another door into a vast, darkened loft created by the removal of most of the tenement's walls. A few dim lights illuminated crude murals it took him a moment to see were illustrations of passages in Night Journey. Thick, dark curtains covered the windows. In the distance a high-backed sofa and two chairs stood in front of an ornate wooden fireplace frame and mantel affixed to a wall without a fireplace. Long bookshelves took up the wall at the front of the building. Rough partitions marked off two rooms, and one of these opened as Davey came deeper into the murk. Completely at ease, Paddi Mann emerged naked through the door.

'What is this place?'

'Where I live,' Paddi said, not naked after all, but wearing a flesh-colored leotard. She gave him a smile and moved toward the sofa, swept up from a cushion a man's wing-collar formal shirt, slipped it on, and buttoned the last few buttons so that it covered her like a short white frock.

'What's that under your arm?'

'I had some trouble finding you.' Davey's legs finally unlocked and permitted him to move toward her through the darkness.

'Looks like you had trouble finding the manuscript, too. Unless that's it.'

'No.'

Paddi shifted her position, drawing her legs up beside her and tucking them in. She gave three smart pats to the seat of the sofa.

He found that he was standing directly in front of her and sat down as ordered. Her feet insinuated themselves against his thigh as if for warmth. 'Here,' she said, and turned sideways to take from a tray and press into his hand a glass filled with ice cubes and a cloudy red liquid.

He drank, then jerked back his head at the pungent, unpleasantly sweet shock of the taste. 'What's this?'

'A Top-and-Bottom. Good for you.'

Davey let his eyes wander around the dark, jumbled spaces of Paddi's loft. Arches and openings led into invisible chambers from which came inaudible voices. 'Are you going to show me what's in that package?'

Davey said, 'Oh,' because he had forgotten the package, and handed it to her. In seconds her fingers had undone the knots. In another second the wrapping lay in her lap like a frame around the frame and Paddi was gazing down at the long photograph with her mouth softly opened.

'Shorelands, July 1938.'

'And here is your grandfather.'

Warts and carbuncles jutting from nose and cheek, jowls bulging over his collar, eyebrows nearly meeting in a ferocious scowl above blazing eyes, hands locked on the arms of his chair, rage straining at the buttons, seams, and eyelet; of his handmade suit, Lincoln Chancel appeared to have breakfasted on railroads and coal mines.

Davey regarded the phenomenon with the mixture of wonder, respect, and terror his grandsire invariably aroused in him. For the fifty years of his adult life, he had bullied his way south from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to New York and Washington, D.C., north to Boston and Providence swallowing human lives. Before a massive stroke had felled him in a private dining room in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel indictments and lawsuits had buzzed around the great man's head. After his death nearly all of the intricately pyramidal structure Lincoln had constructed had tumbled. What remained was a transient hotel in Rhode Island, a struggling woolen mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, both of which had soon folded into bankruptcy, and his last bauble. Chancel House.

'He looks so unhappy.'

'He's the only one looking at the camera,' Davey said, having noticed this for the first time. 'See? Everybody else is looking at another person in the group.'

'Except for her.' Paddi delicately tapped the glass over the face of a small, strikingly pretty young woman in a loose while shirt, a half-mast necktie, and trousers. Seated on the ground beside Lincoln Chancel, she was gazing down at the grass, lost in thought.

'Yes,' Davey said. 'I wish I knew her name.'

'Whose names do you know?'

'Apart from Driver and my grandfather, only her,' He indicated a tall woman with a bulldog chin and a fleshy nose who sat upright staring at Lincoln Chancel from a wicker chair. 'Georgina Weatherall. She and Hugo Driver are both staring at my grandfather.'

'Probably wondering what they can get out of him,' Paddi said.

'Oh?'

'There have been a couple of books about Shorelands,' Paddi said. 'Georgina wanted to be the center of attention. Everybody made fun of her behind her back.'

'Georgina couldn't have been too pleased about that girl.'

Now Davey indicated an elongated, bearded gentleman in sagging tweeds gazing down at the young woman, his lips stretched so tightly that they looked like wires. 'That's not a very friendly smile,' Davey said. 'I wonder who this guy was?'

'Austryn Fain,' said Paddi. 'In 1938 he had just published a novel called The Twisted Hedge. It was supposed to be wonderful and all that, but from what I gather people forgot about it in a hurry. He killed himself in 1939. January. Cut his wrists in a bathtub.'

'Georgina wouldn't help him?'

'Georgina dropped him flat. But, Davey, look at this man. Merrick Favor was his name. He was murdered about six months after this photo was taken.'

Paddi was pointing at the broad, handsome face of a man in an unbuttoned double-breasted blue blazer and white trousers who stood immediately behind Georgina. Like Austryn Fain, he was smiling at the girl seated on the grass.

'Murdered?'

'Merrick Favor was supposed to be a rising star. His first novel. Burning Bushes, got great reviews when Scribner's published it in 1937, and he was supposed to be working on something even better. One day his girlfriend showed up after trying to call him for a couple of days, and when she couldn't get him to come to the door, she climbed in a window, took a look around, and almost passed out.'

'She found his body?'

'His house was torn up, and there were bloodstains everywhere. Favor had been stabbed to death, and his body was in his bathtub. They never found who killed him. The book he was working on was torn to scraps.'

'Shorelands didn't bring much luck to these people,' Davey said. 'What happened to this guy?'

He was pointing at a long-haired young man with horn-rim glasses, a floppy bow tie, velvet jacket, soft eyes, short nose, and a witty mouth. This person seemed to be concentrating all of his thoughts on handsome Merrick Favor.

'Oh, Creeley Monk. Another sad story. A poet. His second book was called The Field Unknown, and the only reason anybody remember; it is that a lot of third-graders used to have to memorize the title poem.'

'Oh,' said Davey, 'we had to recite that at the Academy. The field unknown, the unknown field I thought I knew I In childhood days, my ways return me now to you.'

'Creeley Monk killed himself, too. Shotgunned himself in the head. Right around the time Merrick Favor was killed.'

Davey stared at her. 'This guy blew off his head a few months after he left Shorelands?'

Paddi nodded.

Davey was staring at her. 'Two of the guests at Shorelands that summer killed themselves?'

'It's even better than that. Three of them killed themselves. This man here, the one who looks like a bricklayer, he did, too.' Paddi's finger was tapping the chest of a wide, sturdy man in a lumpy blue turtleneck sweater who was trying to smile at the camera and Lincoln Chancel at the same time.

'His name was Bill Tidy, and he'd published one book, called Our Skillets. It was a memoir of his childhood in the South End of Boston. Must have been the only really working-class guest Georgina ever had at Shorelands. Our Skillets is a beautiful book, but it went out of print right away and only came back into print in the late sixties. I don't know about this for sure, but I think Tidy had a lot of trouble getting to work on a new book after he got back to Boston. Anyhow, he jumped out of his fifth-floor window. In January 1939.'

'When…'

'Right between Merrick Favor's murder and Monk's suicide, which happened a few days apart, and two days before Fain killed himself. It's like a curse or something, isn't it?'

'God, it's like they paid for Hugo Driver's success.'

'You should write a book about all this,' Paddi said.

'I thought you already read a book about all this.'

'I read a lot of books about Shorelands because I'm interested in Hugo Driver, but this information is scattered all over the place. Actually, hardly anybody cares about what was going on at Shorelands after the early thirties. By the start of the war, it was all over. Georgina was drinking a lot and taking laudanum and her stories began smelling like fish. She told people that Marcel Proust used to stink up Honey House with his asthma powders, which is a nice story, but Proust never left France. Georgina finally retreated into her bedroom, and she died around 1950. The house rotted away until a preservation group bought it.'

'What happened to the girl sitting on the ground next to my grandfather?'

'She was supposed to have disappeared during her stay, but even that isn't really clear.'

The characters in the photograph on his lap, his grandfather and the great author, Austryn Fain and Merrick Favor and Creeley Monk, Georgina Weatherall and Bill Tidy and the abstracted young woman, seemed as familiar, as known, as his old schoolmates at the Academy. He saw into their, so clearly that he could not understand why until now he had not seen the clearest thing in the picture. All he had really seen before was his grandfather's comic fury. What was clearest in the photograph was the reason for the universal discomfort.

As if the picture came equipped with a soundtrack and a flashback, it all but shouted that Lincoln Chancel had uttered a crude flirtatiousness to the attractive young woman at his feet, and that the young woman had swiftly woundingly rebuffed him. While she looked inward and Chancel erupted, everyone else in the photograph took sides.

Davey said, 'You know what? I don't know anything about you. I don't know where you were born, or who your parents are, or what college you went to, if you have brothers and sisters, anything like that. It's like you stepped out of a cloud. Where did you live before you walked into our offices?'

'Lots of places.'

'Where were you born?'

'You really want to do this, don't you? Okay. I was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. My parents' names are Charles Roland and Sabina. Sabina teaches German in a high school in Amherst, and Charles Roland was an English professor at Amherst College. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. After I got out of RISD, I went to Europe and traveled here and there, but mainly lived in London, painting and taking art courses, and after a couple of years I came back and lived in L.A. and did some design work for a couple of small presses and read everything I could about Hugo Driver, which is when I learned about Shorelands, and after a while I came to New York so I could get a job at Chancel. I just walked in, showed my work to Rod Clampett, and he hired me.'

'I should have guessed the RISD part,' Davey said. Rod Clampett, Chancel's art director, had gone to RISD and liked hiring its graduates.

Paddi said, 'Don't you think all this Shorelands business is like some huge plot that you can't quite see?'

Davey began to laugh. 'Well, if you're looking for a sinister plot, Lincoln Chancel is your man. He was a tremendous crook, I'm sure. It's like the big secret in my family - the thing we don't talk about. On the way up, my dad's dad obviously stabbed everybody he met in the back, he must have stolen with both hands whenever he had the chance, he raped his way into a huge fortune…'

Davey stopped talking for a moment, a meaningless smile stuck to his face, as the crowded darkness in the center of the room seemed to thicken. He glanced down, and his eye found propped on the sofa the photograph from Shorelands. Lincoln Chancel was suddenly before him, beaming undimmed fury, rage, and frustration into his soul.

Paddi stroked his cheek with a cool finger and then stood up, held out her hand, and stepped back to lead him across the room.

'She insulted my grandfather, didn't she? That girl who disappeared.'

'Maybe your grandfather insulted her.'

Moving backwards, she drew him toward a mural in which Lord Night stood guard at the black opening of a cave, came up to the wall, and instead of bumping into it, slipped into the cave. Davey followed her through the opening.

And that, Davey said, was the end of his story.26

'How can that be the end?' Nora was trying not to yell. 'What happened?'

'This is the part that's hard to talk about.'

Davey had not finished talking about Paddi Mann. He had merely finished talking in that way.

'You remember what we saw today? Where we went?'

Nora nodded, almost dreading whatever he would say next.

He gave her no help.' That's the point.'

'Did you ever find the manuscript? What happened to her? Oh no, you're not going to tell me she was killed, are you?'

'I never did find the manuscript. Anyhow, my father told me that he'd decided against doing a scholarly edition of Night Journey.'

'That must have upset Paddi.'

Davey went back to smoothing out the bedcover, and Nora tried again. 'She was so committed to that project.'

Davey nodded, looking down and pushing his lips forward in the way he did when forced into an uncomfortable situation.

'Just tell me what happened.'

'We had that Thursday night, when I gave her the picture. On Monday, I never saw her at all, and when I got back to my apartment all the coke caught up with me and I slept for two straight days. I just conked out. Woke up barely in time to shower and put on new clothes before I went back to the office.'

'Where Alden told you he wasn't going through with your pet project. And you had to break the news to Paddi.'

'She was hanging around in the hallway when I got up to the fifteenth floor, like someone had told her what was going to happen. We Didn't really have time to talk before I went in, and she said, "Seven-thirty?" or something like that, and I nodded, and then I went in and saw Dad. She was still there when I came out, and I gave her the bad news. She didn't say a word. Just turned around and left. So at seven-thirty, I went to her place.

'When I got up to the loft, she wasn't there, so I walked around for a little bit. I thought she might have been asleep or in the bathroom or something. I looked at her books. You know what they were? Nothing but editions of Driver novels. Hardbacks, paperbacks, foreign languages, illustrated editions.'

That's not too surprising,' Nora said.

'Wait. Then, of course, I had to go through the opening in the mural and look at the only other place in the whole loft I'd ever seen. So I walk into the cave. And my eyes bug out and my heart just about stops and I'm stuck. And after about a hundred years go by, I'm unstuck, I realize I'm not going to faint after all.'

He looked at Nora, who did nothing but look back at him. This, too, had the tone of one of Davey's inventions.

'It was like a slaughterhouse. There was blood everywhere. I was so scared. I was pretty sure you couldn't lose that much blood and still be alive, and I was gritting my teeth until I saw her body. I got to the other side of the bed, where this big smear of blood went all the way across the floor and halfway up the wall. And that almost made me puke, because I'd been sure I was going to see her there. I even looked under the bed.'

'Why didn't you call the police?' And why do I want to believe this? He's describing Natalie's room.

'I didn't know where the phone was! I don't even know if there was a phone!' Davey looked wildly around the bedroom and opened and closed his mouth several limes, as if trying to swallow this remark.

'Weren't you afraid that whoever did it was still there?'

'Nora, if I'd even thought of that, I would have had a heart attack on the spot.'

'Where did you find her body?'

'I didn't.'

'Well, where was it? It must have been somewhere.'

'Nora, that's what I'm saying. Nobody found it. It wasn't there.'

'Somebody took it?'

'I don't know!' Davey yelled. He pressed both hands to his; face, then let them drop.

'Oh. It was like Natalie, you mean. The body was gone, like Natalie.'

He nodded. 'Like Natalie.'

Nora struggled to regain a sense of control, of a world in which things made sense. 'But there can't really be any connection, can there?'

'You think I know?'

She tried again. 'I don't suppose Natalie Weil quoted Hugo Driver at you and had you rummaging around for lost manuscripts…' In the midst of this, Nora remembered the books in Natalie Weil's bedroom, and the sentence trailed off.

'No, I don't suppose;' Davey said, still not looking up.

The moment of silence which followed seemed extraordinarily crowded to Nora.

'What did you do when you realized that she wasn't there?'

Davey inhaled deeply and looked over her shoulder. 'I was too scared to go home, so I walked all the way to midtown and took a hotel room under a phony name. Around noon the next day, I called Rod Clampett and asked if Paddi had turned up yet. He said he hadn't seen her all day, but he'd tell her to give me a call when she showed up. Of course, she never did.'

'I guess you couldn't exactly look for her,' Nora said. 'But Davey, excuse me, what's the point of all this?'

'I have to get up and move around a little. Could you make some coffee or something?'

'I could make decaf,' she said, looking at the digital clock on the bedside radio. It was 2:00 A.M. She took from the couch a pale yellow robe, slipped it on, and tied its sash.

Davey was sitting up in bed and staring at nothing. For a second, he looked like someone Nora had never seen before, an ineffectual man who would always be puzzled by life. Then he glanced up at Nora and was again her husband, Davey Chancel, trying to seem less distressed than he was.

'Nora,' he said, 'do you know where that blue silk bathrobe is, the one from Thailand?'

'On the hook in the bathroom,' she said, and padded out to make coffee.27

Davey sipped his decaffeinated French Roast and winced at the heat. 'A little kummel would go nicely with this mocha Java, don't you think?'

Nora shook her head, then changed her mind. 'What the hey.'

Davey went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of Hiram Walker kummel, all Nora had been able to find on her last visit to the liquor store. He frowned at the label to remind her that she should have gone to another liquor store, if not to Germany, to find decent kummel, and filled his cup to the brim. Then he moved behind Nora and tipped perhaps half an inch of the liquid into her cup. A smell of caraway and drunken flowers filled the kitchen.

'Well?' she asked.

'Yes.'

'Yes, what?' She sipped what tasted like a poison antidote with an accidental similarity to coffee.

'Yes, there is more. Yes, I'm kind of leery of telling you about it.'

She found herself taking another sip of the mixture, which seemed less ghastly than before.

'I left out one thing about the last time I was in Paddi's loft.'

'Oh, no.'

'It wasn't anything I did, Nora. I'm not guilty of anything.'

Then why do you look so guilty? she wondered.

'Okay, I did something.' He drank again and tilted back his head as if, like a bird, he had to do that to swallow. Then he lowered his head and folded his hands around his cup. 'I told you about looking under her bed.'

Nora suddenly felt that whatever Davey said next would forever change the way she felt about him. Then she thought that his story about Paddi Mann had already changed the way she thought about Davey.

'I saw something under there.'

'You saw something,' she said.

'A book.'

Is that all? Nora thought. No severed head, no million dollars in a paper bag?

'After I fished it out, I thought she might even have left it for me. What do you think it was?'

'The Egyptian Book of the Dead? The, uh, that Lovecraft thing, the Necronomicon?'

'Night Journey. A paperback.'

'Forgive me,' she said, 'but that doesn't actually seem too startling.'

Davey held her eyes with his own and took another swig of his doctored coffee. 'Uh huh. I opened it up. You know, maybe there was a note or something in it for me. But there wasn't anything in it except what was supposed to be there. And her name.'

'Her name,' Nora said, feeling like an echo.

'Written on the flyleaf. At the top. Paddi Mann.'

'She wrote her name in it.'

'That's right. I shoved the book in my pocket and took it away with me. A few days later I tried to find it, but the damn thing was lost.'

'It fell out of your pocket.'

'Here we go,' he said, and set his cup down. 'Hold on. I'll be right back.' Davey stood up and walked out of the kitchen, nervously straightening his blue robe.

Nora heard him return to the bedroom. A closet door opened and closed. In a moment, he reappeared holding a familiar black paperback. As if reluctant to surrender it, he sat down and held it up before him in both hands before offering it to Nora.

'Well, I don't suppose this is…' Nora noticed that she was as reluctant to take the book as he was to let go of it. She stopped talking and accepted it. Printed on the flyleaf, which had become slightly discolored, in small clear letters with a ballpoint pen, was PADDI MANN. Beneath her name, Davey had signed his own.

'So it turned up,' Nora said.

'Where, do you suppose?'

'How should I know?' She took her hands off the book, thinking that she did not actually care where the book had surfaced, and for some reason hoping that she would not have to find out. She braced herself for another of Davey's inventions.

'Natalie Weil's bedroom.'

'But-' Nora closed, then opened her mouth. No longer able to bear the expression in Davey's eyes, she looked down at her fingers spread on the edge of the table as if she were about to play the piano. 'This book, the same book.'

'This same book. I saw it when we went in, and after that big cop took us out, I went back, remember? I opened it up and just about passed out. Then I shoved it in my pocket.'

'What made you go back in? Did you suspect that it might be-?'

'Of course not. I wanted to take a closer look at it.' He shrugged his shoulders.

'You don't know how it got there.'

'I didn't put it there, if that's what you mean.'

'You never gave Natalie a copy of Night Journey.'

He looked at her in real exasperation. 'Do I have to spell it out for you?'

Nora guessed he did.

'Someone took it from me. He killed Paddi and left the book for me to find. Later that week he stole it from me. And the same person killed Natalie and left it in her bedroom.

'The wolf killed Paddi Mann?' Nora asked, too confused to speak clearly.

'Lord Night? What does he have to do with it?'

'No, sorry, I mean our wolf - the Westerholm Wolf.' She waved her hands in front of her, as if she were erasing a blackboard. 'That's what I call the… the guy. The man who murdered Natalie and the others.'

'Our wolf.' Davey seemed disturbed, and Nora feared that his disturbance was caused by her appropriation of an animal sacred to Hugo Driver. 'Yeah. It was the same guy. Okay. It has to be. He's not much like Lord Night though.'

'Davey,' she said, 'not everything is related to Huge Driver.'

'Night Journey is. Paddi Mann was certainly interested in Driver.'

She had made him defensive. 'Davey, all I meant is that he couldn't have left Paddi Mann's copy of Night Journey in Sally Michaelman's bedroom, or in Annabelle Austin's, or any of the others. And maybe he didn't steal yours. He probably found it.'

Davey was vigorously shaking his head. 'I bet there's some correspondence between the women he killed and certain parts of the book. In fact, that's obvious.'

'Why is it obvious?'

'Because of Paddi,' he said. 'Paddi was obviously Paddy don't you think?'

'Paddi was Paddi,' she said. 'I don't get it.'

'In the book. The mouse. The mouse named Paddy, who tells Pippin Little about the Field of Steam. Jesus, don't you remember anything? Paddy is… Sometimes I wonder if you ever even read Night Journey.'

'I read parts of it.'

'You lied.' He was looking at her in absolute astonishment.

'You told me you finished it, and you were lying to me .'

'I skipped around,' she said. 'I apologize. I realize that this is important to you -'

'Important.'

'- but aren't you maybe a little upset that a man who killed five women is -'

'Is what?'

'- somehow connected to you? I don't know how to say it, because I don't really understand it.' A flash of pain exploded behind the right half of Nora's forehead and sent a hot tendril down into her pupil. She leaned back in her chair and placed her hand over her eye.

'I'll never be able to get to sleep. I think I'll go down to the family room and put on some music.'

Nora waited to be invited into the family room, so that she could refuse. She heard him push back his chair and stand up.

He told her that she could try lying down. He advised aspirin.

Nora removed her hand from her face. Davey tilted the square brown bottle over his cup and poured out several inches of amber liquid that reeked of caraway seed.

'You said you had that manuscript you found in the conference room, the Clyde Morning book? Would you mind if I took a look at it?'

'You want to read Clyde Morning?'

'I want to see the first new Blackbird Book,' Nora said, but Davey acknowledged this conciliatory sally only with a frown and a shrug of his shoulders. 'Would you get it for me?'

Davey tilted his head and rolled his eyes. 'If that's what you want.' He went into his office.' Nora could hear him talking to himself as he worked the catches on his briefcase. He came back into the kitchen, awkwardly holding a surprisingly slim stack of typing paper held together with rubber bands. 'Here you are.' He set the typescript on the table. Tell me if you think it's any good.'

She said, 'You doubt the great Clyde Morning?'

Already at the kitchen door, Davey turned to give her a look that pretended to offer her sympathy for being left alone, and escaped.

She removed the rubber bands and tapped the bottom edge of the manuscript on the table. Then she folded over the last page and looked at the number in the top right-hand corner. Whatever miracles of the narrative art the hope of Blackbird Books had performed in Spectre, he had contained them within 183 pages.

From downstairs floated the eerie sound of Peter Pears singing words from a Britten opera Nora had heard many times but could not place. The voice seemed to come from an inhuman realm located between earth and heaven. Death in Venice, that was what Davey was listening to. She picked up the slim manuscript, carried it into the living room, switched on a lamp Sally Michaelman had sold her, and stretched out on a sofa to read.

BOOK III

AT THE DEEP OF NIGHT

At last the child lost all hope and admitted to himself that this dark land was death, from which no release could be had. For a time he lost all strength and reason, and wept in panic and despair.28

Early the next morning, Nora turned her back on Long Island Sound, ran over the arched wooden bridge at Trap Line Road, and came into the twelve acres of wooded marsh known as the Pierce A. Gordon Nature Conservancy. The air was cool and fresh, and behind her seagulls hopped along the long, seaweed-strewn beach. She had reached the midpoint of her run, and what lay before her were the pleasures of the 'Bird Shelter,' as Westerholm natives called the Conservancy, where for just under fifteen minutes she enjoyed the illusion of passing through a landscape like that of the Michigan wilds to which Matt Curlew had taken her on weekend fishing trips during her childhood. These fifteen minutes were the secret heart of her morning run, and on the morning after her first literally sleepless night in years, Nora wished no more than to stop thinking, or worrying, or whatever it was that she had been doing for the past four hours, and enjoy them. Familiar trees filled with cardinals and noisy jays surrounded her. She looked at her watch and saw that she was already nearly five minutes behind her usual time.

Davey's crazy story had affected her more than she liked to admit. In the past, Davey's embellishments, when not clearly self-serving, had been in the service of either color or humor. Though nothing if not highly colored, the tale of Paddi Mann had seemed to conceal more than it gave away. Even if he had been trying to emphasize the extent to which he had been seduced, he had overdone his effects.