The Hellfire Club

Other things, too, had distressed her. Nora had read the first twenty-odd pages of Spectre in such a swirl of doubt and anger that the sentences had instantly disappeared from her memory.

What right did Davey have to demand that she be interested in a second-rate author? For his benefit, Nora had absorbed a lot of information about classical music. She knew the difference between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, she could identify fifty operas from their opening bars, she could tell when it was Horowitz playing a Chopin nocturne and when it was Ashkenazy. Why did she have to bow down to Hugo Driver?

At this point, Nora's conscience forced her to acknowledge that she had, after all, lied to Davey about reading Driver's book. She had closed the manuscript, gone downstairs, and paused outside the family room door. Death in Venice poured from the speakers. She slowly pushed open the door, hoping to see Davey sitting up and making notes or staring at the wall or doing anything at all that would prove he was at least as awake as she was. Covered to the throat by a plaid throw rug, eyes closed and mouth fluttering, Davey was lying on the couch. Exactly as she had foreseen, Mr Sensitivity had loaded the two Britten CDs into the player, stretched out with the rug wrapped around him like a baby blanket, and trusted that she would be asleep before he was.

That was it, that did it. Nora took herself back to the living room and turned on the radio. She dialed until she reached a station pounding out James Cotton, blues with wheels, blues with guts, cranked up the volume, and sat down to start reading Spectre all over again.

Spectre was the second topic she wished to put out of her mind during the favorite part of her run. After about an hour's reading, a certain possibility concerning Clyde Morning had occurred to her. This possibility, if true, might mean something to herself and Davey, or it might not. Then there was a problem with the book itself. As she had feared. Spectre was a slight book. It read like a fictional skeleton barely fleshed out by a writer too tired or lazy to keep his characters' names straight. George Carmichael, the main character, had become George Carstairs by page 15, and by page 35 he had changed back to Carmichael. For the rest of the book, he switched back and forth, depending, Nora thought, on which name surfaced first in Clyde Morning's mind when he reported to his typewriter.

Even worse was the exhaustion which weighed down the writing. Three different characters said, 'Too true.' Far too many sentences began with the word 'Indeed' followed by a comma. George Carmichael/Carstairs's eyes were invariably a 'deep, soulful brown, and his shoes were always 'crosshatched with scuff marks.' Neither sense nor grammar was safe. As he ran down the stairs, the sun struck George in his eyes of deep, soulful brown. When he 'gazed longingly' at his beloved. Lily Clark, his eyes adhered to her dress. Or they flew across the room to meet her 'tigress' lips.' Half a dozen times, George and other people 'wore out shoe leather' by 'pounding the pavement' or 'double-jumping the stairs.' After she had begun to notice these repetitions, Nora got up, found a pencil, and made faint check marks in the margin whenever one of them appeared.

When she had finished reading, pale light came slanting in through the windows at the front of the house. She returned to the kitchen for more coffee and discovered that she had ground beans from the package of French Roast that was not decaffeinated. Her radio station had pumped out blues all during the night and switched over to jazz while she read the manuscript's last pages. A tenor saxophone was playing some ballad so tenderly that individual notes seemed to float through her skin. 'Scott Hamilton,' said the announcer, 'with "Chelsea Bridge."'

Scott Hamilton… wasn't that the name of an ice skater?

Nora had looked up from the manuscript, dazed and uncertain. It was as if along with the sound of the saxophone, some secret thought, one not to be admitted during normal hours, had swum into her mind, taken form, and floated out. Carmichael/Carstairs and Paddi Mann had been part of this thought, but it was gone. The experience had made her feel oddly like a visitor in her own life. She stood up, put her hands on her hips, and twisted her back twice sharply to the right, then twice to the left.

Davey had not left the family room during the night, but her irritation with him had passed. After nearly a week of keeping his fears inside him, he had finally blurted out his confession. Even if only a tenth of it was true, it was still a confession.

Nora went downstairs and peeked in on her husband. Above the rug, his face was tight with an anxious dream. She switched off the light and turned off the CD player. Upstairs, she put Spectre back in its rubber bands. She felt at once utterly tired and completely awake. Why not now, in the gift of these extra hours, take her run, and then make breakfast for them both before Davey left for New York? Inspired, she put on her shorts and running shoes, slipped into a tank top and a cotton sweater, pulled a long-billed cap on her head, and left the house. After a few minutes of stretching in the dew-soaked grass on a front lawn that looked exotic in the unfamiliar gray-blue light of dawn, Nora was loping past the sleeping houses on Fairytale Lane.

Tendrils of doubt and worry continued to prod at her concentration as she ran through the almost hallucinatory landscape of the Bird Shelter. Paddi Mann was not a problem; nor, really, was whatever Davey had been hiding. Davey's secrets invariably turned out to be less significant than he imagined. The problem was whether or not to tell him what she had inadvertently discovered about Clyde Morning.29

Nora picked up The New York Times from her doorstep, unlocked her front door, and automatically checked the signal on the security keypad. The green light burned; no one had touched the system since she had left the house. She carried the paper downstairs and opened the door to the family room. There, lost in untroubled sleep, was Davey, throw rug twisted around his hips, eyes closed, mouth open just wide enough for him to lick his lips.

She knelt in front of Davey and drew her hand down his cheek. His eyes fluttered open. 'What time is it?'

She looked at the digital clock next to the CD player. 'Seven-seventeen. You have to get up.'

'Why? Jeez, did you forget it was Saturday?'

'It's Saturday? Good God,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I'm so mixed up, I guess I thought it was Monday.'

He noticed what she was wearing. 'You already did your run? It's so early.' He sat up and took a closer look at her face. 'Did you get any sleep?' He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. A faint smell of used alcohol clung to his skin. He drooped back against the wall and looked at her. 'You really have this completely wired look. I didn't think Spectre was that exciting. In fact, from what I saw, it was kind of sucky.'

This did not seem the time to risk telling him her theory about Clyde Morning. 'Well, I had an idea or two, but I should take another look at the manuscript before I talk about them.'

'Oh?' He tilted his head and looked wary.

'I just want to make sure of a few things. Do you want to go back to sleep?'

He rubbed his cheek. 'Might as well get up. Maybe I can get in some golf before lunch. Would that be okay with you?'

'Good idea.' Nora kissed his whiskery, slightly stale cheek and stood up. In the living room, she realized that she was still carrying the newspaper and tossed it onto a chair.

After a hurried shower, Nora turned off the water and left the compartment just as naked Davey entered the bathroom. When she reached for a towel, he grabbed one of her buttocks. She bunched the towel in front of his chest and pushed him toward the shower.

She toweled herself dry, wrapped the towel around her trunk, and came out into the bedroom to get dressed. Naked pink, and rubbing his hair with a towel, Davey came out of the bathroom and said, 'The only problem with going to the club so early is that you have to play with these old jock-type guys, and they all treat me like somebody's retarded grandson. They never pay attention to anything I say.'

The telephone next to the bed rang. Both of them stared at it. 'Must be a wrong number,' Davey said. 'Get rid of them.'

Nora picked up the telephone and said, 'Hello?'

A male voice she had heard before but did not recognize pronounced her name.

'Yes.'

'This is Holly Fenn, Mrs Chancel. I'm sorry to bother you so early, but in the midst of all the excitement down here, something came up that you might be able to help us with.'

Davey appeared before her in a pale green polo shirt, boxer shorts, and blue knee-high socks. 'So who is this idiot?'

She put her hand over the mouthpiece. 'Holly Fenn.'

'I don't know anybody named Holly Fenn.'

'That cop. The detective.'

'Oh, that guy. Swell.'

Fenn said, 'Hello?'

'Yes, I'm here.'

'If you wouldn't mind performing a little public service for your local police, I wonder if you and your husband could come down here to the station. As friends of Mrs Weil's.'

Davey removed a pair of khaki pants from the dry cleaner's plastic bag and tossed the bag, now entangled with the hanger, toward the wastebasket, missing by a yard.

'I don't quite understand,' she said. 'You want to talk to us about Natalie?' Davey muttered something and thrust one leg into the trousers.

'I might have some good news for you,' Fenn said. 'It seems your friend may not be dead after all. LeDonne found her, or someone who claims to be Mrs Weil, down on the South Post Road just a little while ago. Can you be in soon? I'd appreciate your help.'

'Well, sure,' she said. 'That would be great news. But what do you need us for, to identify her?'

'I'll fill you in when you get here, but that's about it. You might want to come around to the back of the station. Everything's crazy around here.'

'See you in about ten minutes,' she said.

'In the midst of the pandemonium, I'm grateful to you,' Fenn said. 'Thanks.' He hung up.

Still holding the receiver, Nora looked at Davey, who was now at his shoe rack, deliberating. 'I still don't get it,' she said. Davey glanced at her, made an interrogatory noise in his throat, and bent down to select penny loafers. 'He wants us to come down to the station because that policeman who was at Natalie's house - LeDonne? - because he says LeDonne found a woman who said she was Natalie down on the South Post Road.'

Davey slowly straightened up and frowned at her. 'So why do they need us?'

'I'm not really sure.'

'It's stupid. All they have to do is look at her driver's license. What's the point of dragging us in?'

'I don't know. He said he'd explain when we got there.'

'It can't be Natalie. You saw her bedroom. People don't get up and walk away from a bloodbath like that.'

'According to you, Paddi Mann did,' she said.

His face turned a bright, smooth red, and he moved away to slip on the loafers. 'I didn't say that. I said she disappeared. Natalie was murdered.'

'Why are you blushing?'

'I'm not blushing,' he said. 'I'm pissed off. You expect cops to be kind of dim and incompetent, but this is a new low. They pick up some screwball who says she's Natalie, and we have to waste the morning doing their job for them.' He paced to the door, shoved his hands in his pockets, and gave her a guarded look. 'I hope you know enough not to blurt out anything I told you last night.'

Nora noticed that the receiver was still in her hand and replaced it. 'Why would I?'

'I wish we had time to get something to eat.' Davey said. 'Let's get this over with, shall we?'

A few minutes later, the Audi was zipping beneath the trees that lined Old Pottery Road as Davey wondered aloud if he should tell the police about finding Paddi Mann's copy of Night Journey in Natalie Weil's bedroom. The problem is, I took it. I bet I could get into trouble for that.'

For Nora, the question represented another instance of Hugo Driver's amazing ability to go on making trouble long after his death. 'There's no reason to bring it up.'

Davey gave her an injured look. 'This is serious, Nora. Maybe I shouldn't go in with you. This woman can't be Natalie, but what if she is?'

'If she can't be, she isn't. And if somehow she is Natalie, she'll have a lot more to talk about than a copy of Night Journey.'

'I guess so.' He sighed. 'You said you had some idea about Spectre.'

'Oh!' she said. 'When I was running into the Bird Shelter, something about the writing occurred to me. But I could be wrong.'

Davey accelerated downhill toward the green light on the Post Road, signaled for a turn, and swung north into the fast lane.

'You know how you used to joke about Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime being the same person? I think they really could be.'

He gave her an incredulous glance.

'Last month, I read a Marietta Teatime novel, remember? The Grave Is Waiting!'

'The Waiting Grave,' Davey said.

'Right. Some things in the style struck me as funny. Marietta had people say "too true" a couple of times when they agreed with something. Who says "too true"? English people, maybe, or Australians, but Americans don't say it. In Spectre, people say "too true" over and over.'

'Obviously Clyde reads her books.'

'But there's more. Marietta started half a dozen sentences with the word "indeed." The same thing happens in Spectre. And there's something about shoes. In the Marietta book, the gardener character, the one who kills the little boy, his shoes are crosshatched with scuff marks. That's how you find out later that he was impersonating a minister in the other town. Well, in Spectre, Morning keeps saying that George Whatshisname's shoes are crosshatched with scuff marks. It's not even a very good description.'

'Oh great, now you're an editor.'

Nora said nothing.

'You know what I mean. I don't think it's a bad description, that's all.'

'Okay, look at their joke names,' Nora said. 'Morning and Teatime, it's like being called six o'clock and four o'clock.'

'Hah,' Davey said. 'You know, maybe Morning invented Teatime as a pseudonym. It's not actually impossible.'

'Thank you.'

'If he had two names, he could unload twice as many books. God knows, he must have needed the money. All he had to do was set up Marietta's post office box and a separate bank account. Nobody ever saw either one of them, anyhow.'

'So if they were the same person, it wouldn't cause any problems?'

'Not if we don't tell anybody,' Davey said. 'When Spectre is edited, we take out all the "indeeds" and "too trues" and the crosshatches, that's all.'

'You could get a little publicity out of it,' Nora said.

'And make us look like fools. No thanks. The best thing is to keep quiet and let the problem go away by itself. Which is what I wish we could do with this stupid Driver business.'

'What Driver business?'

'It's so ridiculous I don't even want to talk about it.'

This is the problem your father told you about.'

The reason I had to watch that travesty. Okay, here goes.'

Davey turned off the Post Road and drove toward the stone building of the Westerholm police station. The adjacent parking lot seemed unusually full to Nora.

'How can that movie be a nuisance for Chancel House?'

'It can't be,' Davey said, sounding weary, 'not in itself. What happened was, these two screwball women in Massachusetts went out to see that dumb movie right after they were going through some family papers in their basement.' Davey came out of the main lot and turned into the police department lot, which was as crowded as the one they had just left. Cars and vans were parked in front of the station.

Nora said, 'Look at those vans.' She pointed at two long vans bearing the logos and call letters of network news programs in New York.

'Just what we need.'

'These women found old family papers?'

'They thought they found a way to scare a lot of money out of my old man. Their greasy lawyer did everything but admit it.'

Davey had now driven to the far end of the police lot without finding an opening, and he circled around toward the parking places reserved for police vehicles.

'I don't get it,' Nora said.

They found notes a sister of theirs was supposed to have made. Like three pages. In a suitcase.' He pulled into an empty spot between two police cars.

'They're claiming that their sister wrote Night Journey?'

Whatever the women in Massachusetts were claiming was apparently not to be discussed, because Davey immediately got out of the car. Nora opened her door, stood up, and saw Officer LeDonne approaching. He looked like a man under a great deal of pressure.

'I'm not moving this car,' Davey said. 'You asked us to come down here.'

'Will you follow me into the station, please? Mr Chancel? Mrs Chancel? I'll have to ask you to move pretty quickly, and not to talk to anyone until we're with Chief Fenn.' He came toward them as he spoke and halted about two feet away from Davey. 'Stick as close to me as you can.' He looked at them both, turned around, and set off toward the front of the building.

When they came around the side of the station, Nora noticed something she had not taken in earlier. Unlike the cars in the main lot, these were occupied. The men and women waiting in their cars watched LeDonne lead the Chancels toward the steps of the police station.

'Why, half the town is out here,' she said.

'Been here since dawn,' LeDonne said.

They hurried up the three long steps. Nora felt hundreds of avid eyes watching them from behind windshields and then was distracted by the commotion on the other side of the door. LeDonne sighed. 'Up to me? We'd put 'em all in the holding pen and let 'em out one at a time.' He faced the door, motioned them nearer, and lunged inside. Davey moved in behind Nora, put his hands on her hips, and pushed.

As Nora knew from her misadventure with the millionaire's child, the tall desk manned by a sergeant dominated one side of the space beyond the entrance, and on the other stood two long rows of wooden benches. A few steps ahead of her, LeDonne was pushing his way through a crowd surging forward from the benches. Two uniformed men behind the desk shouted for order. Davey's hands propelled her past an outheld microphone into a babble of questions and a sudden wave of bodies. Voices battered at her Davey seemed to lift her off the ground and speed her along into the narrow vacancy behind LeDonne. From behind her right ear, Nora heard a reporter asking something about the Chancel family, but the question vanished as they turned into a wide hallway, where, abruptly, they found themselves alone.

'Chief Fenn's office is up ahead,' LeDonne told them, seeming to promise that everything would be answered there, and started off again, leading them past a series of doors with pebbled glass windows. On the far side of a wide metal staircase he opened a door with the words CHIEF OF DETECTIVES written on the opaque window.

In the office stood a rolltop desk, a long, green metal desk facing two wooden chairs, and a gray metal table pushed up against a pale green cinder-block wall. Both the metal desk and the table were covered with papers, and more papers bristled from the open rolltop. A narrow window behind the green desk looked out on the police parking lot, where the Audi stood like a trespasser in the rows of black-and-white cars.

'Holly Fenn is a slob,' Davey said, surveying the room with his arms crossed over his chest. 'Are we surprised? No, we are not.'

Nora sat on a wobbly wooden chair, and Holly Fenn charged through the door, carrying a thick, battered notebook before him like a weapon. 'I suppose the press sort of closed in on you out there.'

They did,' she said, and laughed. 'What are they doing here, anyhow?'

Fenn stood up. 'Our chief thought we could manage them a little better inside the station.' He held his hand out toward Davey, who shook it. 'Thanks for showing up like this, Mr Chancel.'

'I meant, what are they doing here?' Nora said. 'I don't understand how they found out so fast about this woman who says she's Natalie.'

Fenn paused halfway to his desk and turned to look at her. 'You mean you really don't know?'

'Guess not,' she said.

'Didn't you see the papers this morning?'

She saw herself tossing the newspaper toward a chair.

'Oh, my God.' Davey put his hands on the top of his head. 'You did it? You got him?'

'Looks like it.' For a moment Fenn looked almost pleased with himself.

'Did what?' Nora asked.

'Brought in our murderer,' Fenn said. 'Been in custody since about ten last night. I think Popsie Jennings must have called the Times herself. You know Popsie, don't you?'

Both Chancels knew the notorious Popsie Jennings, who owned a women's clothing store on Main Street called The Unfettered Woman and lived in the guesthouse of her third husband's estate on the good side of Mount Avenue, about a quarter of a mile from the Poplars. A short, solid, blond woman in her mid-fifties with a Gitane voice and a fondness for profanity, Popsie looked as though she had been born on a sailboat and raised on a golf course, but she had lived unconventionally, even raucously, and was supposed to have named her dress shop after her conception of herself. She was rumored to have in her bedroom two paintings of horses by George Stubbs given her by her first husband, and to declare that all three were well hung - the paintings, the horses, and the first husband.

'He broke into Popsie's house?' Davey said. 'He's lucky he didn't wind up tied naked to a bed and force-fed vodka.'

'He almost was,' said Fenn. 'He came over to her house around nine last night. She got suspicious, nailed him with an andiron, taped his hands and feet together while he was out, and then got a cleaver and said she'd castrate him if he didn't confess.'

'Wow,' Nora said. 'Popsie was pretty sure of herself.'

'Pretty damn mad, too.'

'So who was the guy?' asked Davey.

'I suppose you know him, too. Richard Dart.'

'Dick Dart?' Davey sat down clumsily on the chair next to Nora's and gave her a look of utterly empty astonishment. 'I went to school with him. His brother, Petey, was in my class, and Dick was in the sophomore class when I graduated. We were never friends or anything like that, but I see him around town now and then. I introduced him to Nora a couple of months ago - remember, Nora?'

She shook her head, wondering why they were not talking about Natalie Weil and still not quite capable of taking in that she had actually met the man she had called the Wolf of Westerholm. 'Where?'

'Gilhoolie's. Right after it opened.'

And then she remembered the languid, drawling man in the awful bar, the man who had complimented her scent when she had not been wearing one. So she had spoken to, had looked into the eyes of, had been lightly touched by, the man she called the Wolf, who turned out to be a creepy, aging preppy with a drinking problem. The reason he acted as though he hated women turned out to be that he really did hate women. Still, Dick Dart did not at all match the vague mental images she had formed of Westerholm's murderer. He was too ordinary in the wrong ways, and not at all ordinary in other wrong ways. But maybe she should have guessed that the Wolf would have an ill-concealed sense of his own superiority.

'I still can't believe it,' Davey said now. 'You remember him, don't you, Nora?'

'He was awful, but I wouldn't have imagined he was that awful.'

'His father is having a little trouble with that one, too.' Fenn proceeded around to the front of his desk, thumped down the notebook, and sat to face them. 'Leland sent over Leo Morris as soon as he heard what happened, and Leo has been in our face since two A.M. He's still back in the holding cell with your friend.'

Though Leo Morris, the Chancel family lawyer who had hired the QE2 for his daughter's sweet-sixteen party, was one of the most powerful attorneys in Connecticut, he was not usually thought of as a criminal lawyer, and Davey expressed his surprise at this choice.

'Leo won't argue the case in court, they have a sharp young guy for that, but he'll stage-manage the defense. We'll have a fight on our hands.'

'You're sure he's the guy,' Davey said.

'He is the guy,' said Fenn. 'When we booked him, he had a silver cigarette case of Sally Michaelman's in his jacket pocket. She stopped smoking ten, twelve years ago, but her husband gave her the case a couple of years before they divorced. And when we searched Dart's apartment, we found lots of goodies. Jewelry, watches, little things that belonged to the victims. Some of this stuff was engraved, and we're checking the rest, but I'd bet you anything you could name we'll find that most of it came from the women's houses. Hell, he even took a book about Ted Bundy from Annabelle Austin's house - she wrote her name in it. Guess he wanted to pick up some pointers. Besides that, Dart had a scrapbook of articles about the killings, clippings from every newspaper for fifty miles around. And on top of that, while Popsie was threatening his manhood, he coughed up a detail we never told the press.'

Davey, who had looked a little alarmed at the mention of the book, asked, 'What detail?'

'I can't tell you that,' said Fenn.

'What made Popsie suspicious in the first place?' asked Nora.

'Dart had no real reason for showing up at her house. He called to say he had to discuss something, but once he got there he just rattled off some gobbledygook about the inventory at the dress shop - stuff he didn't have anything to do with. Then he says it would be useful to have a look at the paintings in her bedroom, maybe she could will them to a museum for a tax deduction. He wants to look over the paintings before they go any further. Popsie tells him he's full of it, no tours of the bedroom tonight, junior, go home but really what she thinks is. This guy is lonely, he just wants to talk. Popsie has been around enough men to understand that this guy isn't on the normal wavelength, it isn't about sex after all, so she figures she'll give him one more drink and throw him out. So she gets up, walks around him, and realizes that he's not just making her nervous, he's making her really nervous. She's standing next to the fireplace. And then she realized something that made her pick up the andiron and clout him in the head.'

'What was that?' Nora asked.

'All the murdered women were Dart, Morris clients. Popsie referred Brewer, Austin, and Humphrey to Dart herself, and Sally Michaelman had referred her. They weren't on Dick's luncheon list, but they all knew him. She had what you could call a brainstorm, and because she's Popsie, instead of falling apart she got mad and brained him.'

'Was Natalie a client of Dart's?' Nora asked.

Fenn tilted his head back and contemplated the ceiling for a couple of seconds. When he looked back at them he seemed almost embarrassed. 'Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs Chancel. I must be getting too old for this screwball job. Got so caught up in the excitement around here, I forgot the reason you came in.' He slid the thick notebook closer to him and opened it to read the last page. From the other side of the desk, Nora saw that instead of the scrawl she might have expected, Fenn's notes were written in a small, almost calligraphic hand. He looked up at Nora, then back down at the page. 'Let me tell you about this woman. Officer LeDonne was reporting to the station early, at my request. He was coming up the South Post Road when he noticed a woman behaving oddly on the sidewalk in front of the empty building that used to house the Jack and Jill Nursery, in the 1300 block there, just south of the old furniture factory?' He looked up at her.

'Yes.' She felt a faint stirring of alarm.

'Officer LeDonne pulled over and approached the woman. She appeared to be in considerable distress.'

'Did she look like Natalie?' Nora asked.

Fenn ignored the question. 'The woman more or less begged to be taken to the police station. She was insistent on getting away from the old nursery. When LeDonne helped her into the patrol car, he saw a resemblance to the photographs he had seen of Mrs Weil, and asked her if she was Natalie Weil. The woman responded that she was. He brought her here, and she was taken to the station commander's office, where she almost instantly fell asleep. We called her doctor, but all we got was his service, which said that he'd call us back. We'll take her to the hospital this morning, but in the meantime she's still asleep on the station commander's couch.'

'She didn't explain anything about what happened to her? She just passed out?'

'She was asleep on her feet from the second she came into the station. I should mention this. LeDonne never met Mrs Weil. I never met Mrs Weil. Neither did the station commander. None of us knows what she looks like in person. So it seems as if the two of you can help us out again, if you don't mind.'

'I hope it is Natalie,' Nora said. 'Can we see her?'

Holly Fenn came around the side of his desk with a half smile visible beneath his mustache. 'Let's take a little walk.'

'Hey, when Dick Dart was spilling his guts to Popsie and the policemen at her house, what did he say about Natalie?' Davey followed Nora and the detective toward the door.

'Said he never went near her.'

'He never went near her?' Nora still had not quite separated Natalie's bloody disappearance from the fate of the other women.

'You believe him?' Davey stopped moving and let Fenn walk past him to get to the door.

'Sure.' Fenn opened the door and turned toward them. 'Dart admitted everything else to Popsie. Why would he lie about one more victim? But the real reason I believe him is that Natalie Weil didn't use Dart, Morris.'

'He only killed his father's clients,' said Davey, with a fresh recognition of this fact.

'Makes you think, doesn't it?' Fenn motioned them through the door.

Out in the hall he led them past dull green walls, bulletin boards, doors open upon rooms crowded with desks. They were approaching a

metal door which stood open behind a uniformed policeman. Through the door a row of barred cells was visible. It struck Nora that the cells looked exactly the way they did in movies, but until you actually saw them you would not guess that they were frightening. 'Your friend Dart is back there,' said Fenn. 'He'll stay until we move him to the county lockup. Leo Morris is with him, so it might be a while. We still have to take his picture and print him.'

Nora imagined the languid, smirking man from the bar at Gilhoolie's penned up in one of these horrors. The image filled her with dread. Then she took another step, and the entire row of cells came into view. In the last of them, one man sat bowed over on the end of the cot and another, his face obscured by a row of bars, stood. They were not speaking. Nora could not look away.

Davey and Holly Fenn moved past the open door. Nora looked at the man hunched at the end of the cot, then took in his curly gray hair and realized that he was Leo Morris. Involuntarily she glanced at the man standing beside the lawyer, and at that second the man moved sideways and became Dick Dart, his face brightening with recognition. She felt an electric shock in the pit of her stomach. Dick Dart remembered her.

Dart looked relaxed and utterly unworried. His eyes locked on hers. He derived some unimaginable pleasure from the sight of her. He winked, and she pushed herself forward, telling herself that it was ridiculous to be frightened by a wink.

Farther down the hallway was a door marked STATION COMMANDER. Nora forced herself to stop seeing the mental picture of Dick Dart winking at her and took a long, deep breath.

'Let's see what's happening.' Fenn cracked open the door and peered in. A wide young woman in a police uniform immediately slipped out. Fenn said, 'Folks, this is Barbara Widdoes. She's our station commander, and a good one, too. Barbara, these are the Chancels, friends of Mrs Weil's.'

'Holly gave me this job.' Barbara Widdoes held out her hand and gave them each a firm shake. 'He has to say I'm good at it. How do you do?' She was attractive in a hearty, well-scrubbed way, with friendly brown eyes and short, dark hair as fine as a baby's. Nora had misjudged her age by at least five years. The woman before her was in her late thirties but looked younger because her face was almost completely unlined. 'Actually, all I do is keep everybody else out of this old bear's way. And rent my couch out to exhausted strays.'

'Can we look in on her?' Fenn asked.

Barbara Widdoes glanced inside. She nodded and allowed Nora, Davey, and Holly Fenn to enter her office.

Covered to her neck by a blanket, a small old woman lay on a short, functional couch against the side wall of the dark office. Her eyes were deep in their sockets, and her cheeks were sunken. Nora turned to Holly Fenn and shook her head. 'I'm sorry. It's someone else.'

'Move a little closer,' Fenn whispered.

When Davey and Nora took two steps nearer the woman on the couch, her face came into sharper focus. Now Nora could see why LeDonne had mistaken her for Natalie. There was a slight resemblance in the shape of the forehead, the cut of the nose, even the set of the mouth. Nora shook her head again. 'Too bad.'

Davey said, 'It's Natalie.'

Nora shook her head. He was blind.

'Look,' Davey said, and instantly the woman opened her eyes and sat up, as if she had trained herself to spring out of sleep. She wore a filthy blue suit, and her bare feet were black with grime. Nora saw that this old woman was Natalie Weil after all, staring directly at her, her eyes wide with terror.

'No!' Natalie shrieked. 'Get her away!'

Appalled, Nora stepped back.

Natalie screeched, and Nora turned openmouthed to Holly Fenn. Davey was already backing toward the door. Natalie pulled up her legs, wrapped her arms around them, and lowered her head, as if trying to roll herself up into a ball.

Fenn said, 'Barbara?'

'I'll deal with her,' said the policewoman, and moved across the room to put her arms around Natalie. Nora followed Fenn through the door.

'Sorry you had to go through that,' said Fenn. 'Do you both agree that she's Natalie Weil?'

'That's Natalie, but what happened to her?' Nora said. 'She's so-'

'Why would Natalie react to you like that?' Davey asked.

'You think I know?'

'We'll get Mrs Weil to the hospital,' said Fenn, 'and I'll be in touch with you as soon as I can make some sense out of all this. Can you think of any reason Mrs Weil might be afraid of you?'

'No, none at all. We were friends.'

Looking as perplexed as Nora felt, Fenn took them down the corridor, not back toward the entrance but in the same direction they had been going. 'Can I ask you to stay home most of the afternoon? I might want to chew the fat later.'

'Sure,' Davey said.

Fenn opened a door at the back of the station, and the Chancels stepped outside into bright, hot light.

Davey said nothing on the way to the car and did not speak as he got in and turned on the ignition. 'Davey?' she said.

He sped behind the station and into the little road that curved away from the empty field and the river. It would take them longer to get home this way, but Nora supposed that he wanted to avoid the crowds and reporters at the front of the station. 'Davey, come on.'

'What?'

Something unexpected leaped into her mind, and she heard herself ask, 'Don't you ever wonder what happened to all those people from Shorelands? Merrick Favor and the others, the ones that girl told you about?'

He shook his head, almost too angry to speak, but too contemptuous to be silent. 'Do you think I care about what happened in 1938? I don't think you should start bugging me or anybody else about stupid Shorelands in stupid 1935. In fact, I don't think you should have done anything you did. Whatever you did.'

'Whatever I did?' This was really beyond her.

But Davey refused to say anything more on the ride home, and when they returned to Crooked Mile Road, he jumped out of the car, hurried into the house, disappeared into the family room, and slammed the door.30

At times like this, Nora wished that her father were still alive to give her advice about the male mind. Men were capable of behavior explicable only to other men. Most conventional wisdom on the subject was not only wrong but backwards, at least in Nora's experience. Would Matt Curlew tell her to confront her husband, or would he advise her to give him the temporary privacy he wanted? Some furious part of herself suggested that Matt Curlew would remind her that these days even Catholics were known to get out of bad marriages. Certainly Matt Curlew would not have regarded Davey Chancel as a suitable son-in-law. In any case, she could hear him advocating both courses with equal clarity: Get in there and make him open his yap and Back off and give the moody bastard a little time.

Nora turned away from the door, remembering that her father had sometimes retreated to his basement workshop in a manner which indicated that he was to be disturbed only in case of emergencies on the order of fire or death. Davey was doing pretty much the same thing.

Nora went back upstairs to read about Richard Dart in the Times. On the bottom half of the front page, the headline,

SOCIALITE ALLEGED FAIRFIELD COUNTY SERIAL KILLER

stood above a face-forward photograph of a barely recognizable grinning boy with shadowy eyes. Nora thought it must have been his law school graduation photo. According to the article, Dart was thirty-seven, a graduate of the Mount Avenue Academy of Westerholm, Connecticut, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut Law School. Since graduation, Dart had worked for the firm of Dart, Morris, founded by his father, Leland Dart, a significant figure in Republican politics in the state of Connecticut and a failed candidate for state governor in 1962. Richard Dart's specialty within the firm was estate planning. He had been brought in for questioning after Mrs Ophelia Jennings, 62, widow of the yachtsman and racehorse owner Sterling 'Breezy' Jennings, had rendered the suspect unconscious after becoming convinced of his guilt during a late-night legal consultation. Westerholm's chief of police expressed confidence in the identification of Richard Dart as the murderer of four local women, saying, 'We have our man, and are fully prepared to offer conclusive evidence at the appropriate time.' Did policemen ever really talk like that, or did reporters just pretend they did?

Leland Dart declined to speak to the press but said through a spokesman that the charges made against his son were completely without foundation.

Two long columns on page 21 gave the limited information the Times reporters had been able to unearth during the night. Mr Dart's brother, Peter, a lawyer with a Madison Avenue firm, expressed conviction in his brother's innocence, as did several neighbors of the accused's parents. Roger Struggles, a currently unemployed boatmaker and close friend of the accused, told a reporter, 'Dick Dart is a loose, witty kind of guy with a great sense of humor. He couldn't do anything like this in a million years.' A bartender named Thomas Lowe described him as 'laid-back and real charming, a sophisticated type.' Mr Saxe Coburg, his retired former English teacher, remembered a boy who 'seemed remarkably comfortable with the idea of completing every assignment with the least possible effort.' In his yearbook entry, Dart had expressed the surprising desire to become a doctor and chosen as his motto As for living, our servants do that for us.

At Yale, which both his grandfather and his father had attended before him. Dart was suspended during the second semester of his freshman year for causes undisclosed, but he managed to graduate with a C average. Out of the two hundred and twenty-four graduates in his law school class. Dart placed one hundred and sixty-first. He had passed his bar examinations on the second try and immediately joined Dart, Morris. The firm's spokesman described him as 'a unique and invaluable member of our team whose special gifts have contributed to our effort to provide outstanding legal service to all of our clients.'

The uniquely gifted lawyer lived in a three-room apartment in the Harbor Arms, Westerholm's only apartment building, located beside the Westerholm Yacht Club on Sequonset Bay in the Blue Hill area. His neighbors in the building described him as a loner who played loud music on the frequent nights when he returned home at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M.

This lazy, self-important pig had managed to slide through life, not to mention three good schools, on the basis of his father's connections. He had chosen to live in three rooms in the Harbor Arms. Blue Hill was one of the best sector's of Westerholm, and the Yacht Club admitted only people like Alden Chancel and Leland Dart. But the Harbor Arms, which had been built in the twenties as a casino, was an ugly brick eyesore tolerated only because it provided convenient housing for the bartenders, waitresses, and other lower-level staff of the Yacht Club. What was Dick Dart doing in that dump? Maybe he lived there in order to irritate his father. Dick Dart's relationship with his father, it came to her. Was even worse than Davey's with his.

She had a vivid, instantaneous flash of Dick Dart stepping sideways in his cell to freeze her with a gleaming wink. Nora folded the newspaper, sorry that she had met Dart even once and happy that she would never have to see him again. When the stories got worse, when the trial produced the torrent of ink and paper which Alden had cheerfully predicted, she promised herself to pay as little attention as possible.

Then she wondered what it would be like to have actually known Dick Dart. How could you reconcile your memories with the knowledge of what he had done? Shuddering, she recognized the reason for Davey's distress. He had been given a moral shock. Someone he had seen every day for two years had been exposed as a fiend. Now sensible Matt Curlew could speak to her: Let him think about it by himself for as long as he likes, then make him a good breakfast and get him to talk.

Nora dropped the paper on the kitchen table and went into the kitchen to toast bagels, get out the vegetable cream cheese, and crack four eggs into a glass bowl for scrambling. This was no day to fret about cholesterol. She ground French Roast beans and began boiling water in a kettle. After that she set the table and placed the newspaper beside Davey's plate. She was setting in place the toasted bagels and the cream cheese when the music went off downstairs. The family room door opened and closed. She turned back to the stove, gave the eggs another whisk, and poured them into a pan as she heard him mount the stairs and come toward the kitchen. With a pretty good idea of what she was about to see, she forced herself to smile when she turned around. Davey glanced expressionlessly at her, then looked at the table and nodded. 'I wondered if we were ever going to have breakfast.'

'I'm scrambling some eggs, too,' she said.

Davey entered the kitchen in a way that seemed almost reluctant. 'That's the paper?'

'Page one,' Nora said. 'There's another long article inside.'

He grunted and began reading while smearing cream cheese on a bagel. Nora ground some pepper into the eggs and swirled them around in the pan.

When she set the plates on the table, Davey looked up and said, 'Popsie's real name is Ophelia?'

'Live and learn.'

'Just what I was thinking,' Davey said, concentrating on his plate. 'You know, not that we have them that much, but you always made good scrambled eggs. Just the right consistency.'

'Made?'

'Whatever. The only other person who got them just the way I like them was O'Dotto.'

She sat down. 'If her name was Day, why did you call her O'Dotto?'

'I don't know. It was what we did.'

'And why did you call her the Cup Bearer?'

At last he looked at her, with the same irritated reluctance with which he had joined her in the kitchen. 'Can I read this?'

'Sorry,' she said. 'I know it must be upsetting for you.'

'Lots of things are upsetting for me.'

'Go on,' she said. 'Read.'

He placed the newspaper on his far side, so that he could glance from plate to print and back again without risking whatever he thought he would risk by looking at her. Behind Nora, the kettle began to sing, and she stood up to decant ground beans into the beaker and fill it with boiling water. Then she clamped on the top and carried the machine back to the table. Davey was leaning over the paper with a bagel in his hand. Nora put a forkful of scrambled egg in her mouth and found that she was not very hungry. She watched the liquid darken in the beaker as flecks of pulverized bean floated toward the bottom. After a while she tried the eggs again and was pleased to find that they were still warm.

Davey grunted at something he had read in the paper. 'Geez, they got a statement from that cynical old fart Saxc Coburg. He must be about a hundred years old by now. I asked him once if he had ever considered putting Night Journey in the syllabus, and he said, "I can trust my students to read drivel in their spare time." Can you believe that? Coburg wore the same tweed jacket every day, and bow ties, like Merle Marvell. He even looked a little bit like Merle Marvell.' Marvell, who had begun by editing the Blackbird Books, had been the most respected editor at Chancel House for a decade, and Nora knew that Davey's admiration of him was undermined by jealousy. From remarks he had let drop, she also knew that he feared that Marvell though little of his abilities. The few times they had met at publishing parties and dinners at the Poplars, she had found him invariably charming, though she had kept this opinion from Davey.

She touched his hand, and he tolerated the contact for a second before moving the hand away from hers.

'This must be very strange for you. A kid you knew in school committed all these murders.'

Davey pushed his plate away and pressed his hands to his face. When he lowered them, he stared across the room and sighed. 'You want to talk about what's upsetting me? Is that what you're trying to get at?'

'I thought we were getting at it,' she said.

'I could care less about Dick Dart.' He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. Then he put his hands on the edge of the table and interlaced his fingers and stared across the room again before turning back to her. The alarm in the center of her chest intensified. 'Nora, if you really want to know what I find upsetting, it's you. I don't know if this marriage is working. I don't even know if it can work. Something really bizarre is happening to you. I'm afraid you're going off the rails.'

'Going off the rails?' The thrilling of alarm within her had abruptly dropped into a coma.

'Like before,' he said. 'I can see it happening, all over again, and I don't think I can take it. I knew you had some problems when I married you, but I didn't think you were going to go crazy.'

'I didn't go crazy. I saved a little boy's life.'

'Sure, but the way you did it was crazy. You stole the kid out of the hospital and put us all through a nightmare. You had to quit your job. Do you remember any of this? For about a month, actually more like two months before you capped things off by abducting that kid instead of going through channels, you got into fights with the doctors, you almost never slept, you cried at nothing at all, and when you weren't crying you were in a rage. Do you remember smashing the television? Do you remember seeing ghosts? How about demons?'

Davey continued to evoke certain excesses committed during her period of radioactivity. She reminded him that she had gone into therapy, and they had both agreed it had worked.

'You saw Dr Julian twice a week for two months. That's sixteen times altogether. Maybe you should have kept going longer. All I know is, you're even worse now, and it's getting to be too much for me.'

Nora looked for signs that he was exaggerating or joking or doing anything at all but speaking what he imagined was the truth. No such signs revealed themselves. Davey was leaning forward with his hands on the table, his jaw set, his eyes determined and unafraid. He had finally come to the point of saying aloud everything he had been saying to himself while listening to Chopin in the family room.

'I wish you'd never been in Vietnam,' he said. 'Or that you could just have put all that behind you.'

'Swell. Now I'm talking to Alden Chancel. I thought you understood more than that. It's so dumb, the whole idea of putting things behind you.'

'Going nuts isn't too smart, either,' he said. 'Are you ready to listen to the truth?'

'I guess I can hardly wait,' she said.31

'Let's start with the small stuff,' he said. 'Are you aware of what you're like in the middle of the night?'

'How would you know what I'm like in the middle of the night? You're always downstairs drinking kummel.'

'Did you ever try to sleep next to someone who jerks around so much the whole bed moves? Sometimes you sweat so much the sheets get soaked.'

'You're talking about a couple of nights last week.'

This is what I mean,' he said. 'You don't have any idea of what you really do.'

She nodded. 'So I've been having more bad nights than I thought, and that's been disturbing for you. Okay, I get that, but I'll sleep better now that Dick Dart is behind bars.'

He bit his lower lip and leaned back in his chair. 'When you're having one of these bad nights, do you sometimes look around under the pillows for a gun?'

For a moment Nora was too startled to speak. 'Well, yes. Sometimes, after a really bad nightmare, I guess I do that.'

'You used to sleep with a gun under your pillow.'

'At the Evac Hospital. How did you ever figure out what I was looking for?'

'It came to me one night while you were sweating like crazy and rummaging under every pillow on the bed. You were hardly looking for a teddy bear. I'm just wondering, what would you do with a gun if you found one?'

'How should I know?' He was waiting for the rest of it. Go on, she told herself, give him the rest of it. 'One night two guys raped me, and a surgeon gave me a gun so I'd feel more protected.'

'You were raped and you never told me?'

'It was a long time ago. You never wanted to hear any more than about a tenth of what used to go on. Nobody does.' Feeling that she had explained either too little or too much, Nora assessed Davey's response and saw equal quantities of injury and shock.

'You didn't think that this was something I ought to know about?'

'For God's sake, I wasn't deliberately keeping a big, dark secret from you. You weren't exactly in a hurry to tell me all about Paddi Mann and the Hellfire Club either, were you?'

'That's different,' he said. 'Don't look at me that way, Nora, it just is different.' His eyes narrowed. 'I suppose some of these nightmares of yours are about the rape?'

'The bad ones.'

He shook his head, baffled. 'I can't believe you never told me.'

'Really, Davey, apart from not wanting to think about it all that much, I guess I didn't want to upset you.'

He looked up at the ceiling again, drew in a huge breath, and pushed it out of his lungs. 'Let's get to the next point.

'This Blackbird Books stuff is just a delusion. You had me going for a while, I'll grant you that, but the whole thing is ridiculous.'

It was as if he had slapped her. 'How can you say that? You can finally -'

'Stop right there. There's no way in the world my father would agree to it. If I went in there the way we planned, he'd bust me down to the mailroom. The whole thing was just a hysterical daydream. What got into me?' For a time he rubbed his forehead, eyes clamped shut. 'Next point. You are not -I repeat, not - under any circumstances, to badger my mother into giving you her so-called manuscript. That is out.'

'I already told you I wasn't,' she said. 'Why don't you move on to the next point, if there is one.'

'Oh, there are several. And we're still dealing with the little stuff, remember.'

She leaned back and looked at him, inwardly reeling from the irony of the situation. When he finally displayed the confidence she had been trying to encourage in him, he used it to complain about her.

'I want you to show my father the respect he deserves. I'm sick and tired of this constant rudeness.'

'You want me to keep quiet when he insults me.'

'If that's how you hear what I just said, yes. Now, about moving out of Westerholm. That's crazy. All you want to do is run away from your problems, and on top of that you want to destroy my relationship with my parents, which I won't let happen.'

'Davey, Westerholm doesn't suit us at all. New York is a lot more interesting, it's more diverse, more exciting, more -'

'More dangerous, more expensive. We hardly need any more excitement in our lives. I go to New York every day, remember? You want to deal with homeless people lying all over the streets and muggers around every corner? You'd go crazier than you already are.'

'You actually think I'm crazy?'

He shook his head and held up his hands. 'Forget about it. We're getting into the serious stuff now. Let's consider the way Natalie Weil reacted to you in the police station. She went nuts. And it wasn't because of me. It wasn't because of that cop. It was because she saw you.'

'Something happened to her. That's why she acted like that.'

'Something happened to her, all right. And where it happened was in the same nursery where you took that kid when you decided to play God. Do you want me to believe that's a coincidence?'

'You think I took her there?' The sheer unreasonableness of this idea made her momentarily forget to breathe.

'There's no other way to explain things. You locked her up in that empty building and kept her there until she managed to get out. Now I'm wondering whether or not you remember doing all this. Because you really did seem startled when Natalie started screaming, and I don't think you're that good an actress, Nora. I think you must have had some kind of psychotic break.'

'I kept her locked up in an empty building. I guess I must have thrown all that blood around her bedroom, too. What else did I do? Torture her? Did I let her starve?'

'You tell me,' Davey said. 'But from the way she acted -the way she looked - I'd say both.'

'You astound me.'

'The feeling is mutual.'

Nora regarded him during the silence which followed this exchange, thinking that he had somehow managed to become a person she did not at all know. 'Would you mind telling me why I would do all this to Natalie Weil, whom I like? And whom I haven't seen, in spite of what you told Holly Fenn, for almost two years?'

For the first time during this confrontation, Davey began to look uncomfortable. He turned some thought over in his mind, and the discomfort moved visibly into anger. 'Dear me, what in the world could it be? Wow, I wonder.'

'Well, I do,' Nora said. 'Apparently it's staring me in the face, but I can't see it.'

'Is this really necessary? At this point, I mean?'

'You bastard,' she said. 'You want me to guess?'

'You don't have to guess, Nora. You just want me to say it.'

'So say it.'

He rolled his head back and looked at her as if she had just asked him to eat a handful of dirt. 'You know about me and Natalie. Satisfied now?'

'You and Natalie Weil?'

Wearily, he nodded.

'You were having an affair with Natalie Weil?'

'Our sex life was hardly wonderful, was it? When we did have sex, you were turned off, Nora. The reason for that is, you started going into the Twilight Zone. I don't know where you went, but wherever it was, there wasn't much room in there for me.'

'No,' she said, battling to contain the waves of rage, nausea, and disbelief rolling through her. 'You cut me out. You were anxious about work, or so I thought, you had all this anxiety, and it began to affect you when we went to bed, and then you started getting even more anxious because of that, which affected you even more.'

'It was all my fault.'

'It was nobody's fault!' Nora shouted. 'You're blaming me because you were sleeping with Natalie, damn her, and you know what that is? Babyish. I didn't tell you to stick your dick into her. You thought that one up all by yourself.'

'You're right,' he said. 'You're not responsible. You hardly know what reality is anymore.'

'I'm beginning to find out. When did this start? Did you drive up to her house one day and say. Gee, Natalie, old Nora and I aren't getting it on very well anymore, how about a tumble?'

'If you want to know how it started, I met her in the Main Street Delicatessen one day, and we started talking, and I invited her to lunch. It just sort of took off from there.'

'How long ago was this wonderful lunch?'

'About two months ago. I'm just wondering how you found out about it, and when you started to hatch your crazy plan.'

'I found out about two seconds ago!' she yelled.

'It's going to be interesting to hear what Natalie says when she's able to talk. Because from what I saw, you scare the shit out of her.'

'I should,' Nora said. 'But because of what she did to me, not the other way around.'

At an impasse, they stared at each other for a moment. Then a recognition came to Nora. 'This is why you wanted to go to her house that day. You wanted to see if you left anything behind. All that stuff you told me last night was just another Davey Chancel fairy tale.'

'Okay, I was afraid I might have left something at her house. If I saw something, I could say I left it behind the last time we visited her.'

'And tell me some lie about how it got there.'

He shrugged.

'How did Paddi Mann's book get into Natalie's house?'

He smiled. 'Dick Dart didn't give it to her, that's for sure.'

Nora felt like throwing every dish in the kitchen at the wall. Then, in a shivering bolt of clarity, she remembered Alden's talking to Davey on the terrace about Dick Dart, saying something like I wonder what Leland's wife thinks about her son romancing the same women her husband seduced forty years ago. Alden had said, It'd be a strange boy who did that, wouldn't you think? Alden had been the man Natalie called 'the Prune.' Alden had probably taken the photographs in Natalie's kitchen. No longer smiling, Davey gave her an uncertain, guilty glance, and she knew she was right. 'Natalie had an affair with your father, didn't she?'

Davey blinked and looked guiltier than ever. 'Ah. Well. She did.' He bit his lower lip and considered her. 'Funny you should know about that.'

'I didn't know. It just sort of hit me.'

'I suppose she could have told you when it was going on. Didn't you meet Natalie in the supermarket a while ago?'

'Alden gave her those Blackbird Books,' she said, having come to another recognition. 'I wondered why they were separate like that on the shelf. They were a gift from a lover, and she kept them together.'

'She never got around to them,' Davey said.

'No wonder, given her active life. Did she cut him off when you turned up? Was it like a trade-in deal, a newer model, like that?'

'Their thing was over by then. It was no big deal in the first place.'

'Unlike your grand passion. Stealing your old man's slut away from him must have perked the old ego right up. Kind of a primal victory.'

'I didn't know about her and my father until later.' Davey's left leg began to jitter, and he chewed on his lip some more.

'Did you get any comparisons? Length? Endurance? The sort of thing you boys worry about so much?'

'Shut up,' he said. 'Of course not. It was no big deal.'

'Nothing is a big deal to you, is it? You have no idea what your feelings are. You just push them aside and hope they'll go away.'

'Nora, I had a fling. People all over the world do the same thing. But if I'm as emotionally stupid as you say I am, why are we having this conversation? I'm worried about you, I know that much. The only way I know to explain these things is what I just said. And if you're going off the rails, I don't know what to do with you.'

'But I didn't do it! You had this sneaky little affair, you betrayed me, and then you took your guilt and handed it over to me. If I'm crazy, your adultery is justified.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Maybe there is some other explanation. I hope there is, because I really can't say I like this one very much.'

'Oh, I love it,' she said. 'It shows so much trust and compassion.'

'So I guess we'll wait and see.'

'I can't stand this anymore,' Nora said, electric with rage. 'I can't stand you anymore. I'm furious with you for sleeping with Natalie, yet if you can show me that you might begin to understand who I am, I could probably get over that eventually, but this garbage is so much worse that I…' She ran out of words.

'If I'm wrong. I'll crawl over broken glass to apologize.'

'Gee, it makes me so happy to hear that,' she said.

He stood up and hurried from the room without looking at her.32

After the door to the family room had opened and closed, Nora unclenched her hands and tried to force her body to relax. The beginning of Manon Lescaut drifted up the stairs. He was going to hide, presumably until a squad of policemen showed up to drag her away in shackles to the lunatic asylum.

He had reduced her, dwindled her. In his version of their marriage, a criminally irrational wife tormented a caring, beleaguered husband. Nora was not too angry to admit that their sex life had been imperfect, and she knew that many marriages, perhaps even most, had repaired themselves after an unfaithfulness. She could acknowledge that her night terrors, apparently far worse than she had imagined, might have played a role in what Davey had done. She found herself ready to take on her share of guilt. What she could not forgive was that Davey had written her off.

As soon as the difference in their ages had become a difference - Davey had started to panic. A woman's forty-nine lay several crucial steps beyond a man's forty. Menopause, not nightmares and irrational behavior, was spooking Davey Chancel.

This was really bleak, and Nora pushed herself away from the table. She piled their dishes and gathered the silverware, resisting the impulse to hurl it all to the floor. She put the plates, cups, and silver into the dishwasher, the pans into the sink. If Davey left her, where would she go? Would he move into the Poplars while she stayed in this house? The idea of living alone on Crooked Mile Road made her feel almost dizzy with nausea.

She could remember what she had done every day since Natalie's disappearance. She had shopped, made the bed, cleaned the house, read, exercised. She had phoned agents on behalf of Blackbird Books. The afternoon of the day after Natalie's disappearance, when Davey would have had her tormenting the missing woman on the South Post Road, Nora had run into Arturo Landrigan's wife, Beth, in a Main Street cafe called Alice's Adventure. In spite of being married to a man so crass that he felt he should bathe in a golden tub ('Makes you feel like a great wine in a golden goblet, Arturo had confided), Beth Landrigan was an unpretentious, smart, sympathetic woman in her mid-fifties, one of the few women in Westerholm who seemed to offer Nora the promise of friendship, the chief obstacle to which was their husbands' mild mutual antipathy. Davey thought that Arturo Landrigan was a philistine, and Nora could imagine what Landrigan made of Davey. The two women had taker advantage of their chance meeting to share an unplanned hour at Alice's Adventure, and at least half of that time had been spent talking about Natalie Weil.

Maybe I really am crazy, she said to herself twenty minutes later as she drove her car aimlessly down Westerholm's tree-lined streets. Nora took another turn, went up a curving ramp, and found herself surrounded by many more cars than she had noticed before. Then she realized that she was driving down the Merritt Parkway in the direction of New York. Some part of her had decided to run away, and this part was taking the rest of her with it. They had covered about fifteen miles; New York was only twenty-five more away. In half an hour she could be ditching the car in a garage off the FDR Drive. She had a couple of hundred dollars in her bag and could get more from an automatic teller. She could check into a hotel under a false name, stay there for a couple of days, and see what happened. If you're going to change your life, Nora, she said to herself, all you have to do is keep driving.

So there were presently two Noras seated behind the wheel of her Volvo. One of them was going to continue down the Merritt Parkway, and the other was going to get off at the next exit and drive back to Westerholm. Both of these actions seemed equally possible. The first had a definite edge in appeal, and the second corresponded far more with her own idea of her character. But why should she be condemned always to follow her idea of what was right? And why should she automatically assume that turning back was the only right course of action? If what she wanted was to flee to New York, then New York was the right choice.

Nora decided not to decide: she would see what she did and add up the cost later. For a few minutes she sped down the parkway in a state of pleasantly suspended moral freedom. An exit sign appeared and slipped past, followed by the exit itself. The two separate Noras enjoyed their peaceful habitation of a single body. Ten minutes later another exit sign floated toward her, and she remained in the left-hand lane and thought, So now we know. Several seconds later, when the exit itself appeared before her, she flicked her turn indicator and nipped across just in time to get off the parkway.33

Nora pulled her Volvo into the empty garage. That she would not have to explain herself to Davey came as a relief mixed with curiosity about what he was doing. At first she thought that he must be visiting his parents, but as she moved to the back door, she realized that Holly Fenn might have called with news of Natalie. A vision of her husband murmuring endearments to Natalie Weil made her feel like getting back into the Volvo and lighting out for some distant place like Canada or New Mexico. Or home, her lost home, the Upper Peninsula. She had friends back in Traverse City, people who would put her up and protect her. The notion of protection automatically evoked the image of Dan Harwich, but this false comfort she pushed away. Dan Harwich was married to his second wife, and neither groom nor bride would be likely to welcome Nora Chancel into their handsome stone house on Longfellow Lane, Springfield, Massachusetts.

She glanced into the family room and continued on upstairs. She wondered if Davey had gone out to look for her. The most likely explanation for his absence was that he had been summoned to the police station, in which case he would have left a note. She went to the usual location of their notes to each other, the section of the kitchen counter next to the telephone, where a thick pad stood beside a jar of ballpoint pens. Written on the top sheet of the pad were the words 'mushrooms' and 'K-Y,' the beginning of a shopping list. Nora went to the second most likely place, the living room table, which held nothing except a stack of magazines. Then she returned to the kitchen to inspect the table and the rest of the counter, found nothing, and went finally to the fourth and least likely message drop, the bedroom, where she found only the morning's rumpled sheets and covers.

Feeling as if she should have become the irresponsible Nora who had disappeared into New York, she was moving toward the living room when the telephone; rang.

She lifted the receiver, hoping in spite of herself to hear Davey's voice. A woman said, 'I made up my mind, and I want you to do it.'

'You have the wrong number.'

'Don't be silly,' said the woman, whom Nora now recognized as her mother-in-law. 'I want to go ahead with it.'

'Is Davey there?'

'Nobody's here. I can shoot right over and give it to you. I've been alone with the thing so long, I think it's crucial that you read it. I won't be able to sit still until I hear from you.'

'You want to bring your book over here?' Nora asked.

'I want to get out and around,' Daisy said, misunderstanding Nora's emphasis. 'I haven't been out of this house in I don't know how long! I want to see the streets, I want to see everything! Ever since I made up my mind about this, I've been absolutely exalted.'

'You're sure,' Nora said.

'I bless you for offering, I bless you twice over. You can bring it back to me Tuesday or Wednesday, when the men are at work.'

'You're going to drive?' Daisy had not undertaken to pilot a car as far as the end of the driveway in several decades.

Daisy laughed. 'Of course not. Jeffrey will drive me. Don't worry, Jeffrey is completely dependable. He's like the Kremlin.'

Nora gave up. 'You'd better do it fast. I don't know when Davey's coming home.'

'This is so exciting,' Daisy said. She hung up.

Nora released a moan and slumped against the wall. Davey could never know that she had seen his mother's book. The entire transaction would have to be conducted as if under a blanket in deepest night. Daisy would give her the manuscript, and after a few days, she would give it back. She did not have to read it. All she had to do was give Daisy the encouragement she needed.

Nora straightened up and went to the living room window, not at all comfortable with the idea of treating Daisy so shabbily.

When she thought that Daisy's car would soon be turning into Crooked Mile Road, she left the house and walked down to the end of the drive. A Mercedes came rolling toward her. Daisy began to open the door before the car came to a stop, and Nora stepped back. Daisy leaped out and embraced her. 'You darling genius! My salvation!'

Daisy leaned back to beam wildly at Nora. Her eyes were wet and glassy, and her hair stood out in white clumps. 'Isn't this wonderful, isn't this wicked?' She gave Nora another wild grin and then turned around to wrestle from before her seat a fat leather suitcase bound with straps. 'Here. I place it in your wonderful hands.'

She held it out like a trophy, and Nora gripped the handle When Daisy released her hands from the sides, the suitcase, which must have weighed twenty or thirty pounds, dropped several feet. 'Heavy, isn't it?' she said.

'Is it finished?'

'You tell me,' Daisy said. 'But it's close, it's close, it's close and that's why this is such a brilliant idea. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about it. My God!' Her eyes widened. 'Do you know what?'

Nora thought that Daisy had read about Dick Dart in the morning paper.

'They've gone and put up this hideous fortress on the Post Road, right where that lovely little clam house used to be!'

'Oh,' said Nora. Daisy was talking about a cement-slab discount department store which had occupied two blocks of the Post Road for about a decade.

'I think I should write a letter of complaint. In the mean time, Jeffrey is going to expand my horizons by driving me hither and yon, as you are going to do, also, my dear, by talking to me about my book. While I'm taking in the sights, you'll be peering into my cauldron.'

'Enjoy yourself, Daisy,' Nora said.

'You must enjoy yourself, too,' Daisy said. 'Now I think Jeffrey and I had better make our getaway. I will be calling you this evening for your first impressions. We need a code word, to announce that the coast is clear. She closed her eyes and then opened them and beamed. 'I know, we'll use what you said when I called you. If Davey's in the room, you say "wrong number." That's perfect, I think. I do have a gift for this sort of thing. Perhaps I should have been a spy.' She climbed back into the car and whispered through the open window, 'I can't wait.'

Nora bent down to see what Jeffrey made of all this. His face was rigidly immobile, and his eyes were dark, shining slits. He leaned forward and said slowly, 'Mrs Chancel, I don't mean to be presumptuous, but if I can ever do anything for you, call me. My last name is Deodato, and I have my own line.'

Nora stepped back, and the car moved forward. Daisy had turned around in her seat, and Nora tried to return her smile until Daisy's face was only a pale, exulting balloon floating away down the street.34

Nora hoisted the case onto the sofa and undid the straps. Scuffed and battered, variously darkened by stains, the suitcase appeared to be forty or fifty years old. When Nora finally yanked the zipper home, the top yawned upward several inches, the mass of pages beneath it expanding as if taking a deep breath.

Thousands of pages of different sizes, colors, and styles rose up. Most of these were standard sheets of white typing paper, some of them yellow with age; some of the remainder were standard pages shaded ivory, gray, ocher, baby blue, and pink. The rest, amounting to about a third, consisted of sheets torn from notebooks, hotel stationery, Chancel House invoice and order forms used on their blank sides, and the sort of notepaper that is decorated with drawings of dogs and horses.

Where could she hide this monstrosity? It would probably fit under the bed. She knelt to get her arms under the bottom of the case, lifted it off the sofa, and staggered backwards, barely able to see over the top. A faint odor of dust and mothballs hung about the weight of paper and leather in her arms.

The first sheet floated along in front of her and resolved itself into a title page which had never managed to make up its mind. Over the years Daisy had considered an evergrowing number of titles, adding new inspirations without rejecting the old ones.

In the bedroom Nora cautiously made her way toward the couch, then bent down to lower the case onto an out-flung leg of a pair of jeans and a blouse she had been intending to iron. Holding her breath, she put one hand on top of the suitcase while with the other she tugged the jeans to one side, the blouse to the other. Then she sat beside it. She looked at it for a moment, regretting that she had ever offered to read this unwieldy epic, then grasped it front and back and lowered it to the floor. Yes, it might just, it probably would, fit under the bed.

Nora regarded the bright double window in the wall to her left. She stood up to raise the bottom panes as far as they would go and returned to the couch. She looked down at the untidy stack of pages at her feet, sighed, picked up sixty or seventy pages, turned over the title, or nontitle, page, and read the dedication. Typed on a yellowing sheet with the letterhead of the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, complete with an idealized front elevation of the building, it read: For the only person who has ever given me the encouragement necessary to any writer, she who alone has been my companion and without whose support I would long ago have abandoned this endeavor, myself.

On the next page, also liberated from the Sahara Hotel, Las Vegas, was an epigraph attributed to Wolf J. Flywheel. The world is populated by ingrates, morons, assholes, and those beneath them.

Nora began to enjoy herself.

PART ONE: How the Bastards Took Over.

She began reading the first chapter. Through a maze of crossed-out lines, arrows to phrases in the margins, and word substitutions, she followed the murky actions of Clementine and Adelbert Poison, who lived in a decrepit gothic mansion called The Ivy in the town of Westfall. A painter whose former beauty still shone through the weight she had put on during the course of an unhappy marriage, Clementine drank a bit, wept a bit, pondered suicide, and had a peculiarly ironic, distant relationship with her son, Egbert. Adelbert made and lost millions playing with the greater millions left him by his tyrannical father, Archibald Poison, and seduced waitresses, secretaries, cleaning women, and the Avon Lady. When he was home, Adelbert liked to sit on his rotting terrace scanning Long Island Sound through a telescope for sinking sailboats and drowning swimmers. Egbert was a boneless noodle who spent most of his time in bed. Some vague but nasty secret, possibly several vague but nasty secrets, fouled the air.

When she reached the end of the first chapter, Nora looked up and realized that she had been reading for half an hour. Davey had still not returned. She looked back at the page, the last line of which was 'You know very well that I never wished to reclaim Egbert,' said Adelbert. Reclaim him? Egbert did resemble something reclaimed, like a lost dog.

The telephone rang. Hoping to hear her husband's voice, Nora picked it up and said, 'Hello?'

'Goody goody, you didn't say "Wrong number," so you can talk.' Daisy's voice, slightly slurred. 'What do you think?'

'I think it's interesting,' Nora said.

'Poop. You have to say more than that.'

'I'm enjoying it, really I am. I like Adelbert and his telescope.'

'Alden used to spend hours looking for topless girls on sailboats. How far are you?'

'The end of chapter one.'

'Umph.' Daisy sounded disappointed. 'What did you like best?'

'Well, the tone, I suppose. That sort of black humor. It's like Charles Addams, in words.'

'That's because you've only read the first chapter,' Daisy said. 'After that it goes through all kinds of changes. You'll see, you're in for a real treat. At least I hope you are. Go on, go back to reading, But you really like it so far?'

'A lot,' Nora said.

'Whoop-de-do!' Daisy said. 'Stop wasting time talking to me and surge ahead.' She hung up.

Nora went back to the couch and began the second chapter. Adelbert stood beside a tall, bony, blond woman and signed a hotel register under a false name. In their room Adelbert ordered the woman to undress. Honey, can't we have a drink first! He said, Do what I say. The woman undressed and embraced him. Adelbert pushed her away. The woman said she thought they were friends. Adelbert took a revolver from his jacket pocket and shot her in the forehead.

Nora read the line again. Adelbert raised the revolver, squeezed the trigger, and put a bullet through her stupid forehead. This was a new side of Adelbert. Nora smiled at the idea of Daisy's turning Alden into a murderer. She was killing off her husband's conquests.

The telephone rang again. Groaning, Nora got up and answered it by saying, 'Daisy, please, you have to give me more time.'

A male voice asked, 'Who's Daisy?'

'I'm sorry,' Nora said. 'I thought you were someone else.'

'Obviously. I hope she gives you all the time you need, whoever she is.'

'Holly,' Nora said. Chief Fenn, I mean. How embarrassing. I'm glad you called, actually. You must have some news.'

'It's Holly, and the reason I'm calling is that we don't have any news yet. We finally got Mrs Weil's doctor off the golf course, and he shot her full of sedatives and put her in Norwalk Hospital. According to him, the earliest we can get a straight story out of her is probably Monday morning. I thought I'd pass that along, so you can relax for one night, anyhow.'

She thanked him and said, 'I guess if I'm going to call you Holly, you ought to start calling me Nora.'

'I already do,' he said. 'I'll be in touch Monday morning around nine, ten at the latest.'

A wave of relief loosened the muscles in Nora's back. Holly Fenn assumed her innocent of whatever had happened to Natalie, that now. Holly Fenn wanted to clear things up.

She returned to Daisy's epic. Adelbert parked in front of his crumbling mansion and went inside to pull Egbert out of bed. Egbert got off the floor, crawled back into bed, and pulled the covers over his head. Adelbert went downstairs to order a cringing servant to bring a six-to-one martini to the library. By the time the servant appeared with his drink, Adelbert was deep into a volume called The History of the Poison Family in America.

A new chapter, apparently from a much older version of the novel, began. On yellowed pages, the letters rose above and sank beneath the level of the lines, every e tilting leftwards, every o a bullet hole. After a battle with the style, far more congested than that of the first two chapters, Nora saw that Adelbert was reading about the history of his father during the period immediately after the birth of Egbert. A secret Nazi sympathizer, Archibald had made millions by investing in German armament concerns and was presently diverted from his covert attempts to consolidate a group of right-wing millionaires into a Fascist movement by a maddening personal problem. After rereading several pages three times over, Nora gathered that Adelbert and Clementine had perhaps produced the grandson Archibald passionately desired. Either the child had died or they had put him up for adoption. Archibald's tirades, lengthily represented, had not convinced them to repair the loss. When his orders and ultimatums came to nothing, Archibald informed his son that he would be cut out of his will if he did not provide an heir.

All of this lay half hidden beneath a furious explosion of exclamation points, tangled grammar, and backwards sentences. Archibald's fantasies about American Fascism clouded whole pages with descriptions of Nazi uniforms and other regalia. Hitler appeared, confusingly. She could not be certain if the new child had been reclaimed, adopted, or even resurrected.

Nora turned to a page typed on a sheet of Ritz-Carlton stationery and skimmed through three paragraphs before the first two sentences chimed in her head. She went back and reread them and then reread the sentences again. Adelbert's shoes were crosshatched with scuff marks. Indeed, Adelbert's were not the shoes of a fastidious man, and such secret stains and stinks permeated his entire character.

'Oh, my God,' Nora said. 'It was Daisy.'35

She looked up in astonishment. Not only were Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime the same person, but both were Daisy Chancel. After Blackbird's initial authors had deserted Chancel House, Alden had replaced them with his wife, who had churned out piecework horror novels while she labored on her grim monstrosity. Blackbird's two stalwarts had never been seen or heard from because they were phantoms. Spectre had been hidden on a conference room shelf because Daisy had lost interest and written it when tired, drunk, or both. Alden would never revive Blackbird. Davey had been right about that, though he did not know why.

She wondered how he would react if she presented him with her discovery, then realized that she could not. Nora knew exactly how Davey would respond, by frothing at the mouth for twenty minutes before disappearing downstairs to hide behind Puccini. A more urgent question was whether or not to tell Daisy what she had discovered. Once again, for a time two separate Noras inhabited a single body, which stood up to move into the kitchen and make a ham sandwich. Daisy's instability made it equally possible that she would be enraged or delighted to have her pseudonyms known. Nora carried the sandwich back into the bedroom and realized that Davey had been gone for hours. At least he was not in Norwalk Hospital cooing over Natalie Weil. She decided to do precisely what she had done on the parkway, postpone any decision until it made itself. Daisy's manner would dictate her choice.

Nora bit into her sandwich and began skipping through the pages, trying to learn where this story was going.

After another hour, she decided that if this story was going anywhere, it was in some Daisyish direction unknown to the normal world. Scenes concluded, and then, as if an earlier draft had not been removed, repeated themselves with slight variations. The tone swung from dry to hysterical and back. At times Daisy had broken up a straightforward scene to interpolate handwritten passages of disjointed words and phrases. Some scenes broke off unfinished in midsentence, as if Daisy had intended but forgotten to return to them later. There was nothing faintly like a conventional plot. One chapter read in its entirety: The author wants to have another drink and go to bed. You idiots should do the same.

After following these confusions through a maze of arrows and crossings-out, Nora began to feel sick to her stomach. She decided to see what happened at the end and dug the last thirty pages out of the pile. Cleanly typed on fresh white bond, they were free from alterations, insertions, or marks of any kind. Nora leaned back, resumed reading, and soon found herself once more entangled in barbed wire.

The ending of Daisy's book described an argument between Clementine and Adelbert ranging over the whole of their marriage. At various moments, they were in their twenties, their forties, fifties, and sixties. The site of the argument shifted from different rooms in their house to train compartments, hotel dining rooms, and terraces in European cities. They lounged on the grass in a London park and propped up the bar of a Third Avenue gin mill at two in the morning. The ending was a compilation of the occasions of their dispute. What Nora did not understand was the nature of the dispute itself.

Clementine spewed accusations, and Adelbert responded with irrelevancies, most of them about music. I have kept your business going, you bastard, but instead of thanking me you kicked me in the teeth. (Adelbert: I never liked Hank Williams all that much.) Your entire existence is based on a lie, and so is our son's. (Adelbert: Cheap music sounds good on car radios.) You're not merely a fraud, but a fraud soaked in blood. (Adelbert: Most people would rather go to a ball game than a symphony, and they're correct.) Bile soaked the paragraphs, a bitterness evoked by a subject as familiar to Clementine and Adelbert as it was opaque to Nora.

The last paragraph drew away from the protagonists to describe the terrace of a restaurant in the Italian Alps. Glasses sparkled beside white plates and shining silverware arrayed on pink tablecloths. Snow gleamed on the peaks beyond the terrace. A distant bird sang, and a diner answered with an imitation as exact as an echo. A white cloud of cigar smoke arose from a far table and dissolved into the air.

'Fraud,' Clementine said, and the moron sun, having no choice, shone down upon the Poisoned world.

Nora placed the last page atop the others and heard the sound she had most been dreading, the ringing of the telephone.36

'Thanks be to God, I did not hear the most hateful phrase on the face of the earth, "Wrong number." Haven't I been good? Haven't I been the most restrained little thing on the face of the earth? I am proud of myself, unto the utmost utmost. I have been circling this phone, picking it up and putting it down, I have several times dialed the first three numerals of your phone number only to put the blasted thing down again, I promised you hours of peace and quiet untroubled by little me, and by my count three hours and what's more twenty-two minutes have passed, and so what did you think? Tell me, speak, discourse, dearest Nora, please say something.'

'Hello, Daisy,' Nora said.

'I know, I'm too nervous to shut up and let you speak, listen to me babble! How far are you? What do you think? You like it, don't you?'

'It's really something,' Nora said.

'Isn't it ever! Go on.'

'I've never read anything like it.'

'You got through the whole thing? You couldn't have, you must have skimmed.'

'No, I didn't,' Nora said. 'It isn't the kind of book you can skim, is it.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'For one thing, it's so intense.' Daisy uttered a satisfied grunt, and Nora went on. 'You have to pay attention when you're reading.'

'I should hope so. Go on, Nora, talk to me.'

'It's a real experience.'

'What kind of experience? Be more specific.'

Confusing? Irritating? 'An intense experience.'

'Ah. I think you already said that, though. What kind of intense experience?'

Nora groped. 'Well, intellectual.'

'Intellectual?

'You have to think when you're reading it.'

'Okay. But you keep saying the same things over and over. A little while ago, when you were talking about how it wasn't the kind of book you could skim, you said, "for one thing," so you must have another reason in mind, too. What was it?'

Nora struggled to remember. 'I guess I meant the condition of the manuscript.'

An ominous silence greeted these words.

'You know what I mean, all those changes and deletions.'

'For God's sake, the whole thing has to be retyped, but you asked to see it, remember, so I gave it to you as is, this is so obvious, but anybody can read a book after it's published, that's hardly the point, I want to hear what you have to say, and you're talking about something completely irrelevant.'

'I'm sorry. All I meant was that you have to read it more slowly this way.'

'Yes, you have been abundantly clear on the subject, trivial though it is, and now that we have that out of the way I wish to sit back and soak up your observations.'

Nora could hear Daisy's impatience compounding itself several times over. 'Some of it is very funny,' she said.

'Goody goody. I meant for parts to be ecstatically funny. Not all of it, though.'

'Of course not. There's a lot of anger in it.'

'You bet. Anger upon anger. Grrr.'

'And you took a lot of chances.'

'You wonderful girl, you saw that? Blessings on your head. Tell me more.'

'So it seemed very experimental to me.'

'Experimental? What could possibly seem experimental to you?'

'The way you repeat certain scenes? Or how you end some sections before they're finished?'

'You're talking about the times when the same things happen all over again after they happened the first time, but differently, so the real meaning comes out. And the other thing you're talking about is when anyone with half a brain can see what's going to happen, so there's no point in writing it all down. My God, it's a novel, not journalism.'

'No, you're right. It's a wonderful novel, Daisy.'

'Then tell me why it's wonderful.'

Nora groped for the safest comment that could be made about the book. 'It's bold. It's daring.'

'But why do you think so?' Daisy shouted.

'Well, a lot of books start in one place and tell you a story, and that's that. I guess what I mean is, you're willing not to be linear.'

'It's as linear as a clothesline. If you don't see that, you don't see anything at all.'

'Daisy, please don't be so defensive. I'm telling you what I like about your book.'

'But you're making me be defensive! You're saying these stupid things! I spent most of my life laboring over this book, and you sashay up to me and tell me it doesn't even have a story.'

'Daisy,' Nora said, 'I'm trying to tell you that it's much richer than the books that only tell you a story.'

Slightly mollified, Daisy asked, 'What's your favorite part so far?'

Nora tried to remember something she had liked. 'I have lots of favorite parts. Adelbert killing the women. The way you present Egbert. Your descriptions of Adelbert's clothes.'

Daisy chuckled. 'How far are you? What's happening now?'

Nora tried to remember what had been going on at the point she had skipped ahead. 'I'm at the part where Archibald is carrying on about Nazi uniforms and talking to Hitler while he's making Clementine and his son give him a grandson.'

'The fantasia? You're only as far as the fantasia? Then you can't possibly see the pattern, you're not entitled to speak about it at all. I trusted you with my soul and you're walking all over it with your big, dirty feet, I give you a masterpiece and you spit on it.'

Nora, who had been uttering Daisy's name at intervals during this tirade, made a desperate effort to placate her. 'Daisy, you can't twist everything around this way, I am not lying to you, I understand what you have put into your book, and I know how special it is because I know you wrote those Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime novels, and this is so much more adventurous and complex.'

During the long silence which followed she thought that she might have reversed the trend of this conversation, but Daisy had been gathering herself to scream. 'Traitor! Judas!'

The line went dead.

Nora dropped the receiver in its cradle and blindly circled the bedroom, hugging herself. When she reached the telephone again, she sat on the bed and dialed the Poplars' number. She heard the phone ring three times, four times, five. At the tenth ring, she hung up, fell back on the bed, and groaned. Then she sat up and dialed the Poplars' number again.

After the second ring, Maria picked up and spoke a cautious 'Hello?'

'Maria, this is Nora,' she said. 'I know Mrs Chancel doesn't want to talk to me, but could you please tell her I have important things to say to her?'

'Mrs Chancel doesn't want,' Maria said.

'Say whatever you have to, but get her to talk to me.'

Nora heard the telephone clunk down, then a few nearly inaudible words from Maria followed by a series of howls.

'Mrs Chancel say you not family, her son family, not you. No good. Not talk.' She hung up.

Nora fell back onto the bed and contemplated the ceiling. After an indeterminate time, one small consolation offered itself. Daisy would never speak to Alden of what had occurred. From this certainty grew a larger consolation. Because Daisy would not trouble Alden, Alden would not trouble Davey. Over time, the issue of Daisy's novel would vanish into the established pattern. In a week or two she and Nora could work out a reconciliation.

She got off the bed to reassemble the manuscript and stuff it back into the suitcase.37

Still anxious, Nora wandered into the kitchen and wiped down the counter. The problem was that if something could go wrong, it usually did. For Daisy, the manuscript was in enemy territory as long as it remained with Nora. She thought about dragging the suitcase from under the bed and driving it to Mount Avenue, but this prospect immediately induced exhaustion and despair.

Without considering what she was doing, Nora went to the sink, turned on the hot water, squirted soap into the palm of her hand, and began washing her hands. Then she washed her face. When she was done, she washed her face and hands again. The fourth time she scrubbed soap into her cheekbones and the flanges of her nose, Nora became conscious of these actions. Hot water stung her skin. She turned on the cold tap, rinsed herself, and reached for a dry dish towel. Her face stung as if she had sandpapered it. Blotting herself dry, Nora realized that she still felt appallingly dirty - no, not still, but rather as though someday very soon she would be appallingly dirty. Fighting the urge to turn the water back on and scrub herself all over again, she drifted into the living room, lay down on the sofa, and closed her eyes until the sound of Davey's car turning into the driveway awakened her. She wondered where he had been for the previous nine or ten hours and decided she didn't care. The Audi pulled into the garage.

Here was an interesting problem: would he slip into the family room and pretend she was not there, or would he come upstairs to confront her? Davey opened and closed the back door. His footsteps brought him toward the stairs. However slowly, he was moving in her direction.

Davey reached the top of the stairs and glanced into the kitchen before turning to the living room. He was looking for her, definitely a good sign. Was this what was called grasping at straws? Go on, she thought, grasp away. He came into the living room. His eyes locked with hers and slid away. He dropped into the chair most distant from Nora, leaned back, let his arms fall, and closed his eyes.

Nora said, 'Welcome back.'

'Did the police call?'

'Natalie's under sedation.'

He was still collapsed into the chair as if thrown into it, and his eyes were closed.

'It might be nice if you said something.'

Davey opened his eyes and leaned forward, catching her eyes yet again and then quickly looking down. 'When I heard you leave, I bounced around the house like a Ping-Pong ball. Finally I went for a drive, got on the expressway and headed north. No idea where I was going. I had to think. That's what I've been doing all this time, driving and thinking. When I got to New Haven, I got off the highway, went to the campus, and walked around for about an hour.'

'Eli, Eli,' Nora said. She wondered if Davey had ever associated with Dick Dart in New Haven.

'Don't be sarcastic, all right? Nora, I was thinking about you. This morning everything seemed so clear. About ten minutes after you left, I began to wonder. Did that sound like you? You can do some rash things, but I thought you'd draw the line a long way short of kidnapping and torture.'

'What do you know?' Nora said.

'I thought about what you said - that I was putting my guilt on you. But all the pieces fit together so perfectly, the whole pattern was so convincing, that it seemed like: it had to be the truth. It was like one of those crossword puzzles Frank Neary and Frank Tidball do! The only part that didn't fit was you.'

'You debated with yourself.'

He nodded. 'The more I thought, the idea that you kidnapped Natalie got more and more ridiculous. I got back in my car and drove around New Haven. New Haven is a crummy town, once you get away from Yale.' Here he looked up at Nora, as if the irrelevance of the sentence had released him.

'I got completely lost, if you can believe that. I spent four years in New Haven, and it isn't that big. You know what happened? I got scared. I thought I'd never find my way out. I kept driving past the same little diner and the same little bar, and it was like I was under a curse. I almost had a breakdown.' He wiped his forehead. 'After about an hour I finally drove past this pizza joint I used to go to, and I knew where I was. No kidding, I almost cried from relief. I got back on 1-95. My hands were still shaking. It felt like my whole life was up in the air.'

'Good thinking,' Nora said.

He nodded. 'I was so tired and so hungry. When I got to Cousin Lenny's, I drove in. I grabbed a booth and ordered meat loaf and mashed potatoes. When it came, I dumped ketchup all over the meat loaf like a little kid, and when I was eating, this idea opened up in my head like a giant scroll: If I could get so lost in New Haven, you could be telling the truth. Who says all the pieces have to fit, anyway? One thing I knew for sure. Even if you did find out about me and Natalie, you could never kidnap her. That's not you.'

'Thank you.'

'You really didn't, did you?'

'I said that three or four times this morning.'

'I was just so convinced. I…' He shook his head and looked down again, then back up. Complicated feelings, all painful, filled his eyes. 'Will it do any good if I apologize?'

'Try it and see.'

'I apologize for everything I said. I wish with all my heart for you to forgive me. I'm sorry that I let myself get into that thing with Natalie Weil.'

'That thing is commonly called a bed,' Nora said.

'You're mad at me, you must despise me and detest Natalie.'

'That's about right.'

'This morning, didn't you say that we could eventually work things out? I want to do that, Nora. I hope you'll forgive me. Will you take me back?'

'Did you leave?'

'God bless you,' said Davey, uncomfortably reminding Nora of his mother. He pushed himself out of the chair and came forward. Nora wondered if he intended to kneel in front of her. Instead, he kissed her hand.' Tomorrow we start over again.' He placed her hand on her lap and began caressing her leg. 'What did you do all day?'

'I almost drove to New York.' She moved her thigh away from his hand. 'I was thinking about not coming back. Then I turned around and came back.'

'I would have gone crazy if you hadn't been here when I got back.'

'Here I am.'

He kissed the top of her head. 'I have to lie down and get some sleep. I can barely stand up. Do you mind?'

'Of course not.'

He went toward the hallway, turned to give her a grateful look and a sketchy wave, and was gone.

Nora leaned back against the sofa. If she had any feelings, they were like the little, black, shriveled husks left behind by a fire. She supposed that someday they would turn back into feelings.38

Hunger eventually forced Nora off the sofa. Her watch said it was ten minutes to eight. Davey slept on. Nora thought he would probably wake up around midnight, fumble his way out of his clothes, and climb right back into bed to finish digesting his meat loaf and mashed potatoes, another example of Davey's habit, when under stress, of regressing to the age of training wheels. A search of the kitchen shelves yielded a can of mushroom soup, hot diggity. She plopped the congealed gray-brown cylinder into a pot, turned on the heat, and waited for it to melt while she toasted two slices of wholewheat bread.

As soon as she began to spoon soup into her mouth an inner rheostat dialed itself upward, and a sense of well-being came to life within her. She'd return Daisy's book, and that would be that. She could get over Natalie Weil, though she would never trust her again. Nora didn't have to trust her; she never had to see or speak to the platinum cockroach again. If they met over the dairy counter at Waldbaum's, in a nanosecond Natalie's frisky little cockroach heels would skitter her away behind a mountain of toilet paper until Nora was in the parking lot. Pleased by this image, Nora took the last spoonful of soup, crunched the final inch of toast, and stood up to rinse the dishes.

The telephone went off. Nora abandoned the dishes and hastened to pick it up before it awakened Davey. She said 'Hello?' What followed froze her stomach before it reached her mind. A man ice cold with rage said something about an unimaginable breach of trust, something about an unspeakable intrusion, something else about devastation. At last she recognized the ranting voice as Alden Chancel's.

'And what I will never understand,' he was saying now, 'besides the unbelievable pretension of imagining that you could offer advice about writing, is your persistence in following a course you knew to be dangerous. Didn't it ever occur to you that your recklessness might have consequences?'

'Alden, stop yelling at me,' Nora said.

'You refuse to listen to people who know better than you, you pick up an axe and start swinging. You burrow in like a termite and eat away at other people's lives. You are an outrage.'

'Alden, I know you're upset, but-'

'I am not upset! I am furious! The person who is going to be upset is you!'

'Alden, Daisy wanted me to read her manuscript. She insisted on bringing it here, she wouldn't have let me say no.'

'She has been laboring over this god-awful thing for decades, but until you came sidling up to her, did it ever occur to her to show it to anyone else? Daisy doesn't solicit comments on unfinished work. You weaseled into her like you weaseled into this family, and you planted a virus inside her. You might as well have killed her outright.'

'Alden, I was trying to help her.'

'Help? You picked up a knife and stuck it in her heart.'

'Alden!' Nora shouted. 'None of that is true. When Daisy called me to see how I was getting on with her book, I said it was a wonderful book. She kept twisting everything I said into an insult.'

'This surprised you? You must be feebleminded. Daisy knows her book is a chaotic mess. It can't be anything else.'

'I don't know if it's a chaotic mess or not, and neither do you, Alden.'

'You're a destructive jackass, and you should be horsewhipped.'

'Alden!' she shouted again. 'Unless you calm down and try to understand what really happened, you're going to -'

Hair flattened on one side, clothes crisscrossed with wrinkles, Davey came into the kitchen and stared at her openmouthed.

'That's Dad? You re talking to my father?'

Nora held the telephone away from her ear. 'I have to explain this to you,' she said to Davey. 'Your mother misunderstood something, and now your father's going crazy.'

'Misunderstood what?'

Alden's voice bellowed from the receiver.

'You have to stick with me on this,' Nora said. 'They're both flipping out.'

Alden tinnily bawled Nora's name.

She put the receiver to her ear again. 'Alden, I'm going to say one thing, and then I'm going to hang up.'

'Let me talk to him,' Davey said.

'No!' Nora told him. 'Alden, I want you to calm down and think about what I said to you. I would never deliberately hurt Daisy. Let things quiet down, please. I'm not going to talk to you until you're willing to listen to my side of the story.'

'Nora, I want to talk to him.'

'I hear my son's voice,' Alden said. 'Put him on.'

Davey put his hand on the receiver, and Nora reluctantly surrendered it.

'He called me a termite. He called me a jackass.'

Davey waved for silence. 'What?' He clutched his hair and fell against the counter. His fingers burrowed further into his hair, and he gave Nora an agonized look of disbelief. 'I know that, how couldn't I know that?' He closed his eyes. Though he had clamped the receiver to his ear, Nora could still hear the clamor of Alden's voice. 'Well, she says she wanted to help Mom… I know, I know… Well, sure, but… Yeah. Okay, fifteen minutes.' He hung up the receiver. 'Oh, God.'

He looked around the kitchen as if to reassure himself that the cabinets, refrigerator, and sink were all still in place. 'We're going over there. I have to wash my face and brush my teeth. I can't show up like I am now.'

'Call him back and tell him we'll come tomorrow night. We can't go over there now.'

'If we don't show up in fifteen minutes, he'll come over here.'

'That'd be better,' Nora said.

'If you want to piss him off even more.' Davey came across the kitchen and glowered at her. 'Where is that blasted manuscript, anyhow?'

'Under the bed.'

'Oh, God.' Davey hurried into the hallway.39

By the time they reached the Post Road, Nora had described the conversations she had had with Daisy before and during her reading of the book, and by the time the barred iron fence in front of the Poplars came into view, she had finished telling him about the telephone call which had led to the present difficulty. What she had not described was the book itself. She also left out one other detail. Emitting noxious fumes, the suitcase sat in the trunk.

'She forced it on you,' Davey said.

'If I hadn't agreed, she would have started screaming at me then.'

'It doesn't sound like she gave you any way to say no.'

'She didn't.'

Davey turned into his parents' drive. Looking at the gray stone facade of the house, Nora experienced even more tension than the sight of the Poplars usually aroused in her.

'We ought to be able to make Dad understand that,' Davey said.

'You're going to have to do most of the talking.'

When they got out of the car, Davey looked up at the house and rubbed his hands on his trousers. For a couple of seconds, neither of them moved.

'Was the book any good, anyhow?'

'I have no idea,' Nora said. 'It's mostly a furious attack on Alden. His name in the book is Adelbert Poison.'

Davey closed his eyes. 'What's her name in the book?'

'Clementine.'

'Clementine Poison? Am I in there, too?'

'Afraid so.'

'What's my name?'

'Egbert. You almost never get out of bed.'

'I want to get this over with and go home.' He went to the back of the car and, grunting, lifted out the suitcase. It must be one elephant of a manuscript.'

'You have no idea,' Nora said. 'Davey, I was serious about what I said before. You're going to have to speak up, because if I say anything, Alden is going to yell at me.'

'He'll yell at me. too.' Davey closed the trunk and lugged the case toward the steps. 'No matter what you think you want, Nora, you can't stay out here.'

She and Davey slowly ascended the steps. He pushed the brass-mounted button beside the huge walnut door.

Maria opened the door before Davey's hand left the button. Evidently she had been posted at the entry. 'Mr

Davey, Mrs Nora, Mr Chancel say you go to library.' She gave the suitcase an uneasy glance.

'Is my mother in there, too?'

'Oh no, oh no, your poor mother she can't leave her room.' Maria stepped back and held the door.

'When I was a little kid, he always chewed me out in the library.' In the living room, a water stain twice the size of the suitcase darkened the carpet at the foot of an empty pedestal intended for a Venetian vase. A second large stain dripped down the wall beside the fireplace.

At the far end of the living room, the door to the library was closed. 'Here goes nothing,' Davey said, and opened it.

Wearing a blue pin-striped suit he had put on for the occasion, Alden stood up from a red leather chair at the far end of an Oriental rug bursting with violent blues and reds. 'I think the first order of business is the surrender of the manuscript.'

Davey walked toward his father as a man armed with a Swiss Army knife approaches a hungry tiger. Alden accepted the suitcase and put it down. He pointed at a tufted leather couch behind a leather-topped coffee table. 'Sit.'

'Dad-'

'Sit.'

They moved around the table and sat. Alden placed himself on the chair and moved his foot to press a raised button set into the floor amid the fringes of the rug.

'Dad, none of this is -'

'Not now.'

The door opened to admit Jeffrey.

'The object is now returned,' Alden said. 'Take it upstairs to Mrs Chancel and place it in her hands.'

Jeffrey bent to pick up the suitcase and turned around to carry it off as if he were disposing of a dead animal. On his way out, he gave Nora a dark, unreadable glance. The door closed behind him.

'You have nothing to say in this matter,' Alden told his son. 'Unless, that is, you encouraged either your wife or your mother in their actions.'

'Of course I didn't,' Davey protested. 'I told Nora to stay away from Mom's work. I knew something terrible would happen.'

'As it did. Now we must deal with the fallout. Your mother is in great emotional extremity. When I came home this evening, I found her weeping and hoarse from screaming. The living room was littered with broken glass. Maria was too frightened to cope, and Jeffrey, who must have understood that his role in this unhappy matter would rebound on him, was cowering in his apartment.'

'Jeffrey?' Davey said. 'What role did Jeffrey have?'

Alden ignored him 'Of course Jeffrey was responding to a request on the part of his employer. I have spoken to him, and we can all be sure that Jeffrey will never again be involved in any transaction of this kind. But nothing like this is ever going to happen again.'

'What did he do?' Davey asked.

'He drove her,' Nora said.

'Yes. He drove Daisy to the house you share with this viper.'

'Please, Dad, don't call her names. I want you to understand what really happened. Mom called Nora and insisted that she read the book. She didn't give her a chance to say no.'

'Really.' Radiating contempt, Alden turned to Nora, 'You have no free will? You don't have the excuse of being on our payroll, except indirectly, and you cannot be said to be a friend of Daisy's. Daisy doesn't have friends. Were you being a dutiful little daughter-in-law?'

'In a way, that's right,' Nora said. 'I did think I might be able to help her in some way.'

'So you suggested that you read what she had written in order to offer editorial advice.'

'No, just to give her someone to talk with about her book. Give her support.'

'We see how well that worked. But you don't deny that this evil suggestion came from you?'

'I wanted to be helpful.'

'I repeat. The suggestion was yours?'

'Yes, but Davey and I talked about it, and I agreed not to pursue it. Today Daisy called me and said it was crucial that I read her book and she was coming over right away.'

'At which point you could have told her that you were too busy, or any one of a hundred other things.'

'She wouldn't have accepted any excuses. If I had tried to back out, she would have been terribly insulted.'

'You encouraged her mania instead of dampening it. But that wickedness is nothing beside the unspeakable obscenity of claiming that my wife is the author of Clyde Morning's and Marietta Teatime's novels.'

'What?' Davey whirled to stare at Nora.

'She is,' Nora told him. 'In her book, there are those crosshatched scuff marks and sentences starting with "Indeed."'

'Why didn't you tell me before this?'

'I forgot,' she said, which was the truth. 'There was so much else, it just slipped my mind.'

Alden said, 'Are you starting to see the kind of woman you married? Is a bit of light beginning to dawn?'

'He doesn't want you to know,' Nora said. 'He doesn't want anyone to know.'

'Shut your vile mouth,' Alden shouted, pointing at Nora. 'Not only does this lie insult my wife, who considers herself an artist and has never even read one of our horror novels, it throws mud at my firm and myself. You are endangering our reputation and mine. It's scandalous, and I won't stand for it.'

'Oh, God,' Davey said.

'Davey, stop moaning and pay attention to me.' Alden inhaled. 'Your marriage was a mistake. This creature has brought discord into our family from the moment she appeared. She has injured you in ways you can't even begin to comprehend.' Alden, who had begun to shout again, brought himself under control. 'Maybe we share a taste for erratic women.'

'I'm leaving,' Nora said, and stood up.

'You generally run away when you hear the truth, don't you?'

'I don't take orders from you, Alden. Davey, let's go.'

Looking only half awake, Davey began to stand up.

'Sit down,' Alden said.

Davey sat down.

'I am going to make this very simple for you, Davey. I am presenting you with a choice. If you divorce this woman and get your life in order, you stay on at Chancel House and remain in my will. If you refuse to see reality and stay in your marriage, you're out of both your job and my estate. You'll have to find a way to support yourself - if you can, which I'm sorry to say I doubt.'

'That's not a choice, it's an ultimatum,' Nora said.

'As far as I'm concerned, you are no longer in this room. Davey, I want you to think about your decision. Think hard. Do you want to stay with the madwoman you married, or do you want the life you deserve? We would be more than delighted to have you back with us.'

'Do you really mean all this?' Davey asked.

'You have a while to think things over. I want you to do the right thing, and I think you will see that I am acting in your best interests.'

Nora said, 'You're using your money like a club. If you stick to this sadistic plan, you'll wind up losing your son. Do you want that to happen?'

Alden stood up. 'Davey, you may leave. I have to go upstairs and deal with your mother.'

Davey obediently stood up. Alden marched to the door and held it open.

'Dad,' Davey said.

'I'll speak to you next Sunday.'

Davey moved toward the door. 'Boy, are you going to be sorry,' Nora said. Pretending that he could not see or hear her, Alden patted Davey on the back as he went through the door. Nora suppressed the impulse to slap away his hand.

Clutching a white cloth in a distant corner of the living room, Maria quivered and began to move toward the entry.

Alden said, 'My son can let himself out of the house.' She froze in midstep.

'Good-bye, Maria,' Nora said, but Maria was too terrified to speak.40

They came out of the house into abrupt night. Davey went down a step and looked back at the door. 'Maybe we should go back in.'

'What for? He gave his speech.'

'I guess you're right. He's too angry.'

'Phooey. He's happier than he has been in years. He thinks he's got you right where he wants you.'

Davey shook his head and went down the rest of the stairs, fumbling in his pocket. 'Would you drive? I feel kind of scrambled.'

Nora took the keys. By the time she got into the driver's seat and moved it forward, he was leaning back with his eyes closed, his body so limp it seemed lifeless. 'Come on,' she said. 'He'll never go through with it. All you have to do is call his bluff.'

'He doesn't bluff.'

Nora started the car and drove toward the distant gate in a cocoon of darkness. After a moment she turned on the headlights. 'Do you think he's really willing to cut you out of his life forever?'

'I don't know,' Davey moaned.

'Of course he isn't,' Nora said. 'He's trying to bully you. This time, you can't let him get away with it.' She turned onto Mount Avenue, accelerated, and the car shot forward like a nervous horse.

'What are you talking about?'

Usually an excellent, even a bold driver, Nora made a small adjustment to the wheel, and the Audi twitched sideways over the broken yellow line. She steered back into the proper lane and deliberately relaxed her hands. 'The last thing in the world he wants is to lose you. That's what this: is all about.'

Davey moaned again, whether at his plight or her handling of his car she could not tell. 'He's going to do everything he said.'

'So what? After a couple of weeks he'll come nosing around to see how you're doing. If you don't have a new job, he'll give you your old one back. If you accept, he'll offer you a higher salary or a better position.'

'Suppose he doesn't. Suppose it isn't a strategy.'

An odd sense of familiarity as strong as deja vu took possession of Nora. Hadn't she been reading a book in which a character presented an ultimatum much like Alden's? What scene, what book? Then it came to her: Alden had reminded her of Archibald Poison forcing Adelbert and Clementine to provide him with a grandson.

'Don't have an answer, do you?'

'What?'

'What happens if he really means it?'

'Every publishing house in New York would take you on. Some of them would hire you just to spite Alden. In fact She grinned sideways at Davey, who had flattened both hands on top of his head. 'Screw the week. Call the people you know at other houses. Take the best offer you get, then go into your father's office and resign. He'll go nuts.'

'No, he won't,' Davey said. 'Why would anybody give me a job? I edit crossword puzzle books. I send out form letter; on behalf of the Hugo Driver Society. Besides, you don't know what's going on in publishing. Nobody quits anymore. It's not like the eighties, when people hopped around all over the place.'

'Davey, you don't need this crap. Make some calls and see what happens.'

They drove the rest of the way home in silence.

In the dark, Nora felt her way to the light switch and realized that Davey was still in the Audi. She spoke his name. He slowly left the car. When Nora opened the back door, he began moving zombielike to the front of the garage.

'It's going to be all right,' she said, struggling to maintain her optimism. She closed the door behind them and saw him glance at the family room. 'Come on upstairs,' she said.

He dragged himself toward the stairs. Nora followed him into the kitchen, turning on lights as Davey advanced before her. 'Let me make something for you,' she said.

'Who can eat?'

Nora watched him take the bottle of kummel from the shelf, select a lowball glass, and fill it to within an inch of the rim. He sat down opposite her and began revolving the glass on the table. At last he looked up at her.

'You're letting this get to you too much.'

'There's one big difference between us, Nora. He's not your father.'

'Thank God,' Nora said, perhaps unwisely. 'My father would never have treated you like that.'

'I forgot, the great Matt Curlew was perfect. According to you, my father is the scum of the earth.'

'I never said that,' Nora protested. 'I hate the way he treats you, and this ultimatum is the perfect example. He's using Daisy's tantrum to drive us apart.'

'Gee, thanks. In case I don't understand what my father is doing, you have to explain it three or four times.' He took a gulp of his drink, and a delicate shade of pink rose into his cheeks.

'Oh, Davey, maybe I've been talking too much, but he made me incredibly angry. And you were so silent.'

'You keep forgetting he's my father. This guy you say has mistreated me all my life sent me to the best schools in America - something the sacred Matt Curlew never did for you - he gave me a job and pays me a lot more money than I deserve, he runs an important company - another thing Matt Curlew didn't do - and in case you forgot, see this table? He paid for it. He paid for everything in this house, including the light bulbs and the toilet paper. I think he deserves some gratitude, not to mention respect.'

'In other words, he owns you.'

'He doesn't own me, he loves me. Even though I don't like some of the stuff he does, you can't order me to hate him.'

'I don't want you to hate him,' Nora lied. 'But I love you, too, and I'd like you to get out from under his thumb.' Davey lifted his glass and drank. 'In a way he was right. You have to decide which one you want more, him or me. But if you choose him, you lose me for good, and if you choose me, you'll get him back in about a second.'

'I'm married to you, not my father,' he said.

'Thank God, I was beginning to get worried.'

'But I don't want to lose either one of you. I think you're nuts to imagine that he'll change his mind.'

'He won't change his mind, he'll just wait for another chance.'

'How can you be so sure? If he cans me and I can't find another job, we're going to run out of money in about three months. Then what? Welfare? A cardboard box?'

'He'd never let that happen. You know he'd-'

'If I do get a job with another publisher, do you know what my salary would be? About a third of what I'm making now. We move out of here, okay, but all we could afford would be some dinky rathole of an apartment.'

'Who says you have to work in publishing? The world is full of jobs.'

'Don't you read the newspapers? Okay, maybe I could get a job as a clerk but then we'd get half of a rathole.'

'I can get a job,' Nora said. 'That way we get the whole rathole.'

'God, it's like being married to Pollyanna.'

'But you will make the calls, won't you?'

Davey pursed his lips and gave the refrigerator a considering glance. 'Actually, there might be another way.'

'What other way?'

'I could tell him that I'll move back into the house if he lets you stay here as long as you want. I think he'd go for it.'

'We'd have lawyers all over us before you stopped talking. Good old Dart, Morris would build a wall between us six feet thick. How does that help us?'

'Once I'm there, I can talk to him, and if I can talk to him, I can soften him up. Sooner or later, he'll listen to reason.'

'Davey, the Trojan horse.'

'That's right.'

Nora leaned back in her chair and looked at him steadily for what seemed a long time.

'I knew you wouldn't like it,' he said. 'But he has to calm down sooner or later.'

'Davey, your father is doing his damnedest to turn you back into a child, and you want to give him a helping hand. Once he has you locked up in there, he's going to keep hammering away. By the time he's finished, you'll be wearing diapers and eating pureed carrots, and we'll be divorced.'

'What a high opinion you have of me,' His face had turned a brighter shade of pink.

'I know what happens when you're around your father. You turn mute, and you do everything he says.'

'Not this time,' He frowned at his glass, then looked back up at Nora in a way that seemed almost challenging. 'Where did you find that garbage about my mother writing the Morning and Teatime books, in the astrology column?'

'It's true,' Nora said. Davey grimaced. 'I was reading along, and there they were, the Crosshatch scuff marks and a sentence starting with "Indeed." I was flabbergasted.'

'Not as flabbergasted as my mother. She's never even read novels like that. You heard my dad. Why would she do it in the first place?'

'Because Alden talked her into it. He thought he could make a lot of quick money out of horror novels.'

He put on a disgusted expression and gazed at his drink. 'Nora, even if this crazy idea came to you, why did you decide to tell her about it? Didn't you realize what would happen? I don't get how…' He threw up his hands.

'She was already ranting at me about spitting on her masterpiece, and I tried to rescue myself by telling her that it was so much better than those books. I guess I thought she'd be flattered.'

'Smart,' he said. 'You throw a bomb into the living room and expect her to take it as a compliment.'

Nora pushed hers away from the table. 'I have to go to bed. Will you come, too?'

'I'm going to stay up. I won't be able to get to sleep for hours.'

'But you will make those calls?'

'I don't need another bully in my life.'

'I'm sorry, I won't say any more about it, I promise.' Nora backed toward the door. 'I'll see you later, then.'

'I suppose.'

She forced herself to smile as she left the room.41

About half an hour after Davey had left for work on Monday morning, Nora cried out aloud and woke herself up. Sweat covered her body and dampened the sheets. A small, trembling pool lay between her breasts. She groaned and wiped her face with her hands, then grabbed a dry portion of the top sheet on Davey's side of the bed and blotted her chest. 'Holy cow,' she said, an expression inherited from Matt Curlew. As soon as she wiped away the moisture, more of it rolled from her pores. Her body radiated heat. 'Oh, hell,' she said. 'A hot flash.' She had not known that you could get a hot flash while sleeping. An insect of some kind began crawling up her right thigh, and she raised her head to look at it. Nothing was or her thigh, but the sensation continued. Nora tried to rub it away. The invisible bug moved another two inches up her leg and ceased to be. She lay back on the damp sheets, wondering if phantom insects were common occurrences during hot flashes, or if this were some little treat all her own. A few seconds later the moisture on her body turned cold, and it was over.

After she had showered and out of habit put on a dark blue T-shirt, white shorts, and her Nikes, Nora realized that she had dressed for a run. She padded into the kitchen for a glass of orange juice and realized that she knew at least one person sufficiently down-to-earth not to mind being asked what some would consider an intrusive question. She pulled the telephone directory toward her and looked up Beth Landrigan's number. Only when she heard the telephone ringing did she wonder if she might be calling too early.

Beth's untroubled greeting dispatched this worry. 'Nora, how nice, I was just thinking about you. Our lunch last week was so much fun that we should do it again. Just us, no noisy husbands. Let's cut loose and go to the Chateau.'

'Great,' Nora said. 'I love the Chateau, and Davey never wants to go there.'

'Arturo practically lives at the Chateau, but he never goes there for lunch, so we'd be safe. Wednesday?'

'You're on. Twelve-thirty?'

'Could you wait until one? I have a Japanese lesson at eleven-thirty on Wednesdays, and it lasts an hour.'

'Sure,' Nora said. 'Wow, Japanese lessons. I'm impressed.'

'So am I. I'm getting to speak it like a native… of Germany, unfortunately. Anyhow, you didn't call me to talk about my language difficulties. What's on your mind?'

'I wanted to ask you a question, and I hope it won't offend you.'

'Fire away.'

'It has to do with menopause.'

'Offended, are you kidding? Everybody I know is menopausal, including me. It's all the rage. What's the question?'

'I had my first hot flash this morning.'

'Welcome aboard.'

'This strange thing happened. In the middle of it, I felt a bug crawling up my leg, but there wasn't any bug. I could really feel it. Did that ever happen to you?'

Beth was laughing. 'Oh God, the first time that happened I almost jumped out of my skin. They tell you about the flashes, they tell you about night sweats and lots of other unpleasant things, but they never get around to telling you about the bug.'

'I'm glad it's not just me.'

'There's even a name for it. I can't remember the word, but it's something like masturbation. Maybe I'll ask my tutor what it's called in Japanese. On second thought, I'd better not. He'd probably run out of the house. He's an intellectual lad, but he probably doesn't know a thing about menopause.'

'Probably knows a lot more about masturbation,' Nora said, and the two women laughed and talked another few minutes before saying good-bye.

Cheered by this conversation and delighted by the promise of a friendship with funny, smart, levelheaded Beth Landrigan, Nora settled her long-billed blue cap on what she hoped was her own level head and left the house.

Forty-five minutes later, Nora heard the telephone ringing as she opened her front door, and she rushed up the stairs to answer it. Sweat darkened the blue T-shirt and shone on her legs. She snatched up the receiver and said, 'Hello.'

'Nora, this is Holly. I'd like you to get down to the station right away. Can you do that?'

'Did Natalie say something?'

'We have a lot of things to talk about, and that's one of them. If you don't have a car, I can send a man for you.'

'I came in from my run just this second, and I'm dripping. Let me take a quick shower and change clothes, and I'll be right in.'

He hesitated. 'Okay, but some folks here are going to get nervous if you don' show up soon, so make it as quick as you can.'

'Holly, you sound so… kind of abrupt. Should I be worried about anything? My life has gone so haywire lately,I wouldn't be surprised.'

'It isn't quite that simple,' he said. 'Do what you have to do and get here as fast as you can.'

'I'll see you in twenty, twenty-live minutes.'

'Come around to the back. This place is a zoo.'

Nora said, 'Okay, good-bye,' and Fenn hung up without speaking.42

Nora parked in the slot Davey had taken behind Fenn's office, and saw through his window the back of his head and shoulders as he talked to Barbara Widdoes, who was wandering back and forth in front of his desk. Several other people, dark shapes in the back of the room, also seemed to be present. Through the humid air, Nora rushed past the row of police cars. She had put on a blue chambray shirt, jeans, and brown loafers. Wet hair clung to her ears. Her heart pounded.

It isn't quite that simple. What did that mean?

The back door swung open as she hurried up the concrete path. A red-haired, acne-pitted fullback in a tight uniform skin stepped out. He looked from side to side before turning his corrugated face to her.

'Mrs Chancel, okay? I'm going to take you down the hall to Chief Fenn's office, and we're going to have to do this fast. Things are real complicated here today.'

They're real complicated here, too, she said. The policeman gave her a neutral look. She moved through the door into relative coolness. A chaos of voices came from the front of the building.' This way,' the policeman said, moving past her to walk briskly down the cement-block corridor. It occurred to Nora that she spent a great deal of time following men. They passed the door marked STATION COMMANDER and approached the metal door to the double row of cells. A vivid memory of Dick Dart's winking at her reminded Nora to look straight ahead, and she took in no more than that men in the tribal uniforms of police officers and lawyers crowded the passage between the cells. An intense, quiet conversation was going on among the lawyers, but she could not, and did not wish to, make out their words. The babble from the front of the station increased as she double-timed behind the officer. At last they came to Fenn's office.

The policeman knocked on the door and leaned in. He said, 'Mrs Chancel. Several people moved into different positions. A chair scraped. Fenn said, 'Show her in.'

Behind his desk Fenn was standing with his arms at his sides, looking at her in a distinctly unsmiling fashion echoed by Barbara Widdoes who stood at attention at the far corner of his desk. Nora felt panic's icicle jab her stomach. Two men in dark suits and white shirts, one wearing black-framed sunglasses, stepped forward from the adjacent wall: Slim and Slam, the FBI men who had been in Natalie Weil's house.

'Hello, Mrs Chancel,' said Fenn. So Nora was no longer Nora. 'I think you've met all the people in this room. Barbara Widdoes, our station commander, and the federal agents assigned to this case, Mr Shull and Mr Hashim.' Mr Shull, the taller of the two, wore the sunglasses. They gave him a vaguely hipsterish air which suddenly struck Nora as hilarious.

'Nice to see you again,' she said, and a second of silence greeted her remark.

'I guess we can get this thing straight,' Fenn said, and became Holly once again. 'Let's try to figure out what we have here.'

'About time,' said Mr Shull, speaking either to himself or to Mr Hashim, who crossed his arms and watched Nora take one of the chairs. Holly sat down, and Barbara Widdoes perched herself on the edge of the chair next to Nora's and put her fat knees and calves together. The two federal agents stayed on their feet.

Mr Shull folded the sunglasses into the top pocket of his suit jacket.

'Well now, Nora,' Holly said, and smiled at her. 'The people in this room have differing opinions on various matters, one of them being what to do with you, but with your help we might work out a consensus. It's going to be important for you to be completely frank and open with me. Can you do that?'

'What did Natalie say?' Nora asked. Behind her, one of the FBI men made a little popping sound with his lips.

'Mrs Weil said a lot of things, which we'll get to in a minute. I want you to go back to the time we met on her front lawn. We had a little discussion there that made me think you and your husband might be able to help us. Do you remember that?'

'I remember,' Nora said. 'We said we'd been there a couple of times.'

'Six, if I recall. The last time being two weeks before her disappearance.'

Nora nodded, silently condemning Davey for his self-serving lie.

'Do you want to stand by that statement, or have you had second thoughts about it?'

'Well, the truth is, I hadn't been in that house in over two years,'

Barbara Widdoes clasped her hands on top of her knees, and Mr Hashim and Mr Shull slowly moved to the other side of Holly's desk.

'That agrees with what Mrs Weil told us. If there was some point to misleading me as to the nature of your relationship with Mrs Weil, I'd certainly like to hear it.'

Nora sighed. 'Actually, it was Davey, my husband, who said we'd been there all those times, and that we had dinner at her place two weeks before. Remember? He said we had Mexican food and watched wrestling on TV, but that was what we did about a month before we bought our house, the time we did go there.'

'Do you have any idea why he'd say all that?'

She sighed again. 'He has this, I don't know, habit of stretching the truth. Almost always, it isn't anything more than exaggerating - like decorating the facts.'

'As I remember, you went along with this particular decoration.'

'We'd just had a quarrel, and I didn't want to irritate him, especially by contradicting him in front of you. Now that I'm thinking about this, I thought you knew he was lying right away.'

'Didn't take Sherlock Holmes,' Holly said. 'From our point of view, this made the two of you kind of interesting. So I decided to let you into the house and see if any other interesting things might come up.'

'Are we getting to it now?' asked Mr Shull. 'Can we skip the cracker-barrel stuff?'

'It?' Nora looked at Mr Shull, who smiled at her.

'There's something all of us find puzzling,' Holly said. 'It has to do with the physical evidence at the crime scene, and also a couple of remarks made by you and your husband. Do you recall your husband telling me that you didn't think Mrs Weil was dead?'

'I don't know where he got that from. I was sure she was dead.'

'Your husband's comment showed considerable foresight, wouldn't you say?'

'To tell you the truth, I think he was just trying to make me look foolish.'

'Because of your quarrel?'

'I suppose.'

'What was your quarrel about?'

'He thinks I don't show his father enough respect, and I think his father's a bully. We go round and round.'

'The argument isn't important,' said Mr Shull, 'If you don't get to it right now, I'm taking over.'

'We're there,' Holly said. He smiled at Nora again, but not vindictively, as Mr Shull had done. 'Let's get to when we were standing outside Mrs Weil's bedroom. Do you remember the condition of the room?'

Nora nodded.

'Do you remember what I said to you?'

'I didn't have to go in if I didn't want to.'

'Do you remember what I said right after that?'

'No, I don't. I'm sorry.'

'I suggested that you might want to reconsider the idea that Mrs Weil was not dead.'

'I don't remember that,' Nora said.

'You don't remember your response? It concerned the blood in the room.'

'It did?'

'You said, "Maybe it isn't her blood." Do you remember now?'

'Oh, you're right, I did, I remember. But that just popped into my mind because of Davey, what he told you outside.' She glanced up at Mr Shull, who, smiling, looked back. 'Of course it was her blood, it couldn't have been anything else.' She turned to Holly Fenn. 'It wasn't her blood? It was some kind of blood.'

'Yes, it was some kind of blood.'

'What kind?'

'Animal blood,' Holly said. 'Pig, most likely. You see why we're interested in your remark.'

'I guess I do,' Nora said. 'But it was just this dumb thing I said.'

'We're in sort of a quandary here, Nora.'

'You're in a quandary,' said Mr Shull.

'So you weren't speaking with any real knowledge when you told me that the stains in that room might not have been Mrs Weil's blood.'

'None at all. But everything connected to Natalie's disappearance is strange.'

'Yes, let's turn to Mrs Weil at this point. Mrs Weil said a lot of contradictory things, but she did give us one new bit of information.'

Barbara Widdoes spoke for the first time. 'You were aware that your husband and Mrs Weil were having an affair, weren't you?'

'I only found out on Saturday afternoon.'

'How did that happen?'

'Davey told me. He was very distressed about what had happened to her, and he blurted it out.'

'You deny any involvement in Mrs Weil's abduction and mistreatment?'

'It still isn't clear that abduction occurred,' Holly said.

'Holly, you were in my office Saturday morning,' said Barbara Widdoes. 'You saw the woman go into hysterics when she saw Mrs Chancel and stay that way until she was sedated. What occurred is pretty clear to me, and it ought to be clear to you, too. Mrs Chancel learned about her husband's affair, removed the victim from her bedroom, and kept her prisoner in her old stamping grounds, the former nursery. I'm sure you remember the incident. She detained her there until the victim managed to escape. I don't like all these coincidences. We have a pattern here, and I don't think Mrs Chancel should be permitted to leave this station until she is read her rights and booked on a variety of charges.'

'Somebody finally came out with it,' said Mr Shull.

'You want to arrest me?' Nora asked. 'I didn't do anything to Natalie. I wouldn't treat my worst enemy that way.' She looked across the desk at Holly Fenn. 'Didn't you say Natalie contradicted herself? About me?'

'Didn't she, Barbara?' Holly said. 'You think about this, too, Mr Shull. We have a victim one step away from saying she was abducted by little green people from outer space.

She says Mrs Chancel forced her out of her house and locked her up in the old nursery, but is there anything in all that about the animal blood in the bedroom?'

He focused on Nora again. 'Here's the situation with Mrs Weil. The first thing she said when we went in there this morning was that you went to her house, threatened her with a knife, drove her to that building, and chained her up. Two minutes later we want her to repeat her story so we can take a statement, and she says she has no idea what happened to her. She looks back at the past week, and it's all a fog. She thinks she found her own way to the South Post Road but couldn't say how or why. So we write that down all over again and read it back to her and we say. Is that what happened? and she says, I don't remember. Then she lies there for a while, and after that she can respond to questions again, and we ask her about you, and she cries and says you took her to the building, and the whole thing starts all over again.' He looked over at Barbara Widdoes. 'Is that accurate? Have I exaggerated anything?'

'Holly, our victim is considerably disordered. But she keeps returning to the accusation, and that's enough for me. Give her another day or two, she'll be able to connect the dots.'

'Barbara, Mrs Weil keeps returning to the kidnapping story, yes, but she also keeps returning to wandering away by herself. Unless Mrs Chancel gives us a confession and pleads guilty, we'll have to put our victim on the stand. Do you think we really have a case here?'

Barbara Widdoes glanced at Mr Shull. 'We have the grandmother of all motives, she had nothing but opportunity, and we'll come up with physical evidence in about ten seconds. In the old nursery where Mrs Chancel took a child the first time she experimented with kidnapping.'

Nora and Holly Fenn both began to protest, but Barbara Widdoes stood up and said, 'I want to move on to the next phase. As soon as we process Mrs Chancel, she can get in touch with her lawyer.' She looked down at Nora. 'In fact, your lawyer is probably here. Aren't you a Dart, Morris client? Leo Morris is waiting for charges to be filed against Mr Dart, and we'll be doing that after we finish with you. If you like, I could advise him of your situation and tell him you have asked to see him.'

Nora swiveled in her chair to look at Holly. 'This is really happening? I'm going to be arrested for something I didn't do?'

'Barbara's our station commander. This is her call. Get your lawyer on it.'

The entirety of her situation burst upon her, and its sheer, improbable hopelessness caused her to slump against the back of the chair and laugh out loud. Everybody in the room stared at her, exhibiting emotions from concern to contempt.

'Mrs Chancel, are you all right?' asked Barbara Widdoes.

'I wish you knew what else is going on in my life.'

Holly looked at his watch as he came around the side of his desk. 'I'd let you use my phone to call your husband, but we're running out of time. I want to get you through our procedures before the Dick Dart circus gets out of hand. When we're done, I'll take you around to one of the interview rooms. You can use the phone there while you wait for Leo Morris.'

She stood up.

'We need a little time with Mrs Chancel, too,' said Mr Shull.

'How could I forget?' Holly placed his hand between her shoulder blades and urged her forward. 'If we don't get this done fast, it'll take hours. Everything's going to go crazy around here in about ten minutes.'

'Everything already has gone crazy,' Nora said.

Holly opened the door with one hand while keeping the other on her back, moved her into the corridor, and followed immediately behind. Voices and the tramp of feet came from the front of the station, and before Barbara Widdoes and the FBI men were out of the office, a crowd of men burst around the corner and came hurrying toward them. At the front of the crowd. Officer LeDonne was a few paces in front of Leo Morris, who gave Nora a look of intense, unfriendly curiosity. Next to the lawyer, Dick Dart, in a gray suit and a white shirt but without a necktie, caught sight of Nora and grinned.

'What's this?' said Holly. 'Cripes, they're taking him around the back to keep him away from the reporters. I'll send them back to the cells so we can take care of you first.'

Officer LeDonne slowed down at the sight of Holly Fenn, and the other two men bumped into him.

'LeDonne, take this man back to the holding cell. I want my other business out of the way before we deal with him. Is that okay with you. Counselor?'

Leo Morris gloomily inspected Nora with his dark-rimmed eyes.

Nora tried to back through the door so that Dick Dart would stop grinning at her, but Barbara Widdoes pressed against her and gripped her arms.

'Davey Chancel's lovely spouse,' Dart said. Nora closed her eyes.

Holly turned to LeDonne.' Take them back and keep the reporters away.'

Before LeDonne could respond, a second group burst around the corner and filled the corridor, bawling out questions. Two or three men with video cameras on their shoulders forced their way to the front of the crowd.

'Everybody stop!' Holly shouted. 'People, stop moving. LeDonne, wait a second before you lead the prisoner around the back. I want our station commander to take these men into her office. Mrs Chancel and I will wait here.'

Barbara Widdoes released her grip on Nora and squeezed out of the office, followed by the FBI men. They escaped down the corridor.

Holly raised his voice. 'Media people, go back to the front of the station, this is not permissible, am I understood?'

'Nora-pie,' said Dick Dart, and she looked up at the eyes sparkling in his grinning face.

Leo Morris and Holly Fenn suggested in their various fashions that Dart refrain from speaking, but he held Nora's eyes with his own and said, 'What an interesting day.' Then he wrapped his left arm around Officer LeDonne's neck and snatched his revolver from its holster so quickly that LeDonne was straining against the arm clamped over his throat, and the revolver was aimed at his temple before Nora was aware that Dart had moved at all.

LeDonne stopped struggling, and Holly stepped forward.

The reporters fell silent. Dart tightened his ringer on the trigger. 'Now, now,' he said. 'Be a good boy.'

Holly held up his hands. 'Mr Dart, you are in a police station. Release the officer and surrender his weapon.'

'Do what he says,' said Leo Morris. The lawyer's voice came out in a high pitched squeak.

'Leo, isn't it obvious that I am in charge here?'

'Not for long,' Holly said.

'Move against that wall.'

Holly slowly began going to the other side of the hall, and Nora followed.

'No, Nora, you go back into the doorway.' Dart pushed the gun barrel into LeDonne's head and walked the policeman toward her like a doll. LeDonne's face was mottled scarlet, and rage and pain filled his eyes. Nora glanced at Holly Fenn, who frowned and nodded. She stepped backwards.

'What do you think you're doing?' Holly asked.

'Simple exchange of prisoners,' said Dart. 'Followed by a daring escape and a successful flight, that kind of thing.'

Holly opened his mouth, but before he spoke, Dart sent LeDonne reeling toward him and immediately materialized beside Nora. LeDonne collided with Holly, and Dart circled Nora's neck with his arm and pressed the barrel of LeDonne's revolver to her temple. The metal felt cold and brutal, and Dart's arm cut off her breath. 'Ready?' he asked. 'Bags packed? Passport in order?' He pulled her into Holly's office and slammed the door with his foot.

BOOK IVGENTLE FRIEND

The old man turned to the trembling boy and said,

'You have entered my cave for a purpose. In this darkness shall you learn about fear.'

43

Dick Dart bent Nora back over his knee to turn the lock on the office door. 'You and I are going out that window. If you give me any trouble I'll kill you on the spot. Do you understand?' She nodded, and he propelled her across the room. 'Where's your car?' She pointed through the window at the Volvo. Holly Fenn shouted from the other side of the door, and the knob rattled. 'I lead a charmed life,' Dart said. 'Open the window. Now. Jump out and get into the driver's seat. I'll be right behind you.'

Nora's hands moved to the bottom of the window, efficient little hands, and pushed it up. She thrust her left leg through the frame and saw it outlined against the grass below, her slim leg encased in blue denim, her ankle, her narrow, sockless foot in a brown basket-weave loafer. Her leg seemed entirely surreal, suspended above the grass. What would it do next, this entertaining leg?

The entertaining leg strained toward the strip of green between the building and the concrete path, and, when she pushed her bottom over the windowsill, abruptly landed on the grass. Awkwardly, she pulled her right leg through the window. As soon as she hopped backwards, Dick Dart flew face first through the empty space, the revolver clutched to his chest. He got his feet under him in midair, landed so close to her that she felt the shock in the earth, spun her around, and jabbed the gun into her back.

'Keys,' Dart said. She reached in her pocket and pulled them out as she trotted toward the car. 'Get in and drive. Go!' He was already sliding into the passenger seat.

Sweating, Nora backed out of the parking space. 'You want me to take that little road?'

'What a piece of shit you drive. We're going to have to trade up. Faster, faster. When you get to the end of this street, turn left and get to 1-95.'

Nora slowed down for the stop sign at the end of the road, and Dart swore and held the gun to her head. Nora pressed the accelerator, rocketed past the stop sign, and turned left. Holding the gun to her head, Dart checked the rear window and whooped. 'They're not behind us! Those dummies are still talking to the door!' He lowered the gun and slapped his knee. 'Hah! They couldn't get through the reporters. Shows you how shitty the press in this country is.' He grinned at her. A stench of sweat, oil, bad breath, and secret dirt floated out of him. 'Brighten up, you're on the road with Dick Dart, it's an adventure.'

Traveling at sixty miles an hour down a tree-lined, completely foreign street she knew she had seen dozens of times, Nora barely took in his words. Her hands had clamped to the wheel, her teeth were gritted, and her eyes felt peeled. She ran two more stop signs. Where was 1-95?

'I knew we were connected the first time I saw you. I'm protected, I'm guided, and nothing bad is ever going to happen to me. What the fuck are you doing?' He rammed the revolver's barrel into her ear. 'Stop, damn you.'

Nora slammed her foot on the brake. Her hands shook, and her throat had constricted.

'Where are you going? Hardly the time for the scenic route.' Metal ground into her ear,

'I don't remember how to get there,' she said.

'Cool under fire, are we?' He glanced at the rear window, then removed the gun. 'Back up past the stop sign, turn right. Go to Station Road, turn left. We want north, toward New Haven.'

She backed up and made the turn toward Station Road. In the distance, sirens wailed.

'Step on it, bitch, you cost us about thirty seconds. Move it!'

Nora hit the accelerator, and the Volvo jolted forward. At the next stop sign, she nipped past a Dodge van just entering the intersection. The driver hit the horn and held it down.

'Asshole,' said Dart. 'Blow these guys off, run around them.'

Two cars proceeded down the road ahead of them. The sirens seemed to get nearer. A man in cycling shorts and a helmet rode a bicycle toward them in the center of the opposite lane. 'What about-'

'Go through the dumb fuck.'

Nora accelerated into the cyclist's lane. The man driving the car in front of them turned his head to stare, the surprise on his face nothing compared with the astonishment on the cyclist's. Nora honked. The man, who had something like five seconds in which to decide what he wanted to do, wasted two of them on wagging his index finger and shouting. Nora locked her elbows, stretched her mouth taut, and uttered a high-pitched, panicked whine.

'Eye-byeee,' Dart sang.

The cyclist wrenched himself sideways and disappeared from the windshield a moment before being struck by the Volvo. Nora twisted her head. She had a momentary glimpse of man and bicycle entangled at the bottom of a shallow, grassy ditch, then blew past the second car at seventy miles an hour.

'Hope he broke his dumb neck,' Dart said. 'Good work, kiddo. But if you stop for the Station Road light, I'll shoot off your right nipple, am I understood?'

Nora blasted up a little rise, and at the top felt the car leave the road for a second before thumping back down. Dick Dart yipped and waved the revolver. Two blocks away, at the end of the empty road, the traffic light burned red. Cars streamed in both directions through the intersection.

'I can't do this.'

'Poor baby, you'll miss that nipple. Gonna smart, too. But you know what?' He patted her on the top of her head. 'I bet it turns green before we get there. If I win, you have to tell me everything you did to Natalie Weil.'

'If you lose, we get turned into tomato soup.' She roared through an intersection, and one block separated them from the traffic light.

'C'est la vie.'

Making a low sound in her throat, Nora straightened her arms and locked her elbows.

'Slow down a little for the turn.' Dart sounded completely calm.

Nora slammed her foot on the brake, and her chest bumped the wheel. Dick Dart, who had been lounging back in his seat, slipped forward and down until his knees hit the dashboard. The car slewed halfway around and shot out into the intersection just as the light turned green. Dart pushed himself back into his seat and grabbed the door handle. Nora hauled on the wheel and brought the car into line.

'Hooray! Nora keeps her nipple,' Dart shouted. 'Personally, I'm very happy about that.'

He's happy about that? Nora thought. She said, 'I have to slow down - look at all these cars.' A line of automobiles was strung out in packs of two and three on the long four-lane straightaway of Station Road.

'Pass 'em, crank it up and pass 'em, I'm not kidding. We get on the expressway, we're outta here. Then you can tell me about Natalie Weil.'

The next four minutes were a blur of honking horns, startled faces, waving fists, and accidents averted only by the last-second recognition on the part of other drivers that, yes, the woman driving the Volvo wagon in the oncoming lane really did intend to keep moving. Several times, Nora's insistence on forward progress caused some minor fender damage to the vehicles of the drivers who had to accommodate the drivers who had to accommodate her. Finally, she crossed laterally over the right lanes in another outraged din and twirled onto the ramp to the northbound lanes of the expressway. What seemed to be four solid lanes of cars and trucks racing in the direction of Hartford and New Haven appeared before her. Nora closed her eyes and kept her foot down on the accelerator. When she opened them three long seconds later, she found herself about to smash into the rear end of a sixteen-wheeler with huge BACK OFF, DUMMY mud flaps. She backed off.

A state police car with a flashing light bar screamed toward them on the other side of the divider and flew past.

'You want to continue your criminal career, you could always get a job as a getaway driver. Now we want to move along a little less conspicuously before we turn into Cousin Lenny's.'

This was the restaurant where Davey had convinced himself of her innocence while eating meat loaf submerged under ketchup.

'Why there?'

'Every cop in the state - fuck, every cop in the Northeast - is looking for this Swedish piece of shit. Nora, sweetie, if you're going to be a getway artist, you have to learn how to think like one.'

I'm not your sweetie, she thought.

'Okay, tell me what you did to Natalie Weil.'

He was leaning against the passenger door, smirking.

'How do you know about her? You were in a cell for two days.'

'When I wasn't discussing my hobbies with nauseating Leo Morris, that dishonest squirrel-eyed fart, I spent a lot of time talking with

Westerholm's fine young officers. They told me about the other interesting matter taking place in the station. I heard that the station commander thought you kidnapped Ms Weil and the chief of detectives thought you were innocent.'

They told you that?' asked Nora, aghast.

'If I happened to be the murderer of several of Westerholm's most notable bitches, a matter I strenuously denied, though not to you, of course, if I happened to be the celebrity in question, I would undoubtedly be interested in learning that I had inspired a copycat. Not just any old copycat, no no, but the delightful Nora Chancel, wife to pretty but ineffectual Davey Chancel. Needless to say, I was honored. Leo Morris, on the other hand, did not take the news as happily as I did.'

'Leo Morris knew?'

'I told him. He was not delighted by the prospect of mounting your defense. In fact, he dislikes you, your husband, and the entire Chancel clan.'

'Leo Morris?'

'Let us not wander from the point. You did it, didn't you? You beat the crap out of that little asshole. You locked her up and did nasty stuff to her.'

Nora did not respond for a second, and then said, 'Yes. I beat the crap out of her, and then I dragged her into a filthy room and did nasty stuff to her.'

'What did she do to you?'

'She slept with my husband.'

'Were you going to kill her?' Dart had become less offhand.

'I could hardly let her go, could I?'

'What an event! My opposite number, my female self! It doesn't mean I won't kill you, but I'm thrilled.'

'Why break me out of jail if you're going to kill me?'

'If you're a good girl I might keep you around.'

'You could travel faster on your own.'

'What would you do if I let you go?'

'Get some money from a cash machine, I guess, and go to New York. Figure out a way to get in touch with Davey.'

'You wouldn't last a day. You'd be standing in a phone booth a block away from the cash machine, trying to sweet-talk nebbishy Davey Chancel into sending you your favorite Ann Taylor dress, and all of a sudden a hundred cops would be aiming guns at you. Listen, you have to learn to think in a whole new way. In the meantime, I can keep you out of trouble.'

'This is your idea of staying out of trouble?'

'This is my idea of staying out of prison,' he said. 'There's one other reason I want to keep you around for a while.'

The skin on the nape of her neck contracted. She glanced sideways to see him leaning against the door, his hands folded on one knee and his mouth in a twist of a smile. 'What would that be?'

'Unlike you, I have a plan. You have this quality - what to call it? - a sort of a peasant forthrightness, which I see opening necessary doors.'

'Which doors?'

He placed his index finger to his smiling lips.

'What's this plan ?'

'I suppose I can give you the broad outlines. We are going to go to Massachusetts and kill a couple of old farts. Here comes that disgusting restaurant. Turn into the lot'

Nora flicked the turn indicator and changed lanes. The huge sign, COUSIN BENNY'S FOOD GAS, floated toward them.

'Can I ask you another question?'

'Ask.'

'How did you know I wear Ann Taylor dresses?'

'Nora, my love, spend my entire life doing nothing but talking to women. I know everything.'

'Can I ask you another one?'

'As long as it isn't tedious.'

Nora turned onto the access road into Cousin Lenny's parking lot. 'Holly Fenn said one detail about those murders was never released to the press. What was it?'

'Ah, my little signature. I cut them open and took out most of their internal organs. Let me tell you, you learn a lot more doing that than you do from anatomy books. Okay, go over there to the far side, and we'll wait for the right donor to come along.'

Nora advanced down a row of parked cars to the far end of the lot. Concrete barriers stood before a line of green dumpsters. Behind the dumpsters a weedy field extended toward a distant windbreak of gaunt trees.

'Back in,' Dart said. 'We want to be able to see our prospective benefactors. Weigh their advantages and disadvantages.'

'You know how to do that thing with the wires?'

'If I knew how to hot-wire a car, we'd already be in a car on our way to Fairfield. But we're not, are we, dearest Nora? No no, no no. We desire the keys to our new vehicle, and therefore we must take them from the hands of the temporary owner. We prefer an elderly person who trembles at the prospect of violence.' He leaned forward, put his hands on the dash, and looked from side to side. His right hand held the revolver, index finger inside the trigger guard. 'The constables are bound to show up soon. We need our benefactor, and we need him now.'

'Don't kill anybody,' Nora said. 'Please.'

'Little Miss Failed Executioner. Excuse me.' He scanned the lot again. 'Hello, hello. What do we have here? A definite possibility.' A long black Lincoln driven by an elderly man with a round, bald head moved toward them through the sunlight. Beside the driver sat a young woman with shoulder-length dark hair. 'Daddy Warbucks and his trophy bimbo,' said Dart. 'Two-for-one sale.'

'Everybody in the restaurant would hear the shots.'

'And pretend they didn't.'

The Lincoln backed carefully into the second of three empty spaces. 'The man loves his vehicle,' said Dart. He fastened his hand around Nora's wrist. 'My side.' He pulled her toward him and slid the hand holding the revolver into his jacket pocket.

'You're hurting me.'

'Diddums widdums hurturn booboo?' He kept his hand around her wrist as Nora squirmed out of the car, and pulled her along behind him toward the Lincoln. 'I start to run, you start to run, got it?'

She nodded.

Dart dragged her another two yards, then stopped moving. 'What the hell?'

The bald man was gazing at the young woman with an expression of absolute innocence. The woman gestured; the man smiled. Pulling Nora behind him. Dart walked slowly toward the Lincoln. The woman smacked her palm against her forehead, opened her door, got out, and resolved into a fourteen-year-old girl in a tight white jersey, cutoff jeans, and platform espadrilles. Without bothering to close her door, she loped toward the entrance to the restaurant. In a seersucker suit, a starched white shirt, and a navy blue necktie, the old man sat peacefully behind the wheel of his car.

'Allah is good, praise be to Allah.' Dart jerked Nora across the asphalt to the open door. He bent down and said, 'Greetings'

The old man blinked his shining blue eyes at Dick Dart. 'Greetings to you, sir. Can you help me?'

'I intend to do just that,' Dart said. His hand hung suspended within his pocket, the revolver bulging the fabric.

'I do not remember who I am. Also, I have no idea where I am or how I got here. Do you know if this is my car?'

'No, old buddy, this one's mine,' Dart said. The hand came out of his jacket pocket, and the bottom half of his suit jacket swung forward. 'But I saw you come in, and I can tell you where yours is.'

'Goodness, I do apologize. I can't imagine how I came to… I hope you didn't imagine that I intended to steal your car.' The old man got out and stood blinking benignly in the sun. 'I have a granddaughter, I know that much, and I seem to have the impression that she was with me just now.'

'She went into the restaurant,' Nora said.

'Goodness. I had better go in and look for her. Where did you say my car was?'

'Other end of the lot.' Dart glared at Nora. 'Can't miss it. Bright red Cadillac.'

'Oh, my. A Cadillac. Imagine that.'

Dart took Nora's hand and pulled her toward the open door. 'Miles to go before we sleep. Better find your car before you look for your granddaughter.'

'Yes.' The old man marched a few paces across the lot, then turned around, smiling. 'Miles to go before I sleep. That's Robert Frost.'

Dart got into the Lincoln. For a moment, the old man looked disappointed, but the smile returned, and he waved at them before resuming his march toward a nonexistent red Cadillac.

Dart spun the car toward the expressway. 'God, it's even full of gas.' Then he snarled at Nora. 'Why did you tell the old zombie about his granddaughter?'

'I-'

'Don't bother, I already know. You felt sorry for him. We're the two most wanted people on earth, and you take time off to do social work.'

He moved smoothly out into the traffic. Cool air streamed from vents on the dashboard. 'That was so beautiful I can't stay mad. "Can you help me?" I almost fainted. He asked me if this was his car!' Dart tilted back his head and released a series of laughs abrupt as gunfire. 'He gave it to me!' More laughter. 'See that big goofy face? Old fuck looked like a blank tape.'

'You're right,' Nora said.

'Check the glove compartment and find out his name from the no-fault slip.'

Nora opened the glove compartment and stared at what was within. A fat, shiny, black leather wallet sat beside a tall stack of bills held together by a rubber band. 'You're about to get a lot happier.'

'Why?' Nora removed the wallet and the money from the glove compartment. 'Oh. My. God. Look at that. How much is it?'

A wad of bills distended the wallet's money compartment. She riffled them, hundreds and fifties and twenties. Then she pulled the rubber band off the stack. 'An amazing amount.'

Dart yelled at her to count it. Nora began adding up denominations - twenty thousand in hundreds, a thousand in fifties, and five hundred in twenties.

'Twenty-one thousand, five hundred dollars? Who the hell was this guy?'

Nora raised a leather flap and looked at the driver's license. 'His name is Ernest, Forrest Ernest. He lives in Hamden.'

Dick Dart started laughing as soon as he heard the name. 'That was the great Ernest Forrest Ernest?' He gave a whoop of joyful disbelief. 'This day is right up there with the greatest, most supremo, days of my entire life. You don't know who he is?' Ticking and rumbling with suppressed laughter, he slanted his head to look at her. 'No, you're too out of it to know about him. Alden would know him, though. In the great man's presence, Alden Chancel would stain his Polo trousers.'

'Who is he?'

'Twenty years ago he was the lieutenant governor of Connecticut, and now he's like the grand old man of the Republican party in this state. The distinguished pile of shit I'm proud to call my father worships him. What can I say? The man is a god.'

At first faintly, then gaining in volume, the sound of a police siren came to them. Dart checked the rearview mirror, gave Nora a warning look, took the revolver out of his pocket, and held it in his right hand. 'They can't know about this car already.'

Nora clenched her fists and forced herself not to scream. Disgust, hatred, and fear washed through her body. She looked back, saw that the flashing light bar was still a quarter of a mile behind them, and turned to inspect Dick Dart, for the first time really to examine him with the intensity of her loathing. Two years younger than Davey, he appeared to be at least five years older. His skin had a gray pallor. Many shallow wrinkles creased his forehead. Two small, vertical lines, now barely visible beneath dark stubble, ran down his cheek. Above the stubble fine red veins rode on his cheekbones, and larger red and blue veins had surfaced at the base of his long, fleshy nose. Dick's liver had been putting in a good deal of overtime. His long, oval face would have had an unremarkable handsomeness except for the sneering self-regard which permeated its every inch. His eyebrows were permanently arched above his light, alert eyes, and his lashes were a row of pegs. An untrustworthiness, a sly disregard for rules and orders came like an odor from his face. If his hair had been recently washed, it would have been perfect prep hair, slightly too long, falling in soft, natural curves on the sides of his head, and flopping boyishly over his forehead. His wide, blunt hands had enjoyed a manicure a few days earlier. The tired-looking gray suit had clearly cost a lot of money, and he wore a gold Rolex watch. His old ladies had one and all found him delightful.

'What are you doing, taking a fucking inventory?'

'No,' Nora said hastily. 'I was thinking about something.'

'Give me that wallet and the rest of the money.'

The wallet lay forgotten in her lap, and she was still holding the bills. She stuffed as much as she could into the money compartment and handed it all to him, and he shoved it into various jacket pockets. Thinking about what, exactly?'

'I was wondering how you got suspended during your freshman year at Yale.'

'How did you - oh, the newspaper. Well, what I did, I beat up this pig of a townie. Lucky for me, she really was a pig, and all that ever came out of it was the suspension.' He glanced at the rearview mirror. 'Here he comes. He's gotta be looking for your crappy Volvo wagon.'

Nora braced herself.

The screech of the siren grew louder and louder. If Dart started shooting, she would crouch in the well before her seat. Could she grab the gun away from him? Nora remembered how he had jumped through the window and discarded the notion of trying to snatch the gun. For a person in lousy shape, Dick Dart was amazingly strong. She was in excellent shape, and she knew she could not have made that catlike leap.

The patrol car slipped into the next lane and sped past. Neither of the policemen in the car glanced at them. In seconds, the flashing lights and the noise were five cars away, and Dart applauded himself with yips and hoots.

'Did I call it, or what?' He held the barrel of the pistol up to his mouth. 'I want to thank the members of the Academy, my mother and father, all my colleagues at the office, you guys know who you are, Leo, Bert, Henry, Manny, I couldn't have done it without your support, and I must not. fail to mention those lovely ladies, my special clients, Martha, Joan, Leslie, Agatha - love those eyes, Agatha! - dear JoAnne, who never fails to order the best Margaux on the Chateau's wine list, Marjorie, Phyllis, sparkly little Edna of the pudgy ankles, and last but not least, the enchantress Olivia, who makes liver spots look like beauty marks. I wish to thank the Creator for the gifts He has lavished upon this unworthy being, and the Westerholm police force for all their assistance. But above all, I wish to thank my good-luck charm, my rabbit's foot, my four-leaf clover, my shining star, my hostage and partner in crime, the delectable Mrs Nora Chancel. Couldn't have done it without you, babe, you make the magic, you are the wind beneath my wings.' He blew her a kiss with the revolver.

'You're even crazier than I thought you were,' Nora said.

'Most people can never be their real selves, they could never let themselves do what you did to Natalie Weil. The difference between you and me is that when you call someone crazy you think it's an insult, and I understand that it's a compliment.'

'I don't think I have a real self anymore,' Nora said.

'I'll show you your real self,' Dart told her. 'Remember, you make the magic.'

Nora groaned, but only inwardly, with her real self, and Dick Dart smiled his mockery of a human smile as he drifted onto the off ramp for the Fairfield exit.44

Dart steered through a series of narrow streets lined with two-story houses on small lots sprouting lawn furniture, plastic pools, and brightly colored children's toys. A dancing gleam kindled in his eyes. 'Dear Nora, to me has fallen the serious responsibility of freeing you from your illusions.' He rolled up to a stop sign and turned right onto nearly empty Main Street toward Fairfield's small business district.

'You'll see what I see, see through my eyes. I sense - I sense…' He turned into an angled parking spot in front of the hardware store and leaned toward Nora, his right hand three or four inches from her face, thumb and index finger nearly touching. 'You're this close.'

His odor coated her like a mist. Dart lowered his hand and leaned back, eyes gleaming and mouth compressed. Nora tried not to show the nausea she felt.

'I'm going into the hardware store,' he said. An incandescent sliver of hope sparked into life within her.

'You're coming with me, Nora. Any appeal for help, any attempt to get away from me, will be dealt with very seriously.' He was still gleaming, as if saying these words in this way amused him enormously, 'I have to make some purchases, and as yet I cannot leave you alone in the car. This is a test, and if you fail it you'll certainly never have to face another one.'

'You could leave me in the car,' Nora said. 'I won't go anywhere. How could I? I'm one of the two most wanted people on earth.'

'Bad girl.' Dart patted her lightly on the knee. 'There will come a time when you are allowed various freedoms, but we have to know you will not abuse them.'

He got out and walked around the front of the car to open her door. She said, 'Aren't you afraid of being recognized?'

'I've been in this store maybe once. Besides, nobody has a good photograph of me.' He leaned down smiling and whispered, 'And should some unfortunate happen to recognize me, I have Officer LeDonne's mighty thirty-eight.'

Dart wrapped a hand around her elbow and propelled her into the hardware shop.

The dim, cool interior instantly reminded Nora of the hardware stores of her childhood. At the far end a man in shirtsleeves stood between a wooden counter and a wall covered with battery displays, coiled hoses, ranks of scissors, rolls of tape, and a hundred other things. On the soft wooden floor between the counter and the front door stood rows of shelves and bins, each as chaotic as the rear wall. Matt Curlew had drifted entranced through such places. Unlike Matt Curlew, Dick Dart moved quickly through the aisles, snatching up ropes, two differently sized screwdrivers, a roll of duct tape, pliers, a hammer. He had released Nora's elbow as soon as they entered the store, and she trailed after him, noting his purchases with increasing alarm.

'You could set all that on the counter and let me begin totaling it up,' said the clerk. When he glanced at Nora, whatever he saw in her eyes caused him to step back from the counter.

'Great idea,' said Dart, and moved to the counter. 'Need some items from your knife case. Open it for me?'

'Sure thing.' The owner glanced again at Nora but now apparently saw nothing to alarm him. Pulling a fat key ring from his pocket, he led Dart toward the glass case. He unlocked the metal ratchet at the front of the case, slid back one of the panels, and said, 'Anything in particular?'

'Just a good knife or two.'

'We're no fancy knife shop, but I got some good German stag handles, that kind of thing.'

'I like a nice knife,' Dart said.

The man stepped back, and Dart slid the panel farther along and reached in to pick up a brutal-looking, foot-long knife with a curved blade and a thick black handle.

'You got one serious knife there,' said the owner.

Dart scuttled along the case to select an eight-inch knife which folded into a handle carved from an antler.

'That's the one I told you about, that one there's a real collectible.'

'Pop for one more,' Dart stood up to inspect the smaller knives at the top of the case. Humming to himself, he danced his fingers over the glass without actually touching it. After a few bars, Nora recognized the song he was humming, 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' 'Here we go.' He bent down to remove a short, double-edged knife with a utilitarian black handle. 'Got a sheath for this?'

'A belt sheath? Yep.'

The owner placed the knives and a black leather case beside the other purchases, looked up the tax on a chart, and added the column of numbers. 'Well, sir, that comes to two hundred twenty-eight, eighty-nine. Cash or charge?'

'Hey, I'm an old-fashioned American, cash on the barrelhead.' Dart took the bulging wallet from his jacket pocket and put two hundred and forty dollars on the counter.

The owner grunted and began bagging the items on the counter.

'Separate bags for the knives,' Dart said.

'Didn't do too badly, Nora baby.' Dart was driving up a side street toward the Fairfield railroad station, the smallest of the knives concealed under his jacket in the leather sheath, which he had clipped to his belt. The other two knives were in a bag on the backseat, the rest of the purchases in the trunk. 'You gave that old dodo one hell of a look, though. Have to watch out for that, have to control yourself.'

'I did control myself,' Nora said. 'What are you doing? I don't suppose we're going to take the train.'

'Daddy is looking for something, and, wonder of wonders, I believe he has just found it. You're a flicking rabbit's foot.' He slid past a dark a blue sports car with tinted windows and swerved into the curb next to an empty lot. 'Get out of the car and stand next to me.'

She joined him at the back of the Lincoln. While Dart leaned into the trunk and removed a screwdriver from the bag, Nora glanced up and down the street, praying for the arrival of a police car. Before them, on the other side of a long, narrow parking lot, lay the railroad station; back toward Main Street, beyond the empty lot, stood the flowered walkway and green-striped canopy of a restaurant called Euphemia's Diner.

Dart closed the trunk without latching it. 'Stand between me and the street. Don't let anybody see what I'm doing.' He grinned at her, and with his right hand reached around to the small of his back.

'What are you going to do?'

'Buy a little time.' He led her toward the rear of the little blue car. 'You're not going to take a stupid pill, are you?'

'No,' she said. A small, bright blade projected from his palm.

He knelt beside the rear bumper and jabbed the blade into the tire. The blade: slipped out, and the tire hissed and softened. 'If anybody happens along, we're inspecting our flat. Don't look at me, watch the street and tell me if anybody comes along.' He slipped the little knife back into its sheath.

Nora moved to shield him from the sidewalk. 'I don't get what you're doing.'

'Swapping plates. It's not as easy as it used to be. All these idiots treat their plates; like oil paintings. This was the first one that didn't have a frame around it.' The screwdriver clicked against metal. Dart grunted, then began humming 'Someone to Watch Over Me' again. Heat poured down on them. The police car for which Nora continued to pray neglected to appear.

'Now the front.' She: followed him and stood in the road as metal rubbed against metal. 'Want to hear a little-known fact about our old pal Ernest Forrest Ernest? This great man fancied the Nazis during the Second World War, though it was of course a deep dark secret, and afterward he was part of a splendid little group of ultrawealthy men who tried to promote Fascism right here in our good old cradle of liberty… All right!'

He went two paces to the rear of the Lincoln and started to remove the screws in its license plate. 'They didn't use the nasty F-word, of course. They called it the Americanism Movement, which lasted about five minutes until Joe McCarthy came along and put them in his pocket and they had to pretend they liked it. But the point of this' - he slapped the other car's plate into position and fit the screws into place - 'is that little Davey's grandfather was behind the whole show.'

Nora remembered the passages about Fascism in the chapter of Daisy's book she called 'the fantasia.'

'Lincoln Chancel was the badass's badass.'

'So I gather.'

Dick Dart looked up at her in amused surprise. 'I don't think Davey knows a quarter of the stuff the old man did.'

'He knows he wasn't a saint.'

Dart stood up, went to the front of the Lincoln, and knelt down while Nora posted herself to shield him from the empty street. She had been in Fairfield perhaps thirty times during the two years of her marriage, she had shopped on Main Street for her jeans and Ann Taylor dresses, she had bought veal chops and crown roasts from the excellent butcher, enjoyed lunches and dinners at three different restaurants, and in all that time, it came to her now, she had never seen a single policeman.

'We behold an unhappy degeneration in the Chancel line,' Dart said. 'Lincoln Chancel wouldn't have used Davey for a toothpick. Lincoln was one dangerous son of a bitch, and Davey doesn't have the guts of a teddy bear. Alden is sort of halfway between them, a thug and a bully, but not a real thug or a real bully.'

'He has his moments,' Nora said.

'You never met the real thing. Alden thinks he's a big shot and he prances around talking tough, but I think his old man cut his nuts.' He stood up and motioned for Nora to follow him to the rear of the sports car.

They were walking side by side down the street like any ordinary couple. The man beside her looked like a stockbroker or lawyer after a rough night, and she probably looked like his wife.

The old plate came off, the new one went up. 'If Alden Chancel hadn't inherited Chancel House, what would he be doing? He has one great editor, Merle Marvell, and a lot of blockheads. One dead writer, Hugo Driver, keeps the company solvent. His royalties bring in about forty percent of the company's total revenue, and almost all of that is generated by one book. Night Journey. Alden's a disaster. Right now he's negotiating a deal to sell the company to a German publisher - to get a lot of money out of the business before he runs it into the ground, The only reason the German publisher is interested is Night Journey.'

'Alden's trying to sell the company? How do you know about this?'

'We're the lawyers, baby. Remember? As we go along putting dents in dear old Dart, Morris, I am going to give you an education. Before I begin, I have to do something, but after that, tutorials in the real world are in session. Okay, let's wrap up this tedious bullshit.'

He stood up and shook out his arms, then produced a wrinkled, distinctly unclean handkerchief from a trouser pocket and swabbed his forehead.

'He's selling the company?'

'Trying to.' Dart pulled her up the street and knelt in front of the Lincoln. 'I'm going to tell you something little Davey never heard about his grandfather. The guy wasn't born rich, you know, he got there by himself. Did many, many nasty deeds. Even murdered someone once.'

'I don't believe that,' she said, although what she knew of Lincoln Chancel nearly made it possible.

'Old Lincoln was a brute, baby. My sainted daddy, who has been privy to the real history of the Chancels for the last forty years, told me in a moment of imperfect sobriety that Lincoln Chancel once tore a man to pieces - turned him into hamburger with his bare hands. Lincoln was caught short playing too many ends against the middle, threat of scandal, and the only way out was the removal of one man. He arranged a confidential appointment with the guy, canceled it on the morning of the day they were supposed to meet, and showed up unannounced around the time of the meeting he canceled. Nobody knew he was supposed to be there, and the guy was all alone. Got away scot-free '

Dart said, 'Good for another day, anyhow. Let's go to Main Street and pick up a couple of bottles.'45

Police cars swept past them, most of them silently, several flashing and wailing. Dart amused himself by pointing the revolver at drivers and passengers in other cars and pretending to shoot them. Hartford loomed up alongside the expressway, and Nora sped upward to fly through the office towers at seagull height. Dart lolled, half in his seat, half against the door, and sneered his smile at her.

'Why do you have your window down? What happened to air conditioning? Save-the-planet kind of thing?'

'I don't want to pass out from your stink.'

'My stink?' He opened his jacket and sniffed his armpits. 'You're probably having some feminine disorder.'

'You hate women, don't you?'

'No, I hate my father, women I actually adore. They're physically weaker than men, so they had to work out a million ways to manipulate them. Some of these stratagems are fantastically ornate. Guys who don't understand that women are incapable of psychological straightforwardness don't stand a chance. One morning they wake up beside some cash register who has a big fat diamond ring and a gold band on her finger, and she controls the pussy. If he wants any, he has to hand over the credit cards. If he complains, she makes him feel so small and selfish he makes her breakfast for a week. But is he allowed to say no? Uh uh, baby. And think about this. She can hit him, that's fine. Brute like him deserves to be hit. But can a man hit a woman? If he does, she whips his ass in divorce court and takes all his money without even having to give him sex. He's completely under the control of a capricious, amoral being with a tremendous capacity for making trouble. Remember the Garden of Eden? Great place until this woman came along, whispering, Come on, take a bite, the Big Guy isn't paying any attention. Been the same way ever since. If the woman's really good, this poor sucker with a noose around his neck, a perpetual hard-on, and someone else's hand in his pocket is convinced that he's running the show. He's so tangled up he thinks his wife is this sweet little thing who isn't very good at practical matters but sure is great, damn it, a goddamned pearl for putting up with him. Once a year she gives him a blow job, and he's so grateful he races out to buy her a fur coat. Those fur coats in a restaurant, where women don't want to put them in the checkroom? Every single one of those coats? A blow job, and every woman in the place knows it. And here's something else - the older the woman, the better the coat.'

'And you claim to adore women,' said Nora.

'I didn't make this stuff up. Spent the last fifteen years of my life taking my Marthas and Ednas and Agathas to the Chateau and listening to them talk. I hear the things they're telling me and I also hear what they're really saying. And sometimes, Nora, more often than you would imagine, they are the same thing. An eighty-five-year-old woman who has had three face-lifts, two husbands, at least one of them seriously rich, both currently dead, also a couple of glasses of wine with a rakish, good-looking young lawyer, is likely to let down her guard and tell you how she got through a long and pampered life without ever working a single day. Once they see that I already know how it works, they can start having a good time. These ladies are generally pissed off, they used to be fascinating, the whole male world used to stand in line to get into their pussies, and all of it went away when they turned into old ladies. Husbands are dead. Nobody on earth is interested in listening to them. Except me. I could listen to them all day long. Love those soft, elegant, smoky voices full of hidden razor blades, but even more I love their stories. They're so corrupt. They don't even begin to know how corrupt they are, can't, don't have the moral machinery for it. The only thing they regret is that the good part didn't last another ten years, so they could have gotten their hooks into one more rich sucker who got off on hearing about his great big cock. I love the way they look - hair all stiff but made to look fluffy and soft, makeup put on so well you can hardly see their wrinkles, their hands covered with rings so you won't notice the brown spots and the veins and lumpy knuckles. Nobody can tell me I don't like women.'

'Did you sleep with your old ladies?'

'Haven't had sex with a woman under sixty-five in at least nine or ten years. No, sixty-two, I forgot about Gladys.'

'But you killed women,' Nora said.

'Wasn't personal.'

'It was to them,' Nora said.

'I was killing clients, understand? Every time I murdered someone, another chunk fell off the old man's business. Along about the time I did Annabelle Austin, that book agent, he spent two days saying. Couldn't somebody else's clients get killed? If I could have done another ten, he'd be tearing his hair out.'

'But you always chose women clients, and always a certain kind of woman.'

Dart's eyes went flat and two-dimensional.

'Oh. You didn't like the way they lived.'

'Could put it that way,' Dart said. 'Those people went around acting like men.'

His tone gave her an insight. 'Did they behave well around you?'

'The times they came into the office, when I came up to them and said something flattering, they could barely bring themselves to speak to me.'

'Unlike your old ladies.'

'I would never have murdered my old sweethearts… unless they were the only clients left'

'What about me?'