The Hellfire Club

He smiled, slowly. 'Do you mean, am I going to kill you?'

Nora said nothing.

'Dear Nora-pie. We'll know more after our reality lesson.'

'Reality lesson?'

He patted her knee. 'Lots of motels in Massachusetts. We want one with a nice big parking lot.'46

On the far side of Springfield, Dart pointed at a three- story, sand-colored building with white balconies outside the windows. 'Bingo!' It stood at the far end of a half-filled parking lot the size of a football field. A vast blue-and-yellow sign stretching across the roof said CHICOPEE INN. A Swiss ski lodge called Home Cooking faced the lot from the left. 'Get over, we don't want to miss the exit.'

Nora crossed two lanes and left the highway. 'Forgot I was talking to Emerson Fittipaldi,' Dart said.

She drove a short distance down the street and turned into the lot.

'Darling, we'll always have Chicopee. And home cooking, too! Don't you love home cooking? Mom's famous razor blade soup, that sort of thing?'

'Should I park in any particular place?' Nora was weary with dread.

'Right in the goddamned middle. Do you have some favorite alias, my dear?'

'Some what?' She drew the Lincoln into an empty space approximately in the center of the lot.

'Need new names. Have any suggestions, or shall I choose?'

'Mr and Mrs Hugo Driver.' She closed her eyes and slumped back against the seat. 'The Drivers.'

'Love the concept, tremendously appropriate, but using the names of well-known people is usually an error.' He turned sideways and tried to reach the bags on the backseat. 'Hell.' Dart knelt on his seat and leaned over, almost touching the top of the car with his buttocks. Nora opened her eyes and saw the pocket containing the gun hanging a foot away from her face. She considered the energy and speed necessary to snatch it out of his pocket. She wondered if she knew how to fire a revolver. Dan Harwich had instructed her in the operation of the safety on the pistol he had given her, but did revolvers have safeties, and if so, where were they? By the time this baffling question had occurred to her. Dart was pulling himself and two brown paper bags back over the top of the seat. He pushed the bag containing the bottles into her lap. 'You carry this one and the one in the trunk. One more thing: please refrain from giving people these bone-chilling looks of anguish, okay? World loves a happy face. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen you smile, and I smile at you all the time.'

'You're having a better time than I am.'

'Smile, Nora. Brighten up my day.'

'I don't think I can.'

'Rehearsal for the wonderful smile you're going to give the moron behind the desk.'

Nora faced Dart, pulled back her lips, and exposed her teeth.

He gave her a long, considering look. 'Call on some of the old fire, Nora-pie. Let's see the blazing figure who beat the shit out of Natalie Weil.'

'Too scared to come out.'

He gave an exasperated sigh. 'This is a project.' He made the sign of the cross over his heart.

'A project?'

'Inside.' He took the keys and got out. She waited for him to pull her across the seat, but instead he walked to the front of the car and looked back at her, eyebrows raised. Nora left the car and looked around at a vibrant blur. She blotted her eyes on her sleeve and moved toward Dart.

A young man with shoulder-length blond hair lowered a half-liter Evian bottle to an invisible shelf in front of him, smiled across the desk as they came into the chill of the lobby, and stood up. His lightweight blue blazer was several sizes too large for him, and the bottoms of the sleeves were rolled. A silver tag on his lapel said that his name was Clark. 'Welcome to the Chicopee Inn. Can I help you?'

'Need a room for the night,' Dart said. 'Sure hope you got one for us. Been driving two days straight.'

'Should be no problem.' His eyes moved to the bags they were carrying, then from Dart to Nora and back again. His smile vanished. He sat down in his chair again, pulled a keyboard toward him, and depressed random-seeming keys. 'One night? Let me set you up, and then we'll take some information.' He brushed his hair back with one hand, exposing a circular gold ring in his ear. Keys clicked. Three twenty-six, third floor, double bed. Is that okay?' Dart agreed. Nora slumped against the counter and regarded the bright, unreal green of the carpet. 'Name and address, please?'

'Mr and Mrs John Donne, Five eighty-six Flamingo Drive, Orlando, Florida.'

At the boy's request, he spelled out Donne. Then Dart spelled Orlando for him. He supplied a zip code and a telephone number.

'Orlando's where they have Disney World, right?'

'No need to leave America, you want to see exotic places.'

'Uh, right. Method of payment?'

'Cash.'

Clark paused with his hands on the keyboard and looked up. He flicked back his hair again. 'Sir, our policy in that case is to request payment in advance. The rate for your room is sixty-seven dollars, forty-five cents, tax included. Is that all right?'

'Policy is policy,' Dart said.

Clark returned to the keyboard. The tip of his tongue slipped between his lips. A young woman in a blazer identical to his came through a door behind him to his right and gave Dart a double take as she walked past the desk to another door in the wall to his left.

'I'll get your keys and take the payment.' He opened a drawer to remove two round-headed metal keys. He put them into a small brown folder and wrote 326 in a white space at the top of the folder. The boy stood up and slid the folder across the desk. Dart placed a hundred-dollar bill beside it. 'You can swing your car right up in front here to bring in your bags,' the boy said, his eyes on the bill.

'Everything we need in the world is right here.'

The boy picked up the bill and said, 'One minute, sir.' He went through the door from which the young woman had emerged.

Dart began humming 'I Found a Million-Dollar Baby.'

A few seconds later, the boy reappeared, smiled nervously at Dart, unlocked a cash drawer, and counted out change.

'Good business demands vigilance,' said Dart, shoving the bills and coins into a trouser pocket.

'Yeah. I should explain, we don't have a restaurant or room service, but we serve a complimentary continental breakfast from seven to ten in the Chicopee Lounge just down to your right, and Home Cooking - right outside in our lot - they give you good food there. And checkout is at twelve noon.'

'Point me toward the elevators,' Dart said. 'You behold a pair of weary travelers.'

'Past the lounge, on your left. Enjoy your stay.'

Nora jerked herself upright, and Dart took a step back from the desk, opening a path to the elevators. She plodded past him, trying not to hear the cajoling voices in her head. The bottles took on weight with every step. She barely noticed the small, open room outfitted with couches, chairs, and tables into which Dart slipped to extract a folded newspaper from a rack. He placed a hand in the small of her back and urged her toward the elevators, where he punched a button. 'Every little bird must find its branch.'

Upstairs in a hazy corridor, Dart fit one of the keys into the lock of room 326. 'Nora, look.' It took her a moment to notice the three round holes, puttied in and clumsily retouched with paint, in the brown door. 'Bullet holes,' Dart said.

Nora walked in. Every little bird must find its branch. You didn't have to leave America to see exotic places. As she moved past the bathroom and the sliding panel of a closet, she heard Dart close the door and slide a lock into place. A window leading onto a narrow white balcony overlooked the parking lot. She put her bags on the table. Dart brushed past her, clicked the lock on the window, and moved a metal rod to draw a filmy curtain. He shrugged off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair, and took his knives from their bag. 'Lookee, lookee.' He was pointing at discolored blotches on the lampshade. 'Bloodstains. Our kind of place.'

Nora glanced at the queen-sized bed jutting out into the room.

Dart unpacked the purchases from the hardware store and arrayed them in a straight line on the table. He moved the coils of rope from first place to second, after the roll of duct tape, and made sure everything was straight, bottom ends lined up. 'Forgot scissors,' he said. 'We'll survive.' He laid the two larger knives at the end of the row, then fussed with the alignment. 'Shall we begin?'

She said nothing.

He picked up a vodka bottle, untwisted the cap, and swished vodka around in his mouth before swallowing, then recapped the bottle and set it gently on the table. 'Take your clothes off, Nora-pie.'

'I don't feel like doing that.'

'If you can't do it yourself, I'll have to cut them off.'

'Please,' she said. Don't do this.'

'Don't do what, Nora-pie?'

'Don't rape me.' Soundlessly she began to cry.

'Did I say something about rape? What I said was, take off your clothes.'

She hesitated, and through her tears saw him pick up the larger of the two knives, the one Matt Curlew would have called an Arkansas pig-sticker. He stepped toward her, and she began unbuttoning her shirt. A small, separate part of her mind marveled at the quantity of tears spurting from her eyes. She placed the blue shirt uncertainly on the chair and glanced at the blurry figure of Dick Dart. The blurry figure nodded. Nora undid her belt, unbuttoned her jeans, pulled down the zip, and stepped out of the brown loafers. Hatred and disgust penetrated the cloud wrapped around her emotions. She made a small, high-pitched noise of outrage, pushed down her jeans, and, one leg after the other, stepped out of them. She draped the jeans over the arm of the chair and waited.

'Not really into underwear, are you? Dear me, look at that bra. Your basic no-frills Maidenform Sweet Nothings, isn't it? A thirty-four B? You should try one of those new uplift bras, not just an underwire, but the new kind, do wonders for you, give you a nice contour on top. Well? Let's unhitch Nora's pretty mammaries, shall we?'

Nora closed her eyes and reached up to unhook the bra, which was, as Dart had said, a Maidenform Sweet Nothings, size 34 B. She let the straps slip backward over her shoulders, exposing her breasts, pulled it away from her body, and dropped it onto the chair.

'Don't really hang up our clothes at home, do we? You've got, ummm, you've got an overstuffed chair with layers of T-shirts and blouses draped over the back and jeans folded on the seat. No, I take it back. For you I see a nice long couch, hardly visible under all those clothes. What you do is grub around in these clothes, wear them a few times, and then dump them into the hamper and start all over again.'

This was, in fact, exactly what Nora did, except that she did it less consistently than Dart had suggested.

'Oh my, look at that. Hanes Her Way undies - purple, what's more, to go with your tired white Maidenform. Nora, you shouldn't buy your dainties at the drugstore. At the very least, your bra and undies should match. With your body, you'd look good in Gitano. They make pretty matching bras and underpants, and they're cheap. You want to spend more money, try Bamboo or Betty Wear. Myself, I'm crazy about Betty Wear, it's nice stuff Listen, do yourself a favor and stop throwing out those Victoria's Secret catalogs. I know you think they're cheesy, but if you'd just look at them at least as thoroughly as Davey undoubtedly does, you'd see that they're very useful. Above all, you owe it to yourself to look at Vogue now and then. Great magazine, I never miss an issue. I bet you've never even bought one.'

'I bought one once.'

'When? In 1975?'

'Around then,' she said, her arms folded over her chest and her hands on her shoulders.

'Written all over you, especially those Hanes Her Way spanky-pants. Should take better care of yourself. Take the dumb things off.'

She pushed down the waistband on her underpants, shoved them to her knees, and stepped out.

'Nora's got a great big bush! God, Nora, you've got this clump, get out the Weedwacker!'

She had gradually been convincing herself that no man who spoke in this way to a woman would rape her - a rapist would never advise the purchase of Betty Wear, much less be able to identify a Maidenform Sweet Nothings bra and Hanes Her Way underpants - but his next words undermined her shaky hope that Dart wished to do no more than inspect her body.

'Sit on the bed,' he said.

She walked to the end of the bed as if over broken glass and sat down with her hands on her shoulders and her legs clamped together. A sudden mental flash of Barbara Widdoes's plump knees and fat calves above her heavy shoes brought with it the surprising thought that Barbara Widdoes was probably a lesbian.

'Have to restrain you for a while,' Dart said, and picked up one of the coils of rope to slice off two sections, each about four feet long. These he carried toward Nora, along with the knife and the roll of duct tape. 'Might be a little uncomfortable, but it won't actually hurt.' He knelt in front of her, looked up into her eyes, winked, and wound one of the sections of rope around her ankles. 'You have a nice body,' he said. 'Maybe just the teeniest bit stringy, and your skin could use a moisturize.' The rope bit into her skin, and she said, 'Ouch.'

'Doesn't pinch, isn't tight enough,' Dart said, tying the ends of the rope into an elaborate knot. He put his hands on her knees and looked directly at her breasts. 'Small, and they kind of sag, but still pretty, if you want my opinion.' He reached for the tape, unpeeled a strip three feet long, tore it off the roll, and wound it over the rope around Nora's ankles. Then he stood up, touched her chin with the tips of his fingers, and tilted her face toward his. 'You're the kind of person who thinks she's above makeup, apart from a little lipstick now and then, but you're wrong. You ought to try Cover Girl Clean Make-up, or maybe Maybelline Shine Free. That's all you need, a little blush. Plus one of those nice new mascaras, like Cover girl Long 'N Lush. And you really do need a good scent. You have a teeny-tiny little bottle of Chanel No. 5 on your dresser, right, and you put on a dab or two when Davey takes you out somewhere fancy. Right?'

She nodded.

'You're not really the Chanel No. 5 type, but nobody ever knew enough to tell you. You should wear Chanel Coco, if you want Chanel, or L'Air du Temps, if you're feeling a little more feminine. You ought to wear a good scent every day, all day, no matter what you're doing.'

He took his fingers from her chin and moved behind her. The bed sank under his weight. 'Hands,' he said. She put her hands behind her back, and he grasped her wrists and lashed them together. 'This is a disgrace. You need a manicure more than anyone I've ever met. Pedicure, too. And you have to start using some really good nail polish, I don't care what kind. We're going to have to shop for some essentials, and after we get toothpaste and stuff like that, I'll get you some female equipment. It'll help our project.'

She heard him rip off a length of tape and felt him coil it around her joined wrists. 'Why are you doing this? Are you going somewhere?'

'Don't want you to run away while I wash the Westerholm slammer off me. Want to come in with me?'

'No, thanks.'

He cackled. 'You can have one after.'

'After what?'

He patted her shoulder and hitched himself off the bed to carry the tape and the knife to the table, where he placed them in their old positions and made sure they were properly aligned.

'Are the two of us going to sleep in this bed?'

He looked over his shoulder in mock surprise. Slowly, as if pondering the question, he revolved to face her. 'Since there's only one bed, I suppose I presumed… And twin beds are so Ozzie and Harriet… But if you have strong objections, I guess I could sleep on the floor.' His drawl ridiculed his own words. 'All right?'

She nodded.

'All right, then.' Dick Dart stripped off his shirt, dropped it on the floor, and undid the top of his trousers. His tasseled black loafers came off, and he bent down and skipped out of his trousers. His arms and shoulders were flabby, and a crust of black hair covered his chest. The shapeless slab of his stomach pushed out the waistband of boxer shorts decorated with a fly-fishing pattern. 'But I don't expect to have that problem.' He pushed down the shorts, exposing a nest of brown curly hair and a long, thick cucumber penis ridged with prominent veins. He tossed the shorts onto the chair and unselfconsciously walked to the table to pick up the roll of tape. His buttocks were flat, almost absent, and his heavy thighs and calves ended in wide, oddly primitive-looking feet, like those of dinosaurs. Tufts of black hair grew alongside his spine at the small of his back.

He ripped a four-inch section off the tape and came toward Nora, penis swinging before him like a pendulum. 'We'll work things out.' Then he was standing in front of her, the ridged gray cucumber at the level of her eyes radiating stinks like a swamp. She began to shake. Tears slipped from her eyes. He pushed up her chin, smiled down over the bulge of his belly, and flattened the tape over her mouth. 'Breathe through your nose. Don't panic.'

He pushed her shoulders and sent her flopping backwards onto the bed. Dart disappeared. She tried to gasp, and coarse tape clamped against her lips. Her body demanded oxygen, immediately. Pain blazed in her shoulders, and the rope chewed her wrists and ankles. She rolled from side to side, choking on tape, and finally remembered to breathe through her nose. Dimly she heard a chuckle, then the closing of the bathroom door. The shower hissed and rattled against the tub. Dart's unmelodious voice began singing 'Them There Eyes.' Nora rotated her hands and wrists the quarter inch permitted by the rope handcuffs. She lay collapsed against the bedspread, too terrified to cry.

Nora had a sudden vision of herself as seen from above: naked, bent across the bed, trussed like a roaster for the oven. She looked like a corpse in a crime-scene photograph. The woman in the photograph was nothing, an emptiness, less than pathetic. Some deaths might be preferable to the madness waiting within her, but not that one.

Dart came out of the bathroom, hair plastered to his head, water shaping the hairs on his legs into vertical lines. 'What a picture you make.' He unfurled a towel and systematically began rubbing it over his arms, chest, gut, genitals, legs.

'Back in a second.' He vanished into the bathroom and reappeared with a fresh towel. Instead of returning to the bedside, he closed the bathroom door and stepped back toward the closet. Nora watched his reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door. He scrubbed his hair until it floated about his head, and then lightly ran the towel over his neck, his chest, his penis. He clutched himself with the towel, pulled himself roughly several times, and manipulated his testicles. After reaching a satisfactory stage of self-arousal, he stood sideways, held in his belly, gave himself an encouraging pat, as much a slap as a caress;, and twitched upward another half inch. Dart had forgotten all about her. His beloved, the cucumber, jutted out before him. Dart clutched it in his fist and jerked up and down causing the entire structure to darken to purple, bloat out another half inch, and raise itself in an upward curve. This; accomplished, Dart turned to face himself head-on. Excited by the sight of itself, the thing in front of him stiffened into a curved rigidity ending in a red-blue knob the size of a small apple. Dart's eyes were glazed, and his mouth was open. Nora thought he was about to ejaculate. He hefted his testicles and groaned. Go on, she said to herself, spurt all over the mirror. The eyes in the mirror met hers.47

Dart strode back into the room. 'Hope you appreciate my consideration in showering. Did it for me more than for you, but wouldn't want any unseemly body odors distracting you from what most women find a deeply enjoyable experience.' He straddled her legs, bent over her, pushed the head of his penis into her stomach, and rubbed it back and forth across her stomach. 'Like that?' He stroked one of her breasts with his free hand. Nora closed her eyes, and he pinched her nipple. She uttered a sharp sound of protest into the tape over her mouth. 'Pay attention,' he sang, twirling the nipple painfully between his thumb and index finger. 'We are going to perform an introduction, and it isn't polite to close your eyes.' Smiling, he hitched himself up onto the bed and settled his knees on either side of her rib cage. 'Nora's titties, meet the Big Guy.' He leaned forward and ran the Big Guy along first one nipple, then the other. He lowered himself between her breasts, squeezed them around himself, and pumped back and forth. Dart released her breasts and hitched himself forward to thrust his beloved before her eyes. 'Don't call me Dick for nothing, right? Never saw one like that before, did you?'

The object four inches from Nora's eyes looked like something pried out of calcified mud at an archaeological dig, something offered for half price at an Arabian bazaar, something carved from an enormous root. Granddad had brought it home from his travels and shown it to Grandma, and after she stopped shouting at him he had taken it upstairs to the attic and buried it in a steamer trunk. Varied in texture from corrugation to a dangerous, slick smoothness, lumpy with veins, a goiter stuffed with rocks - was this what most men wanted to have? Would Davey wish to swap his nice, willing member for this? She knew the answer. He would, absolutely.

She shook her head. No.

'Going to go places hubby could never take you, Nora-pie.'

He moved off the bed, went to the table, and picked up the largest knife. Then he knelt in front of Nora and peeled the tape off her legs. Instead of cutting; the rope, he laboriously untied the knot. Her legs loosened and sagged. Nora instantly closed them, and Dart chuckled and stood up. 'Move up on the bed,' he said.

She hesitated, and Dart brought the point of the knife into contact with her left thigh.

She got her feet on the bed and levered herself up to the pillows. Her arms and shoulders ached, and her wrists burned. Dart walked up beside her on his knees. When he reached her groin, he slapped the knife on the pillow, thrust his hand between her legs, and rummaged around until he inserted a blunt fingertip. Nora's body shuddered and went cold.

Humming to himself, Dart withdrew his finger and slid on top of her. He pushed her legs apart, planted his knees between them, and moved down to take aim. Nora made a high-pitched sound muffled by the tape. Her face was covered with tears.

Dart maneuvered a portion of himself into her and grunted. He shoved forward. Nora felt as though she were being torn apart. She screamed and heard only a thin, weightless wail. Smiling, Dick Dart propped himself on his elbows and held the knife to her throat. 'What we have here is a reality lesson. All sex is rape, pure and simple. I am going to put my cock into your pussy. This act has been known to send women out of their minds, even then it was rape…' He pushed himself another quarter inch forward. '… and do you know why? Because when it was all over, I owned them. That's the secret.' He hoisted himself up, withdrew a tiny bit, and then rammed himself into her. Nora screamed again and rolled to one side.

Dart shoved her back down.

'Better relax, or there's going to be a lot of blood. Have to stretch you out, and you'll get there as long as you loosen up.' He withdrew and plunged ahead again, invading her. 'Do you know the secret?' Nora had been hiding within herself with her eyes closed, her body clamped in revulsion, and when Dart slapped her cheek she realized that he was talking to her. 'Didn't think so.' He shoved forward again. 'Women, who run rings around men all the time, who can outthink any man ever born, have one weakness. They love being fucked more than anything else on earth.' His voice seemed to come from a distant professorial source completely unrelated to what he was doing.

'Money, cars, fur coats, jewelry, houses, they're smart enough to know those things are just toys. Give them all away for a guy with a Johnson big enough to turn them inside out. Trouble is, most women never find that guy. But if they do, they're his. Every guy is trying to do this, because deep down every guy knows how it's supposed to be, and every woman is secretly hoping he'll turn her inside out, because deep down she knows that's the way it's supposed to be. So it's always a rape.'

Nora opened her eyes to a curious sight. Dick Dart's upper portion hung over her. His mottled face had hardened around his concentration, and another face, a secret face, seemed to surface beneath the public one. His lips had drawn back from his yellow teeth. His nose had sharpened, and a suggestion of hair darkened his cheeks. She closed her eyes and heard distant artillery fire.

Eternities later, a quickening in her torture returned Nora to the world. Dick Dart's sweat plopped on her in great tears. He groaned; his hands locked on her shoulders. His body froze, his legs turned to iron bars. Her mind seemed to burst into flame. He arched his back and slammed into her twice, three times, four, five, so forcefully her head banged the headboard.

Dart collapsed on top of her. She felt extraordinarily denied, so dirty that she could never again be clean. When he rolled off, she felt as though he had broken each of her bones systematically. She would never open her eyes, never again. A hand crawled over her thigh.

'Was it good for you, darling?'

He left the bed and padded into the bathroom. Everything hurt everywhere. She was afraid to open her eyes.

Little voices hissed and chattered. Her demons had found her again. The demons were fond of room 326, and presently they were fond of Nora also, because once more she had been pushed through the bottom of the world into the devastation where they flourished. Nora hated and feared the demons, but she was much more fearful of what she would see if she opened her eyes; therefore she had to endure them. She remembered from her last exposure that although demons did not wish to be seen, you occasionally caught sight of those who crept up to impart a morsel of demon knowledge. Some of them were tiny red devils with toothpick pitchforks, some looked like animals created by mad scientists: long-toothed badgers with rat's tails, hairy balls with darting eyes and heavy claws. Some demons looked like moving smudges.

An indistinct, winged thing flapped past her head whispering, 'He isn't a wolf.'

Nora wondered if she would have the demons if she had been raised in some sensible religion, like Buddhism.

The thing circled around and flew past again. 'He's a hyena.'

'You belong to a hyena,' giggled something invisible but near. A tinny ripple of demon laughter greeted this remark.

'Wasn't it fun, wasn't it fun?' sang another. 'And now you're back with us again!'

Most of the information imparted by demons was true, for if they told lies they would be lunatic annoyances, not demons.

She heard them rattling up to her, whispering to each other in their rapid-fire voices, and drew into herself as tightly as possible, though she knew that the elated demons would never touch her. If they touched her, her mind would shatter, and then she would be too crazy to be interesting.

A demon who looked like a rat with small blue wings and granny glasses whispered, You can't get out of this one, is that clear? You passed through and now you're on the other side, is that clear?

When she nodded, the ratlike demon said, Welcome to the Hellfire Club.

'It's not as bad as it looks,' said Dick Dart. Nora opened her eyes, and the demons scattered under the bed, behind chairs, into drawers. Her pain bounded back into her body and stretched like a big cat. Naked, smiling, his hair combed. Dart stood beside the bed, idly tugging at himself. His free hand held a damp white towel. The secret face moved toward the surface of his public face. Nora saw that it was true; he was a hyena. 'Take a gander. You have to sit up anyhow, so I can get the rope off your wrists.'

She shook her head.

Dart told her in an equable, good-humored fashion that like it or not she was going to sit up, grasped an upper arm, and jerked her forward. The room swung before and beneath her. Grimacing, she looked down and nearly fainted.

'Okay, let's get this off.' Dart reached across the pillow for the knife and expertly nicked the tape around her wrists. He ripped off the tape and worked on the knot until the rope released her wrists. 'Now the gag. I'm going to do this fast. Make any noise louder than a peep, I'll ram this knife in you, understand?' She closed her eyes. The chattering demons crowded around. Her lips and a good deal of skin seemed to rip away with the tape, but she managed not to whimper.

He tossed the damp towel onto her legs. 'Wipe yourself off. Have to strip the bed. I don't want to sleep in this mess.'

Nora obediently passed the towel down the tops of her thighs and realized that if he was going to strip the bed, she would have to get off. She moved her right leg half an inch to the side, and her various pains held steady. Gritting her teeth, Nora swung both legs off the side and forced herself to stand up. Her head swayed, and a bolt of pain shot upward in her groin.

'Girl's a trouper,' said Dart, reclaiming the knife. 'To prove I'm not completely evil, I did you a favor. Try to guess what it is.'

'Can't,' she muttered.

He smiled at her and tugged out the bedclothes. 'Ran you a bath, Nora-pie. Aren't you grateful?'

'Yes.' At that moment she wanted a bath more than she wanted freedom.

'Pop yourself in that tub.' In a single gesture, he jerked the bloody cover and sheets off the bed, balled them up, and threw them into the corner.

She walked, knees trembling, to the bathroom. The casket-sized tub was three-fourths filled with water. The soap dish held a tiny plastic bottle of shampoo and a cake of soap the size of a commemorative stamp. Two curling black hairs adhered to the soap.

Nora's stomach contracted, and she turned to the toilet in time to vomit pinkish drool into the bowl. She wrenched a tissue out of the dispenser, tottered over to the tub, picked up the soap as she would have a dead spider, then dropped the wrapped obscenity in the toilet and flushed it away. From a shell-shaped dish beside the sink she took another minuscule bar of soap and, stepping as gingerly as a stork, at last got into the tub.

Ah, yes. She never wanted to be anywhere at all except the inside of the tub. A pink cloud swam into the water from the center of her body. Delicately Nora explored herself. She was still bleeding, not seriously, and she had a lot of sore tissue. Various little fires continued to burn along the path of Dart's invasion. She soaped her arms and legs and realized that she would have to wash again under the shower to remove the film of blood deposited by the water in the tub. She was bending forward to open the drain when Dick Dart sauntered into the bathroom. She leaned back and sank up to her neck in the cloudy water, and her knees rose like islands.

'Comfy?' Dart grinned down at her, then inspected his face in the mirror. 'I hate the way your teeth feel when you haven't brushed. Being unshaven doesn't exactly fill me with joy, either. On our way to lunch, we can see if this place has a gift shop.'

Dart moved forward and peered into his eyes in the mirror, twirled around, and sat on the toilet, regarding her almost paternally. 'Couldn't help but notice you experienced some discomfort during our encounter.' He put a sarcastic stress on the last word. 'To facilitate matters I'm going to do what I do with my old dears and buy some K-Y. Lubrication will eliminate about half of your problem, but: if you don't relax, you're going to keep on getting hurt.'

Nora closed her eyes. A demon flapped up and hissed, 'You're going to get hurt!'

She opened her eyes.

'Embarking on the great adventure of menopause, aren't we?'

'Yes,' she said, startled.

'Irregular periods, vaginal dryness?'

'Yes.'

'Irritability?'

'I suppose.'

'Hot flashes?'

'Just started.'

'Formication?'

'What's that?'

'Sensation of an insect crawling on your skin.'

She astounded herself by smiling.

'Doing any hormone replacement therapy? You should, but you have to experiment with the dosage levels before you get it right.'

She closed her eyes.

'I suggest a shower and a shampoo before we visit Home Cooking. Time for the next step in your education.'

He bestowed another hyena smile upon her and walked out. Moving as if in a trance, Nora dialed a disk at the end of the tub, and the bath-water gurgled into the drain. She pulled herself to her feet, waded through the froth, and twisted both dials at once. Water shot from the faucet. She flipped the lever directing the water to the showerhead, and freezing water shattered against her body.

BOOK VLORD NIGHT

The huge black animal might have been grinning at him.

'Why, now that you have learned about your fear, you must learn to trust it, of course.'48

'Of course it's about money.' Dart put down his fork and grinned. He had taken her to the hotel's gift shop, where he bought toothbrushes and toothpaste, a pack of disposable razors and shaving cream, two combs, mouthwash, a deodorant stick, a black polo shirt with MASSACHUSETTS stitched across the left breast in small red letters, and a copy of Vogue. His teeth were no longer so yellow, and without the stubble his cheeks were almost pink. Nora had heard only something like half of what Dart said, and half of that had disappeared into the demonic buzz filling her head. 'Hey, this is America! Bid'ness is bid'ness. When you see the other side is likely to rake in a hell of a lot more money than you are, what do you do? Switch sides. Here, what we have on the table adds up to four or five million smackers. Put that against a pissy billing of maybe ten thousand tops, you've got what the boys call a no-brainer.'

'From Night Journey.' This, along with the name of the young woman who had mysteriously disappeared from Shorelands, was most of what she had been able to retain from Dick Dart's explanation.

'Absolutely. You prove that Hugo Driver stole the manuscript, fifty-four years' worth of royalties, not to mention all future royalties, go to the real heirs. And if you can prove that the publishing house cooperated in this fraud, all of their profits from the book, plus a whopping payment in damages, go into the pot. On top of that, there's all the money from foreign editions.'

Nora's legs felt like rubber, and the center of her body sent out steady waves of pain. She looked at her plate. Beside a nest of french fries glistening with grease, a rectangle of processed cheese drooped over a mound of whitish paste on a slice of toast.

'So the old man cut a deal with this Fred Constantine, the old ladies' lawyer. Constantine knows he's in over his head, little practice in Plainfield, does a few penny-ante divorces and real estate closings, sixty- five years old, hasn't seen the inside of a courtroom since he got out of law school. Imagine his relief when after making him piss blood for a couple of weeks the great Leland Dart suggests - suggests, mind you - that an accommodation might be arranged. Whoopee! If Mr Constantine could settle for a payment of something on the order of a hundred thousand dollars. Dart, Morris might be willing to render some assistance to his poor defrauded clients, who would no doubt be delighted to receive fifty percent of the ultimate proceeds. Mr Constantine, who has no idea how much money is at stake, thinks he's getting a great deal!'

A bitten-off portion of a french fry lay on Nora's tongue like a mealworm. She spat it into her hand and dropped it on her plate. 'How can they do something like that?'

'Very carefully.' His eyes glowing, he pushed the remains of his first cheeseburger into his mouth and wiped his fingers with his napkin. 'Operative word? Buffers. By the time you're done, you're in a fortified castle a thousand miles away, and, baby, the drawbridge is up.'

'I mean, how can they do it?'

Holding his second cheeseburger a few inches from his mouth, Dart looked away and giggled 'Nora-pie, you're so touching. I mean that sincerely. Bid'ness is bid'ness, I told you. What's the name of our economic system? Isn't it still called capitalism?' He shook his head in mock incredulity and took an enormous bite out of the cheeseburger. Frilly lettuce bulged from the back of the bun, and pink juice drooled onto his plate.

Nora closed her eyes against a wave of nausea. Alden Chancel and Dick Dart thought alike. This discovery would be amusing, had she the capacity to be amused. Leland Dart, who shared Alden's moral philosophy, used it to justify betraying his own client. Presumably this moral philosophy reached its fulfillment in the lunatic cheerfully demolishing a cheeseburger across the table.

Nora remembered a detail from the Poplars terrace. 'I heard Alden tell Davey that your father might be playing both ends against the middle.'

Dart swallowed. 'Do the Chancel boys talk about this in front of you?'

'Davey was taking notes on the movie of Night Journey, and when I asked him why, he said there was some problem with the Driver estate.' The night in the family room seemed to have taken place on the other side of an enormous hole in time. 'A little while later, he told me something about two old ladies in Massachusetts who found some notes in their basement.'

She realized that she was having a civil conversation in a restaurant with Dick Dart as if such occasions were absolutely normal.

'Notes on the movie. What a schlump. Katherine Mannheim's sisters never read the book, of course, they remembered the movie when they found the notes, but I mean really.'

'I suppose you want to kill the sisters.' Nora poked her fork into the white paste and transported a portion the size of a pencil eraser to her mouth. It seemed that she had ordered a tuna melt.

'Absolutely not. The people I want to kill might help the case against Chancel House. We'll be protecting Hugo Driver's name, something I am pleased to do because I always liked Hugo Driver. Not the last two, you know, only the good one.'

'You like Night Journey?' That Dick Dart had enjoyed any book surprised her.

'Favorite book, bar none,' he said. 'Only novel I ever really liked. To keep up with some of my old ladies, I had to pretend to swoon over Danielle Steel, but that was just work. Agatha had a pash for Jane Austen, so I plowed through Pride and Prejudice. What a waste. Literally about nothing at all. But I reread Night Journey every couple of years.'

'Amazing.' Nora ate another forkful of her tuna. If you peeled off the plastic cheese and avoided the bread, it was edible after all.

'Amazing? Night Journey is one twisted motherfucker of a book. Whole thing takes place in darkness. Almost everything happens in caves, underground. All the vivid characters are monsters.'

It was like a warped echo of Davey; for the thousandth time she was listening to a man rave about the book. In asking him to research the case against Chancel House, Leland Dart had exploited his son's one conventional passion. The recognition that Alden Chancel had done the same thing with Davey brought with it an upwelling of her nausea.

'I never read it,' she said.

'Davey Chancel's wife never read Night Journey? You lied to him, didn't you? You told him you'd read it, but you were lying.'

Nora turned her head to stare at the two elderly couples at separate tables in front of the window. The big reversed letters on the window arched over them like a red rainbow.

'You did, you lied to him.' Another dirty explosion of laughter. He went back to work on the second cheeseburger. 'Don't suppose: you ever heard of a place called Shorelands.'

'Hugo Driver was there. And Lincoln Chancel. In 1938.'

'Bravo. Do you remember who else was there that summer?'

'A lot of people with funny names.'

'Austryn Fain, Bill Tidy, Creeley Monk, Merrick Favor, Georgina Weatherall. The maids. A lot of gardeners. And Katherine Mannheim. Did Davey tell you anything about her?'

Nora thought for a moment. 'She was good-looking. And she ran away.'

'Upped and vanished.'

'What do you think happened to her?'

'Her sisters say she had a "weak heart," whatever that means. Supposed to avoid exertion, but she refused to be an invalid. Rode bikes, went on trips. If she'd lived like Emily Dickinson, she might still be alive.'

'You read Emily Dickinson?'

He made a sour face. 'Florence. One of my ladies. Besotted with Emily Dickinson. Had to put up with reams of that stuff. Even had to read a biography. Bitch makes Jane Austen look like Mickey Spillane.' He closed his eyes and recited.

'There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons -' That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the Meanings, are -'

He opened his eyes. 'It's not even actual English, it's this gibberish language she made up. Read page after page of that vapor for Florence, and now it's stuck in my mind, along with everything else I ever read.'

The lines had swept into Nora like an inexorable series of waves. 'That's too bad,' she said.

'You have no idea. Anyhow, I guess the Mannheim girl croaked, and in the confusion Driver swiped her manuscript. Night Journey was published the next year, and what do you know, pretty soon every other person in the world was reading it.'

'I saw soldiers carrying it in Vietnam,' Nora said.

'You were in Nam? Excuse me, the Nam. No wonder you have this wild streak Why were you there?'

'I was a nurse.'

'Oh, yes, I recall a certain adventure involving a child, yes, yes.'

She looked down at her plate.

'Nora fails to demonstrate excitement. Very well, let us return to our subject. Most, I repeal, most unusually, Mr Driver makes over the copyright to his book to his publisher in exchange for an agreement that he shall be paid all royalties due during the course of his and his wife's lifetime, all rights thereafter to revert to said publisher, who agrees to remit a smaller portion to Driver child or children for the course of their lives. This was supposed to be a gesture of gratitude, but doesn't it seem a bit excessive?'

'You've been doing a lot of work.' Acting on its own instructions, her hand detached another wad of tuna and brought it to her mouth.

'Made stacks and stacks of notes, none of them currently available, due to the interference of our local fuzz. Fortunately, I retain all of the essentials. I'd like to visit a library during our busy afternoon, continue my research, but let me distill our mission for you.' He looked sideways to ensure that the waitress was still seated at the counter. 'You know three of these scribblers offed themselves.'

She nodded.

'Austryn Fain. No wife, no little Fains. Creeley Monk was a perv, so of course he left behind no weeping widow or starving children. But luck is with us, for in the summer of 1938 Mr Monk was sharing his life with a gentleman still with us, a doctor in fact, named Mark Foil. Dr Foil, bless him, still lives in Springfield, the very same city in which he dwelt with our poet. I very much want to think that he occupies the same house, along with lots and lots of Monk memorabilia. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an address for him, but once we get to Springfield, I'm sure we will be able to unearth it.'

'Then what?' Nora asked.

'We telephone the gentleman. You explain that you are doing research for a book on the events at Shorelands in 1938. You feel that the other guests, Creeley Monk in particular, have been unfairly overshadowed by Hugo Driver. Since you happen to be in Springfield, you would be extremely grateful if Dr Foil could give you an hour of his time to discuss whatever he remembers of that summer - anything Monk might have said to him, written to him, or put in a diary.'

Even in her present condition, encased within a tough, resistant envelope which at the cost of prohibiting any sort of action protected her from feeling, Nora remarked upon the oddity of this creature's obsessions so closely resembling Davey's. What Dart was asking her to do seemed as abstract as the crossword puzzles concocted by Davey's two old men in Rhinebeck. She filled in a square with a question. 'What if Monk never even mentioned Hugo Driver?'

'Very unlikely, but it doesn't matter. After we get inside I have to kill the old boy.'

The hyena within Dick Dart displayed its teeth. 'He'll see us, baby. If we get lucky down the line, the old guy is going to put things together. Next stop is Everett Tidy, son of Bill. Everett lives in Amherst, he's an English professor. Don't you think the name Tidy in a headline will catch Foil's eye? Got to cover our tracks.'

The smell of cigarette smoke floated toward them, and Nora turned to see the waitress approaching their table.

Dart said, 'Let's shop and do the library while we can still use the Lincoln.'49

Main street, of what town? Dart pulled her into women's clothing stores, shooed away the clerks, and hand in hand drew her up and down the aisles, flicking through dresses, blouses, skirts. Here a sand-colored linen suit, skirt knee-length, jacket without lapels ('Your interview suit,' Dart said), in the next shop brown pumps and a cream silk jersey, short sleeves, collarless. No, she did not have to try them on, they would fit perfectly. And they would; without asking, he knew her sizes. Into a barn where summer-school students with lumpy backpacks prowled the long aisles and Dart heaped up jeans, hers and his, T-shirts, ditto, a dark blue cotton sweater, hers. A minimalist boutique, a conference with another charmed clerk, the production of six Gitano bras, white, six pairs of Gitano underpants, white, six pairs of Gitano pantyhose. Around the corner, his and hers low-cut black Reeboks.

Two wheeled carry-on black fabric suitcases. Into Main Street Pharmacy for quick selections under the eye of a blond-gray mustache with granny glasses: L'Oreal Performing Preference hair color, Jet Black and Starlight Blonde; LaCoup sculpting spritz; Always ultra plus maxi with wings, her brand, though Dart had not asked; Cover Girl Clean Make-up, Creamy Natural; Cover Girl Lip Advance, Poppy; Maybelline Shine Free Sunset Pink eye shadow ('Glimmer, don't glitter,' said Dart); K-Y; Cover Girl Long 'N Lush mascara; Vidal Sassoon Ultra Care shampoo and conditioner; Neutrogena bath bars; Perlier Honey Bath and Shower Cream; Revlon emery boards and cuticle sticks; OPI Nail Lacquer, a smooth, quiet blush she could not catch before he tossed it into the basket; a dram of Coco by Chanel; a jug of Icy Cool Peppermint Scope mouthwash; Hoffritz finger- and toenail clippers, styling scissors, tweezers, nail cleaner. From behind the digital register where the numbers mounted past one hundred dollars, the mustache declared, 'Mister, I've seen savvy husbands before, but you take the cake.'

Back to the car. Dart angled in before a bowfront shop, Farnsworth & Clamm, and drew Nora into an air-conditioned club room where another mustache marched smiling toward them through glowing casements hung with suits. Yes, Dart murmured, 46 extra long - this one, this one, a double-breasted blue blazer, four blue shirts, four white shirts, cotton broadcloth, spread collars, 17 neck, 36 sleeves, eight boxer shorts, 38 waist, eight pairs calf-length black socks, a dozen handkerchiefs, pick out some ties too, please. Alterations immediately, if poss. Nora deposited in a stiff leather chair near the tall minor, a stooping man with a tape measure around his neck summoned from the depths. Dart disappeared into the changing room for an eye blink before emerging in the first of his new suits. Another stooping figure materialized to whisk away the suit while Dart twinkled into number two. Dart and his reflection preened. The fittings completed, Dart inhabited another club chair and the mustache presented a bottle of Finnish vodka, two glasses, a bucket of ice. While you wait, sir. The presentation of the bill. Nora looked over and saw that Dart had purchased six thousand dollars' worth of clothes. 'Nearest really good library?' Dart asked.

He swung the Lincoln into the exit near the Basketball Hall of Fame, and Nora realized that, wherever they had been before, now they were in Springfield, where Dr and Mrs Daniel Harwich lorded it over Longfellow Lane. If she could escape from Dick Dart, would the doctor and his wife give her shelter in their basement? Answer cloudy, ask again. Three years before, a semi-radioactive Nora had whirled into Springfield on what she imagined was a sentimental visit, wound up in a bar, then a motel, with a strange, embittered Dan Harwich, who afterward talked her into coming home with him. Ten-thirty at night. The Mrs Harwich of the time, Helen, who had microwaved her half of dinner an hour earlier and dispatched it with several vodka tonics, started shouting as soon as they came through the door. Nora had attempted an exit, but Harwich had settled her in a chair, presumably as a witness. What she had witnessed had been an old-time marital title bout. Helen Harwich ordered them both out, Dan to return the next morning to pick up some clothes and depart for good. Back to the motel, Harwich uttering evil chuckles. The next morning, he promised to call her soon. Soon meant two days later, another call a week later, a third after another two weeks. After that, intermittent calls, intermittently. Two years later, a wedding announcement accompanied by a card reading. In case you wondered. The new Mrs Dr Harwich was named Lark, nee Pettigrew.

'I have to use the bathroom when we get to the library,' Nora said.

Dandy, he'd go with her, fact was, he had to bleed the lizard.

Dart parked across the street from a long stone building resembling the Supreme Court, complete with Supreme Court steps. In a wide marble hall on the second floor, the ladies' room, like the reading room downstairs, was empty. Dick Dart lounged in behind her. Nora took one stall, he another. They left together, startling a pop-eyed, quavery woman whose mouth opened and closed like a molly's until they had passed out of sight on the stairs.

Dart pushed Nora not ungently into a chair before a long wooden table, sat beside her, and opened a fat volume entitled Shorelands, Home to Genius. She sat beside him, now and then hearing tiny, metallic voices like the voices of insects. She was within the envelope, the envelope excluded feeling, she was fine. Dart grinned at his book. She pulled toward her Muses in Massachusetts by Quinn W. S. Dogbery, opened it, and read a random paragraph.

Due to the erratic nature of the artistic personality, any community like Shorelands will produce scandal. On the whole, Georgina Weatherall's colony of gifted personages ticked peacefully along, producing decade after decade of significant work. Yet problems did arise. There are those who would list the 'strange' disappearance of the minor poet Katherine Mannheim among these, though the present writer is not of their number. This young woman had alienated both staff and fellow guests during her brief residence. There can be no doubt that her hostess was resolved to issue her walking papers. Miss Mannheim, who did not wish to face an humiliating expulsion, departed in a fashion calculated to cause a maximum of confusion.

Shorelands' true scandals, as we might expect, are very different in nature.

Dart thumped two telephone directories on the table and patted her on the back.

Perhaps most distressing to Georgina Weatherall was the disappearance, not of a troublesome young malcontent, but of a favorite work of art from the dining room, a drawing by the Symbolist Odilon Redon of a strapping female nude with the head of a hawk upon her shoulders. There can be no doubt that Georgina's desire for the Redon drawing had its origin in its title, identical to that of a central Shorelands tradition. The works in the dining room were typically of a more traditional nature The Redon drawing, measuring some eight by ten inches, hung far up on a wall filled with more notable works. A guest with a particular interest in Redon first noted its absence in 1939. An immediate search of the rooms and cottages yielded no result. Georgina Weatherall remarked several times to guests during the succeeding years that it would not surprise her to discover that Miss Mannheim had absconded with it during her 'midnight flit' and while the matter may never be resolved, it may be not uncharitable to acknowledge that the drawing did then and does now possess considerable monetary value.

Dart said, 'Out of here,' gripped Nora's arm, and pulled her outside into the heat and light.

They made three trips to get all the bags and packages into the hotel.

'Clark, my old friend, could you spare a moment to help us convey these essentials up to our charming room?'

Clark licked his lips. 'Whatever.' He leaned into the office behind him and said something inaudible to whoever was in there. Then he emerged through the lobby door, glanced at Dart, and moved toward the suitcases. He was shorter than he had seemed behind the counter, four or five inches over five feet.

'I'll get the suitcases,' Dart said 'Help my wife.'

'Whatever.' Clark picked up as many bags as he could. Nora took up three others, leaving one on the floor, Clark looked up at Dart, who smiled, opened his mouth, and chopped his teeth together. The boy glanced at Nora, and bent over, bit down on the twine handles of the remaining bag, and jerked it upward.

The three of them crowded into the elevator.

'I'm interested in your use of the word "whatever,"' Dart said. 'Mean something, or merely verbal static?'

The boy grunted and clutched his armful of bags. Sweat ran down his forehead.

'Is it as rude as it sounds? Sort of a hint that the person who says "Whatever" feels a mild disdain for the other party. Is that accurate, or am I being paranoid?'

Clark shook his head.

'A great relief, Clark.'

The elevator reached the third floor, and Dart led them down the hall. 'Clark, old dear, deposit those shopping bags in front of the closet and hang the suit bags.'

Dart motioned Nora through the door. Clark bent over to deposit on the floor the bag he held with his teeth, exhaled a shaking breath, and lowered the shopping bags. He succeeded in getting the hanger wires over the rail in the closet and backed out into the corridor.

Dart locked the door and came into the room to stand smiling in front of her. Nora drew up her knees and hunched her back. He moved away, and she looked up. He was selecting a length of rope. 'Do I have to tell you everything?'

She kicked off her shoes. Her fingers, which did not have to be told what to do, began unbuttoning her shirt. Dart went to the bathroom for the pharmacy bag and carried it to the table as she undressed. One by one, he took the items out of the bag and arranged them on the table. When everything had been satisfactorily aligned, he took the scissors from their plastic case and beckoned Nora into the bathroom.

'Straddle the toilet,' he said. Quivering, Nora positioned herself over the bowl, and Dick Dart hummed to himself as he cut off most of her pubic hair and flushed it away.

'Okay,' he said, moved her backwards like a mannequin, turned her around, planted a hand between her shoulder blades, and urged her back into the bedroom, where he tied her hands behind her back and taped her mouth shut.

She looked up at the flat white ceiling. Dart hiked himself up onto the bed. 'It's not going to be as bad this time, see?' She turned her head to see him brandishing a tube of K-Y.

It was slightly less painful than before, but every bit as bad.50

'Keep your head upright. You have to cooperate with me, or you'll end up looking like a ragamuffin.' Bath cream scented the air in the bathroom, and her hair, still wet, hung straight and flat. Dart lowered his head alongside hers so that the mirror framed their faces.' Tell me what you see.'

Nora saw a terrorized version of herself with shocked eyes, parchment skin, and wet hair, posing with a hyena. 'Us.'

'I see a couple of fine desperadoes,' said the hyena in the mirror. 'You needed me to open your eyes, and along I came. Wasn't any accident, was it?'

'I don't know what it was, but-'

Before she could add I wish it had never happened, the eyes in the mirror charged with an illumination. 'Used to do this with hubby dear, didn't you? Put your heads together and looked at yourselves in the mirror. I know why, too.'

She did not have to tell him he was right; he already knew that. 'Why?'

'Until now, I hadn't seen how much you and Davey resemble each other. Bet there's a nice little erotic charge in that - probably helped Davey get it up. Like making it with who you'd be if you were the opposite sex. But Davey isn't your male self. The biggest risk Davey-poo ever took was getting into bed with Natalie Weil, and the only reason he did that was his old man made him so insecure about his manhood that he had to prove he could use it.'

Nora clamped her mouth against agreeing, but agree she did.

'I'm your real male self Only difference is, I'm more evolved. Which means that eventually we are going to have tremendous sex.'

The hyena surged into his face once more. 'In fact, Nora-boo, didn't you have a bit of an orgasm that time?'

'Maybe,' she said, thinking it was what he wanted to hear.

He slapped her hard enough to snap her head back. A broad, hand-shaped red mark emerged on her cheek. 'I know you didn't come, and so do you. Goddamn it, when I make you come, they'll hear you howling in the next county. Shit.'

He slammed his fist against the bathroom door, then turned around and pointed at her face in the mirror 'I bust you out of jail, I buy you clothes, I'm going to give you the best haircut you ever had in your life, after that I'm going to do what your mother should have done and teach you about makeup, and you lie to me?'

She trembled.

'I have to keep remembering what women are like. No matter how much a man does for them, they stab you in the back first chance they get.'

'I shouldn't have lied,' she said.

'Forget it. Just don't do it again unless you want to hold your guts in your hands.' He wiped his face with a towel, then draped it over her shoulders. 'Stop shaking.'

Nora's eyes were closed, and in some world where the demons did not exist she felt a comb running through her hair. This is going to be an inch or two shorter all over, but it'll look completely different. For one thing, I cut hair a lot better than the last guy who did this. Also, I know how you ought to look, and you don't have the faintest idea. It's too bad we have to turn you into a blonde, but that'll be okay too, believe me. You'll look ten years younger.'

He positioned her head and started cutting with small precise movements of the scissors. Dark hair fell onto the towel and drifted down to her breasts. He said, 'Hold still. I'll get the hair off you later.' Wisps of hair landed on her forearms, her stomach, her back. Dart was humming 'There'll Be Some Changes Made.'

'Good hair,' he said. 'Nice full texture, good body.'

She opened her eyes and beheld exactly what he had promised, the best cut of her life. It was too bad that she should be given such a cut when she was a corpse being prepared for the coffin. His hands flew about her head, fluffing, cutting.

'Pretty good, if I do say so myself.' He snapped the towel away from her shoulders and brushed hair from her body. 'Well?'

Nora snatched the towel and wrapped it around her chest. Dart grinned at her in the mirror. She ran her lingers through her short, lively hair and watched it fall perfectly back into place. Apart from the fading red mark on her cheek, the only problem with the woman in the mirror was that beneath the cap of beautifully cut hair her face was dead.

Dart opened the box of hair coloring and removed a white plastic bottle with a nozzle and a cylinder of amber liquid. He snipped off the tip of the nozzle. 'You won't be as blond as the picture, but you'll be blond, anyhow.' He wiggled his hands into the transparent plastic gloves from the inner side of the instruction sheet. After pouring in the amber liquid, Dart shook the bottle.

'Bend forward.' She leaned over the sink, and Dart squeezed golden liquid into her hair and worked it in with his fingers. 'That's it for twenty-five minutes.' He looked at his watch. 'Sit here so I can use the mirror.' She dragged her chair in front of her as she backed toward the toilet.

Dart leaned forward and began cutting his own hair. He did a better job with the back of his head than Nora had expected, missing only a few sections where long hair fanned over the rest. 'How's it look?'

'Fine.'

'In the back?'

'Fine.'

He snorted. 'Guess that means close enough for jazz.' He opened the box of black hair color and mixed the ingredients. 'I'm going to have to close my eyes, so I want you to put your hand on me. If you take it off, I'll smash your head open on the bathtub.'

'Put my hand where?'

'Grab anything you like.'

She hitched herself forward and, shivering with revulsion, placed her hand on his hip.

Dart squeezed the fluid into his hair. 'I wish I were a woman, so I could have me do this for myself. Without doing it like this, I mean.'

'You wish you were a woman,' Nora said.

He stopped massaging the lather into his hair. 'I didn't say that.'

Goose bumps rose on Nora's arms.

'I didn't say I wanted to be a woman. That's not what I said.'

'No.'

Violence congealed about Dart's heavy body and sparkled in the air. He lowered his hands and faced her.

'I mean, I would enjoy having these things done to me by me. The women who get my special treatment are extremely lucky people. I think it would be nice to be pampered, like I pamper you. Anything strange about that?'

'No,' she said.

He turned back to the sink and shot her a simmering glance. She settled her hand on his hip. 'You're tied down by the crappy little conventions that inhibit melon-heads like your husband. The truth is, there are two kinds of people, sheep and wolves. If anyone should understand this, it's you.'

He peeled off the smeary gloves. 'That's that.' She lowered her hand and looked at the door. 'Nope, we're staying in here. Sit on the side of the tub.'

Nora moved. Dart frowned, tossed the gloves into the basket, checked himself in the mirror, and sat on the toilet. 'We have some time to kill. Ask me something, and try not to make it too stupid.'

She tried to think of a question that would not infuriate him. 'I was wondering why you live in the Harbor Arms.'

He held up his finger like an exclamation point. 'Very good! First of all, my parents will never come there - the place gives them hives. Secondly, nobody gives a shit what you do.' For fifteen minutes, he described the advantages of living in a place where the fellow residents willingly supplied drugs, sex, and gossip - the members of the Yacht Club universally assumed that their waiters and busboys, Dart's confidants, chose not to overhear their private conversations.

If she were alive, Nora thought, most of what she would feel about this vain, destructive, self-important man would be contempt. Then she realized that what she was now feeling actually was contempt. Maybe she was not entirely dead after all.

'Anyhow,' Dart said, 'time to wash that gunk out of your hair and do the conditioner.'

'I'd like to do it by myself.'

He held up his hands. 'Fine. Use a little warm water, lather up, and rinse. Then take that tube on the side of the sink and massage the whole thing into your hair. After two minutes we'll rinse it out.'

Nora worked her fingers through her hair until a cap of white foam appeared, then lowered her head beneath the tap and washed it away.

'Amazing,' Dart said.

Nora looked up.

A drowned sixteen-year-old blonde stared at her from the other side of the mirror. Short, wet hair only slightly darker than Natalie Weil's lay flat against her head.

'I didn't think it'd be that good,' Dart said. 'Don't forget conditioner.'

Nora took her eyes from the drowned girl's and unscrewed the cap, then faced the strange girl again and squeezed the contents of the tube over the top of her head in a long, looping line. Together she and the girl worked their fingers through their hair.

'My turn.' Soon a black-haired Dick Dart was grinning at his image in the mirror. 'Should have done this years ago. Don't you think I look great?'

A greasy crow's wing flattened over his head. Stray feathers adhered to his temples and forehead.

'Great,' she said.

He pointed at the sink, and she came: forward to rinse out the conditioner.

'Okay, next step,' Dart pulled her toward the bedroom and sat her at the table. 'Watch what I'm doing so you'll be able to do it for yourself, later.' He flipped open a mirrored case and handed it to her. He smoothed a dab of makeup across her cheekbones and feathered it down her cheeks, stroked mascara into her eyelashes, brushed lipstick onto her mouth. 'When we're all done, I want you to clean up your nails and cuticles and put on that polish. I suppose you have done that before?'

'Of course.' She could not remember the last time she had applied nail polish.

'One last touch,' Dart said, putting a dime-sized dab of the sculpting spritz on his palm. Behind her, he began massaging her scalp. He combed, patted, combed, tugged at her hair. 'Impress myself. Go in the bathroom and take a look.'

Nora slipped into her blue shirt.

'You won't believe it.'

Nora stood in front of the mirror and lifted her eyes. A woman just beginning her real maturity, the second one, a woman who should have been selling expensive shampoo in television commercials, looked back at her. Her glowing gamine's hair had been teased into artful ridges and peaks. She had perfect skin, a handsome mouth, and long, striking eyes. She was what the lacquered twenty-somethings who lived on mineral water from Waldbaum's wanted to be when they grew up. For some reason, this woman wore Nora's favorite blue shirt.

Nora moved her face to within three inches of the mirror. There, lurking beneath the blond woman's mask, she saw herself. Then she pulled back and disappeared beneath the mask. A howl of rage came from the bedroom.

Dick Dart was seated at the table with the newspaper he had taken from the lounge. The bottle of Cover Girl Clean stood open on the bottom half of the paper, and he was jabbing the brush at a story, spattering the paper with tan flecks. 'Know what these idiots are saying?' He turned toward her a face from a trick photograph, its left half smoothed into a younger, unlined version of the right. 'I should sue the bastards.'

Nora went past the row of shopping bags outside the closets. 'What's wrong?'

The Times, that's what. They got everything wrong, they fouled up in every possible way.'

She sat on the bed.

'Know what you are, according to this rag? A socialite. If you're a socialite, I'm the Queen of Sheba. "To abet his escape. Dart seized a hostage, Westerholm socialite Nora Chancel, 49, wife of David Chancel, executive editor at Chancel House, and son of the current president and C E O of the prestigious publishing company, Alden Chancel. Neither David nor Alden Chancel could be reached for comment."' He read this in a mincing, sarcastic drawl which made every word seem a preposterous lie.

She said nothing.

'If you go by this article, the only criminal in Westerholm is me, and can you guess what they say I am? Go on, take a stab at it.'

'A murderer?'

'A serial killer! Are they so brain-dead they can't tell the difference between me and some psycho who goes around killing people at random?' Indignation brought a flush to the side of his face he had not made up. 'They're insulting me in print!'

'I don't really -'

Dart pointed the makeup applicator at her like a knife. 'Serial killers are scum. Even Ted Bundy was a nothing from a completely insignificant family of nowhere Seattle nobodies.'

He was breathing hard.

'I see,' Nora said.

'What's the point of doing anything if they're going to twist it around? What about credit where credit is due?'

She nodded.

'Here's another lie. They say I'm an accused serial killer. Excuse me, but when did that happen? I was brought into the station because of the allegations of a drunken whore, I spent about twelve hours with Leo Morris, but when during all that time was I accused? This is libel.'

She kept her eyes on his.

'Work like mad, put yourself in constant danger, accomplish things the ordinary jerk couldn't even dream of, and they go out and peddle these lies about you. It makes me so mad!'

'Do they have any idea of where we are? What about the car?'

'For what it's worth, it says here that the fugitive and his hostage - hostage, that's a good one - fled in the hostage's car, which was later discovered in the parking lot of a restaurant stop on 1-95. Probably they do know about that old asshole's Lincoln. I was going to get a new car tonight anyhow.' He picked up the makeup bottle and threw the newspaper at her. 'Serial killer.'

She sat back on her haunches. 'What are you going to do?'

He dipped the applicator back into the jar of makeup, positioned the mirror in front of him, and started working on the right side of his face. 'We're going to change into new clothes and pack up. Early tomorrow, we're going to await the arrival of a weary traveler, kill him, and steal his car. Move to another motel. Sometime before noon tomorrow, we'll locate Dr Foil. After that, we'll Journey on to Northampton and pay a call on Everett Tidy, son of poor Bill.'

He replaced the cap on the bottle and offered his face for inspection. 'What do you think?'

From the neck up, he was a different, younger man who might have been a doctor. Nurses would have flirted with him, gossiped about him. 'Remarkable,' she said.

He reached across the table for the rope and the duct tape.51

Nora returned to her body. Perhaps her body returned to her. The process was unclear. From an indefinite realm, she had fallen into a damp bed already occupied by a large male body sweating alcoholic fumes. Her body was sweating, too. She raised a tingling hand to wipe her forehead, and the hand jerked to a halt before it reached her face, restrained by a tight pressure encircling her wrist. On examination this proved to be a rope. The rope extended beneath the inert body of the man, whom Nora could remember linking them wrist to wrist as she passed through the interior of cloud after cloud. She was back with Dick Dart, and she was having the second hot flash of her life. A nice mixture of demons in high good humor squatted around the bed, sniggering and muttering in their rat-tat-tat voices.

A man half visible in the darkness crossed his legs ankle to knee in a chair near the window. She looked more closely at the man and saw that her father had found a way to join her in this netherworld.

Daddy, she said.

This is a pretty pickle you're in, said her father. Seems to me you could use a little good advice from your old man right about now.

Don't wake him up. You're talking too loud.

Hey, this clown can't hear me. He drank most of that bottle of vodka, remember? That guy's out cold. But even stone-cold sober, he wouldn't be able to hear either one of us.

I miss you.

That's why I'm here.

Nora began to cry. I need you.

Honey, the person you need is Nora. You got lost, and now you have to find yourself again.

I don't even have a self anymore. I'm dead.

Listen to me, sweetie. That pile of horse manure did the worst thing to you he could think of because he wants to break you down, but it didn't work, not all the way. Forget this dead business. If you were dead, you wouldn't be talking to me.

Why not? You're dead, too.

You're not as easy to kill as Dick Dart thinks you are. You're going to get through it, but to do that you have to go through it. It's hard, and I wish it didn't have to be this way, but sometimes you have to take an awful bitter pill.

The form facing her in the chair, one ankle on the opposite knee, had been gradually coming clearer in the darkness, and now she could make out his plaid shirt open over the flash of a white T-shirt, the vertical red stripes of his suspenders, his work boots. His close-cropped white hair glimmered. She fastened on his beloved, familiar face, the clear eyes fanned with deep wrinkles and the heavily lined forehead. Here was Matt Curlew, her strong capable steady father, looking back at her with a mixture of tendene ss and authority which pierced her heart.

It's too much, she said.

You can come through. You have to.

I can't.

He folded his hands together on top of his raised leg and leaned forward.

Okay, maybe I can. But I don't want to.

Of course not. Nobody wants to go all the way through. Some people, they're never even asked to do it. You might say those are pretty lucky people, but the truth is, they never had the chance to stop being ignorant. You know what a soul is, Nora? A real soul? A real soul is something you make by walking through fire. By keeping on walking, and by remembering how it felt.

I'm not strong enough.

This time, you get to do it right. Last time you got half as bad as this, you closed your eyes and pretended it didn't happen. Inside you, there are a lot of doors you shut a long time ago. What you have to do is open those doors.

I don't understand.

Just let yourself remember. Start with this. Remember one summer when you were nine or ten and I taught you all those knots? Remember doing the half hitch? The slipknot?

Tying knots when she was ten years old? The present Nora had never been ten years old.

You were sitting on that stump in the backyard, the one from the oak that fell down during that hellacous storm.

Then she did remember: the smooth white surface of the stump, her tomboy self fooling with a length of rope she had unearthed in the garage, her father wandering up to ask if she wanted to learn some fancy knots. Then the pleasure of discovering how a random-seeming series of loops magically resolved into a pattern. She had badgered him for weeks, showed off at the kitchen table, impressed various boys, absorbed by one of those childish fascinations which last a season and then disappear for good.

I remember.

What was the best one? You used it to tie up Lobo.

The witch's curse?

The guy who taught it to me called it the witch's headache. Probably has a dozen names. If you tie it right, nobody who doesn't know the trick can ever undo it. From what I can see, your friend Dick Dart tried to put a witch's headache on your wrist, but he doesn't know as much about knots as he does about cosmetics.

Nora looked down at the complication on her wrist, as solid as a bracelet and intricate as a maze. Something about the pattern was misshapen.

You can get out of that contraption in a couple of seconds. You see how?

Nora tugged here and there with her free hand, gently loosening the web, then slowly drew the end of the rope from under a strand, unwound it from around her wrist, and passed it beneath another strand. The knot sagged into a series of loops from which she could easily slide her hand.

Now tie it all back up again with that stupid mistake where he missed the choke.

But I can get away!

You're not done yet, honey. You have to stick with this animal for a while, then you'll be able go through with what you have to do.

I don't know what you're talking about!

I wish I could guarantee you it'll all turn out the way it should, but can anybody ever promise that? Don't worry about the knot - it'll tie itself, and miss the choke, too.

I suppose you think this is easy.

Nothing about this is easy. Go all the way through it, honey. This time go all the way through.

Nora watched the rope slither twice around her wrist, create a loop, wind around, slip beneath a strand and through the loop, miss the essential hitch, and tuck itself into the web. When she looked up, her father said, I love you. Sunshine. You're one hell of a girl.

Help me, she said, but the chair was empty.52

Faint gray light touched the edge of the curtains. The last time she had looked at them, she had seen darkness, so she had slept. Dart had planned a busy day, and she was supposed to stop him. She could not stop Dick Dart. A thick membrane made of transparent rubber surrounded her, stealing her will, robbing her of the power to act. Within the membrane, she could do no more than follow orders and utter occasional remarks. Matt Curlew had come to her in a dream and shown her that Dart couldn't tie the witch's headache, but he knew nothing about the membrane.

Dart lay on his side, turned away from her. Experimentally, she put her hand on his shoulder. He rolled over to face her, his bloodshot eyes gleaming. 'Need an early start today. Get any sleep?' His breath smelled like burning tires.

'A little, I guess.'

He sat up and pulled her wrist onto his broad thigh. 'Don't suppose you made any little efforts to untie that knot while I was out.'

'I touched it, that's all.'

'Ooh, Nora, you excite me.' He giggled. This knot, you try to get out of it, it tightens up on you. Called the devil's conundrum. Watch this.' He tugged at a strand, passed it beneath another, and the knot dissolved. 'Need two hands to make it work. If you try it, you'll cut off most of the circulation to your hand.'

If you tied it right, that is, she thought. Inside the bubble, she made a ghostly smile.

He looked at his watch. The first thing I want you to do is pack everything in your suitcase, leaving out one of the new T-shirts and jeans. I have to fix your face and hair. Then we're going to keep our eyes on the parking lot.' He patted her face. 'If I say so myself, I improved your looks about a thousand percent. Don't you agree? Don't you have to admit that your rescuer from Durance Vile is a genius?'

'You're a genius,' Nora said.

Dart jumped out of bed and spun around. 'I'm a genius, I was born a genius, I always will be a genius, and I have never done anything wrong! Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for a man who can truly be said to be one of a kind, the great one, the maestro, Mr RIIICHARD DART!'

He flapped a hand at Nora, and she clapped twice.

'Hustle your fine little buns into the bathroom and brush your teeth. Void your bowels. Enjoy a lengthy urination. While I do the same, get your shit packed. Time's a-wasting.'

Nora had folded all the new clothes into the suitcase, slid the unopened packets of soap and bath cream down the sides, jammed in the mouthwash, and begun placing all the makeup and beauty-care equipment on top of the pile. After packing his own clothes twice as well as she in half the time, Dart stopped admiring himself in the mirror to check her progress. 'Didn't your mother teach you anything? You can't put that stuff in your suitcase, for God's sake.'

'Where do you want me to put it?'

He winked at her. 'Little surprise.' He opened the closet door, took from the shelf a black leather handbag with a golden snap, and danced toward her. 'Gucci, you will observe. Testimonial to your invaluable assistance.'

'I didn't see you buy this.'

'Took advantage of the trusting inattention of the salesladies at our second stop. Fit neatly into the bag from the first emporium.'

Nora scooped the bottles, cases, and containers into the bag and snapped it shut.

'Let's find our victim,' Dart said.53

'A lot of people think traveling salesmen died out with Willy Loman, but the world is full of guys with their backseats full of sample cases and catalogs. Travel these huge territories, two or three states, the whole; Northeast. Drive high-end Detroit iron and pull into joints like this too tired to fight.'

Standing on the balcony a few feet from Dart, Nora rubbed her bare arms. Condensation shone on the empty cars beneath them, and the windows of Home Cooking were dark. The headlights of a dark green sedan on the side of the lot shone on a cement planter in which geraniums wilted in a carpet of cigarette butts.

'Idiot's battery is going to die before he gets his ass out of bed,' Dart said. Some people shouldn't be allowed to drive.'

'You're sure someone's going to come in?'

'Dick Dart's word is his bond,' he said in a booming voice. 'If Dick Dart tells you something, you can take that motherfucker to the motherfucking bank.'

A car veered into the exit. 'What did I tell you?' Dan pulled her into the room and looked back at the car, which drove past the entrance to the lot. 'Cheapskate's looking for a place costs five bucks less a night.' He dropped Nora's arm and stepped back out onto the balcony. 'Let's see some action here, people. Haven't got all day.'

He shoved his hands in his pockets and rose onto the balls of his feet. He patted the top of the balcony rail with his fingertips. 'Still can't get over that serial killer thing.' For a minute or two, he paced up and down on the narrow balcony. 'Let's take our bags downstairs.'

Nora carried her suitcase in one hand, and with her other arm clutched to her chest the bags from the hardware store and liquor store. Draped over these was Dart's bulging suit bag.

They carried their things past an empty desk. 'No conception of service left in this country. We're turning into Nigeria.' He crammed himself into the revolving door, swore, swung it around, and disappeared from view, leaving Nora to solve the problem of the revolving door by herself. She had to struggle around twice to move everything outside. Once, she would have fled through the hotel and escaped, but the person she was now could not do that; she had been punished too much, and the transparent membrane protected her from further punishment.

Dart was standing beneath the marquee. 'Get over here in case one of those morons actually deigns to work the desk.' He pulled keys from his jacket pocket and displayed them on his palm. These things cost something, but hey, they just work here, it's not their money.' He tossed them into the cement planter. 'That thing is supposed to add some beauty to the place, and what do people do? Turn it into an ashtray. First of all, they smoke, as if nobody ever told them they're begging for lung cancer, and then they throw their butts into a planter. Anybody can stop smoking. Used to smoke four packs a day, and I stopped. What happened to self-control? Fuck self-control - what happened to simple consideration for others?'

Nora watched dark outlines speed down the highway against the brightening sky.

'Isn't there any work ethic left in this country?'

Nora looked at the car with its lights burning and made out a shape behind the wheel.

'Come on, Nora. Can't do everything by myself. Wind it up, cross your fingers, turn the key, do whatever the hell you do.'

'I don't do anything.'

'Do you…' He stopped talking and looked at her, blinking rapidly. 'If that dodo left his lights on, maybe he left his keys in his car.'

He walked out from under the canopy, bent to look into the car, and ran toward it, pulling the revolver from his jacket pocket.

Nora pressed the heavy suit bag to her eyes and waited for the explosion. Dart's shoes thudded on the asphalt and came to a stop. She heard his dirty bow-wow-wow laugh.

She lowered the bags. Dart was blowing her a kiss from beside the open car door. 'Goddamn it, Nora, you deserve a bonus.'

She moved toward him.

'Ta da!' Dart stepped aside to reveal an obese male body slumped behind the wheel. A yellow tie had been yanked sideways, and the first four buttons of the shirt had been torn off.

'Heart attack, wouldn't you say?'

'Looks that way,' Nora said.

'Butterball here's about fifty pounds overweight, and the inside of his car reeks of cigarettes.' He touched the corpse's flabby cheek. This bag of shit drove in about a minute before we went out onto the balcony, turned off his car, and dropped dead before he could switch off his lights. He's been here all along! Put down that stuff and give me a hand.'

Dart kneeled on the passenger seat, wrapped his arms around the dead man's chest, and yanked him sideways. Nora bent down and pushed. Her hands sank into the soft body.

'Jesus, Nora, you've handled dead bodies before. You can't wimp out on me now.'

Nora put her shoulder into the dead man's side. 'Push!'

The body tumbled into the passenger seat.

Dart tossed the keys over the top of the car. Put the bags in the trunk.'

Obedient Nora opened the trunk and laid the suit bag across cartons and boxes. Then she got in the backseat and Dart accelerated backwards, braked, and shot toward the front of the hotel. The dead man's head rolled sideways. They jammed the rest of the bags into the trunk and backseat. The knives between his feet. Dart rolled chuckling toward the exit. Then he braked and leaned toward the corpse.

He tugged a wallet from the dead man's jacket. 'Check out these business cards. Playtime Enterprises, Boston. Gumbo's Goodies, Boston. Satisfaction Guaranteed, Waltham. What are these places? Hot Stuff, Providence. The Adults Only Parlor.' Dart started laughing. 'Jumbo sells sex toys! What a gem! Let's find out his name.'

He held up a license displaying a photograph of a pudgy face with distended cheeks and close-set eyes. 'We have the pleasure of being in the company of Mr Sheldon Dollkis. Mr Dolkis is, let's see, forty-four years of age, weight two hundred twenty-five pounds, height five feet, eight inches. He claims to have hazel eyes, and he has declined to be an organ donor. We shall see about that, I believe.' Dart grasped the corpse's right hand. 'A treat to make your acquaintance, Shelley. We'll paint the town red.'

He drove into the southbound lanes of the highway. 'We want a Mom and Pop motel redolent of the two quintessential Normans, Rockwell and Bates. A shabby little office and a string of depressing cabins.'

'Why is that what we want?'

'Can't leave our new friend in the car, now, can we? Shelley is part of our family.'

'You're going to keep him?'

'I'm going to do a lot more than that,' Dart said.54

'Delightful place, Springfield,' Dart said. 'Pay attention now, Shelley. Even a lowlife like you must have heard of the Springfield rifle, but did your education cover the Garand? Wonderful weapon for its time. For two hundred years, both of these rifles were manufactured in Springfield. It may be the only city in America with a weapons museum. Now, there's a museum worth visiting. Of course it also has that Basketball Hall of Fame, if you can believe that. Have to throw the yokels a crumb now and then.'

'Basketball was okay when white people still played it, but look what happened. Overgrown glandular cases took over, and now it's all exhibitionism. Sportsmanship? Forget it, there's no sportsmanship in the ghetto, and basketball is only the ghetto with big paychecks. All part of the decline in public morality. My father - you think he cares who really wrote Night Journey? His idea of good literature is a copy of American Lawyer with his picture on the cover. You should see what goes on at Dart, Morris - the bill padding, the Concorde flights we charge to the client. What gets me, they don't see the humor in this stuff, they chug down two bottles of Dom Peignon and stuff themselves with caviar at what they call a conference, bill the client five hundred bucks for the dinner, and don't even think it's funny! No wonder people hate lawyers. Compared to the other guys, I'm a paragon. I take care of my old ladies. If I bill them for lunch, it's because during that lunch we talked about business. It isn't all Danielle Steel and Emily Dickinson, you know.'

They had been driving aimlessly through the outskirts of Springfield, Dart scanning both sides of the streets for a motel as he talked.

'Take Shelley Dolkis here. Delivered dildos and inflatable dolls to guys too feeble to have sex with other people. Even the sex industry has a hierarchy, and Shelley was on the bottom end - the jerk-off end. But if he could talk, he'd tell you he provided a necessary service. If people didn't have access to his products, why, they'd go out and commit rape!'

'I suppose you're right,' Nora said.

'Whole thing comes down to having the balls to be completely straight about being crooked. The guy who runs for the Senate and says he wants the job so he can screw the aides, stuff his pockets with payoff money, take a lot of drugs, and swim naked with a couple of strippers, that's the guy who gets my vote. This country founded on fairness? A bunch of other guys owned it, and we took it. Wasn't there a little thing called the Boston Tea Party? Suppose you came to Connecticut in 1750 and happened to see a nice plot of land on the Sound with half a dozen Pequot Indians living on it. Did you say, too bad, guess I'll move inland? You killed the Indians and got your land. You lived in Westerholm a couple of years. Ever see any Pequots? The same things happen over and over. History books lie about it, teachers lie about it, and for sure politicians lie about it. Last thing they want is an educated public.'

'Yes.'

'This is a happy time for me. I'm a lot more sensitive than most people think I am, and you're beginning to see that side of me.'

'That's true,' Nora said.

'And here's a place that will suit our little family just fine.'

A shabby row of cabins stood at the top of a rise. Numbered doors lined a platform walkway. A neon sign at the entrance to the parking lot said HILLSIDE MOTEL.

'Hillside, like the strangler,' Dick said. He pulled up in front of the last unit and patted the corpse's cheek. 'Relax for a moment, Shelley, while Nora and I secure our accommodations.'

An ancient Sikh accepted twenty-five dollars and shoved a key across the counter without leaving his chair or taking his eyes off the Indian musical blaring from the television set on his desk.

'Nora, Nora,' Dart said as they walked on creaking boards back toward their car and Sheldon Dolkis. 'As they say in beer commercials, does it get any better than this?'

'How could it?' Nora said.

'You and me and a big fat dead man.' He slid the key into the door of the last room. 'Let's have a look at our bower.'

An overhead light in a rice-paper bubble feebly illuminated a bed covered with a yellow blanket, a battered wooden dresser, and two green plastic chairs at a card table. Worn matting covered the floor. 'Nora, if this room could talk, what tales it would tell.'

'Suicides and adulteries,' Nora said, and felt a dim flicker of terror. This was not the kind of thing the person inside the bubble was supposed to say.

But she had not displeased Dick Dart. 'You get more interesting with every word you say. When you were in Vietnam, were you raped?'

She collapsed against the wall. Davey couldn't figure it out in two years of marriage, and Dick Dart saw it in about twenty-four hours.

He glanced outside. 'After we escort Shelley into this lovely room, I have a story to tell you.'

Back outside. Dart opened the passenger door and put his hand on Dolkis's shoulder. The dead man was regarding the roof of his car as if it were showing a porn movie. 'Shelley, old boy, time for a short stroll. Nora-sweetie, what I am going to do is pull him toward me, and I want you to get up behind him and catch him under the other arm.

Dart leaned into the car and pulled the dead man's head and shoulders into the sunlight. 'Get set, don't want lo drop him.' Nora wedged herself next to the car and bent down. The dead man's suit was the oily green of a Greek olive and stank of cigarette smoke. 'Here we go,' Dart said. The suit jerked sideways. She lifted the arm and edged in close to the body. 'Good hard pull,' said Dart. The body lifted off the car seat, and its feet snagged. A soft noise came from the open mouth. 'Don't complain, Shelley,' Dart said. He reared back, and Dolkis's feet slid over the flange. One of his shoes came off. 'Walky walky,' Dart said.

They dragged him inside. At the far end of the bed, Dart lowered his side of the body and let go. The weight on Nora's back slipped away, and the body's forehead smacked against the rattan carpet. Dart rolled the corpse over and patted the bulging gut. 'Good boy.' He untied the twisted necktie and threw it aside, then unbuttoned the shirt and pulled it out of the trousers. A thin line of dark hair ran up the mound beneath the sternum and down into the dimple of the navel. Dart unbuckled the belt and undid the trouser button.

'What are you doing?' Nora asked.

'Undressing him,' He yanked down the zipper, moved to the lower end of the body, pulled off the remaining shoe, and peeled the socks off the plump feet. He yanked at the trouser cuffs. The body slid a couple of inches toward him before the trousers came away, exposing white shorts with old stains on the crotch. Dart reached into the left front trouser pocket and extracted a crumpled handkerchief and a key ring, both of which he threw under the table. From the right pocket he withdrew a brass money clip and a small brown vial with a plastic spoon attached to the top.

'Shelley took coke! Do you suppose he actually tried to get a heart attack?' He unscrewed the cap and peered into the bottle. 'Selfish bastard used it all up,' The bottle hit the floor and rolled beneath Nora's chair. 'I have to get some things out of the car.'

Dart strode out into the dazzling light. Grateful to be powerless, to feel nothing, Nora heard the trunk of the car open, the rustle of bags, a lengthy silence. A blue jay screamed. The trunk slammed down. A dignified, doctorly man carried a lot of bags into the room and became Dick Dart.

He hitched up his trousers, knelt beside the body, and arranged the bags in a row beside him. From the first he dumped out his knives. From the second he removed a pair of scissors. He took the half-empty vodka bottle from the third, removed the cap, winked at Nora, and took a long pull, which he swished around in his mouth before swallowing. He shuddered, took a second drink, and replaced the cap. 'Anesthesia. Want some?'

She shook her head.

Dart walked up the body and levered the trunk upright. 'Give me a hand.'

When the body was naked except for underpants. Dart rummaged through the suit pockets: a ballpoint pen, a pocket comb gray with scum, a black address book. He threw these toward the wastebasket, then noticed the money clip on the floor beside him. 'My God. I forgot to count the money.' He pulled out the bills. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten, four singles. Why don't you take it?'

'Me?'

'A woman's incomplete without money.' He folded the bills into the clip, scooped coins from the floor, and dropped it all into her palm. 'Nora-pie, would you be so kind as to go into the bathroom and tear down the shower curtain?'

She went into the bathroom and groped for the switch. Glaring light bounced from the walls, white floor, and mirror. A translucent curtain hung down over the side of the white porcelain tub. Nora reached up and tore at the curtain. One by one, plastic rings popped off the rail.

When she carried the sheet into the bedroom, the light from the bathroom fell across the floor. 'Perfect.' Dart cut away the dead man's underpants and spread the shower curtain next to the body. A flap of underwear lay across Sheldon Dolkis's groin. 'Let's see how our boy was hung.' He ripped away the cloth. 'Had to jerk off with tweezers.'

Dart draped his suit jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled his sleeves halfway up his biceps and tucked his necktie in between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt. Kneeling beside the body, he slid his arms under the back, grunted, and rolled it onto the shower curtain. He moved up and rolled it over again, so that the body faced upward. He fussed with it, centering it on the plastic sheet. 'All righty.' He rubbed his hands together and looked fondly down at the corpse. 'Do you know what I wanted to be when I grew up?'

'A doctor,' Nora said.

'A surgeon. Loved cutting things up. Loved it. What did the great Leland Dart say? "I'm not wasting my money on some medical school that'll flunk you out in a year." Thanks a bunch. Dad. Lucky me, I found a way to be a surgeon despite him.'

He lowered himself to his knees and picked up the stag-handled knife. 'You've seen a million operations, right? Watch this. Tell me if I'm any good.' She watched him slide the knife beneath the breastbone and draw it down the mound of the belly, bisecting the line of hair. Yellow fat oozed from the wound. 'I don't suppose, when reminiscing about his dear old Yale days, your husband ever mentioned an organization called the Hellfire Club?'55

She gave a start of surprise and said, 'You did that very well.'

'Of course,' he said, annoyed. 'I'm a born surgeon. What's the essential quality of a born surgeon? A passion for cutting people up. Used to practice on animals when I was a kid, but I didn't want to be a vet, for God's sake.' He cut away wide semicircles of flesh on either side of the incision, then carved off soft yellow fat and dropped it onto the shower curtain. In a few seconds, he had exposed the lower part of the rib cage and the peritoneum. 'Want to take a look at Shelley's liver - a real beauty, I bet - and his pancreas, check him for gallstones and anything else that might turn up, but I have to get this huge, ugly membrane, the greater omentum, out of the way. Look at that fat. This guy could keep a soap factory running for a month.'

'You've been doing your homework.'

'Medical books are much more enjoyable than the nonsense I read for my old darlings.' He sliced through the thick, fatty membrane and peeled it back, then began probing the abdominal cavity.

'The Hellfire Club?' Nora asked.

'You know about the secret societies at Yale, don't you? The secret secret societies are a lot more interesting. The Hellfire Club is one of the oldest. Used to be you could only get in through heredity, but during the forties they started taking in outsiders. Lincoln Chancel was buddy-buddy with some old sharks who were members, and they bent the rules to get Alden in, so Davey was eligible, and he joined. I came in when I was a sophomore, so we were there together for a year. Jesus Christ, look at this.'

He sliced the peritoneal attachments and pulled the liver out of the body. 'Right lobe is about half the size it's supposed to be. See all this discoloration? A decent liver is red. Here, around the vena cava, this big vessel, it's turning black.

'The texture is all wrong. I don't know what the hell old Shelley had, but his bad habits were killing him.' Dart placed the severed liver on the plastic sheet and cut it in half. 'What a mess. Hepatic artery looks like a toothpick… I don't know why Davey stayed in the club. Probably his old man thought it would toughen him up. He was all wrong for the place. It was about cutting loose, getting down and dirty. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.'

This was interesting, even within the comforting membrane. Most of what Davey had said to her had been a lie 'Where did you meet?'

'Used to rent a couple of floors in the North End. When the neighbors got suspicious, we'd move into another building. Point was, once you got inside the club, you could do whatever you liked. Nobody was allowed to criticize anything another member chose to do. Don't question, don't hesitate, don't judge. Naturally, we had a few ODs. No problem, dump the body in a vacant lot. People in your generation think they invented drugs. Compared to us, you were pussies. Hash, LSD, angel dust, speed, heroin, bennies, lots and lots of coke. Now, that's one area where little Davey felt right at home. He'd go three and four nights without sleeping, shoving blow up his nose with both hands, babble about Hugo Driver until he finally passed out.'

Nora watched his hands working inside the gaping body.

'Hate the smell of bile. If people think shit smells bad, they ought to take a whiff of the stuff that goes through their gallbladder.' Dart brought a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to mop up a dark brown stain spreading across the sheet. He sliced the pear-shaped sac of Dolkis's gallbladder in half and crowed. 'What did I tell you? Gallstones. At least ten of 'em. If his liver didn't kill him first, Shelley was in line for some painful surgery.' He wrapped the mutilated gallbladder in toilet paper and set it aside, but the wet, dead stench still hung in the air.

'I want to check out this guy's pancreas and look at his spleen. The spleen is a gorgeous organ.'

'Did you bring girls to the Hellfire Club?' asked Nora.

'Any woman who walked into that place was fair game. Even Davey's crazy girlfriend, Amy something or other, came there once. Made her even crazier than she was before. Then Davey started turning up with this chick. If Amy was strange, this babe was completely weird. Men's clothes, Short hair.' Dart was severing connective tissue and ducts with quick, accurate movements of his knife. 'You'd see this cute little thing sitting alongside Davey and think Yeah, I'll jump her bones, and then for some reason you realized no, no way. Also, every word she said about herself was a lie. Hello.'

Dart held up a dripping, foot-long pancreas with a gray-brown growth the size of a golf ball drooping from its; head. 'I've seen tumors before, but this baby is something special. Shelley, your body should be on display in a glass case. I can't wait to see what his heart looks like.'

'She was a liar?'

'Have you noticed your hubby has a tendency to expand upon the truth? This girl was even worse. I guess little Davey had a propensity for crazy ladies.' He put down the diseased pancreas and gave her a twist of a smile.

'What was her name?'

'Who knows? She even lied about that. As you may have noticed, I can tell when people are lying. She was about the best liar I ever met, but she was a liar, all right. According to Davey, she went to New Haven College, and came from some little town up around here, I forget which. Chester, something like that. Granville, maybe. I checked her out. She wasn't registered at New Haven College, and no family with her last name lived in that town.'

'Could it have been Amherst?'

'Amherst? No. Why?'

'Davey once told me a story about an old girlfriend of his who said she came from Amherst. I thought it might be the same girl.'

He gave her a long, straight look. 'The lad probably reeled in wacko ladies by the hundreds. He's very pretty, after all. Anyhow, he spent almost all his free time with this one. I don't suppose they spent the whole time talking about Hugo Driver, but whenever I saw them together she was, after him to get his father to do something or other with Night Journey. She was totally focused on that book. The girl was after him to let her see the manuscript - something like that. I know he tried, but it didn't work.'

Dart manipulated the knife and held up a purple, fist-shaped organ. 'Looks surprisingly okay, considering the company it kept.'

'What happened to the girl?'

He placed the spleen beside the oozing liver. 'One night I happened to walk into our favorite pizza place, and who should I see in the back of the room but Davey and his friend. Your husband-to-be was polluted. I was hardly sober myself, but I wasn't nearly as bad as Davey. He waved me over to their table, pointed at me, and said, "There's your answer." The girl said no. It had to be the two of them, no one else. I was the answer. No, I wasn't. The girl was stone-cold sober. Finally I figured out that until he got loaded, she'd wanted him to drive the two of them someplace, and he still wanted to do it. She kept saying they could wait until the next day. That fool you married was insisting on going that night - to Shorelands. She wanted to see the place, so tonight was the night. I could drive. All this without asking me if I had the slightest interest in driving across Massachusetts at night.'

'The girl refused to have me drive them, so naturally I decided to do it. Along the way I planned to inform Davey of his girlfriend's inventions. Then we'd have an entertaining scene, wouldn't we?'

'Davey was too drunk to see that the girl was furious. He couldn't drive, and she didn't have a license. I solved their problem. "It's no good anymore," the girl kept saying, but he wouldn't listen to her. Well, off we go. Davey passed out in the backseat. The girl sat up front with me, but she wouldn't say any more than it took to give me directions. We got about a hundred miles down the highway, and Davey woke up and started quoting from Night Journey. I wish I had whatever you're supposed to use to cut through ribs, because this knife isn't making it. I got through the cartilage and stripped away a lot of the intercostal muscle, but I'm going to have to break 'em off with my hands.'

Dart grasped a rib and pulled, swearing to himself. The curved bone gradually moved upward and then snapped in half. 'Good enough, I guess.' He sliced through more cartilage.

'I tried to drown him out with the radio, but all I could find was disco shit, which I hate. Know what I like? Real music. Kind of singers you never hear anymore. Give me a good wop baritone and I'm a happy camper. Ah, getting a good view of the heart now.

'There we are, a hundred miles into the middle of nowhere, Davey spouting Hugo Driver, the girl sitting like a marble statue. All of a sudden she has to pee. Which makes me see red, because we just passed a rest stop, why didn't she pipe up then? Like a peek into this girl's mind? "Whenever possible," she says, 'I like to pee in the woods like Pippin Little, because I am Pippin Little.' This seemed like the moment to tell Davey what I know about the bitch, so I do. I have to repeat it two or three times, but he does finally get it. She may be Pippin Little, but she sure as hell isn't who she told him she was. In fact, it hits him, drunk as he is, that what she was calling herself was a hell of a lot like the name of another character in Night Journey. The girl doesn't turn a fucking hair. She says, Turn off at the next exit. I can get out there.'

' If you won't tell me who you really are, you can get out and stay out,' Davey yells.

'We're so far in the country it's like a coal mine. I get off the highway, and we're at the edge of these woods. Davey makes a grab for the girl, but she zips out and runs into the trees. Davey starts swearing at me - now it's my fault she's a liar. After ten delightful minutes, I finally suggest that his friend is taking an extremely long time to finish her business. He piles out and charges around in the woods for about half an hour. The hell with this, he says, let's go back to New Haven and this time I'm driving. He gets behind the wheel and guns the car around. All of a sudden the bitch is right in front of the car, and then she disappears. Our hero starts crying. Then he whips a gram out of his pocket, snorts about half of it, and drives away.'

'He left her there?'

'Drove away. Eighty miles an hour all the way back to dear old Yale, that maker of men, not to mention hit-and-run drivers.'

'What happened after that?'

'Crazy Amy got out of the locked ward, and Davey went straight back to mooning over her. Never came back to the Hellfire Club. Boo hoo, we all sure missed him.'

'Is there a Hellfire Club in New York?'

Dart looked up at her, eyes narrowed. 'As a matter of fact, yes. In the twenties, a group of alums decided there was no reason the fun should stop on graduation day. More formal than the New Haven thing - servants, a concierge, great food. The dues are high enough to keep out the riffraff, but the essential spirit remains the same. Why do you ask?'

'I was wondering if Davey ever went there.'

His eyes shone. 'Might have spotted that gutless hit-and-run artist within the hallowed halls a time or two. Avoided him like the plague, of course.'

'Of course.'

'Darling heart, would you do me a favor? The hammer I bought in Fairfield is in a bag on the backseat. If I'm going to break these ribs, I might as well do it a little more efficiently.'

Entirely amused. Dart stood up and watched her move toward the door. Nora went outside, where the air was of an astonishing sweetness. She looked back and saw Dart just inside the door, holding his arms, stained red to the elbows like a butcher's, out from his sides. Amusement radiated from his eyes and face. 'You should smell the air out here,' she said.

'I prefer the air in here,' Dart said. 'Funny old me.'

Heat shimmered off the top of the car. Nora leaned into the oven of the interior and opened a bag on the laden backseat. The long wooden shaft of the hammer met the palm of her hand. Her heart leaped in her chest, and her face grew hot beneath the makeup. She became aware that the thick balloon filled with emotional exhaust fumes was no longer about her. She had not noticed its departure, but it had departed all the same. Dart beckoned her back into the room with a courtly wave.

'Close the door, my dear. Only a tiny test, but you passed it beautifully.'

'You're a fun guy.'

'I am!' He pointed a red finger at Sheldon Dolkis. 'I want you right beside me. You're a nurse, you can assist. Kneel on a pillow, so as not to hurt your knees. Considerate me. Take one off that scabby bed.'

Nora knelt on the pillow and set the hammer down next to her right thigh. Dart squatted and pointed into the body cavity. 'That aortic arch looks more like a slump, and the old pulmonary trunk is like a worn-out inner tube. I want to see his superior vena cavity. Bet it's a terrible mess.' He leaned forward to peer between the ribs on the far side of the chest, clearly expecting her to do the same.

Nora's heart jumped like a fish. She picked up the hammer, still wondering if she could actually go through with it. Then she planted her left hand in the middle of his back as if for support and smashed the hammer into the side of his head.

Dart exhaled sharply and almost fell into the open body. He caught himself by sinking his hands into the cavity and tried to get to his feet. Nora leaped up and battered the back of his head. Dart sagged to his knees. She cocked back her arm and whacked him again. He toppled sideways and struck the floor.

Nora crouched over him, the hammer raised. Her heart beat wildly, and her breath came in quick, short pants. Dart's mouth hung open, and a sliver of drool wobbled from his lower lip.

She dropped to one knee and thrust her hand into his pocket for the car keys. A second later, she was running through the sunlight. She started the car and backed away from the motel. Through the open door, she saw Dick Dart rising to his knees. She jolted to a stop and tried to shift into drive but in her panic moved the indicator to neutral. When she hit the accelerator, the engine raced, but the car slid downhill. She pressed the brake pedal and looked back at the room. Dart was staggering toward the door.

Her hand fluttered over the shift lever and moved the car into drive. Waving his red arms, Dick Dart was racing toward her.

The car shot forward. She twisted the wheel, and the right front fender struck him with an audible thump. Like the girl in the story, he disappeared. Nora fastened her shaking hands on the wheel and sped downhill.

BOOK VI

FAMILIAR MONSTERS

Pippin understood the nature of his task. That was not the problem.

The problem was that the task was impossible.56

Streets, buildings, stoplights flew past her, other drivers honked and jolted to standstills. Pedestrians shouted, waved. For a lengthy period Nora drove the wrong way down a one-way street. She had escaped, she was escaping, but where? She drove aimlessly through a foreign city, now and then startled by the stranger's face reflected in the rearview mirror. She supposed that this stranger was looking for the expressway but had no idea of where to go once she got there.

She pulled to the side of the road. The world outside the car consisted of large, handsome houses squatting, like enormous dogs and cats, on spacious lawns. It came to her that she had seen this place before, and that something unpleasant had happened to her here. Yet the neighborhood was not unpleasant, not at all, because it contained…

Sprinklers threw arcs of water across the long lawns. She was in a cul-de-sac ending in a circle before the most imposing house on the street, a three-story red-brick mansion with a bow window, a dark green front door, and a border of bright flowers. She had arrived at Longfellow Lane, and the house with the bow window belonged to Dr Daniel Harwich.

Her panic melted into relief. She had reached the end of the street before she realized that Mrs Lark Pettigrew Harwich might not welcome the sudden appearance of one of her husband's old girlfriends, however desperate that old girlfriend might be. At that moment, coffee mug in one hand, Dan Harwich emerged from the depth of the room and stood at the bow window to survey his realm. A fist struck her heart.

Harwich gave Nora's car a mildly curious glance before taking a sip of coffee and raising his head to look at the sky.

He had changed little since she had last seen him. The same weary, witty competence inhabited his face and gestures. He turned and disappeared into the room. Somewhere behind him, pouring coffee for herself in a redesigned kitchen, very likely lurked wife number two.

Nora cramped the wheel and sped out of the circle, wondering how on earth she was going to find a telephone. She turned left onto Longfellow Street, another treeless length of demi-mansions old and new, all but identical to Longfellow Lane except for being a real street instead of a cul-de-sac and the absence from any of its numerous bay windows of Dr Daniel Harwich. At the next corner, she turned left onto Bryant Street, another stretch of wide green lawns and sturdy houses, and began to feel that she would spend the rest of her life moving down these identical streets past these identical houses.

At the next corner she turned left again, this time into Whittier Street, then into Whitman Street, another replica of Longfellow Lane, the chief difference being that instead of an asphalt circle at the end of the block there was a stop sign at an intersection, and directly beside the stop sign stood the metal hood and black rectangle of a public telephone.57

Three feet from a chintz sofa piled with cushions, Nora felt herself slip into a collapse. She sank a quarter of an inch, then another quarter of an inch, taking Dan Harwich's unresisting hand with her. Then an arm wrapped around her waist, a hand gripped her shoulder, and she stopped moving.

Harwich pulled her upright. 'I could carry you the rest of the way.'

'I'll make it.'

He loosened his grip, and Nora stepped around the side of a wooden coffee table and let him guide her to the sofa.

'Do you want to lie down?'

'I'll be okay. It's letting go of all that tension, I guess.' She slumped back against the cushions. Harwich was kneeling in front of her, holding both her hands and staring up at her face.

He stood up, still staring at her face. 'How did you get away from this Dart?'

'I hit him with a hammer, then I ran into him with the car.'

'Where?'

'Outside some motel, I don't remember. Don't call the police. Please.'

He looked down at her, chewing his lower lip. 'Back in a sec.'

Nora put an arm behind her back and pulled out a stiff round cushion embroidered with sunflowers on one side and a farmhouse on the other. There was still an uncomfortable number of cushions back there. She did not remember the chintz sofa or this profusion of cushions from her earlier visit to Longfellow Lane. Helen Harwich's living room had been sober and dark, with big square leather furniture on a huge white rug.

Now, apart from the mess, the room was like a decorator's idea of an English country house. Dirty shirts lay over the back of a rocking chair. One running shoe lay on its side near the entrance to the front hall. The table on which she had nearly cracked her head was littered with old newspapers, dirty glasses, and an empty Pizza Hut carton.

Harwich came back with a tumbler so full that a trail of shining dots lay behind him. 'Drink some water before it slops all over the place, sorry.' He handed her the wet tumbler and knelt in front of her. Nora swallowed and looked around for a place to put the glass. Harwich took it and set it on the table.

'You're going to leave a ring,' she said.

'I don't give a shit.' He grasped her right hand in both of his. 'Why don't you want me to call the police?'

'Right before I got abducted by Dick Dart, I was about to be charged with about half a dozen crimes. It sounds a little funny, given what happened, but I'm pretty sure that kidnapping was one of them. That's why I was in the police station.'

Harwich stopped kneading her hand. 'You mean if you go to the police you'll get arrested?'

'Think so.'

'What did you do?'

She pulled her hand away from his. 'Do you want to hear what happened, or do you just want to call the FBI and have me hauled away?'

'The FBI?'

'Couple of real charming guys,' she said. 'They had no trouble at all assuming I was guilty.'

Harwich stood up and moved to the other end of the sofa.

'If this is too much for you, I'll get out of here,' Nora said. 'I have to find this doctor. If I can remember his name.'

'You're not going anywhere,' Harwich said. 'I want to hear the whole story, but before that, let's see if we can take care of Dick Dart.' He stood up and took a cellular phone from the mantel. Nora started to protest. 'Don't worry, I won't say anything about you. Try to remember the name of that motel.' He went across the room and pulled a telephone book from beneath a stack of magazines and newspapers.

'I can't.'

'Did it have a sign?' He held his finger over a number.

'Sure, but…' She saw the sign. 'It was called the Hillside. "Like the strangler," Dart said.'

'Like the strangler?'

'The Hillside Strangler.'

'Jesus,' Harwich punched numbers. 'Listen to me. I'm only going to say this once. The escaped murderer Dick Dart checked into the Hillside Motel in Springfield this morning. He may be injured.' He turned off the phone and replaced it on the mantel. 'I suppose you'll feel safer once Dart is off the streets.'

'You have no idea.'

'So talk,' Harwich said.

She told him about Natalie Weil and Holly Fenn and Slim and Slam, she told him about Daisy's book and Aiden's ultimatum, she described the scene in the police station, Natalie's accusation, her abduction, Ernest Forrest Ernest, the Chicopee Inn. She told Harwich that Dart had raped her. She told him about the library and the shopping spree and being made up; she told him about Sheldon Dolkis.

While she spoke, Harwich scratched his head, squinted, circled the room, flopped into a chair, bounced up again, interjected sympathetic, astounded, essentially noncommittal remarks, and finally urged her into the kitchen. After gathering up the dirty glasses and utensils and stashing them in or around the sink, he made an omelette for them both. He leaned forward, his chin on his elbow. 'How do you get yourself into these situations?'

She put down her fork, her appetite gone. 'What I want to know is, how do I get out of it?'

Harwich tilted his head, raised his eyebrows, and spread his hands in a pantomime of uncertainty. 'Do you want me to take a look at you? You should have an examination.'

'On your kitchen table?'

'I was thinking that we could use one of the beds, but if you prefer, I could take you to my office. I have an operation this afternoon, but I'm free until then.'

'There's no need for that,' Nora said.

'No serious bleeding?'

'I bled a little, but it stopped. Dan, what should I do?'

He sighed. 'I'll tell you what baffles me about all this. This woman, this Natalie Weil, accuses you of beating her, starving her, God knows what, and the FBI and most of your local police force believe her. Why would she lie about it?'

'Screw you, Dan.'

'Don't get mad, I'm just asking. Does she have anything to gain from having you put away?'

'Can we turn on the radio?' Nora asked. 'Or the TV? Maybe there'll be something about Dart.'

Harwich jumped up and switched on a radio beside the silver toaster at the end of a counter. 'I guess I don't have the fugitive mind-set.' He moved the dial to an all-news station, where a man in a helicopter was describing a traffic slowdown on a highway.

'The fugitive mind-set,' Nora said.

'I'm only a jaded old neurosurgeon. I lost all my old wartime instincts a long time ago. But I'd better hide your car.'

'Why?'

'Because about a minute after they show up at the motel, they're going to be looking for an old green Ford with a certain license plate. And it's in my driveway.'

'Oh!'

The telephone rang. Harwich glanced at the wall phone in the kitchen and then back at Nora before pushing himself away from the table. 'I'll take this; in the other room.'

No longer certain of what she made of Dan Harwich or he of her, Nora turned back to the radio. An announcer was telling Hampshire and Hampden counties that the temperatures were going to stay in the high eighties for the next two or three days, after which severe thunder-showers were expected. In the next room Harwich raised his voice to say, 'Of course I know! Do you think I'd forget?'

She stood up and carried her cup to the coffeemaker. Dishes and glasses filled the sink, and stains of various kinds and colors lay on the counter. Then she heard the words 'Richard Dart' come from the radio.

'… this vicinity. Police in Springfield discovered a mutilated male corpse and signs of struggle in a room at the Hillside Motel on Tilton Street. Springfield police have indicated the possibility that the fugitive serial killer has been injured, and are conducting a thorough search of the Tilton Street area. Residents are warned that Dart is armed and extremely dangerous. He is thirty-eight years old, six feet, two inches tall, weighs two hundred pounds, has fair hair and brown eyes, and was last seen wearing a gray suit and a white shirt. The fate and whereabouts of his hostage, Mrs Nora Chancel, are likewise unknown.'

Smiling an utterly mirthless smile, Dan Harwich came back into the kitchen and stopped moving at the sound of Nora's name.

'Mrs Chancel is described as being forty-nine years of age, five-six in height, slender, weighing approximately one hundred and ten pounds, with short, dark brown hair and brown eyes, last seen wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt. Anyone seeing Mrs Chancel or any person who appears to be Mrs Chancel should immediately contact the police or the local office of the FBI.

'Police have not yet been able to identify Dart's latest victim.'

'In other local news, State Senator Mitchell Kramer resolutely denies recent charges of mishandling of…'

Harwich switched off the radio. 'Give me the keys,' Nora handed them over.

'Your life is a lot more adventurous than mine.' He smiled almost apologetically.

'I'm making you uncomfortable, so I'll go,' she said. 'You don't have to keep me around out of charity because we used to be friends.'

'We were a lot more than that. Maybe I ought to be uncomfortable now and then.' He grinned at her, and his eyes flickered, and for a second the old Dan Harwich shone through the surface of this warier, more cynical version. 'Back in a flash.'

'In the meantime, try to think about what I ought to do, will you? Can you?'

'I'm thinking about it already,' Harwich said.58

When Harwich came back, Nora said, 'I get the feeling your wife isn't expected anytime soon.'

'Don't worry about her.' Harwich arched his back. 'Lark's not in the picture anymore.'

'I'm sorry. When did that happen?'

'The disaster took place on the day we got married. I think I got involved with her to get away from Helen. You remember Helen, I suppose?'

'How could I forget Helen?'

'Probably the only time you were thrown out of somebody's house.' Harwich laughed. 'In the end, she didn't want to live here and I did, so I bought her out. Bought is the word, believe me. Two million in alimony, plus ten thousand a month in support payments. Thank God, last year she suckered some other poor bastard into marrying her. At least I covered my ass when I married Lark. She signed a prenuptial - two hundred fifty thousand, all her clothes and jewelry and her car, that's it. On the whole, I should have been smarter than to marry someone named Lark Pettigrew. I let her redo the whole place, and now I'm living in this doll-house.' He gave Nora a rueful, affectionate look. 'The woman I should have married was you, but I was too stupid to know it. There you were, right in front of me.'

'I would have married you,' Nora said.

'That last time? You turned up here like Vietnam all over again, I mean, you were wild. And I was already seeing Lark, anyhow. What I'm saying is, I should have married you instead of that miserable witch Helen'

'Why didn't you?'

'I don't know. Do you know? It's probably better we didn't. I don't seem to be very good at marriage.' He made a wide gesture with one arm and laughed. 'Lark took off about three weeks ago, and the week after that I fired the cleaning woman. I don't mind the mess. Damn woman used to rearrange all my books and papers. Excuse me, but I never understood why I should have to learn my cleaning woman's filing system.'

She smiled.

'Christ, what's the matter with me?' He clamped his eyes shut. 'All this stuff happening to you, and I'm talking about bullshit instead of helping you.'

'You're already helping me,' Nora said. 'You don't know how often I think about you.'

He leaned over the top of his chair and closed one hand around one of hers, squeezed, and released it. 'I think you should stay here at least a day or two, maybe more. I have that operation this afternoon, but I'll come back around four or five, get some food, we can see if they picked up Dart, talk things out. Let me pamper you.'

'That sounds wonderful,' Nora said. 'You'd really let me stay?'

Harwich leaned forward and took her hand again. 'If you even try to get away, I'll lock you in the attic.'

Her pulse seemed to stop.

'I can't believe I said that.' He gripped her hand, which wanted to shrink to a stone. 'Nora, you're like a godsend, you remind me of real life, can you understand that?'

'I remind you of real life.'

'Yeah, whatever that is. You do.' Harwich let go of her hand and wiped his eyes, which had suddenly filled with tears. 'Sorry, I'm supposed to be helping you, and instead I come unglued.' He tried to smile.

'It's okay,' Nora said. 'My life is a lot messier than yours.'

He rubbed his finger beneath his nose and withdrew into himself for a moment, gazing unseeing at the plates stacked at the edge of the table. 'Let's make up your bed.' He stood up, and she did too, returning his smile. 'Do you want to bring in your bags, or anything?'

'Right now, all I want to do is rest.'

'Sounds good to me,' Harwich said.59

After stopping at the linen closet for paisley sheets and matching pillowcases so new they were still in the package, they went into a front bedroom with flowered blue wallpaper and knotty pine furniture disposed around the edges of a pink-and-blue hooked rug. A rocker made of lacquered twigs sat in front of the window. Harwich ripped the sheets from their wrappers before slipping the dark blue duvet off the bed.

'The bed's comfortable, but stay out of that chair.' Harwich nodded at the rocker. 'One of Lark's inspirations - a two-thousand-dollar chair that tears holes in your sweaters.'

He snapped a fitted sheet across the bed. Nora slid the top corner over the mattress as Harwich did the same on his side. They moved down the bed to fit the sheet over the bottom corners. Together they straightened and smoothed the top sheet and tucked it under the foot of the bed.

'Hospital corners,' Harwich said. 'Be still, my heart. 'They began stuffing pillows into the cases.

'Dan, what am I going to do?'

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped toward her, the playfully ironic manner instantly discarded. 'First of all, we have to see if the police pick up Dart, or, even better, find his body. Then we want to find out if the FBI is still after you.' He put his right hand on her shoulder.

'You don't think I should try to see this doctor?'

'Aren't I good enough for you?' He tried to look wounded.

'The one Dick Dart wanted to kill.'

'The only thing you should do, if you still care about Davey, is tell him the Chancel House lawyers are selling them down the river. That might straighten out your problems with the old man.'

Dan Harwich seemed to have admitted fresh air and sunlight into a dank chamber where Nora had been spinning in darkness.

'If I were you,' Harwich said, 'I'd take his father for everything I could get. That tough old number from up the road in Northampton, Calvin Coolidge, wasn't wrong: the business of America is business.'

Nora closed her eyes against a wave of nausea and heard the shuffling of a gathering of demons. 'Don't do this to me,' she said. 'Please.'

Harwich put an arm around her waist and guided her to the side of the bed. 'Sorry. You need rest, and I'm talking your ear off.'

'I'll be okay.' She clasped her hand on his wrist, feeling completely divided: one part of her wanted Harwich to stay with her, and another, equal part wanted him to leave the room. 'I should apologize, not you.'

'Stretch out.'

She obeyed. He went to the foot of the bed, untied her shoes, and pulled them off. 'Thanks.'

'You remember this doctor's name?'

She shook her head. 'Something Irish.'

'That narrows the field. How about O'Hara? Michael O'Hara?'

She shook her head again.

'The man you want is gay, isn't he?' He began kneading the sole of her right foot with his thumbs. 'I can't think of more than three gay doctors in the whole town, and they're all younger than I am.' What he was doing to her foot set off reverberations and echoes throughout her body. 'Did you hear his first name?'

She nodded.

'What letter did it start with?'

Without any hesitation at all, Nora said, 'M.'

'Michael. Morris. Montague. Max. Miles. Manny. Mark. What else? Monroe.'

'Mark.'

'Mark?' He dug his thumbs into her left foot, and a tingle wound all the way up her backbone. 'Mark. With an Irish last name, and gay to boot. Let's see. Conlon, Conboy, Congdon, Condon, Mulroy, Murphy, Morphy, Brophy, O'Malley,

Joyce, Tiemey, Kiernan, Boyce, Mulligan, this isn't easy. Burke. Brannigan. Sullivan. Boyle.'

'Hold on. That was close. Sounds like Boyle.' She held her breath and closed her eyes, and a name floated toward her out of the darkness. 'Foyle. His name was Mark Foyle.'

'Mark Foil?'

That's the name.'

He laughed. 'Yes, but you were thinking F-o-y-l-e, which is why you thought it was an Irish name. Mark Foil is about as Irish as the queen of England, and his name is Foil as in tinfoil. Or as I heard him say once, Foil as in fencing.' He spoke the last: phrase in a mincing, affected voice.

'You know him.'

'Foiled again,' Harwich said, using the same swishy voice.

'Is he like that?'

'He couldn't afford to be. The man was a GP for upwards of forty years, and this isn't the most liberated place on the face of the earth.'

'Where does he live?'

'The good part of town,' Harwich said. 'Unlike we lesser mortals, Dr Foil can behold a great many trees when he glances out of his leaded windows.' He patted her foot. 'Look, if you want to see the guy, I'll take you over there. But the guy's one of those patrician queers.'

The word queers chilled Nora. It sounded ugly and wrong, especially coming from Dan Harwich, but she pushed aside her distaste. 'You think he wouldn't have time for me?'

'Foil never had time for me, if that's any indication. God, you should see his boyfriend.'

The telephone down the corridor began ringing. 'You could probably use a nap,' Harwich said.

'I could try.'

Released, he gave her foot a last pat, went smiling toward the door, and closed it behind him. Nora heard his footsteps racing toward the telephone, which must have been in his bedroom. A moment later, in a voice loud enough to be overheard through the door he said, 'Okay, I know, I know I did.'

She thought she might as well take a bath. On the marble shelf beside the antique sink in the bathroom lay three new toothbrushes still in their transparent pastel coffins and a pump dispensing baking soda and peroxide toothpaste. Nora struggled with one of the toothbrush containers until she managed to splinter one side. Above the tub, modern fittings protruded from the pink-tiled wall. Checking for the necessary supplies, Nora saw a tall, half-filled bottle of shampoo and a matching bottle of conditioner, both for dry, damaged hair, surrounded by a great number of hotel giveaway containers. A used shower cap lay over the shower-head like a felt mute over the bell of a trombone.

Lark had moved out of Harwich's bed before she had moved out of his house. On a shelf above the towel Nora saw a deodorant stick, a half-empty bottle of mouth wash, a Murine bottle, a nearly empty aspirin bottle, an emery board worn white in a line down the middle, a couple of kinds of moisturizer and skin cream, and a tall spray bottle of Je Reviens, almost full. She began pulling the T-shirt out of her jeans.

Someone behind her said, 'Hold it,' and she uttered a squeak and jumped half an inch off the ground.

'Sorry, I didn't mean to…'

She turned around, her hand at the pulse beating in her throat, to find and apologetic-looking Dan Harwich inside the bathroom door.

'I thought you heard me.'

'I was getting ready to take a bath.'

'Actually,' Harwich said, 'maybe we ought to get in touch with Mark Foil. In case Dart did get away, as unlikely as that is, we have to make sure Mark is protected.'

'Well, fine,' Nora said, unsure what to make of this sudden reversal.

'We might be able to go over there this morning.' His whole tempo had sped up, like Nora's pulse. Smiling in an almost insistent way, he went sideways through the bathroom door, silently asking her to come with him.

'You changed your mind in a hurry.'

'You know my whole problem? I can't get out of my stupid patterns. I think Mark Foil looks down on me, and I resent that. An egotistical voice in my head says I'm a hotshot and he's only a retired GP, who does he think he is, screw him. I shouldn't let that kind of crap keep me from doing what's right.'

Nora followed him into a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed and a big-screen television set. Clothes lay scattered across the floor. 'What was Dart going to say to these people? How was he going to get into their houses?'

'I was supposed to be writing something about that summer at Shorelands - the summer of 1938. Everybody knows about Hugo Driver, but the other guests have never been given their due. Something like that.'

'Sounds good,' Harwich said. 'If I have a talent for anything besides surgery, it's for bullshit. Who do you want to be?' He kicked aside a pile of old socks and sweat clothes on his way to a bookcase.

'Gosh, I don't know,' Nora said.

'What's a lady-writer kind of name? Emily Eliot. You're my old friend Emily Eliot, we went to Brown together, and now you're writing a piece about whatsit, Shorelands. Let's see, you got a Ph.D. from Harvard, you taught for a while, but quit to be a freelance writer.' He was paging through a fat directory. 'We have to make you a respectable citizen or Mark Foil won't give you the time of day. You published one book five years ago. It was about… hmm… Robert Frost? Was he ever at Shorelands?'

'Probably.'

'Published by, who? Chancel House, I guess.'

'And I was edited by Merle Maivell.'

'Who? Oh, I get it, he's the big gun there.'

The biggest,' said Nora, smiling.

'The whole point about lying is to be as specific as possible.' He flipped a page and ran his finger down a list of names. 'Here we go. Since this is Mark Foil we're talking about, he might be spending the summer on a Greek island, but let's give it a try. What was his boyfriend's name, Somebody Monk, like Thelonious?'

'Creeley,' she said.

Harwich dialed the number and held up crossed fingers while it rang.

'Hello, I wonder if I could speak to Mark, please… This is Dan Harwich… Yes, of course, hello, Andrew, how are you?… Oh, are you? Wonderful… Provincetown, how nice for you… Well, if you think you could… Thanks.'

He put his hand over the receiver. 'His boyfriend says they're going to Provincetown for the rest of the summer. Doesn't sound too good.' He attended to the telephone again. 'Mark, hello, this is Dan Harwich… An old friend of mine from Brown, a writer, showed up here in the course of doing research for a book, and it turns out that she wants to get in touch with you… That's right. Her name is Emily Eliot, and she's completely house-trained, Harvard Ph.D… A poet named Creeley Monk?… Yes, that's right. She's interested in the people who were at a place called Shorelands with him, and it seems she came across your name somewhere.

He looked at her. 'He wants to know where you saw his name.'

Dart had not explained how he had heard of Mark Foil. 'Doing research on Creeley Monk.'

He repeated the phrase into the telephone. 'No, she did a book before this. Robert Frost… Yes, she's right here.'

He held out the receiver. 'Emily? Dr Foil wants to talk to you.' When she took it from him, he pretended he was working a shovel.

A clipped, incisive voice nothing like Harwich's effeminate parody said, 'What is going on. Miss Eliot? Dan Harwich doesn't have any serious friends.'

'I was a youthful mistake,' Nora said.

'You can't be writing a book about Creeley Monk. Nobody remembers Creeley anymore.'

'As Dan said, I'm working on a book about what happened at Shorelands during the summer of 1938. I think Hugo Driver's success unfairly eclipsed the other writers who were there.'

'Do you have a publisher?'

'Chancel House.'

A long silence. 'Why don't you come over and let me take a look at you? We're going out of town this morning, but we still have some time.'60

A slender, smiling young man in a lightweight gray suit and black silk shirt opened the door of the stone house amid the oak trees and greeted them. Harwich introduced his friend Emily Eliot to the young man, Andrew Manindale, who looked straight into Nora's eyes, widened his smile, and instantly changed from a diplomatic male model into a real person filled with curiosity, humor, and goodwill. 'It's wonderful that you're here,' he said to Nora. 'Mark is tremendously interested in your project. I wonder if you know what you're in for!'

Nora said, 'I'm just grateful that he's willing to talk to me.'

'Willing is hardly the word.' Martindale let them pass into the house and then stepped backwards onto a riotous Persian rug. A broad staircase with shining wooden treads stood at the end of a row of white columns. 'I'll take you into the library.'

At the end of the row of columns, he opened a door into a book-lined room twice the size of Alden Chancel's library. In a dazzle of sunlight streaming through a window, a white-haired man in a crisp dark suit who looked unexpectedly familiar to Nora was standing beside an open file box on a gleaming table. He grinned at them over the top of his black half-glasses and held up a fat volume bound in red cloth.

'Andrew, you said I'd find it, and I did!'

Martindale said, 'Nothing ever gets lost in this house, it just goes into hiding until you need it. And here, just in time to share your triumph, are Dan and Ms. Eliot. Would you like some coffee? Tea, maybe?'

This was addressed to Nora, who said, 'If you have coffee ready, I'd love some.'

The white-haired man tucked the red book under his arm, twinkled the half-glasses off his nose and folded them into his top pocket, and came loping across the room with his right hand extended. He was as smooth as mercury, and though he must have been in his mid-seventies, he looked as if he had undergone no essential physical changes since the age of fifty. He shook Harwich's hand, then turned, all alertness, interest, and curiosity, to Nora, who felt that with one probing glance Mark Foil instantly had comprehended all that was important within her, including a great deal of which she herself was unaware.

Harwich introduced them.

'Why don't we sit down so that you can tell me about yourself?' Foil indicated a plump sofa and two matching chairs near the bright window. A glass table with a neat stack of magazines stood within reach of the furniture. Nora took one end of the sofa, and Mark Foil slid into the other. As if he were cutting her loose, Harwich moved around the glass table, sat down in the chair beside the far end of the sofa, and lounged back.

'You haven't been sleeping very well, have you?' Foil asked.

'Not as much as I'd like,' she said, surprised by the question.

'And you've been under a good deal of stress. If you don't mind my asking, why is that?'

She looked across at Harwich, who looked blandly back.

The past few days have been kind of strange,' she said.

'In what way?'

Looking at the kind, intelligent face beneath the white hair, Nora came close to admitting she was here under false pretenses. Mark Foil took in her hesitation and leaned forward without altering his expression.

Nora looked up from Foil to Harwich, who was staring at her in unhappy alarm.

'To tell you the truth,' she said, 'I've just become menopausal, and my body seems to have turned against me.'

Foil leaned back, nodding, and behind him, unseen, Harwich flopped back into his chair. 'Apart from your looking much too young, it makes a lot of sense,' Foil said, 'You're seeing your gynecologist, keeping a watch on what's going on?'

'Yes, thanks.'

I'm sorry if I seemed to pry. I'm like an old firehorse. My reflexes are stronger than my common sense. You and Dan were friends at Brown?'

'That's right.'

'What was our eminent neurosurgeon like in those days?'

Nora looked across at our eminent neurosurgeon and tried to guess what he had been like at Brown. 'Ferocious and shy,' she said. 'Always angry. He improved once he got into medical school.'

Foil laughed. 'Wonderful thing, the memory of an old friend. Keeps us from forgetting the cocoons from which we emerged.'

'Some old friends remember more than you imagine possible,' Harwich said.

'When I was that age, I read Browning and Tennyson until they came out of my ears. Not very up to date, I'm afraid. I suppose part of what I liked about Creeley's work was that although he was much better than I ever would have been, he wasn't very up to date, either. In medicine you have to be up to the minute to be any good at all, but I don't think that's true in the arts, do you?'

Andrew Martindale backed through the door holding a wide silver tray with three cups and a silver coffeepot in time to hear Foil's last sentence. He turned around to carry the tray toward the glass table. 'Not again.'

'But this time we have a Harvard Ph.D. and professional writer to consult. Emily, what do you think? Andrew and I have an ongoing argument about tradition versus the avant-garde, and he's completely pig-headed.'

Martindale slid the tray onto the table, almost clipping the stack of magazines. Nora looked at them and knew she was lost, out of her depth, about to be exposed as a fraud. Avec, Lingo, and Conjunctions, which almost certainly represented Martindale's taste in literature, might as well have been written in Urdu, for all she knew of their contents.

'Settle our argument,' Foil said.

Harwich said, 'You shouldn't-'

'No, it's all right,' Nora said. 'I don't think you can settle it, and I don't think you want to, because you get too much fun out of it. Speaking for myself, I like both Benjamin Britten and Morton Peldman, and they probably hated each other's music.' She looked around at the three men. Two of them were gazing at her with undisguised friendly approval, the third with undisguised astonishment.

Martindale smiled at them all and vanished.

As if following stage directions, the three of them picked up their cups and sipped the excellent coffee.

'You're right, we enjoy our ongoing argument, and part of what I like in Andrew is that he keeps trying to bring me up to date. And although Creeley's work is not the sort of thing he generally likes, he's been supportive of my efforts to publish a Collected Poems.' Foil smiled at her. 'It would be nice if your work finally permitted me to do him justice.'

Nora felt like crawling out of the house.

'Merle must be your editor.'

'Excuse me?'

'Merle Marvell. At Chancel House. Isn't he your editor?'

'Oh, yes, of course. I didn't realize you knew him.'

'We've met him a half dozen times, but I don't really know him except by reputation. As far as I know, Merle is the only person at Chancel who'd have enough courage to take on a project which might turn out less than flattering to Lincoln. In fact, I have the idea that Merle is the only real editor at Chancel House.'

Nora smiled at him, but this conversation was making her increasingly uncomfortable.

'Do you think Chancel House would be willing to publish something which puts Driver in a different light? Creeley didn't think much of him to begin with, and by the end of the summer, he positively detested the man.'

'I think they're willing to present a balanced viewpoint,' Nora said.

'Well, then.' Foil placed his cup in its saucer. 'I don't see why I shouldn't share this with you.' He picked up the thick red book. 'This is the journal Creeley kept during the last year of his life. I read it when I went through his papers after his death. Read it? I studied it. Like every suicide's survivor, I was looking for an explanation.'

'Did you find one?'

'Does anyone? He had been disappointed the day before he killed himself, but I wouldn't have thought…' He shook his head, the memory of defeat clear in his eyes. 'It still isn't easy. Anyhow, if you're interested in bringing the celebrated Hugo Driver down a peg or two, this will be useful to you. The man was a weakling. He was worse than that. It took a while for Creeley to convince anybody of the fact, but he was a thief.'61

Nora's blood seemed to slow. 'Are you saying that he stole other writers' work?'

'Oh, they all do that, starting with Shakespeare. I'm talking about real theft. Unless you're saying that Driver actually plagiarized Night Journey. But if that was your story, I hardly suppose Chancel would be backing you.' He grinned. 'Instead of giving you a contract, they'd be more likely to put one out on you, Merle Marvell or no Merle Marvell.'

Harwich chuckled, and Nora silenced him with a murderous glance. 'Are you saying that Creeley Monk saw him steal things from the other guests?'

'Not just Creeley, thank goodness. You're interested in all of them, aren't you? In everything that went on that summer?'

She nodded.

This is what I'm prepared to do.' He gestured with the book. 'I'll describe some of the contents of this journal. You continue your research while Andrew and I are on Cape Cod. When I get back, I'll talk to Merle Marvell and hear what he has to say about you and your project. I'd do that now, but we have limited time this morning. You have the most - ah, colorful - neurosurgeon in the state vouching for you, so I'm willing to go farther than I normally would, but I want to be as cautious as is reasonably possible. You have no objections, I assume?'

She thought hard for a moment while both men looked at her, Harwich shooting sparks of wrath and indignation, Foil calmly. 'Why don't I send you the chapters after they're written? If you let me borrow the journal, I could have more time to sort through all the information, and I can get it back to you at the end of the summer.'

He was already shaking his head. 'I hold Creeley's papers in trust.' Seeing that Nora was about to object, he raised an index ringer. 'However! When Merle tells me that you are indeed what you say you are, as I'm sure he will, I'll give you a copy of all the relevant pages from this diary. Do we have an agreement?'

Harwich gave her a grim, unhappy glance. Nora said, 'I think that will be fine.'

'Okay, then.' A suppressed vitality came into his features, and Nora saw how eager he had been all along to do justice to his dead lover. 'Let me tell you something about his background, so you'll be able to appreciate what sort of person Creeley was.' He paused to gather his thoughts. 'He was a year behind me at the Garand Academy, on a scholarship. We were all alike - except Creeley. Creeley was as conspicuous as a peacock in a field of geese.

'Creeley's father was a bartender, and his mother was an Irish immigrant. They lived in a little apartment above the bar, and he had to take two buses to get to school. Creeley turned up wearing big black work shoes, a hideous striped suit far too big for him, and a Buster Brown collar with a velvet bow tie. Of course, the older boys beat him up, and that was that for the Buster Brown collars, but he kept the velvet bow tie. That had been his idea. He'd read that poets wore velvet bow ties, and Creeley already knew he was a poet. He also knew, at the advanced age of fourteen, that he was sexually attracted to other males, although he pretended otherwise. In order to survive, he had to. But he didn't see any point in pretending about anything else.

'By his second year he resembled the rest of us. Because he was absolutely fearless, because he was such a character, he already had a place in the school. Everybody cherished him. It was remarkable. Here was this utterly philistine school, and Creeley Monk single-handedly made them - us - respect a literary vocation. In his junior year, he published a few poems in national magazines.'

'I went to Harvard, and he came on a full scholarship a year later. It didn't take us long to become close. Creeley and I lived together while I was at medical school, and he moved to Boston when I had my internship and residency there. He got a job writing catalogue copy for a publishing house, and we had separate apartments in the same building, which was his choice. He didn't want to do anything that might compromise my career. But in every other way we were an established couple, and when I moved back here, he did, too. Again, we had separate apartments, and I went into practice with two older men. During this time, Creeley and I were like people in an open marriage. He was devoted to me, and God knows I was devoted to him, but he was promiscuous by nature, and he was commuting to Boston almost every day, so that was how it was.'

'He began publishing in all kinds of journals and magazines, gave readings, won a few prizes. In 1937 The Field Unknown came out, and I'm happy to say it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Georgina Weatherall invited him to Shorelands for the following July, and we both saw this as a great sign.'

'In the end, he was disappointed. None of the writers he most admired were present, and two people there had not even published books - Hugo Driver and Katherine Mannheim. He had seen one story by Katherine Mannheim in a literary magazine, and rather liked it, but she had published a fair amount of poetry, which he liked a lot more. In person, she turned out be a very pleasant surprise. He had imagined her as a kind of a lost, waiflike little thing, and her sharpness and tough-mindedness came as a surprise. There was something else he liked about her, too. I'll read you some of that from the diary. Hugo Driver was another matter. Creeley had read some of his stories in little magazines and thought they were weak tea. Even before Creeley became aware of his thieving, Driver made him uncomfortable. In his first letter back to me, he said Driver was "dank and desperate," which turned into a running joke. After a while, he was referring to Driver as "D&D" in the diary, and then that became "DD," which became "DeDe," like the girl's; name.'

The others were a mixed bag. Austryn Fain struck him as a clever nonentity, a sort of literary hustler who spent most of his time trying to charm Lincoln Chancel into giving him a lot of money for his next book. Then there was Bill Tidy. Creeley respected Tidy, and he loved his book. Our Skillets. They had a lot in common. So he went to Shorelands anticipating a kind of meeting of minds, but Tidy put up a rough-spoken, workingman front and refused to talk to him.'

'And then there was the rising star of the gathering, Merrick Favor. Creeley was instantly attracted to him, but it was hopeless. I could see what was coming when he wrote that the first time he went to dinner in Main House and saw Favor talking to Katherine Mannheim in a corner, he thought he was seeing me!'

Suddenly Nora realized that the reason Mark Foil had seemed like a known quantity to her was that he was an older version of the handsome young writer in the famous photograph. She managed to say, 'Yes.'

'I suppose he really did look like me, but that was all we had in common. Favor was straight as a die and a compulsive womanizer to boot. He and Austryn Fain both flirted with Katherine Mannheim, but she wouldn't have either one of them. She made fun of them. Even Lincoln Chancel made some kind of crude pass at her, and she demolished him with a joke. But you know the lure of what you can't get. Creeley developed a hopeless crush on Favor. It drove him crazy, and he enjoyed every frustrating second of it.'

'You didn't mind?' Nora asked.

'If I'd minded that sort of thing, I couldn't have put up with Creeley for a week, much less all those years. He wasn't designed to be celibate. Do you know how the place was set up, how they lived, what their days were like?'

'Not in much detail,' Nora said. 'They lived in different houses, didn't they, and they had dinner together every night?'

Foil nodded. 'Georgina Weatherall lived in Main House, and the guests were assigned to cottages scattered through the woods around the gardens. These were one- and two-story affairs originally built for the staff, back when the family who owned the place had an army of servants. Creeley was in Honey House, one of the smallest cottages, all by itself on the far side of the pond. He had only two tiny rooms and a saggy single bed, which made him very grumpy. As the only woman guest, Katherine Mannheim was put by herself in the next-largest guest house, Gingerbread, stuck back in the woods past the gardens. Austryn Fain and Merrick Favor shared Pepper Pot, and Lincoln Chancel and Dank and Desperate were installed in the biggest cottage, Rapunzel, which had a stone tower on one side and was halfway between Gingerbread and Main House. Chancel had the tower for himself. I suppose he commandeered it.'

'I still don't really understand why Lincoln Chancel wanted to go there in the first place,' Nora said, having just realized this. 'He had his businesses to take care of, and he hardly had to spend a month in a kind of literary colony for the sake of Chancel House.'

Foil started to answer and checked himself. 'I always took his being there for granted, but he didn't have to subject himself to Georgina's selection of writers, did he? He wasn't there for the entire month, though, he showed up only for the last two weeks.'

'The answer's obvious,' Harwich said. The other two waited. 'Money.'

'Money?' Nora said.

'What else? The Weatheralls owned half of Boston. Lincoln Chancel was supposed to be richer than God, but didn't his whole empire turn belly-up pretty soon after all this? He was looking for cash to start up his publishing company.'

'Anyhow,' Foil said, 'to get back to Shorelands, even the normal guests had no formal daily schedule. During the day they could do as they pleased as long as they stayed on the estate. If they wanted to work, the maids carried box lunches to the cottages. If they wanted to socialize, Georgina held court on the terrace. You could swim in the pond or play tennis on the courts. The gardens were famous. Guests wandered around the different areas, or sat on the benches and read. At six everyone gathered in Main House for drinks, and at seven, they went into the dining room. Let me read you something. This is what Creeley wrote when he got back to Honey House on his first night.'

He opened the red book and flipped through pages until he found the entry he wanted.

'The gods in charge of railways having seen to my arriving at this longed-for destination five hours late, thereby postponing the death of my illusions, I was escorted in haste by the alarming Miss W., an apparition in blazing, ill-assorted colors (purple, red, orange, and pastel blue) distributed among layers of scarves, shawls, gown, stockings, and shoes, also in a not-to-be-ignored profusion of monstrous jewels, also in ditto face paint, down a narrow path through the gardens- all splendid so far - to a narrower path leading at weary length to my abode, Honey House, a name which had implied rustic charm to susceptible me. In reality, rustic Hovel House is charmless. Miss W. pointed with a ring-encrusted finger to a tiny prison bedroom, a squalid kitchen alcove, a clunky desk where I am to Create! Create! Cawing, she "left me to my devices."

'Whom do I see upon first entering the Baghdad of the Main House lounge but, sensibly engaged with a pretty boy, my life's ever-sensible companion? Salvation! He had arrived to rescue me from the Hovel! Down flaps Milady, attired in even gaudier rags, face a-glow with fresh paint, to screech introductions to my own, yet not my own MF but his virtual doppel-ga'nger, MF2, who in fact is last year's literary darling, Merrick Favor, and the boy, an actually not-terribly-androgynous young woman revealed to be Katherine Mannheim, whose work appeals to me. As does Katherine herself, due to her prickly unsentimental good nature, her stylish unstylishness, her caustic wit, and, not least, her readiness to admit dismay at our hostess and her realm. And also, alas, to the Favored one, due no doubt to all of the above save the last, Well-Favored being too polite for words, but more than these to her physical attractions. MF2 tolerates my intrusion, and we three discuss our current projects, I already in thrall to 2, he eying the girl. 2 at work on a novel, of course, at which KM declares herself "unwriting" a novel. I ask about unwriting, and she replies, "Just like writing, only in reverse." We murmur admirations of Georgina, which 2 sweetly takes at face value. Among the others I recognize Bill Tidy from publicity photos - awkward, shy, and out of sorts, I must make common cause with him soon- and a bearded string bean who must be Austryn Fain. (At dinner I will be across from him, and yep, he is, fain would I lament he is a talentless lunkhead intent on buttering up Milady, even unto exclaiming over her tacky collection of "art," which consists of a jumbled crowd of eame st daubs all but obliterating her prize, a fine Mary Cassatt, and her only other decent piece, a moody Redon vastly preferred by me.) 2 shares lodgings with Lunkhead and pretends not to be displeased, and Lunkhead, as misguided as his roommate, shares 2's yearnings for KM. In a corner lurks a bedraggled soul later revealed to be one Hugo Driver, of whom the better must remain less said. Invited to drink, I strike a blow for the proletariat by requesting an un-posh Wine Spo-dee-o-dee, half red wine, half gin, oft served at the paternal inn, and KM delights by putting down her bubbly and asking for a lethal Top-and-Bottom, equal parts port and gin. These are wincingly delivered.

'Dinner likewise consists of sweet and raw in equal portions, for while KM coruscates and gorgeous 2 is resolutely amiable, our hostess utters dilations upon the Germanic Soul. I deflect attention to the paintings. Mary Cassatt receives her due, and the eame st daubers are praised to the skies, creepy Fain chiming in. I remark upon the little Redon, which displeased Milady screeches she installed only because of its name. What does Miss Mannheim think of the wondrous Lockesly portrait of yon peasant before his sheepfold? inquires Georgina, seeking to restore the proper moral lone. "I think," said KM, "of Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster."

"Oh my dear," smirks Georgina, "you mean, you surely intend to say…"

"That bellwether is a Buster if I ever saw one," said KM, and sharply we returned to the magnificence of all things Teutonic.'

Mark Foil looked up from the diary and gave Nora an almost apologetic glance. 'Creeley fell into this tone when he was rattled or insecure, and alcohol always encouraged his showy side. He mentions only one Wine Spo-dee-o-dee, something he only drank when he wanted to offend people he thought were being pretentious, but I'm pretty sure he had at least three of them. Of course he loved the girl's ordering a Top-and-Bottom, it proved they were two of a mind. They used to talk about their "outsider drinks."'

'Outsider drinks,' Nora said, jolted by another reference to Paddi Mann.

'Creeley learned about them from the musicians who used to come to the family bar. But he also meant that the two of them were outsiders at Shorelands. The joke about Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer took care of her, and Georgina wasn't completely obtuse, she at least sensed that Creeley thought she was absurd, so he was on the outs, too. Which meant we have this little situation here.'

'What did Driver steal?' Nora asked.

Two loud thumps came from the other side of the door. Andrew Martindale walked in, tapping the face of his watch with a satisfied expression on his face. 'Thirty-three minutes, a world record. How are we doing?'

'As usual, I've been talking too much,' said Foil. He pulled up his sleeve to glance at his own wrist watch. 'We still have plenty of time if we don't dawdle on the way.'

Martindale went to a wing chair on the far side of the room, where he crossed his legs and composed himself.

'Where were we?' Foil asked.

'Stealing,' Nora said.

'We were stealing something?' said Martindale.

'Hugo Driver was stealing something.' Foil opened the red diary and turned pages. 'This was a few days before Lincoln Chancel's arrival, and all sorts of trunks and boxes, even furniture, had been delivered to Rapunzel and set up in the tower. Chancel insisted on his own bed, so it came on a truck and was carried up into the tower, and the old one went into the Main House basement. He had a ticker tape machine put in, so he could keep up with the stock market. A big carton of cigars arrived from Dunhill. A catering company installed a mahogany bar in one room and stocked it with bottles.'

Foil examined a page. 'Here we are, the day before Chancel's arrival. Like good outsiders, Creeley and Katherine Mannheim had been indulging in Top-and-Bottoms, and in the middle of dinner he had to leave the table to visit the bathroom. Who should he spot acting fishy in the lounge but good old D&D, Hugo Driver, who had left the dining room without anyone's noticing.

'I did not even see him at first, and I might not have seen him at all if he hadn't sucked in enough air to fill a balloon and followed that by kicking one of the legs of the sofa. When I looked toward the source of these noises, I observed KM's embroidered bag sliding down the back of the sofa and coming to rest on the seat with a distinct rattle. D&D, whom I had thought wrapped in his usual nervous gloom back at the table, emerged around the side of the sofa and slid something into the right pocket of his shabby hounds-tooth jacket. He twitched the flap over the pocket and tried to face me down. What a pathetic creature it is. I stopped moving and smiled at it and in a very quiet voice asked it what it was doing. I believe it all but fainted. I said that if it replaced the stolen object at once, I would keep silent. The nasty sneak bared its teeth and informed me that Miss Mannheim had requested that it bring her a pillbox from an inner compartment of the bag, and that had I not been fixated on Rick Favor, I would have overheard the exchange. I had observed KM whispering to D&D, and its dank desperate glee at having been so favored, but that had been all. It produced the proof of its innocence, a small silver pillbox. Soon after my return from the bathroom, another laborious dinner and its hymns to Nietzsche and Wagner happily in the past, I inserted myself into the scented region between 'Rick and KM and described what I had seen and said. KM brandished the pillbox, and 2 unsubtly implied I had imagined the theft. I implored her to look through the bag, and when she complied I saw, though 2 did not, an amused expression cross her features. 'Who steals my purse steals trash/ she said. Excited now, dear 2 prepared himself to assault D&-D, but was stayed by KM's saying that no, nothing was missing, certainly nothing of value, and he had after all produced the invaluable box, from which she then extracted a minute ivory pill and lodged it like a sweet beneath her pointed tongue.

'But two weeks later,' Foil said, 'while everyone else paid court to Lincoln Chancel, Driver slipped a pair of Georgina's silver sugar tongs into his pocket, and Creeley saw him do it. The first person he told was Merrick Favor, and Favor called him a degenerate and said that if he didn't stop slandering Hugo Driver, he'd punch him in the face.'

'Speaking of degenerates,' Andrew Martindale said from his distant chair, 'the lunatic who escaped from jail in Connecticut is on the loose in Springfield, what about that? Dick Dirt?'

'Dart,' Nora croaked, and cleared her throat. 'Dick Dart.'

'He was in a motel on the other side of town. When the police got there, all they found was a corpse cut to pieces in one of the rooms. No sign of Dart. The reporter said the body looked like an anatomy lesson.'

Nora's face felt hot.

Foil was watching her. 'Are you all right, Ms. Eliot?'

'You have to drive to Provincetown, and we're keeping you.'

'Let me worry about getting us to Cape Cod in time. Are you sure you're all right?'

'Yes. It's just…' She tried to invent a reasonable-sounding explanation for her distress. 'I live in Connecticut, in Westerholm, actually, and I knew some of Dick Dart's victims.'

Andrew Martindale looked sympathetic, Mark Foil concerned. 'How terrible for you. Did you ever meet this Dart person?'

'Briefly,' she said, and tried to smile.

'Would you like to break for a couple of minutes?'

'No, thank you. I'd like to hear the rest.'

Foil looked down again at the book open in his hands. 'Let's see if I can boil this down. Lincoln Chancel arrived on schedule and almost immediately turned Hugo Driver into a kind of servant, sending him on errands, generally exploiting him in every way. Driver seems to have gloried in the role, as if he expected to keep the job when the month was over. Poor Creeley was left out in the cold. I gather that Merrick Favor mentioned his accusations to one or two people, and after that both he and Katherine Mannheim were out of favor with their hostess. She more than Creeley, actually, because she quickly became absorbed with her 'unwriting,' whatever that meant, and even skipped a few dinners to work on it. This put her in such disfavor that everybody began to feel that it was only a matter of time before Georgina booted her out, as she'd been known to do when a guest seriously disappointed her.

'One night they all took part in a ceremony called 'the Ultimate,' which took place in an area called Monty's Glen. I don't know any more about it, except that it was boring. All Creeley said in his diary was 'the Ultimate, yawn, glad that's over.' But the next day all the excitement began. After lunch, Creeley was out walking through the gardens. Merrick Favor came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, and Creeley all but passed out. For a second, he thought Favor had boiled over and wanted to hit him, but instead he apologized to Creeley. Hugo Driver really was a thief, or so he strongly suspected. Then he explained himself.

'Favor had been trailing after Katherine Mannheim through the gardens, hoping to have a word alone with her, but every time she sat down for a moment, one of the other men popped through an opening in a hedge and sat down beside her. The last one had been Driver, and Favor had watched them say a few words to each other until Miss Mannheim got up and walked away through a gap in the hedges. Favor had started to go toward her when he saw Driver notice that she had left her bag lying half open on the bench, and he stopped to watch what would happen. Driver glanced around' - Foil imitated the quick movements of a man who wishes not to be observed , and moved closer to the bag. From where he was standing. Favor couldn't see Driver dip into the bag, and Driver was clever enough not to look at his hands. Favor was pretty sure what was going on, anyhow, and he was almost certain that he did see Driver slide some kind of object into his jacket pocket, so he came out of hiding and confronted the little weasel. Driver denied everything. He even said he'd had enough of these accusations and intended to complain to Georgina. Off he went. Favor took the bag to Miss Mannheim and told her what he'd seen. When she looked in the bag, she laughed and said, 'Who steals my trash steals trash.' That night she disappeared.'

'After Favor thought he saw Driver stealing something from her bag,' Nora said.

'Right. She didn't show up for dinner. Georgina was irritated and foul to everyone, even Lincoln Chancel. Late at night, Creeley went out for a walk and came across Chancel and Driver near Bill Tidy's cottage, and Chancel was extraordinarily rude to him. He told him to stop sneaking around. The next night, again no Katherine Mannheim, and after dinner, Georgina led the entire party to Gingerbread on the pretext of seeing whether Miss Mannheim was ill. Everybody could sense that unless they found Katherine Mannheim in a high fever and too weak to get out of bed, Georgina was going to throw her out on the spot. Instead, she was gone. She'd taken off sometime between the previous afternoon and that night. Georgina didn't even seem surprised, Creeley wrote. She behaved as though she expected to find an unlocked door and empty cottage. 'I am sorry to say,' she said, 'that Miss Mannheim appears to have jumped the wall.' And that was that. She had a number for one of Miss Mannheim's sisters and called her to ask her to remove the few things left behind in the bungalow, and the next day the sister arrived. She had no idea where Miss Mannheim could have gone. She wasn't in her apartment in New York, and she hadn't spoken to anyone in her family. She was unpredictable, and she'd previously disappeared from places where she'd felt uncomfortable. But her sister did have one huge worry.'

'That she was dead,' Nora said.

'You've heard about her weak heart. The sister was afraid that she might have wandered into the woods and suffered heart failure, so she insisted on calling in the police. Georgina was furious but gave in. For a couple of days, the Lenox police questioned the guests and staff at Shorelands. They searched the grounds and the woods. In the end, it seemed pretty clear that she had run off, and a week later, the summer was over.'

'And then all these deaths,' Nora said.

'Like a plague. Georgina must have felt some sort of renewal was called for, because she immediately paid for a lot of extensive renovations, but all those deaths cast a long shadow over the place.'

'There's going to be a long shadow over us,' Andrew Martindale said.

'One more minute.' Foil consulted his watch and skipped over a thick wad of pages. 'I want you to hear something from the end, so you'll know as much as I do about Creeley's death.' He looked up again. 'If you learn anything at all that might shed light on this, I'd appreciate being let in on it. I know it isn't likely, but I do want to ask.'

'I'll tell you about anything I find,' Nora said.

'It's so enigmatic. Here's what Creeley wrote in his journal three days before he killed himself.

'All at once, a beam of light pierces the depression I've been in since leaving Shorelands. It seems there is hope after all, and from a most Unexpected Quarter. Interest in high places! What a blessed turn, if all goes as it should.

'Then this, the next day.

'Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Done. Finished. I should have known. At least I did not babble to MF. How cruel, to be written only to be unwritten,

'And that's it, that's all, that's the last entry. I didn't hear from him on either of those days. When I tried to call the operator told me his phone was off the hook, and I assumed he was working. I knew he'd been unhappy for a long time, so it was good to think he was working hard. But he never let three days go by without at least talking to me, and the next day, when I still couldn't get through to him, I drove to his apartment after my last patient.'

Foil paused for a moment. 'It was a dark, miserable day. Freezing. We'd had a terrible winter. I don't think we'd seen sunlight for a month. I got to his building. Creeley had the top floor of a duplex, with a separate entrance to his part of the house. After I got out of the car, I climbed over a snowbank and looked up at his windows. All his lights were on. I went up the steps to the porch and rang his bell. His downstairs neighbors, the owners, were both out, and I could hear their dog barking. They had a collie named Lady - high-strung, like all collies. That's a desolate sound, you know, a dog barking in an empty house. Creeley didn't answer. I thought he'd turned up his radio to drown out the sound of the dog, which he had to do off and on during the day. He didn't mind, Creeley played music all the time when he was writing, and the only problem with turning it up was that sometimes he couldn't hear the bell. I rang it a few more times. When I still didn't hear him coming down the stairs, I took out my key and let myself in, just like a hundred times before.'

'As soon as I got in, I heard his radio going full blast. "Let's Dance," Benny Goodman's theme song. It was one of the remote broadcasts they used to do in those days. I went up the stairs calling out his name. Lady was going crazy. Before I got to the top of the stairs, I started smelling something. I should have recognized the smell right away.'

I opened his living room door, but he wasn't there. I hollered his name and turned the radio down. That blasted collie got even louder. I knocked on the bathroom door and looked in the kitchen. Then I tried the bedroom.

'Creeley was lying on his bed. Blood everywhere. Everywhere. He'd used the shotgun his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday, when he still had hopes of normal male hobbies for his son. I went into shock. I just shut down. It seemed like I stood there for a long time, but it could only have been a couple of minutes. After a little while, I called the police and waited like a robot until they came. And that was that. Try as I might - and I tried, all right - I never understood why he did it.'62

'Well, I understand why he did it.' Harwich turned out of the driveway onto Oak Street and rotated his shoulders several times, as if trying to shake off the atmosphere of the past thirty minutes. He leaned sideways to see himself in the rearview mirror and ruffled the tight gray curls on the side of his head. 'Mark is an okay guy, but he doesn't want to see the truth.'

Nora pointed at a driveway a little way ahead of them on the other side of the street. 'Pull in there.'

He stared at her. 'What?'

'I want to see them leave.'

'You want - Oh, I get it.' He pulled up slightly ahead of the driveway between two wings of a stone wall, and backed in. 'See? You think I don't know what this is about, but I do.'

'Good,' Nora said.

'You want to make sure they get away safely.'

'I'm glad you don't mind.'

'I didn't say I didn't mind. I'm just a very agreeable person.'

'So tell me why Creeley Monk killed himself.'

'It's obvious. This guy reached the end of his rope. First of all, he was a working-class kid who pretended to be high society. From the second he got into that school, his whole life was an act. On top of that, he couldn't sustain his initial success. Shorelands was supposed to raise him to a new level, but no one wanted to publish his next book. One flutter of interest sends him into ecstasies, and when it doesn't pan out, he's devastated. He takes the shotgun out of his closet and ends it all. Simple.'

This clever, rapid-fire dissection, as of a corpse under a scalpel, irritated Nora unreasonably; Harwich had reduced Mark Foil's account to the empty diagram of a case history.

'Anyhow, you did a good job in there,' Harwich told her. 'But there is this little issue about that editor who turns out to be part of the Homintern. Did you get that? We've met him a couple of times? Pretty soon Mark is going to know this book is just a smoke screen, and then he's going to have a lot of questions for me.'

'It's no big deal. I said I had a book contract, and it turns out I don't. I'm writing the book before I take it to a publisher.'

'I'm still in a tricky position. Anyhow, there they are, safe and sound.' He nodded toward a long, graceful-looking gray car moving down Oak Street in front of them. 'Not a care in the world, as usual.'

'You don't like them, do you?'

'What's to like?' he burst out. 'These two guys live in a world where everything's taken care of for them. They're so smug, so lovey-dovey, so pleased with themselves, tooling off to Cape Cod in Martindale's new Jaguar while his patients climb the walls.'

'I thought he was retired.'

'Mark's retired, except from all the important stuff, the state boards and the national committees. Andrew has about six jobs, as far as I can make out. Head of psychiatry here, professor of psychiatry there, chief of this and that, a great private practice full of famous painters and writers, plus his books. The Borderland of the Borderline Patient. The Text of Psychoanalysis. William James, Religious Experience, and Freud. I forget the others.' He pulled out of the drive, enjoying her amazement.

'I thought…' Nora did not want to admit what she had thought. 'How can he take a month off? Oh, I forgot. It's August, when all the shrinks go to Cape Cod.'

That's right, but Andrew spends his month off running a clinic in Falmouth. And writing. He's a busy lad.' He gave her a sidelong, appraising look. 'Hey, why don't you take some time off yourself ? You shouldn't run around on your own while your madman is on the loose. And there's no point in trying to find this Tidy character.'

'What do you think happened to Katherine Mannheim?'

'Easy. Everybody thought either she ran away or died in the woods, so they couldn't see that both things were true. She's carrying her suitcase through the woods at night, the weight is too much for her, an owl scares her, blooey. A couple of nitwit cops pretend to search the woods, and surprise, surprise, they don't find her. I've never been inside Shorelands, but I've seen it, and even now we're talking about two square miles of wilderness. An army couldn't have found her.'

'You're probably right,' she said, idly watching suburban houses grow closer together as the lots shrank and sprouted the swing sets, wading pools, and bicycles in the driveway she had seen while Dick Dart drove them into Fairfield in Ernest Forrest Ernest's car. 'Oh, my God.'

Harwich gave her a look of concern.

'I know why Lincoln Chancel went to Shorelands.'

'Money, I told you.'

'Not for the reason you think. He was trying to recruit Georgina Weatherall for his Fascist cause, the Americanism Movement. Lincoln Chancel secretly supported the Nazis. He got together a bunch of sympathetic millionaires, but they had to keep quiet during the war. In the fifties, Joe McCarthy roped them into anti-Communism, I guess, and they had to go along.'

He looked at her suspiciously. 'I have to say, you do liven things up. Let me take you out for dinner tonight, I know a great French place out near Amherst - a little bit of a drive, but it's worth it. Amazing food, candlelight, the best wines. Nobody'll see us, and we'll be able to have a good long talk.'

'Are you worried about somebody seeing us?'

'We have to keep you under wraps. In the meantime, I'll order a pizza. There's not much food in the house. You can get a nap, and I'll go to the hospital. Don't answer the phones or open the door for anyone, okay? We'll keep the world at arm's length for a while and get reacquainted all over again.'

Nora leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Instantly, she was standing in a forest clearing ringed by tall standing stones. Counting money into neat stacks at a carved mahogany desk placed between two upright stones, Lincoln Chancel glanced up and glared at her. Misery and sorrow overflowed from this scene, and Nora stirred and awakened without at first recognizing that she had fallen asleep. Longfellow Lane rolled past the windows like a painted screen.

'Right now you need to be taken care of,' Harwich said.

He pressed a button clipped to his visor to swing up the garage door and drove inside to park beside Sheldon Dolkis's green Ford. As soon as he got out of the car, he moved to the wall and flipped a switch to bring the heavy door rattling down, A bare overhead light automatically turned off, and the door clanked against the concrete. Nora felt almost too tired to move. Harwich's dim form moved past the front of the car toward the right side of the garage. 'You okay?' he said, and opened an interior door. A panel of gray light erased the front of his body and turned his hair to silver fuzz.

'Guess I didn't know how tired I was. She dragged herself out of the remarkably comfortable seat and noticed that a small figure like a white sparrow had perched atop the car's hood. No, not a bird, a winged woman, poised for flight. This had a meaning, but what meaning? Oh yes, what do you know, Dan Harwich numbered among his possessions a Rolls-Royce. How odd; the deeper into the world she descended, the further up she went. The car door closed with a bank vault's serious thunk, and Nora went past the waiting Harwich into the house.

'Everything caught up with you,' he said from behind her. He put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and squeezed past in the narrow space of the rear entry, lightly kissed her, and took her with him through the kitchen to the living room, where she stood embarrassed in the midst of a yawn while he darted forward and drew down on a cord which advanced dark curtains across the bow window. 'Let's get you settled,' he said, and ushered her gently up the stairs, past the linen closet, and into the guest room, where he conducted her toward the bed and removed her shoes once she had stretched out. She yawned again, hugely.

'You fell asleep in the car for about ten minutes.'

'I did not.' The protest sounded childish.

'You did,' Harwich said in an amused echo of her tone. 'Not very peacefully, though. You made a lot of unhappy noises.' He began massaging the sole of her right foot.

'That feels wonderful.'

'Why don't you take off that T-shirt and unbutton your jeans? I'll help you slide them off.'

'No.' She shook her head back and forth on the pillow.

'You'll be more comfortable. Then you can slide under the covers. Hey, I'm a doctor, I know what's best for you.'

Obediently she sat up and yanked off the white V-necked shirt, turning it inside out in the process, and flipped it toward him.

'Cute bra,' he said. 'Do the top of those jeans.'

Protesting, she flattened out and undid the button, pulled down the zip, and wiggled the jeans over her hips. Harwich yanked them down, and in one quick movement they whispered over her thighs, knees, feet. 'Matching panties! You're a fashion plate.' He raised the sheet and the cover so that she could wriggle under and then lowered them over her, not without a little tucking and parting. 'There you are, sweetie.'

'What a guy,' she heard herself say, and roused herself to add, 'Give me about an hour, okay?' The words sounded distant in her ears, and soft, slow-moving bands of color began to spill from the few objects visible through the slits of her eyes, one of them being Dan Harwich as he drifted toward the door.

The broad circle of grass within the tall stones looked like a stage. Nora moved forward as Lincoln Chancel wrapped bands around the stacks of bills before him and one by one placed them in a satchel as carefully as if they were raw eggs, He gave Nora a sharp, disgruntled look and returned to his task. 'You don't belong here, he said, seeming to address the satchel.

His ugliness outdid the famous photograph, in which it had seemed a by-product of rage. It was an entire ugliness, domineering in its force.

'No sand in your craw. A few setbacks and you're on your knees, whimpering Daddy, help me, I can't do it on my own. Pathetic. When people talk to you, all you hear is what you already know.'

'I understood why you went to Shorelands,' she said, doing her best to mask the fear and impotence she felt.

'Consider yourself fired.' He sent her a cold, ferocious glance of triumph and pulled a thick cigar from his top pocket, bit off the end, and lit it with a match which had appeared between his fingers. 'Go home. It's not a job for a little girl.'

'Screw you,' Nora said.

'Gladly.' He grinned at her like a dragon through a flag of smoke. 'Even though you're too scrawny for my taste. In my day we liked our women ample - womanly, we used to say. Tits like bolsters, buttocks you could sink your hands into, Women to make your pole stand up and beg for it. One other kind I liked, too - small ones. Every big man wants to roger a little thing. Get on top, you feel like you'll either snap their bones or split 'em in half. But you're not that type, either.'

'The Katherine Mannheim type.'

He drew on the cigar and blew out a quivering ring of smoke that smelled like rotting leaves. 'The runaway.' Instead of losing its shape and drifting upward, the trembling smoke ring widened and began shuddering toward Nora. 'Little bitch didn't have the manners of a whore.'

The smoke ring floated into the middle of the grassy circle, paused, and twisted into nothingness. Pretending that she had already followed orders and left. Chancel snapped the lock of the satchel over the last wad of bills, and her question spoke itself in her head. What did she say…

'What did she say to you while the photograph was being taken?'

He looked over at her and mouthed the cigar. 'Who?'

'Katherine Mannheim.'

'I graciously invited her to sit on my lap, and she said, "I've already seen your warts, I don't have to feel one, too." Tidy and that blockhead Favor both laughed. Even the pansy smiled, and so did that poser with the funny name. Austryn Fain. What kind of a handle is Austryn Fain?' He aimed the astonishing nose at her like a gun. 'You don't know anything. You don't even read the right books. Get out of here. Lose yourself in the woods.'

She cried out and found Harwich's shadowy, reassuring face inclining toward her. 'Ow, that hurt,' he said, maintaining his smile. 'You walloped me!'

'Sorry. Bad dream.' A long leg brushed hers, and she squinted at his face.

'Do you always make so much noise in your sleep?'

'Get out of this bed. What are you doing here?'

'I'm trying to calm you down. Come on. There's nobody here but me.'

Nora dropped her head back on the pillow.

'Nobody's going to hurt you. Dr Dan is right here to make sure of that.' He slid closer to her and inserted an arm between her head and the pillow. A smooth cotton shirt encased the arm. 'In my medical opinion, you need a hug.'

'Yeah.' She was grateful for this simple kindness.

'Close your eyes. I'll get out of here when you fall asleep again.'

She turned into his arms and tugged a corner of the pillow between her head and his shoulder. He caressed the side of her head and began stroking her bare arm. 'Your operation,' she murmured.

'Long way off.'

'I never sleep during the day,' Nora said, and in seconds proved herself a liar.

When she opened her eyes again, Harwich passed a warm hand up her arm and tugged the sheet over her shoulder. Various, not entirely subjective internal dials and gauges informed her that she had spent a significant time asleep. What time was it? Then she wondered if Dick Dart had been arrested since they had left Mark Foil's house. Harwich circled her waist with an arm.

'Don't you have an operation pretty soon?' she asked.

'Took less time than I thought it would.'

'It went all right?'

'Except for the demise of the patient.'

She whirled around to face him and found him propping his head on one hand, smiling down 'Joke. Barney Hodge will live to tear another thousand divots from the country club greens.'