The Hellfire Club

'How long have I been asleep?'

'Most of the day. It's about five-thirty.'

'Five-thirty?'

'When I got. back, I checked on you, and there you were, out cold, even quiet. I was getting the feeling that you refought the war every time you fell asleep.'

'I just about do, according to Davey.'

'Not in my house.' He leaned forward and brushed his lips against her forehead. 'My house is good for you.'

'So are you,' she said.

'I like to think so.' He raised her chin with his hand and kissed her gently on the lips.

'The perfect host.'

'The perfect guest.' He kissed her again, for a longer time and far more seriously.

'I'd better get out of bed before we do something foolish,' she said, relieved that he was in his clothes, and then noticed his bare shoulder visible above the sheet. 'You took your shirt off.'

'More comfortable. Fewer wrinkles. Besides, a shirt seemed so unfriendly.' He circled her waist and pulled her toward him to whisper, 'Pants did, too.' She stiffened, and he said, 'We're alone here. We don't have to answer the phone or open the door. Why don't we spend a little time together? I want us to be nice to each other. You re this spectacular person, and we really care for each other.'

'Whoa, hold on,' she said. 'What are you doing?'

He smiled at her. 'Nora, one of the best things about this lovely relationship of ours is that we always wind up in bed. You go out and raise hell all over the place while I stay here in my hole, marrying the wrong people out of boredom, I guess, but sooner or later you always explode back into my life and we charge our batteries all over again. Isn't that right?'

'Jesus,' Nora said.

'It's always the same, and this time you show up more gorgeous than ever! You're out of your mind with worry…'

'Hardly just worry.'

'… and come right here because you knew you belonged with me. We're in this little bubble of time made just for us. Inside that bubble we help each other, we heal each other. When we're healed, we go on and tackle all the other crappy parts of life.'

'I'm not so sure about that,' Nora said. 'Hold it, I have to tackle the bathroom before I make any decisions here.'

'All the decisions were made a long time ago,' Harwich said. 'This is the follow-through.'

Some fierce emotion she could not begin to identify gripped her, lifted her out of bed, and carried her toward the bathroom. Harwich said, 'I'll be here when you get back,' but she hardly heard him. She locked the door and sat on the toilet, her face blazing. The enormous feeling within her refused to speak its name even as it sent tears brimming in her eyes. He wanted to take care of her, she needed his care. This had seemed to be true. 'But I don't need to get laid,' she whispered to herself. 'I don't need him to fuck me.' She flushed the toilet and looked around at the objects on the bathroom shelves, the dangling shower cap, the lush hotel bathrobe, the shampoo and conditioner, the perfume. 'Oh, my God,' she said to herself, I'm an idiot.'

She stood up, washed her hands, and wrapped the thick robe around herself, all the while watching her feelings align themselves into new positions. The largest of these feelings - not humiliation, chagrin, regret, not even the ghost of her old attachment to Dan Harwich, but simple anger - sent her back into the bedroom to face him.

'What's that for?' he asked, referring to the robe.

'My self-respect,' she said. 'Battered as it is.'

'Uh oh. Come on, Nora, sit down and talk to me. I want to help you.'

'You did help me,' she said, moving toward the chair where he had deposited her clothes. His own jeans lay folded over the top of the chair, his shirt unfurled like a jacket across the back. 'You took me in, you fed me , you let me see Mark Foil. I'm grateful, so thanks, Dan.'

'You're not grateful, you're upset. I understand, Nora. You went through a terrible experience, and it's still affecting you. You don't think you can trust anybody, and when I try to comfort you, all the bells go off. You suddenly think you can't trust even me. Part of the fault is mine, I can see that.'

Halfway to the chair, she turned around and faced him, wrapping her arms around her chest. 'What part is that. Dan?'

'I take too much for granted.'

'Christ, you said it.'

'I mean, I didn't think you could misunderstand me that much. I promise you, Nora, I had no intention of doing anything you didn't want to do.'

'And one of the best things about our relationship is that we always wind up in bed, so after I felt good and safe, you'd really help me out and have sex with me.'

'Let's face it, Nora, we do go to bed together, and we do feel better afterwards.'

'You feel so much better afterwards you go out and get married. You always have girlfriends, don't you, Dan? When one wife finally figures you out and gets fed up, you have her replacement lined up to put her name on the prenuptial agreement. The first time I turned up here, you brought me home from the motel to meet Helen and give her a really good reason to get out quick so you could marry Lark. You couldn't marry me, I'm too crazy.'

'Nora, you don't want my life. There isn't enough excitement here for you.'

She turned away, went to the chair, and stepped into her jeans with her back to him.

'I'm crazy about you. I think you're an amazing woman.'

'You don't have any idea who I am. I'm your shipboard romance.' She fastened the jeans and threw the robe aside, let him gape. 'You're tantalized by the chaos I bring to your tedious, self-important existence, but you want to keep it at bay. It's whoopee time with the emotional bag lady, and when party time is over, back to the girl in the oil-deck circle, right?' She had been wrestling the T-shirt, trying to pull it right side out but in her agitation only bundling the body of the shirt into one of the sleeves. She pulled fabric out of the sleeve and tugged the shirt on inside out. The girl whose things are all over the bathroom, the one who called you twice this morning, the girl who swipes little mementos from the hotels the two of you stay in when you go away together.'

'All the fiction in the world isn't in novels,' he said, marveling.

'This is the same girl who told you she was coming over here this morning, when you suddenly changed your mind and decided to whisk me off to Mark Foil's house. You figured you could fend off the third Mrs Harwich for a day or two. I'm too much of a risk to keep around longer than that, aren't I?'

Harwich was sitting up in bed with his arms around his raised knees, watching her with an expression of mild, half-amused perplexity. He hesitated for a conspicuous beat before speaking, as if assuring himself that she had finished at last. 'Would you like to stop fantasizing and listen to the truth?'

The only thing I don't understand,' she said, 'is why she doesn't sleep in your bedroom. I really don't get that part. Does; she snore like a pig, or are the two of you saving a whole night together in the master's bedroom for after the wedding, like a reward kind of deal?'

Hairwich inhaled deeply, leaned forward, and opened his hands, palm up, the image of beleaguered reason. 'This whole picture you're describing is all made up. It isn't real. Dick Dart knocked you for a loop, remember? As long as you can keep in mind who I am, the real me and not this monster you just invented, I'll be as patient and supportive as I know how. Maybe you can't accept that right now, but it's the God's truth.'

This spoke to all of her old feelings about Dan Harwich, and his reasonableness, his steady, kind, affectionate regard, filled her with doubts. This was Harwich, she reminded herself. Three years ago she had thrown herself at him. Could she blame him for catching her? It was true. She had willingly helped him speed up the wreckage of his first marriage. 'Say more,' she said.

'I don't blame you for feeling strange about Lark. But I was honest about her. I told you I was already seeing her when you came here last time. I can't pretend I've ever been a faithful husband, because I haven't. Okay? I confess. I mess around. I get bored. I need what you have, that… spirit. But honest, this is the truth, I don't have a new bride waiting in the wings.'

'Then whose stuff is that in the bathroom?'

He looked sideways for a moment, considering, then again met her eyes. 'Okay. But bear in mind that I don't really have any reason to explain this or anything else. You see that, don't you?'

'So explain.' Her angry certainty was ebbing away.

'What the hell, Nora, I'm not a monk. During the course of my tedious, self-important life, it has now and then come to my attention that some women really do prefer having their own separate bathroom. So I put some toothbrushes and other stuff in there just in case.'

'You didn't change your mind about taking me no see Mark Foil because your new girlfriend said she was coming over?'

'I don't blame you for letting the past few days make you suspicious of men. And I know it looks bad, my getting into bed with you, but cross my heart, I had no intention of coercing you into having sex. I hope you believe me.'

She sighed. 'Honest to God, Dan, I almost-' The telephone in the bedroom down the hall rang once, twice, and Harwich's face modulated from earnest entreaty to a spasm of irritation and back to a close approximation of innocent indifference before it rang a third time. 'Don't you want to get that?'

'This is more important.'

'It might be the hospital.'

'Trust me, it's just some pest.'

The distant telephone continued to ring: a fifth time, a sixth, a ninth time, a tenth.

'Don't you have an answering machine?'

He held her eyes expressionlessly for a moment or two. 'I turned off the machine on that line.'

'Why would you do that?' Nora watched calculation, annoyance, and something alert and wary appear in his face. 'Why, Dan?'

The telephone stopped ringing.

'I guess it wasn't such a good idea,' he said. 'But hell, nobody's perfect.'

'You bastard.' She felt as though she had been punched in the stomach. 'You slimy, self-serving, lying creep,' The feeling in her stomach intensified. 'You almost had me talked into getting back into bed with you.'

'Do it anyhow. What's the difference? This is about you and me. To hell with anybody else.'

'You still think you have a chance, don't you?'

'Consider this. I was protecting your feelings. Okay, I have a woman friend, I've known her for a couple of months, and she stays here from time to time. I don't know if I'm going to marry her. If I'm not willing to let her destroy our relationship, why should you?'

She looked at him in outright amazement. 'You really are an absolute bastard. Boy, I wonder what you… No, I already know.'

'You know what I think of you? I doubt that very much. But don't waste time brooding about it, just get in your car and go. At this point, I don't see much point in prolonging the situation. Take off. Nice to know you, kind of.'

She considered throwing some heavy object at him but then realized with a sad, final thump of defeat that he was not worth the effort. 'Answer one question for me, will you?'

'If you insist.'

'Why does this woman sleep in here instead of your bedroom? I don't get it?'

'Because of the pillows,' Harwich said. 'If you really want to know.'

'The pillows?'

'She's allergic to down pillows, and they're the only kind I can stand to sleep on. These are foam. I think sleeping on a foam pillow is like having sex with a condom.'

She found she could smile. 'Dan, I don't see much of a future for your third marriage.'

His eyes hardened, and his mouth thinned like a lizard's. 'The truth is, Nora, you were always a little nuts. Being nuts was okay in Vietnam - it probably helped you make it through - but it sure as hell doesn't work anymore.'

'I'm beginning to understand that you have a lot in common with Dick Dart.' She walked down the side of the bed toward the door. Harwich slid an inch or two away, trying to pretend that he was merely finding a more comfortable position. 'On the whole, I prefer Dick Dart. He's a lot more upfront than you are.'

'See what I mean?' he said, smirking, now that he was out of reach.

She opened the door and looked at him as calmly as she could. 'Aren't you a little worried?'

'Why don't you just leave? Do I have to tell you never to come back, or have you figured that out for yourself?'

'That old Ford is parked really close to your car,' she said, and closed the door behind her. She could hear his shouts as she went down the stairs, and they followed her through the kitchen. By the time she had raised the garage door and started the car, he was standing naked in the back door, no more than an absurd figure with a potbelly, stork legs, and graying pubic hair, yelling but too afraid of being seen by his neighbors to come any closer. She backed out without touching the Rolls.63

'D-E-O-D-A-T-O,' Nora spelled.

During the seconds while the telephone reported a dense silence, she regretted the impulse to call the Chancels' manservant. Why had she imagined that Jeffrey would not go immediately to Daisy, or Alden if Alden was home, or even the police? When the need to talk to someone in Westerholm had seized her, enigmatic Jeffrey had seemed the most likely candidate, although for an irrational moment she had imagined consulting Holly Fenn. She still wished she could talk to Fenn, absolute proof, if after Harwich she needed proof, of her rotten taste in protective men. A telephone began to ring, and she realized that she had not considered what she would do if an answering machine picked up. Nora moved the receiver away from her head and heard a metallic voice say 'Hello.' Was this voice Jeffrey's? Nora envisioned a room full of cops in headphones leaning over a tape recorder. She moved the receiver back to her ear, more uncertain than ever.

A male voice, Jeffrey's, repeated the greeting as a question.

She spoke his name.

Silence. Then, 'Nora.' She had never before heard him speak her name without calling her 'Mrs.' Most often, he had never called her anything but 'you.' 'Where are you?'

'In Massachusetts.'

He paused for a moment. 'Would you prefer me to keep quiet about this? Or would you like me to speak privately to anyone in particular?'

'I don't know yet,' she confessed, understanding that 'anyone in particular' meant Davey. Jeffrey's tact extended to his private life.

He weighed this. 'Are you all right?'

'I think that remains to be seen. I guess I'm trying to decide what to do. Everything's so complicated.' She fought the desire to break down into tears. 'Jeffrey, I'm sorry to do this to you, but I don't exactly feel safe right now.'

'No wonder,' he said. 'All sorts of people are trying to find you.'

'Don't make me ask a lot of questions. Please, Jeffrey.'

Nora could all but hear him thinking. 'I'll try to tell you what I know, but don't hang up and disappear on me. okay? Nobody's listening, I'm alone in my room, and you're fine as long as you stay where you are, at least for now. You're at a pay phone?'

'Yes.' Her anxieties ebbed.

'All right. It's a good thing you called on this line. The other ones are all tapped.'

'Oh, God,' she said. 'They still think I kidnapped Natalie Weil.'

'They're acting that way.' An ambiguity hung in the air while he hesitated. 'From what I overhear, Mrs Weil isn't making a lot of sense.' There was another brief silence. 'For what it's worth, I don't think you went near her.'

'What about Davey?'

'Davey's under a lot of pressure.'

'He's staying with his parents?'

'Yes. Pretty soon he'll be right here.'

'With you?'

'In my apartment. In what used to be my apartment. Until yesterday he was staying in your house, at least at night, but with all the excitement, Mr Chancel persuaded him to move back here. He put his foot down about staying in his old bedroom, but after Mr Chancel… um, temporarily changed the conditions of my employment, he agreed to take over my place.'

'Alden fired you?'

'Mr Chancel called it a provisional suspension. He was very sorry about it. Our salaries will be paid through the end of the month, and if conditions are right, we can return. If not, he'll give us two months' severance pay and sterling recommendations.'

'Us?'

'My aunt and me. I'm packed up, and when she finishes we'll be leaving.'

Nora discovered that she could be shocked. 'But Jeffrey, where will you go?'

'My aunt is going to stay with some cousins on Long Island. I'd drive her out there, but she won't let me, so I'm dropping her at the train station, and I'll stay with my mother for a while.'

Nora had never considered that Jeffrey might have a mother. He seemed to have arrived on the planet fully formed, without the customary mediation of parents. 'He ordered you and Maria out so that Davey could stay in your apartment?'

'Mr Chancel told us that his business was not doing as well as it should, and that for the time being he had to make certain sacrifices.'

It sounded to Nora as though the German deal Dick Dart had mentioned had fallen through. Good. She hoped that Chancel House would dwindle and starve. For a time, her attention wandered from whatever Jeffrey was saying.

'… but still. Here's Merle Marvell asking about that time, that place, and right away we get suspended, or fired, or whatever it is.'

'I'm sorry, Jeffrey, I faded out for a little bit. What happened?'

'Merle Marvell asked Mr Chancel if the firm had signed up a woman to do a book about… a certain subject. A few writers. Someone had just called Mm asking about it, and he thought it sounded funny because he'd never heard of it.'

'Hold on, hold, on.' Nora tried to grasp what he had said. 'Merle Marvell told Alden someone was asking about a woman who claimed to be writing a book?'

'I'm sorry for bringing it up. I wondered… sorry. Forget it.'

'Jeffrey-'

'My aunt would jump down my throat if she knew I brought this up. The Chancels have always been very generous to us. Look, is there anything I can do for you? Do you need money? I'm coming up to Massachusetts anyhow, so I could bring you whatever you need.'

'Jeffrey,' Nora said, and then thought that she probably would be in need of money before long. But that was not Jeffrey's problem; his problem sounded closer to home. 'Did this woman's book have to do with a place called Shorelands? And what went on there in 1938?'

Jeffrey did not respond for a moment, and then said, 'That's an interesting question.'

'I'm right, aren't I?'

Again he considered his words. 'How do you know?'

'Well, I hope you'll keep this to yourself,' she said, 'but I'm the woman.'

Jeffrey managed a partial recovery. 'The woman pretending to be writing the book about Shorelands in 1938 was you.'

'Why does it matter to you?'

'Why does it matter to you?'

'That's a long story. I think I'll get off now, Jeffrey. I'm getting nervous.'

'Don't hang up,' he said. 'This might be straight out of left field, but have you ever heard of a woman named Katherine Mannheim?'

'She was at Shorelands that summer,' said Nora, more baffled than ever.

'Were you looking for information about her? Was Katherine Mannheim why you cooked up this story about a book?'

'What's all this to you, Jeffrey?' Nora asked.

'We have to talk. I'm going to pick you up and take you somewhere. Tell me where you are and I'll find you.'

'I'm in Holyoke. At a pay phone on a corner.'

'Where?

'Ah, this is the corner of Northampton and Hampden.'

'I know exactly where you are. Go to a diner or something, go to a bookstore, there's one down the street, but wait for me. Don't run away. This is important.'

The line went dead. Nora stared at the receiver for a second and then dropped it on its hook. No longer quite aware of her surroundings, she stepped away from the telephone and tried to make sense of what she had just learned. Jeffrey had overheard Alden's half of a conversation with Merle Marvell. Mark Foil, no fool, had called Marvell to check on 'Emily Eliot,' and the puzzled editor had immediately telephoned his boss at home. Why was Alden at home? Because the president of Chancel House had to face the unpleasant task of firing two long-standing employees? Or because Daisy had not recovered from her fit, and the great publisher had to deal with the consequences of dismissing her caretakers? Nora could not imagine Alden fetching drinks and bowls of soup to his stricken wife… Ah, of course: tricky Alden, getting, as usual, exactly what he wanted. Daisy's weakness had forced Davey back to the Poplars. Alden had put him under his thumb by linking his concern for his mother to the hypothetical independence of separate living quarters over the garage. Getting what you wanted was easy if you had the morals of a wolverine.

Nora's satisfaction at having worked out this much evaporated before the remaining mystery, that of Jeffrey. Why should he care about an obscure, long-dead poet?64

Nora walked slowly to the edge of the pavement There, side by side in the next block, stood the plate-glass window of Unicorn Books and a dark blue awning bearing the words Dinah's Silver Slipper Cafe. As if on cue, her stomach told her that she was ravenous.

Into the bookstore she sailed, for the moment holding her hunger at bay. She moved along toward Night Journey and its less celebrated siblings, pulled all three paperbacks from the shelf, and carried them to the counter.

'Driver, Driver, Driver,' the man said. 'Dark, darker, darkest.'

'I gather you don't approve,' Nora said.

He rang up the total, and she gave him twenty of Sheldon Dolkis's dollars.

'I have a few doubts about Night Journey.'

'What kind of doubts?'

'Not my cup of tea,' he said, and handed her the bag.

'I want to know more about your doubts,' she said, fending off her hunger. 'People keep telling me I have to read it.'

'The Driver people are like Moonies. They're worse than authors, worse even than authors' wives.'

'I know two people who read it once a year,' Nora said.

'All kinds of people get the bug. A lot of them never read anything else. They love it so much that they want to read it all over again. Then they think they've missed something, and they read it a third time. By now they're making notes. Then they compare discoveries with other Driverites. If they're tied into computer discussion groups, that's it; they're gone. The really sick ones give up on everything else and move into those crazy houses where everybody pretends to be a different Driver character.' He sighed and looked away. 'But I don't want to spoil the book for you.'

Within the pastel interior of Dinah's Silver Slipper, an efficient young woman led Nora to a table by the window, handed her a three-foot-high menu, and announced that her waitress would be right with her.

Nora lined the books up in front of her. The later two were each several hundred pages longer than Night Journey. Nora turned them over and read the back jackets. Night Journey was the classic, world-famous, much-beloved, et cetera, et cetera. Readers everywhere had blah blah blah. The manuscripts of Twilight Journey and Journey into Light had been discovered among the author's papers many years after his death, and Chancel House and the Driver family were pleased to grant his millions of admirers the opportunity to blah blah blah.

'Hold on,' Nora said. 'Author's papers? What papers?' An alarmed female voice said, 'Excuse me?' A college-aged girl in a blue button-down shirt and! black trousers stood beside her. 'I'll have the seared tuna and iced coffee, please.'

She opened Night Journey, leafed past the title page, arrived at Part One, entitled 'Before Dawn,' and began grimly to read. The waitress placed a basket of bread sticks at the far end of the table, and Nora ate every one before her meal appeared before her. She fed herself with one: hand while propping up the book with the other. The landscapes were cardboard, the characters flat, the dialogue stilled, but this time she wanted to keep reading. Against her will she found that she was interested. The hateful book had enough narrative power to draw her in. Once she had been drawn in, the characters and the landscape of caverns and stunted trees; through which they wandered no longer seemed artificial.

She knew the reason for her anger, and it had nothing to do with Night Journey or Hugo Driver's unfortunate influence on susceptible readers. Jeffrey had told her that Davey was moving back to his parents' house. He had succumbed to Alden's gravitational pull.

More than an hour had passed while she consumed the seared tuna and nearly a third of Night Journey. Jeffrey was close to the Massachusetts border, speeding toward Holyoke to pick her up and take her somewhere.

BOOK VII

THE GOLDEN KEY

'You shall find it, Pippin,' said the old man. His beard rustled along the ground.

'I promise you that. But will you recognize it when you find it?

And do you imagine that if you succeed in claiming it, it will make you happy?'

65

Nora went back down the sidewalk and sat facing Northampton Street on a wrought-iron bench in the shade of an awning. Shelley Dolkis's Ford stood at a parking meter on the far side of the pay telephone, some ten or fifteen feet away. A few cars drove past, none containing Jeffrey. At five-thirty on an August afternoon in Holyoke, most people had already reached the places they were going.

Nora had forgotten to put another set of quarters in the meter, which now displayed a red violation band. She had no desire to get back into that car. Then she remembered the suitcase on the backseat and darted over to it. She leaned into the airless oven of the interior, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and tossed the keys onto the front seat.

At first she placed the carry-on bag on the bench beside her, then tucked it under the bench and gave herself a gold star for criminal cunning. Jeffrey failed to appear. Two or three minutes later, a dark blue vehicle with the sobriety of a hearse drew near. Nora straightened up and waited for it to pull to the curb behind the Ford, but at a steady fifteen miles an hour it proceeded toward the corner of Northampton and Hampden. The driver, a gaunt old party in sunglasses and a fishing hat, stared straight ahead as the car crept past her.

Now the only two cars on the street were a block away to the north, the wrong direction. Nora leaned back into the bench and closed her eyes. She counted to sixty and opened them. A muddy pickup with a Red Sox pennant dangling from the antenna chugged in from the south. She sighed, opened her bag, and took out Night Journey. Pippin was hiding in a crumbling old house where an evil crone dragged herself from room to room searching for him. The door creaked, and Pippin heard the crone's hairy feet whispering on the rotting floorboards. She looked up. The old man in the fishing hat had pulled into a parking spot in front of Dinah's Silver Slipper and was now stepping cautiously toward the restaurant's entrance. Behind him, like an ocean liner following a tug, came an old woman in a bright print dress. Nora looked the other way, and a police car with HOLYOKE P.D. on its door was swinging out around the mud-splashed truck.

Nora dove back into the book. 'Where, oh, where can my pretty be? I want to stroke my pretty boy.'

The police car drove past, and the tingling in her scalp receded. She kept her head tilted toward the book, watching the car move toward the end of the block. It veered left and made a wide U-turn in front of the pickup. She moved the book closer to her face. The police car cruised to a stop in front of the blue hearse. She peeked at the policemen. The officer in the passenger seat got out, walked across the sidewalk, and went into the Silver Slipper.

The police were looking for Nora Chancel, a woman with dark brown hair who never wore makeup. She opened her bag, found the Cover Girl Clean, and snapped it open to examine herself in the mirror. Far too much of Nora Chancel had surfaced through her disguise. She smoothed on a layer of makeup and erased the more prominent lines, applied mascara and lip gloss, tweaked and ruffled her hair into an approximation of what Dick Dart had accomplished. She risked another glance at the policemen and felt half the tension leave her body. They were leaning against the car and drinking coffee.

Far off to the south, a siren rose into the air, at first barely audible, gradually growing more insistent, finally becoming the distant explosions of red and yellow from the lights across the top of a state police car. Nora rammed the bag under her arm, stood up, and took a step forward. One of the Holyoke cops looked at her. She stretched her arms, twisted right and left, and went back to the bench. Where's the book, get the book, it's in here somewhere. She pulled a book from the jumble in the bag, opened it, and pretended to read.

The two cops gulped the last of their coffee, strolled to the corner, and dropped their cups into a wire basket. Fiddling with their shirts and ties, they moved off the sidewalk to walk down the street toward the Ford. When they passed Nora, the officer who had looked at her turned his head and made a flapping, downward gesture with his hand. Stay put.

She nudged the suitcase farther back under the bench and watched the flamboyant arrival of the state police.

The car wailed to the front of the Ford and turned off its lights and siren a second before another highway patrol car came screaming into Northampton Street. Two big men in flat-brim hats left their car angled in front of the Ford. One of them began questioning the two policemen while the other walked past the green car and waited for the second state vehicle. The clamor of the siren shut off in mid-whoop, but the light bar stayed on. One of the big troopers consulted with the driver of the second car, who got out along with his partner and matched the plate with a number in his notebook. Both men from the second car walked crouching around the Ford to peer through the windows. They pulled gloves from their belts and opened the front and rear doors on the driver's side. One of them leaned in and brandished the keys. He gestured to the local cops. The younger of the two jogged back toward his police car while the trooper opened the trunk and began poking through bags and boxes.

His partner walked back to their vehicle and rapped on a rear window. The window rolled down, and the state policeman put his hands on the sill and leaned forward to talk to two men in the backseat. The troopers who had arrived first were talking to the remaining Holyoke cop, who pointed across the street, then at the Ford, and finally at his own car. Nora bent forward and groped for the handle at the top of her suitcase.

One state policeman looked up, grinning, from the trunk.

The rear doors of the second state car opened, and two men in dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties, one of them taller and fairer than the other, got out. The taller man wore heavy black sunglasses. Nora froze, her case halfway out from under the bench. Mr Shull and Mr Hashim, Slim and Slam, idled up to the trunk and inspected a box proffered by the grinning trooper. Nora pushed her suitcase back under the bench and tried to vanish into the shadow of the awning.

Slim looked inside the box, and the corners of his mouth jerked down. He displayed its contents to Slam, who nodded. Slim handed the box back to the trooper, and the trooper allowed himself a final smirk before returning it to the trunk. Mr Hashim began rooting through the Ford's glove compartment. Mr Shull wandered away, thrust his hands in his pockets, and regarded the surface of Northampton Street through his hipster sunglasses.

The trooper who had shown Mr Shull the box came up beside him, attended to a few words, and then signaled to one of the big troopers from the first car. After another brief exchange, he waved at the local cop, who bounced forward and answered a few questions. He nodded, shrugged, nodded again, then turned to point at Nora.

The trooper glanced at her, asked a question, got another nod in return, and planted his hands on his hips as the policeman began walking toward Nora. Mr Shull lifted his head and looked at Nora, then at the cop, then back at Nora. He drifted to the passenger door and said something to Mr Hashim. Mr Hashim leaned forward and gave her a skeptical glance through the windshield of the Ford.

The policeman coming toward her had concerned brown eyes and a wispy mustache, and his belly was beginning to roll over his belt. Nora swallowed to loosen her throat and sat up straight. She found that she was still holding the book open somewhere in the middle, and inserted a finger to look as if she had been interrupted while reading. 'Hi,' she said.

The policeman moved into the shade. He took off his hat. 'Hot out there.' He wiped his forehead with a hand and wiped the hand on his trousers. 'I'd like to ask you a few questions.'

'I don't know what I can tell you.'

'Let me ask the questions and we'll find that out.' He put his hat back on his head and took a notebook and ballpoint from his shirt pocket. 'How long have you been out here, ma'am?'

'I'm not too sure.'

The policeman put his foot on the bench and flattened the notebook on his knee. 'Could you give me a rough estimate?'

'Maybe half an hour.'

He made a note. 'Did you observe any activity taking place in or around the vehicle under investigation? Did you observe anyone in contact with the vehicle?'

She pretended to consider the question. 'Gee, I don't think so.'

'Would you give me your name and address, please?'

'Oh, sure. No problem. My name is…' Her mind refused to supply any name but Mrs Hugo Driver. 'Dinah,' she said. Shorelands? 'Dinah Shore.' As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt like holding out her hands for the cuffs.

The policeman looked up from his notebook. 'That's your name, Dinah Shore?'

'I got teased about it all the time in school. For a long time I had to listen to all these Burt Reynolds jokes, but that stopped a couple years ago. Thank God.' She forced herself to stop babbling.

'I can imagine,' said the policeman. 'Address?'

Where did Dinah Shore live? 'Boston.' She groped for a Boston street name. 'Commonwealth Avenue. Four hundred Commonwealth Avenue. I just moved there about a week ago. Half my stuff is still in storage.'

'I see.' Another note. 'What brings you to Holyoke, Dinah?'

'I'm waiting for a friend. He's picking me up.'

'You don't have a car, Dinah?'

Of course she had a car. Every American had a car. 'I have a Volvo station wagon, but it's in the garage.' The policeman stared down at her, waiting for Dinah Shore, a resident of Boston, to explain her presence on a bench in Holyoke. 'A friend gave me a ride this far, and my other friend is coming along to pick me up. He should be here soon.'

'And you've been here how long, Dinah?'

What had she said earlier? 'I'm not too sure. Maybe forty-five minutes?'

'You bought your book in the Unicorn?'

How did he know that? The policeman nodded down at the brown paper bag printed with a picture of a unicorn and the name of the bookstore beside her bag. 'Oh, yes. I knew I'd have to wait for a while. So I went into the bookstore, and then I had something to eat at that restaurant next to it.'

'Dinah's?'

'Is it called Dinah's? What a coincidence.'

He stared at her for a moment. 'So you went into the Unicorn, you looked around, you bought a book -'

'Three books,' she said. She looked away from the policeman's troubled gaze. A red MG convertible driven by a man in a blue Eton cap was cruising post the patrol cars and officers taking up most of the southbound lanes in the region of Sheldon Dolkis's Ford. Another Holyoke squad car had joined them, and two burly men in sports jackets were talking to the troopers. A tow truck turned the corner of Hampden Street and came to a halt. The man in the Eton cap pulled to the curb across the street from Nora. Her heart gave a thump of alarm; the face under the blunt visor of the cap was Jeffrey's. He looked back at the crowd of policemen and their vehicles. One of the highway patrol cars was moving out of the way, and the tow truck was making beeping sounds as it backed up toward the Ford.

'You bought three books, and you went into Dinah's. You had something to eat. You did all that in forty-five minutes?'

'It was probably more like an hour. My friend just showed up.'

The policeman twisted his body to look across the street. 'That's him in the MG?'

She raised her arm and waved. Jeffrey was looking at the corner where she had said she would meet him. 'Jeffrey!' He snapped his head in her direction and took in the spectacle of an unknown blond woman waving at him from a bench while a policeman glanced back and forth between them. It was dawning on him that the unknown blond woman had called him Jeffrey. He bent over the top of the door and peered at her. Nora prayed he would not utter her name.

The cop said, 'That guy doesn't look like he knows you.'

'Jeffrey's a little nearsighted.' She spread her arms and shrugged, miming her good-humored inability to leave the bench.

'Oh, there you are,' Jeffrey said. He opened the door and put one leg out of the car, but she waved him back.

The policeman faced her again and hitched himself back into position. 'Where did your friend from Boston drop you off?'

'On the corner. Where all the people are.'

'Did you happen to notice if the vehicle was parked there at the time?'

'Yes. I saw it parked right there.'

'How long were you in the bookstore?'

'Maybe five minutes.'

'And then you go into Dinah's. They give you a table, you look at the menu, right? Somebody takes your order, right? How long did that take?'

'About another five, ten minutes.'

'So we have forty to forty-five minutes in Dinah's. And in that time, you ate lunch and managed to read half of that book?'

'Oh.' Nora held up the book. Her finger was still inserted between the pages.

'Dinah, we have a big problem here.' He adjusted his cap.

He put his hands on his hips. Nora prepared herself for imminent arrest. The cop sighed. 'Do you have any idea at all of what time it was when your friend dropped you off on the corner?'

She looked up at his cynical young face. 'Around four-thirty,' she said.

'So you've been in this vicinity for more like two hours, isn't that about right, Dinah?'

'I guess it must be.'

'We don't have much of a sense of time, do we?'

'Apparently not.'

'Apparently not. But that's how long you have been wandering around this part of Holyoke. In all that time, did you happen to see a woman who would be, say, about ten years older than you are, about your height and weight, with chestnut-brown hair down to just below her ears?'

'Are you looking for her?'

'She might have been wearing a long-sleeved, dark blue silk blouse and blue jeans. Five six. A hundred and ten pounds. Brown eyes. She probably came here in that car that was towed away.'

'What did she do?' Nora asked.

'Let me try one more time. Have you seen the woman I described to you?'

'No. I haven't seen anyone like that.'

He took his foot off the bench and flipped the notebook shut. 'Thank you for your cooperation, Dinah. You can go.'

She stood up. 'Thank you.' She went across the curb, and Jeffrey got out of the MG. When she stepped down into the street, the policeman said, 'One more thing, Dinah.'

She turned around, half-expecting him to handcuff her. He shook his head, then bent down to pull her case from beneath the bench. 'Good luck in all your endeavors, Dinah.'66

Jeffrey did not speak until they were out of Holyoke and accelerating onto I-91. With her legs stretched out before her and the rest of her body tilted back at a surprisingly relaxed angle, Nora felt as if she were being carried along on a conveyance more like a flying carpet than an ordinary car.

'I was worried about you back there.' Jeffrey shifted gears to overtake a moving van bulling along at a mere ten miles over the limit, and the magic carpet lengthened out and sailed into the wind.

'Me, too.'

'I didn't recognize you. This… transformation. It's quite a surprise.'

'There have been a lot of surprises lately.'

'I must say, if you're anything to go on, more women ought to be-'

'Don't. Please? Just don't.' Jeffrey looked abashed, and to mollify him she said, 'I'm glad you didn't yell my name.'

'All I really meant was, it's a relief to see you like this. You know, apart from the…' He drew a circle around his face with an index finger.

'The transformation.'

'Better disguise than a hat and a pair of dark glasses.'

'Dick Dart has strong feelings on the subject of cosmetics.' Saying his name out loud made her chest feel tight. 'He's still out there somewhere.'

'You're sure of that?'

'Pretty sure. The cop who was questioning me while you were being so sensible said they were looking for an old dame with brown hair. No, he didn't, don't look dismayed. But Dart couldn't have told them about the new me, or right now the FBI would be dragging me away in leg irons.'

Jeffrey nodded while levitating into a new lane. 'I noticed Hashim and Shull, those two human andirons. Charming couple.'

'They were at Mount Avenue?'

'For a couple of hours yesterday and this morning, while they were setting up the phone equipment and talking to Mr and Mrs Chancel and your husband.' He glanced at her with the consciousness of introducing a new and difficult subject. 'The old manse has been a little chaotic the past few days.'

For the moment, she avoided the lopic of her husband. 'Weren't you afraid they'd see you?'

'I would have been if they'd ever seen me. Mr Chancel had me bring him lunch in the library because he had to do a lot of business over the phone. The andirons were in the kitchen, so I just got a glimpse of them as I went past the door.'

'Tell me about Davey. Is he moving back to the Poplars because the FBI wanted him there?'

'Or was it his father's idea, you mean? A little of both. The agents did want to keep an eye on him, and Mr Chancel was after him to help take care of his mother. To tell you the truth, I did wonder if Mr Chancel was getting rid of us in order to pressure Davey back into the Poplars.' Jeffrey looked over at Nora to see if this had been too critical of his employer.

'Could you put your radio on, Jeffrey?'

'Sorry.' He reached for the dial. 'I should have thought of that earlier.'

With another smooth change of gears, the magic carpet flew around a brace of plodding cars. An announcer with a buttery voice said it was a glorious evening in Hampden, Hampshire, and Berkshire counties, and proceeded to go into details.

'How bad is Daisy?' Nora asked.

'She discovered All My Children, and it seems to have cheered her up. Someone named Edmund kidnapped someone named Erica in Budapest and kept her in a wine cellar, but then the Erica person decided she wanted to stay kidnapped in order to get back at someone named Dmitri. My aunt told me all about it. I gather that Mrs Chancel feels that your story is similar to the Erica person's. You're a romantic heroine.'

'Lovely.'

'She's reconsidered whatever you said to her about her book. My aunt has been bringing her sections, and she rewrites them, propped up in bed.'

'Before and after All My Children.'

'During, too. It's inspirational.'

'Is Alden helping her?'

'Mr Chancel isn't allowed in her room.' Jeffrey paused; apparently he had said all he wished to say about the Chancels. 'Could you tell me why you claimed to be writing a book about Shorelands?'

'Dick Dart has this mission. He wants to keep anybody from proving that Hugo Driver didn't write Night Journey, so he wants to eliminate people connected to writers who were at Shorelands that summer. The man I talked to left for Cape Cod right after he called Merle Marvell, so he's safe, but that still leaves one. A professor in Amherst. I'd better get in touch with him soon. Dart has his address.'

'You said two men. The writers they had connections to were… ?'

'Creeley Monk and Bill Tidy. Why?'

'Not Katherine Mannheim.'

'No, but her sisters started all the trouble, I guess.'

Jeffrey nodded. 'Would you fill me in on this mission of Dart's, and tell me whatever you know about Shorelands and Night Journey?'

'Jeffrey, who are you? Why do you care?'

'I'm taking you to someone who'll be able to answer most of your questions, and I don't want to say anything first. I can tell you about me, though, if you're interested, but I'm not very important.'

'Who are you taking me to?' An entirely unforeseen possibility occurred to her. 'Katherine Mannheim?'

He smiled. 'No, not Katherine Mannheim.'

'Did she write Night Journey?'

'To tell you the truth, I hope she didn't. I'm one of the few who can resist that book.'

'I never even gave it a serious try until a couple of hours ago.'

'And?'

'Jeffrey, I'm not going to say any more until you tell me about yourself. You've always been such an enigma. How can someone like you be happy working for Alden and Daisy? Did you really go to Harvard? What's your story?'

'My story, well.' He looked more self-conscious than she had ever seen him. 'It's a lot less interesting than you make out. My mother wasn't prepared to raise a child after my father died, so I was raised by my father's relatives, all those Deodatos on Long Island. For a couple of years, I was moved around a lot - Hempstead, Babylon, Rockville Centre, Valley Stream, Bay Shore. I saw my real mother on her holidays, but I had plenty of other mothers, and they all doted on me. Went to Uniondale High School. Got a scholarship to Harvard, which was a big deal, majored in Asian studies, got halfway proficient in Chinese and Japanese, graduated magma cum laude. Instead of going to graduate school, I disappointed everybody and enlisted in the army. After I got through officers' training and the Vietnamese course in Texas, I pulled a lot of strings and got into the military police in Saigon. I did some good there, and the work was interesting. Continued the karate lessons I started in Cambridge.'

'When I came back, I took the test for the Long Beach police and got in despite being ridiculously overqualified. One of my uncles was a detective in Suffolk County, and that helped. For three years I did that, took more Japanese at Hofstra, private calligraphy lessons got my black belt, took a lot of cooking classes, and then I sort of fell apart. Quit the force. Did nothing but kill time on the boardwalk and sit in my apartment. After six or seven months, I took all my money out of the bank and went to Japan to polish up my Japanese and live in a Zen monastery. It took two years, but I was accepted into a monastery - long story -and stayed there about eighteen months. Very satisfying, but I had this problem: I wasn't Japanese and never would be. I came back so broke that I had to teach karate on a cruise liner for my passage. No idea what I was going to do. I decided to take the first job anyone offered me and devote myself to it as selflessly as possible. When my aunt told me the Chancels wanted to hire a male housekeeper, I moved to Connecticut and tried to do the best job I could.'

Nora was gaping at him in unambiguous astonishment. 'And you say that's not interesting? My God, Jeffrey.'

'It's just a series of anecdotes. Spiritually I never got anywhere until I moved in with the Chancels. I have no actual ambitions, obviously, apart from that, and helping the Chancels was a lot more satisfying than a lot of other things I could have done.'

Nora, who had been marveling at the disparity between her fantasies about Jeffrey and his reality, suddenly heard what the announcer was talking about and turned up the volume on the radio. 'I have to hear this.'

Jeffrey seemed startled but not at all offended. 'Certainly.'

What had snagged in her ear was an account of a fire in Springfield. '… as we have been informed, no fatalities have been reported as yet, though according to our most recent reports, the blaze has spread to several other houses in the exclusive Oak Street residential area.'

'It's him,' Nora said.

'Him?'

'Shh.'

'To repeat, arson is now assumed to be the cause of the fire in Springfield's Oak Street region first reported shortly after five o'clock this evening by neighbors of Dr Mark Foil, in whose residence the blaze originated. Area residents are advised to keep in touch with the Fire Department's emergency hotline, which is providing minute-by-minute-'

Nora turned off the radio. 'Do you know who Mark Foil is?'

'I'm completely in the dark.'

'Mark Foil is the man who called Merle Marvell.' Jeffrey still did not quite seem to take it all in. 'Which was why Marvell called Alden.' The appalled expression on Jeffrey's face made it clear that he understood what had happened.

'You're convinced it was Dart who torched that house.'

'Of course it was him.'

Jeffrey looked at his watch, made some rapid mental calculations, then hauled down on the steering wheel and without bothering to signal rocketed across two lanes of moderately heavy traffic. Horns blared. He spun the car into Exit 18 at the last possible second. The MG squealed down the ramp and blasted through a stop sign to turn right on King Street in Northampton.

Nora unclenched her hands from the door handle. 'What the hell was that all about?'

Jeffrey pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. 'I want you to explain why Dick Dart is willing to murder people and burn down houses in order to protect Hugo Driver's reputation. Start at the beginning and end at the end.'

'Yes, sir,' Nora said.67

Once Nora began, she found that talking to Jeffrey Deodato was very different from telling the same story to Harwich. Jeffrey was listening to her. By the time she finished, she felt as if her story, initially as confused as Daisy's novel, had in the act of telling reshaped itself into a coherent pattern, at least within Jeffrey.

'I see,' he said, with the sense of having seen more than she had. 'So now that Dick Dart has done what he could to hurt Dr Foil, he'll move on to Everett Tidy. And he probably has a car.'

'Cars sort of give themselves to him.'

'We'd better see Professor Tidy. All I need is a telephone.'

'You're going to call him?'

Jeffrey pulled away from the curb. 'I'm going to call a friend of his.'

'You know him?'

'I've known him forever.' Jeffrey turned right at the end of the block and rolled up to a telephone. 'I'll just be a minute,' he said, and jumped out of the car, fishing in his pocket for change.

Nora watched him dial a number and speak a few sentences into the receiver. He turned his back on her and spoke another few inaudible sentences. He hung up and came back.

'Who was that?' Nora asked, and Jeffrey smiled but did not answer. He spun the MG around in a tight circle and zipped back out onto King Street. 'How do you know Bill Tidy's son?'

'I met him a long time ago.'

'Now where are we going?'

'Amherst, where else?' Jeffrey turned right into a parking lot and continued straight through it into another parking lot, from which he emerged onto Bridge Street and accelerated back toward the distant parade of cars and trucks; on the highway. 'Just out of curiosity,' he said, 'do you remember if Davey told you the name of that girl who was so interested in Hugo Driver? The one who did or did not work for Chancel House, and was or was not a member of something called the Hellfire Club?'

'Paddi Mann.'

'I was afraid of that.'

It took her a moment to gather herself. 'You know Paddi Mann, too?'

'Paddi's dead now, but I used to know her. Her real name was Patricia, but she turned into Paddi after she fell in love with Hugo Driver. The person we're going to see in Amherst, the one who knows Everett Tidy, is Sabina Mann, her mother.'

'How do you know Sabina Mann? Why do you know Sabina Mann?' Nora wailed. 'What is going on?'

Jeffrey would not answer.

Davey had not made up the whole story. It had really happened, but five years earlier, in New Haven. Or it had happened twice.

'Don't tie yourself into knots,' Jeffrey said.

'And you won't tell me how you know them.'

'First we'll take care of Everett Tidy.'

'Then tell me who you were taking me to in Northampton. I'm going to be meeting him anyhow when we leave Amherst.'

'Not him,' he said. 'Her.'

'Who is it?'

'It's about time you met my mother,' Jeffrey said.68

On the way into Amherst, Nora idly inspected a bronze sign and saw that the comfortable-looking two-story brick house on a little rise had been the residence of Emily Dickinson. She heard Dick Dart saying, 'We can find no scar. But internal difference. Where the Meanings, are-' and her mouth went dry and goose pimples rose on her arms.

Uphill into a commercial section with bookstores and restaurants, left past a pretty commons like a green pool, uphill again past Amherst College's weathered brown and red buildings.

Jeffrey turned into a side street lined with handsome old houses, some of them surrounded by white fences, others nearly hidden by gardens of vibrant, nodding lilies and lush hydrangeas. He pulled up in front of a house barely visible behind its front garden.

Nora followed him up a path through waving pink and yellow lilies as high as her head. Three brick steps led up to a gleaming wooden door with a brass bell. The perfume of the lilies surrounded her and drifted off in a breeze she could barely feel. When the door swung open, a tall, gray-haired woman in half-moon glasses and a loose, long-sleeved smock the yellow of daffodils gave her a spine-stiffening glance and pulled Jeffrey into an embrace.

'Jeffrey, you horrible beast, sometime I hope you'll give me more than fifteen minutes' warning before you decide to favor me with a visit. I suppose you're staying with your mother, that's the only reason I ever get to see you!'

'Hello, Sabina, now let go of me before you break something.'

She stepped back and grasped his upper arms. 'You look very dashing in that cap.'

'You look wonderful yourself, but you always do.'

'I trust your mother's fine? She's so busy all the time, I never get to talk to her. I know she did the Trustees' Banquet at the start of the summer, and of course the reception at the President's House, but that's nothing to her, food for two hundred, is it?'

'Piece of cake. Lots of pieces of lots of cakes.'

'And how are things with you?' She had kept her grip on his arms. 'Still happy working for your inferiors?'

'I'm fine. Sabina, this is my friend Nora.'

She released him and extended a hand to Nora. 'You're the mysterious person who had to see Ev Tidy?'

Nora took Sabina Mann's hand and met her intelligent, commanding eyes, a few shades bluer than glacier water. 'Yes, thank you, I hope I didn't put you to any trouble.'

'No trouble, Ev came right over. Jeffrey knows he can get anything he wants. The only problem is he doesn't want enough.' Sabina Mann was making rapid assessments of Nora's age, marital status, social position, and role in Jeffrey's life. 'I'm sworn to silence and secrecy, Jeffrey won't tell me why, but I suppose I might be allowed to ask if you have known him long?'

Nora thought that she had been given a passing grade on the first test. 'I've known Jeffrey for a couple of years, but actually I hardly know him at all.'

Sabina Mann continued her silent assessment. She was far more annoyed than she would let Jeffrey see. 'Let's explore what our mutual friend has told you. I suppose you know about that ridiculous job he's so pleased with, but has he told you about-'

'Now, now, Sabina.'

'Indulge me, dear. Has our friend mentioned his wonderful success at Harvard?'

'He has.'

'Good. Do you know about the Silver Star and Bronze Star he got in Vietnam, or his tenure in a monastery in Japan?'

'No to the first, yes to the second,' Nora said with a glance at Jeffrey.

'Since you have been so favored, you must know that he's fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, but I wonder if he's told you -'

'Please, Sabina, be fair.'

'Has Jeffrey ever told you, my dear, that he has written two plays which were produced off Broadway?'

Nora turned to stare at him.

'Pseudonymously,' he said. 'Weren't nothin'.'

'Now I know something about you, Nora.'

'Don't, Sabina.'

'Be quiet, Jeffrey. You're using my house for your own private reasons, so I'm entitled to all the information I can unearth. And what I have unearthed is that this lovely young woman is an employee at Chancel House, because that awful Mr Chancel is the person from whom you most wanted to keep that particular secret. I'm sure she shares my distaste for your employer and his entire family, including his peculiar wife, his useless son, and the son's unsuitable wife, sufficiently to keep it safe. Isn't that right, my dear?'

'I didn't know the son's wife was as bad as the rest of them,' Nora said.

'She isn't, that's why she's unsuitable. The only thing wrong with her is that she was foolish enough to marry into that family. But you're under Alden Chancel's thumb just like Jeffrey, so you can't be expected to comprehend the trail of destruction left behind by the Chancels.'

'Are you finished, Sabina?' Jeffrey asked.

'I'd better be. Everett never enjoyed being kept waiting.'69

A stocky man with a steel-gray Vandyke beard and short, silver gray hair abruptly closed the book in his hands and looked up frowning. 'Twenty minutes, Sabina. Twenty full minutes.'

'It was only fifteen minutes, Ev. As I am to be excluded from this gathering, I needed a little time by myself with Jeffrey and his companion.'

One side of Everett Tidy's frown tucked itself into his cheek in what might have been amusement.

'Would you like some coffee or tea, Jeffrey? Nora?'

'No, thank you,' Jeffrey said, and Everett Tidy said, 'Tea. Gunpowder.'

'Gunpowder tea, then.' She closed the door behind her.

Nora glanced back at Tidy and caught him looking at her. Unembarrassed, he held her eyes for a moment before turning to Jeffrey. 'Hello, Jeffrey.'

'Thank you for coming on such short notice.'

Tidy nodded, turning over the book in his hands as if puzzled to be still holding it. He moved toward a high-backed velveteen sofa, placed the book on an end table, and looked up at Nora again. A cold, brisk wind, as much a part of him as the crease in his khaki trousers and the brutal little brush of his beard, seemed to snap toward her.

'Sabina thinks I'm impatient,' he said. 'The reason for this misperception is that my awareness of the many tasks which immediate obligations keep me from fulfilling makes me testy.' The temperature of his private breeze dropped by several degrees.

'Until my retirement, I lived in college housing, which means that for twenty-two years I had an extremely pleasant house with plenty of room for my family and my library. I could have remained in my extremely pleasant house, but my wife is dead and my children are gone, and other faculty members had much more need of the space than myself. Therefore I bought an apartment, and when I am not writing two books, one about Henry Adams, the other about my father, I am weeding out books so that I can fit the remainder of my library into three rooms. Half an hour ago Sabina told me that an acquaintance of Jeffrey's wished to speak to me on a matter of the gravest importance. This matter concerned my safety.' He inhaled, and his chest expanded. 'Well, here I am, and I must insist that you tell me what the ragtag hell is going on here.'

Jeffrey said, 'Ev, you should know that-'

'I am talking to your companion.'

The abyss between this man's experience and hers momentarily silenced Nora. She would never be able to convince Everett Tidy that someone wanted to kill him.

Tidy conspicuously looked at his watch, and Nora at last registered why he had to sort through his books. 'How long ago did you move into your apartment?'

He lowered his arm with exaggerated slowness, as if he thought sudden movement might startle her. 'Six weeks. Is there some point to your question?'

'If someone came looking for you at your old house, would the new people tell him where you are? Do they know your new address?'

He turned to Jeffrey. 'Are we to go on in this fashion?'

'Please answer her question, Ev.'

'Fine.' He swung back to Nora. 'Does Professor Hackett know the street address of my apartment building? No, he does not. In any case, the Hacketts are spending the month in the upper valley of the Arno - the Casentino. Who are you, and what are you after?'

'Her name is Nora Chancel,' Jeffrey said.

Tidy blinked rapidly several times. 'I know that name.'

'Have you been watching the news the past few days?'

'I don't own a television set. I listen to the radio.' He was talking to Jeffrey but keeping his eyes on Nora. His entire body seemed to lose its stiffness. 'My God. Nora Chancel. The woman who was… Heavens. Until now I didn't connect the name to… Good Lord, and to think… So that's you.'

'That's me.'

Sabina Mann backed through the door carrying a tray and stopped moving as soon as she turned around. 'I seem to be interrupting you.' She looked at each of them in turn. 'It must be an extraordinary conversation.' She put the tray on the end table and fled.

Tidy had not taken his eyes from Nora. 'Are you all right? You don't appear to have been injured, but I can't even begin to imagine the psychic trauma of such a thing. How are you doing?'

'I can't really answer that.'

'No, of course not. What a thoughtless question. At any rate, you escaped that fellow and had the good sense to summon Jeffrey. If I were in trouble, I'd want Jeffrey's help, too. Please, let's sit down.'

He patted the sofa, and Nora sat on the worn plush. He added milk to a cup of tea and gave it to her. She felt slightly dizzied by the reversal of his manner. Jeffrey slid into an overstuffed chair on the other side of the fireplace. Tidy remained on his feet, fingering his beard. There was no trace of the arctic wind.

'I apologize for blustering. I got in the habit when I discovered that it was useful for intimidating my students.'

Nora said, 'I'm glad that you're willing to hear me out.'

He perched on the edge of the sofa. 'I can only suppose that what you want to say to me concerns the man who abducted you. Please remind me of his name.'

'Dart,' she said. 'Dick Dart. You wouldn't ever have heard of him.'

He considered the notion for a few seconds. 'No. On the other hand, I gather that he has heard of me. I'm right in saying he is a murderer, aren't I? There is no doubt about that?'

'No.'

'And he wishes me ill.'

'Dick Dart wants to kill you.'

He straightened his back and gave her the benefit of his fine blue eyes. 'What an extraordinary thing, to hear such a sentence. I find myself at a loss.'

'Everett,' Jeffrey said, 'would you please shut up and let her talk?'

'Let me ask one more question, and then you can fill in the details, if there are any. Is there a motive, or did this man pick my name out of a hat?'

Nora looked at Everett Tidy, visibly restraining himself, all but biting his tongue. 'He wants to kill you because you're Bill Tidy's son.'

Tidy brought his hand to his cheek as if he had been slapped. Making a monumental effort to remain silent, he nodded for her to continue.

When she had finished, Tidy said, 'So Dart assumes my father kept journals, which he did, that they deal with his stay at Shorelands, which they do, and that I am in possession of these journals, which I am. Tell me, do I have the honor of being first on Dart's list? I suppose I must'

'You're the second. This afternoon he started in Springfield with a doctor named Mark Foil. Foil was the longtime companion of Creeley Monk, and now he's his literary executor. I saw Foil just before he went out of town. Dart got there a little while later.'

'Dart set the fire in Springfield?'

'He isn't very subtle,' Nora said.

Tidy sat perfectly still for a moment. 'Might I ask why you and Jeffrey did not go to the police before arranging to see me?'

'I can't talk to the police.'

Tidy faced Jeffrey. 'Is that so? She cannot?'

'Leave it alone, Ev,' Jeffrey said.

'I don't imagine this fellow will have any luck finding my apartment, but I cannot allow him to destroy Professor Hackett's house under the impression that I still live there. I do not have to give my name or mention you in any way. All I have to say is that I saw a man resembling Mr Dart in the area, and they will do the rest. Then I have some things to tell you, if you have the time.'

'Good,' she said.

Tidy stood up and gazed at her for a moment, biting his lower lip. 'I won't let Sabina overhear my call.' He bustled out of the room.

'Oh, I brought you some money.' Jeffrey stood up, digging his wallet from his back pocket as he came toward her. Three hundred dollars. Pay me back anytime, but take it. You're going to need money.' He offered her what seemed a large number of bills.

Here she was, Nora Chancel, about to accept the offer of Jeffrey's money. She did not want to take it, but she supposed she had to. She was the object of other people's whims, some of them kindly, others malign. 'Thank you,' she said, a little stiffly, and accepted the money. 'I'm grateful.' She bent down for her bag and snapped it open. 'I'll pay you back as soon as I can.'

'There's no rush.' He glanced at the door. 'I hope Ev isn't saying too much.'

The door opened just as he finished speaking, and Tidy walked in, frowned at him, and closed the door with theatrical care. 'I had to persuade Sabina to go upstairs before I placed the call. She isn't very happy with us, I'm afraid.' He watched Nora fasten her bag, then looked back up at her face. 'Would you mind going somewhere with me? You too, of course, Jeffrey.'

'Another trip,' Nora said. 'Where this time?'

'Amherst College Library, where I deposited my father's papers. It's closed, but I have all the keys we'll need. Jeffrey, it might help if you picked up that tray.'

Sabina Mann was stationed on her bottom stair as the three of them came out of the living room. Everett Tidy did not see her until he was almost directly in front of her, and then he stopped short. Nora, right behind, almost bumped into him. Jeffrey fell into place beside her, and an awkward moment passed.

'Sabina,' Tidy began, but she interrupted him.

'They come, they confer, they make clandestine telephone calls, and then, en masse, they depart. It's like a play.'

Jeffrey held out the tray, and she reluctantly stepped down to accept it. 'I promise to explain everything as soon as I can.'

'The Lord knows what that means. Everett, may I ask where you are going, unless that is another state secret?'

'Sabina,' he said, 'I understand that all of this must be very puzzling to you, and I regret the necessity of rushing out without an explanation. However, I -'

'Why don't you try telling me, in simple words, where you are taking them?'

He tilted his head. 'How do you know that I'm taking them somewhere?'

'You're holding your car keys,' she said.

With all the dignity he could summon. Tidy said, 'We have to go to the college library, Sabina. I'll come back in half an hour or so, shall I?'

'Don't bother. Call me tomorrow, if you have anything to say. Jeffrey, will you be returning?'

'I'm sorry, but I'll have to get to Northampton I'll see you soon, I promise.'

'You are the most maddening person.' She gave Nora a look in which outright disapproval threatened to appear. 'I'll see you to the door.'70

There was so much space in front of the long backseat that the two men seemed to be twice the normal distance from her. 'That woman isn't happy with me.'

'It isn't just you,' Jeffrey said. 'Sabina's used to being unhappy with me.'

'Your aunt hasn't been happy with me since I dropped out of the Emily Dickinson Society,' Tidy said.

'Your aunt? Sabina Mann is your aunt?'

'You really do talk too much, Ev.'

Tidy swung his head sideways to stare at him, then looked forward again. 'Excuse me, Jeffrey, but I naturally assumed that your friend knew who you are. Why would she get in touch with you if -'

'That's enough.'

'Damn you, Jeffrey, let him talk,' Nora said. 'I tell you everything, and all you do is move me around like a puppet. I don't care if you won the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Prize, you hear me? You're not my golden boy. I'm really, really sick of this.'

What she really wanted to do, what every cell in her body told her to do, was open the door and jump out. If she didn't get out of the car soon, she would have to flail out, scratch their faces, bite whatever she could bite, because if she didn't something worse would happen to her.

'I don't blame you for being annoyed with me, Nora.'

'Stop the car.'

'I want you to think about two things.'

'I don't care what you want, Jeffrey. Let me out.'

'Calm down and listen. If you still want to get out afterwards, fine, do it.'

'To hell with you.' She gripped the door handle.

'You were fed up back at the house, too, weren't you? That was when this started when we were alone in the living room.'

Nora opened the door, but before she could jump out, Jeffrey had scrambled over the seat and was lunging toward her. Tidy shouted something from the front. As Nora leaned out of the door, Jeffrey caught her around the waist and pulled her back in. Holding her tight while she fought to get free, he slammed the door and locked it. She hit him in the arm, but he fastened his hands around her elbows and pushed her down into the seat.

'Let go of me!'

His face was a few inches from hers. She kicked at his ankle, missed, and tried again. Her foot banged against his leg. 'Ow,' he said, and his face came closer. 'Tell me why you're mad. It isn't because of me.'

She kicked out again, but he had shifted his leg and her foot shot into empty air. She tried with the other foot and missed again. He pressed her arms against her body and pinned her to the seat. 'Come on, tell me why you're mad.'

She yelled, 'Let go of me!'

'I'm letting go.' Little by little, his grip loosened as his face drew back, until finally he was no longer holding her at all. She raised her right hand, but it was too late to hit him. Her mind was already working. She lowered her hand and glared at him. Jeffrey fumbled with something beneath him which floated upward and became a jump seat.

'What kind of car is this, anyhow?' she said, collapsing back into the seat. 'A taxi?'

'A Checker,' said Everett Tidy. He had pulled over to the side of the road and was staring back at them with one arm over the top of his seat. 'My father used to drive one, and they're all I've ever owned. Had this one since 1972. Are you all right?'

'How could I be all right?' Nora said. 'People keep grabbing me and moving me from one place to another without ever telling me the truth. Even before the FBI showed up, my life turned into a catastrophe, and then horrible things happened to me and I just about lost my mind. People lie to me, they just want to use me, and I'm sick of all these secrets and all these plots.'

She stopped ranting and drew in a large breath. Jeffrey was right. She was not angry with him. It had come to her that she was still furious at Dan Harwich, or if not at the real Dan Harwich, the loss of the man she had imagined him to be. This loss felt like an enormous wound, and part of her fury was caused by the knowledge that the wound had been self-inflicted.

'Excuse me,' Tidy said.

'Wait a second,' Jeffrey told him. 'It's Dick Dart, isn't it? Plus Davey moving out of your house. You have been mistreated, of course you feel like you have no control over your life. Anybody would.'

'I suppose.' Another recognition moved within her: that her real resentment had to do with an almost impersonal aspect of her predicament. From the beginning, she had been forced to concentrate on a matter far more important to everyone else around her than to herself. A cyclone had smashed her life and whirled her away. The cyclone was named Hugo Driver, or Katherine Mannheim, or Shorelands, or Night Journey, or all of these together, and even though Dick Dart, Davey Chancel, Mark Foil, and the two men in the Checker cared enough about the cyclone to open their houses, ransack papers, battle lawsuits, drive hundreds of miles, risk arrest in its name, it had been she, who cared not at all, who had been taken over.

Tidy said, 'Jeffrey, I must -'

'Please, Ev. Nora, I didn't feel I could speak for my mother, so I had to postpone certain things until she could meet you. What would you like to do? It's up to you.'

She leaned back against the seat. 'I'm sorry I got wild. Why don't we just forget about it and go back to what we were doing?'

'I'm sorry,' Tidy said, 'but I can't do that until somebody tells me what you meant about the FBI.'

Jeffrey said, 'You heard her say she couldn't go to the police. You took that in stride, I remember.'

'I want to know why the FBI is involved. I'm not going anywhere until I do.'

'Nora?' Jeffrey said, and put a hand, one of the hands which had recently held her down, on her knee.

She jerked the knee from under his hand. 'No problem. I don't have any secrets, do I? You want to hear the story, Professor? Fine, I understand, you want to know if you'll be morally compromised by associating with me.'

'Nora,' Jeffrey said, 'Ev is only-'

'A neighbor of mine was kidnapped. We thought she was murdered, but she wasn't. When she turned up, she claimed that I kidnapped her. At least that's one of the things she says. She isn't very rational. Because it turned out my husband was sleeping with her, which was news to me, the FBI took her seriously. Is there anything else you'd care to know?'

Tidy scratched his beard. 'I think that will do. Are we still going to the college library, then?'

'I wouldn't dream of going anywhere else,' Nora said.71

Nora told Everett Tidy what she had learned about Creeley Monk in a monastic room on the top floor of the Amherst library. Beside her at a long wooden table. Tidy had listened with a gathering excitement which finally had seemed to freeze him into the inability to look at anything but the old upright typewriter at the end of the table and the photograph on the wall of his father seated before the same typewriter.

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

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

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

'I understand,' Nora said.

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

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

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

'Did you keep the letters?'

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

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

'I don't think I do understand,' Nora said.

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

'So he must have envied Driver,' Nora said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Of course.'

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

'Serenity?'

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

Tidy opened the journal. 'Listen to this.

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

'Min and Bill?' asked Nora. 'Wasn't there a movie-' 'Family joke,' said Tidy. 'My mother's real name was Leonie..

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

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

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

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

'What was the Ultimate?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Did he ever finish his book?' Nora asked.

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

'It was torn to pieces.'

'As was my father's book. Shredded, carbon and all.'

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

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

'Don't keep us in suspense,' Jeffrey said.

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

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

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

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

He looked over at Nora. 'Well?'

'It's like Creeley Monk,' she said. 'Was the visit called off?'

'Here's the last thing my father wrote.

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

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

'I guess not,' Nora said, 'but that would mean-'

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

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

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

Nora stared at him. Then she gave a wild look across the table at Jeffrey, who had evidently seen where all this was going sometime before. 'You think Lincoln Chancel murdered your father and Creeley Monk. And Merrick Favor and Austryn Fain, too.'

'I think Chancel pushed him out of the window and tore his manuscript to bits, just like Favor's.'

'Maybe this is obvious, but why would he do it?'

'I suppose he had something to hide,' said Tidy.

'The real authorship of Night Journey.'

'Of course,' said Jeffrey. 'Monk knew that Driver was a thief. He told Merrick Favor, and both your father and Fain overheard, but nobody believed him. Later Favor told them both that Monk was right. He was convinced he'd seen Driver steal something from Katherine Mannheim. Everybody knew that Driver was having trouble with whatever he was writing, but six months later he produces this stupendous book, and gives the copyright to Chancel House.'

'There you are,' Tidy said. 'Chancel was as ruthless with Driver as with everyone else. All he had to take care of was the possibility that Katherine Mannheim had spoken about her work to one of the other guests.'

'He made these confidential appointments,' Nora said, 'and canceled them. Then he showed up on their doorsteps and waited for them to turn their backs.'

For a second, the three people in the room at the top of the library said nothing.

'Now what?' Nora asked.

'It seems the rest is up to you,' said Tidy.72

'What am I supposed to do?' Nora asked. 'I can't prove that Davey's grandfather murdered four people fifty-five years ago. It makes sense to Everett Tidy and you and me, but who else is going to believe all this?'

'I think Ev meant that you should continue what you're already doing.' The sky was still bright, and vibrant green fields lay on either side of the long, straight road to Northampton. Warm wind streamed into Nora's face and ruffled her short hair while seeming to slip past Jeffrey without touching him.

'What am I doing?'

'Taking one step after another.'

'Brilliant. After all that, do you think that Katherine Mannheim wrote Night Journey?'

'I think it's more likely than I did this morning.'

'Why is it so important for me to meet your mother?'

'I always forget how pretty this part of Massachusetts is.' He would not be drawn.

'All right. Let's try another subject. What did your father do?'

'He was a cook, or maybe I should say chef. My whole family, on that side anyhow, were all great cooks. My great grandfather was the head chef at the Grand Palazo della Fonte in Rome. His brother was the head chef at the Excelsior. Despite the handicap of not being Italian, my mother was as good as all the rest of them. Before my father died, they were going to open a restaurant, She still loves it, in fact.'

'And now she keeps herself busy cooking for the Trustees' Banquet and the President's Reception.'

Jeffrey gave her a sidelong look.

'Your aunt Sabina said something about it.'

'You have a good memory.'

'Is Sabina your mother's sister?'

Jeffrey tugged the Eton cap an eighth of an inch lower on his forehead. For the first time, the breeze buffeting Nora seemed also to touch him.

'I see. That's the end of the line. Can you at least tell me about Paddi?'

'I can tell you part of it, but the rest will have to wait. You remember how Sabina feels about the Chancels. She blames them for a lot of things, but the main one is what happened to her daughter. She was a nice girl before she went off the tracks. Maybe she was a little like me, and that was why I liked her. Patty, which was her name then, was a lot younger than I, but I always enjoyed her company. Of course, I was gone a lot, so I wasn't around when she discovered Night Journey. The book took over her life. She change;ed the spelling of her name. Sometimes she pretended to be other characters in the book. I guess Patty got deeper and deeper into her obsession, to the point where she would disappear from home to visit other Driver people. There was a lot of drug abuse, fights at home, her entire personality changed, she wouldn't spend time with anyone who wasn't capable of spending day after day talking about nothing but Driver and the book, and when she was sixteen she ran away.'

'One Driver person told her about another, and she floated through this seedy underworld devoted to Pippin Little, living in Driver houses. These people spend their lives acting out scenes in the book. Nobody knew where she was. A couple of years later, she managed to fake her way into the Rhode Island School of Design, I can't imagine how, and Sabina sent her money, but Patty refused to see her. She was there maybe a year, then she vanished again. Sabina got one postcard from London. She was in another art school and living in another Driver house. Lots of drugs. Then she moved to California - same situation - and wound up in New York, moving back and forth between the East Village and Chinatown, completely submerged in this crazy Driver world. That must have been when she zeroed in on Davey. Anyhow, she took off again, and nobody knew where she was until she died of a heroin overdose in Amsterdam and the police got in touch with Sabina.'

There had been less decoration in Davey's story than Nora had thought. 'Thanks for telling me,' she said. 'But I still don't understand why she was so fixated on the manuscript and Catherine Mannheim.'

'Stop asking questions, and tell me about your childhood or how you met Davey. Tell me what you think of Westerholm.' He would go no further.

'I can't stand Westerholm, I met Davey in a Village bar called Chumley's, and my father used to take me on fishing trips. Jeffrey, where am I going to sleep tonight?'

'There's a nice old hotel in Northampton. You can stay there as long as you like.'

A few minutes later they passed beneath the highway and came into Northampton from the east. Rows of shops and grocery stores lined the street. At the bottom of a hill, the buildings became taller and more substantial, and the MG moved slowly amid a lot of other cars. They passed beneath a railway bridge, and young people moved along the broad sidewalks and stood in clusters at the immense intersections. Jeffrey pointed down a wide, curving street at the Northampton Hotel, an imposing brown pile with a flowery terrace before a glassy new addition.

'When we're all through at my mother's place, I'll bring you back, get you a room. Over the next couple of days we can talk about what you ought to do. We can probably have lunch and dinner together most of the time, if you like.'

'This great cook doesn't feed you?'

'My mother isn't very domestic.'

Nora looked out at pleasant, pretty Main Street with its lampposts and restaurants advertising wood-fired brick oven pizza, tandoori chicken, and cold cherry soup; at galleries filled with Indian art and imported beads; at the pretty throngs and gatherings of the attractive young, mostly women, strapped into backpacks in their sawed-off jeans and halter tops or T-shirts; and said to herself: What am I doing here?

'Almost there,' Jeffrey said, and followed a flock of young women on bicycles out of the traffic into a quieter street running alongside a tract like a parkland where dignified oaks grew alongside well-seasoned brick buildings connected by a network of paths. The young women on bicycles swooped down a drive with a Smith College plaque. Jeffrey executed a smooth U-turn in front of a large, two-story, brown clapboard building with a roofed porch wide enough for dances on the front and left side. It looked like a small resort hotel in the Adirondacks. A sign set back from the sidewalk said HEAVENLY FOOD & CATERING.

Jeffrey turned to her with an apologetic smile. 'Just let me go in and prepare her, will you? I'll be back in a couple of minutes.'

'She doesn't know I'm coming?'

'It's better that way.' He opened his door and put one leg out of the car. 'Five minutes.'

'Fine.'

Jeffrey got out, closed the door, and leaned on it for a moment, looking down at her. If he had been tempted to say something, he decided not to.

'I won't run away,' she said. 'Go on, Jeffrey.'

He nodded. 'Be right back.' He went up the long brick walkway, jumped up the steps, and glanced back at Nora. Then he walked across the porch and opened the front door. Before he went inside, he took off his cap.

Nora leaned back, stretched her legs out before her, and waited. An insect whirred in the grass beneath the sign. Across the street a dog woofed three times, harshly, as if issuing a warning, then fell silent. The air had begun faintly to darken.

After five minutes, Nora looked up at the porch, expecting Jeffrey to come through the door. A few minutes later, she looked up again, but the door remained closed. Suddenly she thought of Davey, at this moment doing something like arranging his compact disks on Jeffrey's shelves. Poor Davey, locked inside that jail, the Poplars. She got out of the MG and paced up and down the sidewalk. Could she call him? No, of course she couldn't call him, that was a terrible idea. She looked up at the porch again and felt an electric shock in the pit of her stomach. An extraordinarily beautiful young black woman with a white scarf over her hair was looking back at her from the big window. The young woman turned away from the window and disappeared. A moment later, the door finally opened and Jeffrey emerged onto the porch.

'Is there a problem?' Nora asked.

'Everything's all right, it's just sort of hard to get her attention.'

'I saw a girl in the window.'

He looked over his shoulder. 'I'm surprised you didn't see a dozen.'

She preceded him up the slightly springy wooden steps and walked across the breadth of the porch to the front door. Jeffrey said, 'Here, let me,' and leaned in front of her to pull it open.

Nora walked into a big open space with a computer in front of an enormous calendar on the wall to her right, and a projection-screen television and two worn corduroy sofas on its other side. At the far end a wide arch led into an even larger space where young women in jeans bent over counters and other young women carried pots and brimming colanders to destinations farther within. One of the pot carriers was the striking black woman she had seen in the window. A slender blonde in her mid-twenties who had been watching a cartoon looked up at Nora and said, 'Hi!'

'Hello,' Nora said.

'You're the first woman Jeffrey ever brought here,' the blonde said. 'We think that's cute.'

On the other side of the arch, ten or twelve young women chopped vegetables and folded dumplings on both sides of two butcher-block counters. Copper pots and pans hung from overhead beams. In front of two restaurant ranges, more women, most of them in white jackets and head-scarves, attended to simmering pans and bubbling vats. One briskly stirred the contents of a wok. A stainless-steel refrigerator the size of a Mercedes stood beside a table at which two young women were packing containers into an insulated carton. Beyond them, a long window looked out onto an extensive garden where a woman in a blue apron was stripping peas. All the women in the kitchen looked to Nora like graduate students - the way graduate students would look if they were all about twenty-five, slim, and exceptionally attractive. Some of the women at the counters glanced up as Jeffrey led her toward the cluster in front of the nearest range.

Slowly, like the unfolding of a great flower, they parted to reveal at their center a stocky woman in a loose black dress and a mass of necklaces and pendants stirring a thick red sauce with a wooden spoon. Her thick, iron-gray hair had been gathered into a tight bun, and her face was unlined and imposing. She looked at Jeffrey, gave Nora an appraising, black-eyed glance, and turned to the woman Nora had seen at the window. 'Maya, you know what to do next, don't you?'

'Hannah's mushrooms, then the other ones, and then it all goes into the pot with Robin's veal, five minutes, and bang, out the door.'

'Good.' She slapped her hands together and took two steps away from the range. 'Let's get Sophie doing something useful. How's the packing going?'

'Almost done with this one,' said one of the girls at the table.

'Maribel, get Sophie to help you carry them out to the van.' A tall, red-haired girl with round horn-rim glasses moved toward the arch. The older woman looked at her watch. 'Jeffrey picked a busy day to drop in. We're doing the Asia Society at nine, and a dinner party in Chesterfield just before that, but I think everything is running on schedule.' She made another quick inspection of her troops and turned to Nora. 'So here you are, the woman we've all been reading about. Jeffrey says you want to talk to me about Katherine Mannheim.'

'Yes,' Nora said. 'If you can spare me some of your time.'

'Of course. We'll get out of here and sit in the front room.' She held out her hand and Nora took it. 'Welcome. I gather that you may have to conceal yourself for a time. If you like, you could pitch in here. I can't give you a room, but you could sleep on a sofa until we find something nicer for you. I can always use another hand, and the company's enjoyable for the most part.'

'I think I'll get her a room at the Northampton Hotel,' Jeffrey said.

Jeffrey's mother had not taken her eyes off Nora. 'Do whatever you please, of course, but if you're at loose ends, you can always pitch in here.'

'Thank you. I'll remember that.'

'I'd be happy to help the woman who married Davey Chancel.'

Nora looked in surprise at Jeffrey, and his mother said, 'I take it that my son left the explanations to me.'

'Would I dare do anything else?' Jeffrey asked.

Sophie and Maribel had paused on their way to the table to help themselves to Swedish meatballs from a steaming platter, and the older woman said, 'Pack the van, my little elves.' Chewing, they hurried across the kitchen. 'Let's go to the front room and sit down. I've been on my feet all day.'

She gestured toward the sofa where Sophie had sprawled in front of the television. Nora sat, and Jeffrey put his hands in his pockets and watched his mother switch off the set. She placed herself at the end of Nora's sofa and rested her hands on her knees. 'Jeffrey didn't introduce us, and I gather that you have no idea of who I am, apart from being this person's mother.'

'I'm sorry, but I don't,' Nora said. 'You knew Katherine Mannheim? And you know the Chancels, too?'

'Naturally,' she said. 'Katherine was my older sister. I met Lincoln Chancel at Shorelands, and before I knew what was what, he hired me to work for him. I was still there when your husband was just a little boy.'

Nora looked from the older woman to Jeffrey.

Jeffrey cleared his throat. 'Mr Chancel disliked the sound of Italian names.'

'When Mr Chancel hired me, I was Helen Deodato, but you may have heard of me as Helen Day,' his mother said. 'I got so used to it that I still call myself Helen Day. When Alden Chancel and his wife took over the house, they used to call me the Cup Bearer.'

BOOK VIII

THE CUP BEARER

For a long time, Pippin sat in the warmth and the flickering light of the fire without speaking.

He gazed into the old woman's face. After all she had told him, the white whiskers sprouting from

her upper lip and pointed chin no longer frightened him.

Not even the skull from which she drank her foul brown potion, nor the heap of skulls behind her,

frightened him now. He was too interested in her story to be afraid. 'I don't understand,' he said.

'You are his mother, but he is not your son?'73

For what seemed to her an endless succession of seconds, Nora could not speak. She could not even move. The decisive old woman before her, her necklaces of antique coins, of heavy gold links, of pottery beads, silver birds, silver feathers, and shining red and green stones motionless on her chest, her broad hands planted on her knees, sat tilted slightly forward, taking in the effect of her announcement as Nora stared at the firm black eyebrows, clever black eyes, prominent nose, full, well-shaped lips, and rounded chin of Helen Day. The Cup Bearer, O'Dotto - Day and O'Dotto, the two halves of her last name - unknown to Davey because his grandfather had thought Italian names too proletarian to be used in his house.

The woman said, 'Jeffrey, you should have told her something, at least. Springing all this on her at once isn't fair.'

'I was thinking about being fair to you,' Jeffrey said.

'I'll be all right,' Nora said.

'Of course you will.'

'It's a lot to take in all at once. I've heard so much about you from Davey. You're legendary. They still talk about your desserts.'

'Whole family has a sweet tooth. Old Mr Chancel could eat an entire seven-layer cake by himself. Sometimes I had to make two, one for him and one for everyone else. Little Davey was the same way. I used to worry about his getting fat when he grew up. Did he? No, I suppose not. You wouldn't have married him if he'd been a great lumbering bag of guts like his grandfather.'

'No, I wouldn't have, and he isn't.'

'Who am I to talk, anyhow?' Helen Day seemed almost wistful. 'Davey must have missed me after his parents got rid of me. Poor little fellow, he'd have had to, with, those two for parents.'

Nora said, 'He once told me he thought you were his real mother.'

'His real mother hardly spent much time with him. Hardly knew he was in the house, most of the time.'

'And of course even she wasn't his real mother,' Nora said. 'You must have been at the Poplars when the first child died,'

Helen Day put a forefinger to her lips and gave Nora a long, thoughtful look. She nodded. 'Yes, I was there during the uproar.'

'Daisy and Alden didn't even want a child, did they? Not really. It was Lincoln who made them adopt Davey.'

Another considering pause. 'The old man let them know he wanted an heir, I'll say that. There weren't too many quiet nights on Mount Avenue during that time.' She looked away, and her handsome face hardened like cement. 'According to Jeffrey, you wanted to talk to me about my sister.'

'I do, very much, but can I ask you a few questions about other people in your family first?'

She raised her eyebrows. 'Other people in my family?'

'Is Sabina Mann your sister?'

The old woman flicked her glance toward Jeffrey.

'We had to see Ev Tidy,' Jeffrey said. 'His number is unlisted, so I called Sabina and asked her to invite him to her house.'

'Which she was delighted to do, I'm sure. I bet she bustled in and out with lots of cheap cookies and cups of Earl Grey.'

'It was Gunpowder, and she only bustled in once. I have to admit that she was peeved with me.'

'Gunpowder,' said Helen Day. 'Dear me. She'll get over it. You wanted to talk to Everett about Shorelands because of his father, I suppose.'

'That's right,' Nora said.

'And was he helpful?'

'He had some ideas,' Jeffrey said, with a warning glance at Nora which did not escape his mother's notice.

'I won't pry. It isn't my business, except for what concerns my sister. But from what I remember of Everett's father, he couldn't have had much to say about Katherine. It was my impression that he'd scarcely talked to her. Couldn't be much there to excite poor old Effie and Grace.' When Nora looked confused, Helen Day added, 'My sisters. They're the fools who saw that movie and hired a lawyer.'

'You're right,' Jeffrey said. 'Bill Tidy had no idea what Katherine was writing.'

'Hardly a surprise. The whole idea is mad. Now I am informed that this madness has infected the wretched man who stole you out of a police station.' She shook her head in disgust. 'Let me answer your question. No, Sabina Mann is not my sister, thank the Lord. She was Sabina Kraft when she married my brother Charles. Thereby completing the severing of relations between my brother and myself which began when he changed his name.'

'Why did he change his name?'

'Charles hated my father. Changing his name was no more than a way to cause him pain. He did it as soon as he turned twenty-one. The disgrace nearly cost Effie and Grace what little minds they have. Katherine didn't care, of course. It didn't mean anything to her. Katherine was like a separate country all her life.'

Nora was thinking that Helen Day, who had apparently not protested Lincoln Chancel's desire to change her own last name, was no less idiosyncratic than her sister.

'You weren't close to Charles or your two other sisters?'

'I got along with the Deodatos a lot better than my own family, if that's what you're after. Good, sensible, warmhearted people, and they were delighted to take Jeffrey in when it became obvious that I couldn't cope with being a single mother. I certainly wasn't going to subject my little boy to Charles, never mind Sabina, and Effie and Grace could scarcely take care of themselves. But here was this glorious clan, full of cooks and policemen and high school teachers. I was so fond of them all, and they had no problems with my way of life, so there was never any difficulty about my seeing Jeffrey whenever I could. When I left the Chancels, I knew I had to come back to this part of Massachusetts. This was my home, and it was where my husband died. It's the one place in the world I've ever really loved. Jeffrey understood.'

'I did,' Jeffrey said. 'I still do.'

'I know you do. I just don't want Nora to judge me harshly. Anyhow, between us all, we did a pretty good job with Jeffrey, didn't we? He's done a lot of interesting things, even though his Mannheim half meant that other people had a lot of trouble understanding them. There's a lot of me in Jeffrey, and a lot of Katherine, too. But Jeffrey is much nicer than Katherine ever was. Or me either, come to that.'

'Katherine wasn't nice?'

'Am I? You tell me.'

'You're beyond niceness,' Nora said. 'I think you're too good to be nice.'

Tiny pinpoints of light kindled far back in the old woman's eyes. 'You just described my sister Katherine. I'd like you to remember my offer. If you ever find yourself in need of a safe place, you'd be welcome here. You would learn to cook every sort of cuisine, and you'd be able to put away some money. We operate on a communal basis, and everybody shares equally.'

'Thank you,' said Nora. 'I'm tempted to sign up on the spot.'

'I should have known,' Jeffrey said. 'The famous Helen Day Halfway House, Cooking School, Intellectual Salon, and Women's Shelter strikes again.'

'Nonsense,' the old woman said. 'Nora understands what I mean. Now we are going to talk about my sister Katherine, so you can stop fretting.'

'Halleluiah.' Jeffrey went to the other sofa and sat down facing them.

'Did Katherine ever talk to you about her writing?' Nora asked.

'I can remember her reading some poems to me when she was twelve or thirteen and I was about nine. It was an occasion, because Katherine was always very private about her writing. Not her opinions, mind you. If she thought something was absurd, she let you know. Anyhow, as I was saying, I used to see her writing her poems all the time, and once I asked her if I could read them. No, she said, but I'll read some of them to you - and she did, two or three short poems, I forget. I didn't understand a word, and I never asked again.'

'But later on? When you were both grown up?'

'By that time, we didn't talk to each other more than once every couple of months, and all she said about her writing was that she was doing it. She did call to tell me she was going to Shorelands. She was pleased about that, and she was going to stay with me for a couple of nights when she left. I was up here, and Katherine lived in New York - by herself, of course, in Greenwich Village, a tiny apartment on Patchin Place. I went there two weeks after I came back home from Shorelands. I knew she was dead, I hope you take my word for that.'

'What did you think had happened to her?' Nora asked.

'Years later, that silly old windbag Georgina Weatherall pretended to think Katherine had run away with some drawing of hers and changed her name to keep out of sight. What a story! Katherine never stole anything in her life. Why should she, she never wanted anything. It just made Georgina look better than having one of her guests die so far off in the woods that you could never find her body.'

'You're positive that's what happened.'

'I knew it the second I saw that ridiculous woman. Katherine would have known just how to ruffle her feathers, and the last thing that kind of woman can stand is the thought that someone is laughing at her. It was exactly like my sister to provoke a fool like that, and then decamp a split second before she was ordered off the premises. It was just her bad luck to die in the midst of this particular jaunt, so that we could never give her a burial. Her heart caught up with her at the wrong time, that's all.'

'How did Georgina know to call you after she disappeared?'

'Katherine gave her my number. Who else's? She wouldn't have given her Charles's number, or Grace and Effie's, heaven knows. Katherine always liked me more than any of the rest of them. I want to show you some things.'

She stood up with a rattle and rustle of the necklaces and went through the arch. Nora and Jeffrey heard her giving orders in the kitchen, then the slow march of her footsteps up a staircase.

'What do you think she wants to show me?' Nora asked.

'Do you think I ever know what my mother is going to do?'

'What's wrong with Grace and Effie?'

'They're too normal for her. Besides, they were scandalized that she went off and worked for Lincoln Chancel. They thought it wasn't good enough for her. My aunts don't much like what she's doing now, either. They don't think it's very ladylike.'

'Hard to see how it could be any more ladylike,' Nora said.

He smiled. 'You haven't met Grace and Effie.'

'How did they wind up with this notebook, or whatever it was, the one that caused all the trouble?'

'My mother used to keep her sister's papers in the basement here, but after she had a couple of bedrooms put in downstairs, she didn't have much room left. Grace and Effie agreed to take them - four cardboard boxes, mostly drafts of stories and poems. I looked through them a long time ago.'

'No novel.'

'No.' He looked back toward the arch and the kitchen full of women. 'By the way, despite the way she talks about Lincoln Chancel, or even Alden and Daisy, my mother's still loyal to them. Don't mention what we were talking about with Ev Tidy, okay? She'd just get angry.'

'I saw the look you gave me.'

'Remember, when she stopped working for them, she recommended Maria, who was about eighteen and just off the boat. Maria hardly even spoke English then, but they hired her anyhow. They hired me, too. She thinks the Chancels have done a lot for our family.'

'I never did understand why Alden and Daisy fired her,' Nora said. 'She was like a member of the family.'

'I don't think they did. She quit when she had enough money saved up to start this business.'

The treads of the staircase creaked.

'I'm sure Davey told me that they fired her. Losing her was very painful for him.'

'How old was he, four? He didn't know what was really going on.' He gave her a tight little smile as his mother's footsteps came down the stairs. 'Too bad they didn't send him out to Long Island. It might have done him some good.'

'Might have done him a lot of good,' Nora said, and turned toward the kitchen to see Helen Day, flanked by three of her assistants, leaning over a copper vat. She inhaled deeply, considered, and spoke to an anxious-looking girl who flashed away and returned with a cup of brown powder, a trickle of which she poured into the vat.

The long day caught up with Nora, and she felt an enormous yawn take possession of her. 'How rude,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

Helen Day marched back through the arch, apologizing for the delay. She sat a few feet away from Nora and lowered two objects onto the length of brown corduroy between them. Nora looked down at a framed photograph on top of a spring binder so old that its pebbled black surface had faded to an uneven shade of gray. 'Now. Look at that picture.'

Nora picked it up. Two little girls in frocks, one of them about three years old and the other perhaps eight, stood smiling up at the photographer in a sunny garden. The smaller girl held a doll-sized china teacup on a matching saucer. Both girls, clearly sisters, had bobbed dark hair and endearing faces. The older one was smiling only with her mouth.

'Can you guess who they are?' asked Helen Day.

'You and Katherine,' Nora said.

'I was playing tea party in the garden, and wonder of wonders, Katherine happened along and indulged me. My father came outside to memorialize the moment, no doubt to prove to Katherine at some later date that she was once a child after all. And she knows what he's doing, you can see it in her face. She can see right through him.'

Nora looked down at the intense self-sufficiency in the eight-year-old girl's eyes. This child would be able to see right through most people. 'Did you find this picture in her apartment?'

'No, that's where I found the manuscript. This picture was on her desk in Gingerbread, and it was the first thing I saw when I went there. Good heavens, I said to myself, look at that. You know what it means, don't you?'

Nora had no idea what it meant, but Helen Day's eyes and voice made clear what it meant to her. 'Your sister felt close to you,' she said.

The old woman reared back with a rustle of necklaces and pointed a wide pink forefinger at Nora's throat. 'Grand-slam home run. She felt closer to me than anyone else in our whole, all-balled-up family. Whose address and telephone number did she give in case of emergency? Mine, Whose picture did she bring to Shorelands and put right in the place of honor on her desk? Mine. It wasn't a picture with stuffy Charles, was it?'

Because the finger was still aimed at her throat, Nora shook her head.

'No. And it wasn't a picture of those two idiots who never read a book in their lives, Effie and Grace, not on your life. She never felt any closer to those three than she did to strangers on the street. At first, I couldn't understand Katherine going off and leaving our picture behind, but when I noticed she had left her silk robe and a bunch of books, too, I saw what she was doing. She knew I'd be coming to get everything for her. She left those things behind for me, because she knew I'd take care of them for her. And I bet you can guess why.'

Again Nora gave the answer Helen Day waited to hear. 'Because you understood her better than the others.'

'Of course I did. She never made any sense to them her whole life long. It was like Jeffrey with the Deodatos. I love them, and they're wonderful people, but they never could figure out some of the things Jeffrey did. People like Jeffrey and my sister always color outside the lines, isn't that right, Jeffrey?'

'If you say so. Mom,' Jeffrey said. 'But you've colored outside the lines a few times yourself.'

'That's what I'm saying! A couple of times in my life people said I was crazy. Charles told me I was crazy. Going with Lincoln Chancel! Giving up my son, and not even to him, but to people he thought were inferior! You must be as crazy as Katherine was, he said. Well, I said, in that case I'm not doing too badly. You can bet he changed his tune when Jeffrey got his scholarship to Harvard and did so well there. When people don't have a prayer of understanding you, the first thing they do is call you crazy. Grace and Effie still think I'm crazy, but I'm doing a lot better than they are. They thought Katherine was crazy, too. She embarrassed them, just like I did when I went to work for the Chancels.'

She folded her arms over her chest in a clatter of coins and beads and gave Nora a flat black glare. 'My sisters actually thought Katherine ran away with that drawing, changed her name, and lived off the money she got for it. Know what they told me? They said Katherine never had a bad heart in the first place. Dr Montross made a mistake when she was a little girl, and she's had special treatment ever since. Stole that drawing and took off, changed her name, now she's laughing at us all. They said Charles changed his name, didn't he? Didn't you? they said. Wasn't Mr Day you married, was it? I said I never changed my name, man I worked for did that, and when he spoke, you listened. All I did was get used to it, and it was only my married name anyway. All that writing, they said, that was crazy, too, but it wasn't, was it, Jeffrey?'

'Not at all,' Jeffrey said.

'She was invited to Shorelands. Nobody says those other people were crazy. And Dr Montross wasn't a fraud. Katherine had rheumatic fever when she was two, and her heart could have given out at any time. We all knew that. She died. Grace and Effie said, You never found her, did you, and neither did all those policemen, but they didn't see what it was like. You could have sent twenty men into those woods for a month, and they wouldn't find everything.'

'If she wanted to get out, why go through the woods instead of taking some easier way?'

'Didn't want to go past Main House,' said Helen Day. 'Katherine didn't want anyone to see her. And you know, maybe she did get to the road. Maybe she even got a ride and a room for the night, or took the train somewhere, but her heart stopped and she died. Because she never got in touch with me about her things. I waited two weeks, but neither Katherine nor anyone else called me, and I knew.'

'But your brother and your two older sisters didn't agree? They thought she might still be alive?'

'Charles didn't. He was sure Katherine had died, just like me. Dr Montross told our parents that it would be a miracle if Katherine lived to be thirty, and she was twenty-nine that year.'

'And Grace and Effie?'

They knew it, too, but they changed their minds when that book came out, almost saying in black and white that Katherine took that picture from the dining room. Katherine couldn't do anything right, as far as they were concerne d. They never had a good word to say for her until they started going through her papers before throwing them out - papers I gave them for safekeeping - and saw some scribbles on a few pieces of paper that reminded them of a movie they didn't even like! They still thought she was crazy, but they didn't mind the idea of making some money off of her. Old fools. Katherine didn't write that book, Hugo Driver did. If you want to know what my sister was writing, look in that folder.'

With a rush of expectant excitement, Nora opened the spring binder. Jeffrey stood up to get a better look.

74

UNWRITTEN WORDS

by

Katherine Mannheim

Patchin Place, #3

New York, New York

(copy 2)

She turned over the title page to find a poem titled 'Dialogue of the Latter Days,' heavily edited in green ink. Her heart sank. This was what Katherine Mannheim had been writing? The poem continued on to the second page. She flipped ahead and saw that it took up twenty-three pages. 'Second Dialogue,' also heavily edited, ran for twenty-six pages. Two more 'dialogues' of thirty to forty pages apiece filled out the book.

'It's one long poem, or so I've decided, divided up into those dialogues. She had two copies, and made changes to both of them. She must have taken the first copy to Shorelands to spend the month revising it there, and I think she was planning to type up a third and final copy with all the revisions when she got back.'

She had been 'unwriting' the Unwritten Words through a lengthy, painstaking series of revisions. 'This was on her desk?'

'In her apartment, right next to her typewriter, along with a big folder full of earlier versions. The one she took to Shorelands was lost along with everything else she put into her suitcase.'

'You never showed it to me,' Jeffrey said.

'You weren't here all that often, and I wasn't done looking at it. I always had trouble understanding the things Katherine wrote, and this was harder than anything else, especially with all those scribbles. After a couple of years, I began to find my way. I saw - I think I saw - that she was writing about her death. About living with her death, the way she did for so long. If you had asked me, I would have said that she never thought about it because she didn't seem to. Katherine wasn't a brooding sort of person at all, but of course she thought about it all the time. That's why she wrote the way she did, and why she lived the way she did. What I think is, my sister Katherine was a saint. A real-life saint.'

Startled, Nora looked up from the book. 'A saint?'

Helen Day smiled and glanced down at the photograph. 'Katherine was the most sensitive, most intelligent, most dedicated person I've ever known, and deep down inside herself the purest. What most people call religion didn't affect her at all, even though we were raised Catholic. You'll find more spiritual people outside churches than in them. Katherine couldn't be bothered with the unimportant things most people spend their whole lives worrying about. She knew how to have a good time, she sometimes shocked ordinary-thinking people, but she had focus. When I take on new girls here, I look to see if they have at least a little bit of what Katherine had, and if they do, welcome aboard. You do, you have some of it.'

'Well, a lot of ordinary-thinking people might think I'm a little bit crazy,' Nora said, thinking of her gleeful demons.

'Don't you believe it. You've been hurt. I can see that. No wonder, considering what happened to you. Here you are, chasing around Massachusetts instead of going back home, if you still have a home to go back to.' She looked over at her son. 'Alden Chancel might not think you're the right wife for his son, but you're hardly crazy. In fact, what I think, you're one of those people who take in more than most of us.'

'You're giving me too much credit,' Nora said.

'You're a person who wants to know what's true. When I look back, it seems to me that most of what I learned when I was little was all wrong. Lies were stuffed down our throats day and night. Lies about men and women, about the proper way to live, about our own feelings, and I don't believe too much has changed. It's still important to find out what's really true, and if you didn't think that was important, you wouldn't be here right now.'

Yes, Nora thought, I do think that it's important to find out what is really true.

Helen Day checked her watch. 'I have to make sure everything's all right before I put in an appearance at the Asia Society. I hope you'll think about everything I said.'

'Thank you for talking to me.'

All three stood up. 'You'll be at the Northampton Hotel?'

'Yes,' Jeffrey said.

Helen Day had not taken her eyes off Nora. 'If you're still up around ten, would you give me a call? I want to talk about something with you, but I have to think it over first.'

'Something to do with your sister?'

The old woman slowly shook her head. 'While I'm thinking about my question, you should think about your husband. You're stronger than Davey, and he needs your help.'

'What's this "question" of yours?' Jeffrey asked.

She turned to him and took his hand. 'Jeffrey, you'll come here tomorrow, won't you? We'll have time for a real conversation. If you turn up around eight, you can help with the driving, too. We have to pick up a lot of fresh vegetables.'

'You want me to drive one of the vans while Maya and Sophie sit in the back and make fun of me.'

'You enjoy it. Come over tomorrow.'

'Should I bring Nora?'

Helen Day had been moving them slowly toward the front door, and at this question she met Nora's eyes with a look as significant as a touch. 'That's up to her.' She let them out into the warm night.75

'You liked her, didn't you?'

'Who wouldn't like her?' Nora asked. 'She's extraordinary.'

Jeffrey was driving them down Main Street, where restaurant windows glowed and gatherings of three and four drifted in and out of pools of light cast by the streetlamps.

'I know, but she drives a lot of people up the wall. She makes up her mind about you as soon as she meets you, and if she takes to you, you're invited in. If not, you get the big freeze. I was almost certain she'd warm to you right away, but…' He glanced at her. 'I guess you see why I couldn't say much about her beforehand.'

'I suppose I do,' she said.

'What would you like to do?'

'Go to bed,' she said. 'After that, maybe I'll spend the rest of my life chopping celery for your mother. I'd have to change my name, but that's all right, everybody else already has. After a couple of years maybe I'd get to be as perceptive as your mother thinks I am.'

Jeffrey gave her one of his sidelong looks. 'I thought you seemed unhappy back there. Disappointed, I guess.'

'Well, you're already perceptive enough for both of us. Yes. I guess I was expecting too much. I thought that even if everything was falling apart around me, at least I could help prove that your aunt was the real writer of Night Journey. Instead, all I managed to find out was that Hugo Driver was a nasty little creep who stole things. But if he didn't steal Night Journey, then everything we thought we knew was all wrong. What did your aunts see in those pages, anyhow? What excited them so much?'

'Phrases. Descriptions of landscapes, fields and fog and mountains. Most of them were sort of like Driver, but not close enough to justify calling a lawyer. There was something about death and childhood - how a child could see death as a Journey.'

'That makes a lot of sense for Katherine Mannheim, but it hardly proves anything about the book.'

'Two other phrases got them excited, mainly. One was about a black wolf.'

'That doesn't mean anything.'

'The other was "the Cup Bearer." They did get excited about that.' The front of the hotel floated past them. A guitarist played bossa nova music on the terrace.

'I don't get it. That's what Davey used to call your mother.'

'You saw that picture of the two of them as little girls, where my mother is holding a cup. After that, Katherine started calling her the Cup Bearer.' He rolled the MG down into the lot. His smiled flashed. 'I forgot, you never read Night Journey.'

'I still don't get it.'

'Book Eight of Night Journey is called "The Cup Bearer." That's what really got Grace and Effie going, that and the wolf.' He pulled into an empty spot and switched off the engine.

'But Davey was calling your mother the Cup Bearer before he could even read. How did he ever hear about it?'

'He must have seen the photograph in her room,' Jeffrey said. 'He went there looking for her sometimes, when Alden and Daisy left him alone. If he'd asked her about it, she would have told him about the nickname. That would have been another reason why the book meant so much to him later on. It reminded him of my mother.'

Now she knew why Davey had been irritated with her when she had asked him about the origin of the nickname. Jeffrey was waiting patiently for her to finish asking questions so that they could leave the car. 'Is the Cup Bearer in the book anything like your mother?'

'Well let's see.' He propped his chin in his hand. 'She makes this foul-smelling brew. She had no children of her own, but she raised someone else's child. On the whole, she's pretty fearsome. I'd have to say she's a lot like my mother.'

'Hugo Driver never saw that picture. Where did he get the phrase from?'

'You got me.'

In the warm evening air they moved toward the concrete steps, washed shining white by the lights, leading to the hotel's back door. Half his face in shadow, the Eton cap tilted over his forehead, Jeffrey more than ever resembled a jewel thief from twenties novels. 'Maybe this is none of my business,' he said. 'But if she leans on you to call Davey, think hard before you do it. And if you do decide to call him, don't tell him where you are.'

He turned away and led her up the gleaming steps.76

Within a small, wary portion of her mind, Nora had been awaiting the news that the hotel had only a single unoccupied room, but Jeffrey had not turned into Dan Harwich. He had returned from the desk with two keys, hers; for the fifth-floor room overlooking the terrace and the top of King Street where she had taken a long bath and now, wrapped in a white robe, occupied a grandmotherly easy chair, the radio playing Brahms's Alto Rhapsody and the air conditioner humming, reading her husband's favorite novel as an escape from thinking about what to do next.

Pippin Little wandered from character to character, hearing stories. Some of these characters were human and some were monsters, but they were fine storytellers one and all. Their tales were colorful and involved, full of danger, heroism, and betrayal. Some told the truth and others lied. Some wanted to help Pippin Little, but even they were not always truthful. Some of the others wanted to cut him up into pieces and turn him into tasty meat loaf, but these characters did not always lie. The truth Pippin required was a mosaic to be assembled over time and at great risk. Nearly everybody in Night Journey was related to everybody else; they made up a single enormous, contentious family, and as in any family, its members had varying memories and interpretations of crucial events. There were factions, secrets, hatreds. Pippin had to risk entering the Field of Steam to learn its lessons, or he had to avoid its contagion; if he stood among the Stones of Toon, he would acquire a golden key vital to his search, or he would be set upon by the fiends who pretended to possess a golden key.

It was just past nine-thirty, half an hour before she had been invited to call Helen Day. Did she want to call Helen Day? Not if Jeffrey's mother was going to do no more than try to make her feel sorry for Davey. She already felt sorry for Davey. Then she remembered that Helen Day had spoken of having to think about some matter before she could discuss it. Probably the old woman was considering telling her something she had already guessed, that the Chancels had never wanted their son.

She might as well get as far as she could with Night Journey. If she skipped here and there, she could just about finish the hundred pages remaining. Or she could go straight to the last twenty-five pages and see if Pippin ever made it to Mountain Glade. On the night her life had started to go wrong, she had come awake in time to see Pippin racing downhill toward a white farmhouse, which she had made the mistake of calling 'pretty.' Pretty, so what if it's pretty, Davey had said, or something close; it's all wrong, Mountain Glade isn't supposed to be pretty. Does that place look like it contains the great secret?

So what did this all-important place look like? Lord Night said it was an 'unhallowed haunt of baleful spirits revealed by the Stones of Toon'; the Cup Bearer described it as 'a soul-thieving devastation you must never see'; even less satisfactorily, Gentle Friend called it 'the locked prison cell wherein you have interred your greatest fear.' Nora turned over most of the pages remaining before the end of the book and skimmed down the lines before finding this paragraph:

The great door yielded to the golden key and revealed what he had most feared, yet most desired to see, the true face of Mountain Glade. Far down the stony, snow-encrusted mountain, he beheld a misshapen cottage, a bleak habitation of lives as comfortless as itself.

Pippin had come back home.

A few minutes before the appointed time, Nora found the Northampton telephone directory in a drawer and sat on the bed to use the telephone.

'Heavenly,' said a female voice.

Nora asked for Helen Day, and the phone rapped down on a counter. She heard a buzz of cheerful female voices.

'Hello, this is Helen Day.'

Nora gave her name and added, 'Sounds like you're having a party over there.'

'Some of the elves got home early from the Asia Society. I have to change phones.' Nora held the dead receiver while time ticked on. She moved the telephone closer to the side of the bed, stretched out, yawning, and closed her eyes.

'Are you there? Nora? Are you all right?'

The ceiling of a strange room hung above her head. She lay on an unfamiliar bed slightly too soft for her taste.

'Nora?'

The strangeness around her again became the room at the top of the Northampton Hotel. 'I think I fell asleep for a second.'

'I have at least half an hour before anybody's going to need me again. Can you talk for a bit, or do you want to forget about it and go back to sleep?'

'I'm fine.' She yawned as quietly as possible.

'I often think about Davey. He was such a darling little fellow. I want to hear whatever you can tell me about him. What is he like now? How would you describe him?'

'He's still a darling little fellow,' Nora said.

'Is that good?'

Nora did not know how honest she should be, nor how harsh an honest description of Davey would be. 'I have to admit that being a darling little fellow at the age of forty has its drawbacks.'

'Is he kind? Is he good to people?'

Now Nora understood what Helen Day was asking. 'He isn't anything like his father, I have to say that. The problem is, he's insecure, and he worries a lot, and he's frustrated all the time.'

'I suppose he's working for his father.'

'Alden keeps him under his thumb,' Nora said. 'He pays Davey a lot of money to do these menial jobs, so Davey is convinced he can't do anything else. As soon as his father raises his voice, Davey gives up and rolls over like a puppy.'

Helen Day said nothing for a moment. 'Do you and Davey go to the Poplars often?'

'At least once a week. Usually on Sundays.'

'How are relations between Alden and you?'

'Strained? Rocky? He put up a good front for about six months, but then he started to show how he really felt.'

'Is he civil, at least?'

'Not anymore. He despises me. I did this stupid thing and Daisy went out of her mind, so Alden called Davey on the carpet and said that unless he left me, he'd fire him from Chancel House and cut him out of his will.'

Helen Day was silent. 'I had the feeling that you had something else in mind when you asked me to call,' Nora said.

'Alden is blackmailing Davey into leaving you.'

'That's the general idea. I tried to convince him that we didn't need Alden's money, but I don't think I did a very good job.'

'What was this thing that gave Alden his excuse?'

'Daisy talked me into reading her book. When she called me up to talk about it, she went on a kind of rampage. Alden blamed me.'

'He's a terrible bully. I respect the man no end, but that's what he is.'

'I don't respect him. He never wanted Davey, but he can't let him go. All Davey's life he's suffered from the feeling that he's not the real Davey Chancel, so he'll never be good enough.'

'I was afraid of this,' Helen Day said. 'Alden's making him pay.'

'Lincoln did the same thing, didn't he? He forced Alden and Daisy to adopt a grandson, and they went along for the sake of the money. Isn't that what you were thinking about telling me? You didn't want to say it in front of Jeffrey.'

Again Helen Day waited a long time to speak. 'I wish I could discuss that subject, but I can't.'

'I already know. There was something just like it in Daisy's book.'

'Daisy was furious with both of them.'

'She didn't want him, either. I'm surprised they ever had a child in the first place.'

Helen Day said, 'I suppose they were surprised, too.'

'You were at the Poplars when the first one was born. You saw them go through all that.'

'I did.'

' "The uproar," you called it.'

'That's exactly the right word. Noise day and night, shouting and yelling.'

'And you think Davey ought to know why his parents have always treated him the way they do. That he was only a way for Alden to stay in his father's will.'

Silence.

'Alden made you promise, didn't he? He made you promise never to tell Davey about this.' Another recognition came to her. 'He made you leave, and he gave you enough money to start up your own business.'

'He gave me the chance I needed.'

'You've been grateful ever since, but you've never felt right about it.'

After a pause, the old woman said, 'He shouldn't be playing the same dirty trick on his son that his father played on him. That makes me very unhappy.'

'Did they even want the first child? They must have had it because of Lincoln.'

'If you guess, I'm not telling you. Do you understand? Keep guessing. You're doing an excellent job so far.'

'So they didn't. How did the first one die?'

'I thought you said that Daisy wrote about this in her book.'

'She did, but she changed everything.' An amazing thought flared in Nora's mind. 'Did Daisy kill the baby? It's a terrible thing to say, but she's almost crazy enough to have done it, and Lincoln and Alden wouldn't have had any trouble hushing it up.'

'The only thing Daisy Chancel ever killed was a bottle,' said Helen Day. 'What would you do with an unwanted baby?'

'You gave yours to your relatives.'

'But what would most people do?'

'Give it up for adoption,' Nora said.

'That's right.'

'But then why make up a story about it dying? It doesn't make sense.'

'Keep guessing.'

'You give up one child and then adopt another one? I don't even know if that's possible. No agency would give a child to a couple that had given their own away.'

'Sounds right to me,' said Helen Day.

'So the first one died. It must have been a crib death. Unless Alden murdered it.'

'What did Daisy put in her book?'

'It was all mixed up. There was a child, and then it was gone. The Lincoln character rages around, but half the time he's in a Nazi uniform. Lincoln Chancel didn't wear Nazi uniforms, did he?'

'Mr Chancel collected Nazi flags, uniforms, sashes, armbands, things like that. After he died, Alden asked me to burn them. You have to guess, Nora. Do you guess the baby died?'

'I guess it didn't die,' Nora said. 'I guess it was adopted.'

That's a good guess.'

'But…' A moment from Daisy's book played itself out in her mind: Adelbert Poison squabbling with Clementine on his rotting terrace. Nora tried to remember what he had said about Egbert - some word Daisy had written. What had actually happened to Davey, the only sequence of actions which made sense out of these uproars, came to her an instant before she recalled the word, which was reclaim. It felt as though a bomb had gone off in her chest.

'Oh, no,' she said. 'They couldn't have.'

After she said what was in her mind, she had no doubt that she was right. They had Davey adopted, and then Lincoln made them take him back. There was no first Davey. Davey was the first Davey.'

'Sounds like a pretty good guess to me,' said Helen Day. 'The Chancels have grand imaginations. Everyday truth doesn't stand a chance.'

Nora let her idea of their crime speak for itself. 'Neither one of them ever wanted him. They had to take him back for the sake of the money. They would have been happier if he had died.'

'And Alden's been making him pay ever since.'

'He's been making him pay ever since,' Nora echoed.

'I was right about you. You do see more than most other people.'

'They lied to him all through his life. How old was he when they got him back?'

'About six months. The other family didn't want to lose him, but Lincoln made Alden and Daisy go up to New Hampshire, and they said all the right things and got him back.'

'Everybody believed that their child had died. The only person who knew what had happened was you. When Davey got older, they were afraid you'd tell him the truth, so they made you leave.'

Helen Day sighed. 'One of the hardest things I ever did in my life. I could see Jeffrey whenever I wanted, and I knew he was with people who loved him. But Davey was all alone. When Mr Chancel died, they just ignored him. They're fine people, but they didn't want to be parents.'

Nora was still reeling. 'How can you say they're fine people when you know what they did?'

'It isn't so easy to judge people when you understand them. Alden has a cold heart and he's a bully, but I know why. His father. That's the pure and simple truth.'

'I bet that's right,' said Nora.

'You never knew Lincoln Chancel. Mr Chancel had more energy, brains, and drive than any other six men put together. He was a fighter. Some of the things he fought for were wrong and bad, and he didn't give a hoot about the law unless it happened to be on his side, but he didn't pussyfoot through life - he roared. There were times when I was angrier at him than I've ever been at anyone, but there was something magnificent about him. I always thought Mr Chancel was a lot like my sister, with everything turned inside out. Neither one of them was very nice, but if they'd been nice people they wouldn't have been so impressive.'

'But he was a monster.'

'You have to have a saint inside you to be a monster. Mr Chancel caused a lot of damage, but his heart wasn't cold, not at all. When I went to Shorelands, who do you suppose tried hardest to find my sister? Who talked Georgina into letting me stay four days? Mr Chancel. Who went out into the woods with me and the policemen? He had his businesses to run, he had his ticker tape and his telephone calls, but he did more to help find Katherine than any of those writers.'

'I see,' said Nora.

'I hope you do. And he saw what kind of shape I was in, with my husband dead and my son gone and my heart broken over poor Katherine, and he offered me a job at twice what I was getting, plus room and board.'

'You feel strongly about him.'

'Some things you don't forget. If Mr Chancel had lived, he would have told Davey the truth, I know that.'

'Should I?' Nora asked.

'You do whatever you think is best, but that's the kind of person you are anyhow. I just want you to remember that I didn't tell you, because I do what I think is best, too, and I don't go back on my promises.'

'Look, didn't they have to have some kind of burial? There was supposed to be a body.'

'Private burial. In the graveyard behind St Anselm's. Just Alden, Mr Chancel, and the rector. Short and sweet, and the only man crying at the funeral was Mr Chancel, because Alden knew damn well that what they were burying was a couple bricks packed in a shroud! so they wouldn't slide around in the coffin.'

'God, what a devil,' Nora said.

'His father said a lot worse than that when he found out.' Helen Day surprised Nora by laughing out loud.77

Davey was in Jeffrey's apartment, where the telephone line was untapped. If she called him, she was under no obligation to reveal his father's treachery. He would believe her in time, she knew, but if she troubled him with Helen Day's revelation while he was still under Alden's spell, he would accuse her of lying. Once he accepted the truth, he would have to burst out of the Poplars, out of Chancel House, out of Alden's life forever. Nora reached out and touched the receiver. The plastic seemed warm and alive. She pulled back her hand, then reached out again. The bell went off like an alarm, and she jumped. Davey.

She picked up the receiver and said hello.

'Nora, is that you?' The man at the other end was not Davey.

'It's me,' she said.

'This is Everett Tidy. I tried to call you before, but you were on the phone. It's not too late to talk, is it?'

'No.'

'I thought you ought to know about something. I don't mean to worry you, but it's got me a little disturbed.'

She asked him what had happened.

'I got two calls. The first was from a lawyer named Leland Dart. He's the father, isn't he?'

Nora asked what Leland Dart had wanted.

'He apologized for taking my time and all of that. He explained that he was the counsel for Chancel House and asked if I was aware that there had been some recent discussion about the authorship of one of their properties. I told him I knew nothing about it. Then he told me the property was Night Journey, and that, as I undoubtedly knew, my father had once had some contact with its author, Hugo Driver. He wanted to know if I was in possession of any papers of my father's which could demonstrate Driver's authorship. If I didn't have the time, he'd be happy to send one of his staff up to Amherst to go through everything for me.'

'What did you say?'

'That nothing my father had written could prove anything about Night Journey one way or the other. Had I examined everything? Yes, I said, and he'd have to take my word for it, there wasn't anything he could use. Then he asked how many journals or diaries my father had left, and where I kept them. Were they on deposit in a library somewhere, or were they in my house? The Amherst College Library, I told him. If he sent a young fellow up to Amherst, would I agree to let him inspect the papers? Not on your life. I said.'

'Then he said that he might need to be in correspondence with me, and he wanted to verify my address. He read out the address of my old house. Was that right? I said that as far as I was concerned, we had no more to talk about.'

'Good,' Nora said.

'Then he asked if I had been discussing this matter recently with any other parties. I told him that was none of his business, either. Had I heard of a woman named Nora Chancel, he asked. Had Nora Chancel come around making inquiries related to Hugo Driver?'

'He asked about me?'

'Right. I said no, I hadn't had any contact at all with you, and if he wanted to have a sensible business discussion, why didn't he call at a sensible hour? Well, he as good as called me a liar, and said you were a fugitive from justice, I should refuse to have anything to do with you, and there would be serious consequences if I ignored his advice.'

'Why would Leland Dart -'

'The next thing he said was that he had a young lawyer already in the Amherst area, and wouldn't I agree at least to meet with the man? No. I would not. He argued with me a little while, and then I heard it.'

'It?'

'The background. People talking. Voices. This strange ringing noise. Then I recognized it, that bell sound a cash register makes when a total is rung up.'

'A cash register?'

'So I said. Are you calling me from a bar?' and he hung up.'

'Oh, no.'

'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

'That it was Dick pretending to be his father?'

'I thought about all the stress the man is under. If your son is Dick Dart, maybe you'd be tempted to do some of your business in bars. But after the next call, it occurred to me that it might have been Dick.'

No more than twenty minutes after the man calling himself Leland Dart had hung up on him, Tidy had heard from a Captain Liam Monoghan of the Massachusetts State Police. Everett Tidy was on the verge of being taken in for questioning, perhaps even charged with various crimes, and if he had one hope in the world of escaping these humiliations, that hope was in Captain Monoghan. Monoghan said, I don't think you were aware that this woman was a fugitive from the FBI, and, we have information that Mrs Chancel has altered her appearance. We also have information that she may be in the Northampton area. Is that correct?

'If he'd named any other town, I wouldn't have said anything at all, Nora. I would have thought he was bluffing. But you have to appreciate my position. I want to help you in any way I can, but I am not willing to go to jail That man promised that I'd spend at least one night in jail if I didn't come across, and if that happened, I was afraid I'd involve Jeffrey and his mother.'

'Professor Tidy, Dick Dart cut and dyed my hair, but the police don't know that. The only way they could know it is if Dick Dart told them.'

There came a silence nearly as long as one of Helen Day's. 'I don't think the man I talked to was a policeman,' he finally said.

'What did you tell him?'

'He said he'd be satisfied that I was acting out of innocent motives if I could confirm or deny the information that you were in Northampton. If I continued to obstruct the police, there were people down at State Police headquarters who wanted to bring me in for the night. It seemed to me that the way to do as little damage as possible was to confirm what they already knew, so I told him that I did have the feeling that you had intended to go to Northampton, but I didn't know any more than that. He thanked me for my cooperation and said an officer would be coming over soon to take a statement. I called you as soon as I got off the phone.'

'No officer turned up at your apartment.'

'No. I suppose one could still show up. What do you think?'

'It was Dick Dart both times,' Nora said. 'When he was pretending to be his father, he learned enough to be pretty certain that I'd visited you, so he made the second call to see if he could bluff more information out of you.'

'I'm so sorry.' He groaned. 'Nora, I had no idea I was putting you in danger. How did he figure out where you were?'

'He didn't,' Nora said. 'Northampton was just an educated guess. If he guessed wrong, he'd just have to keep naming towns until he got it right.'

'Do you think I should call the police - the real police?'

'No, don't do that.'

'Get out of there,' Tidy said. 'Go to Boston and hide out until you can be sure you're safe. If you can get there tonight, call me and I'll wire you enough money to hold you for a while. Get Jeffrey to take you.'

'I want to find out if I'm still in trouble, but if I am, I might take you up on that.'

'I have a little house up in Vermont which is looking very attractive right about now. Do you think Dart might still be trying to find out where I live? I hate to think of him being in Northampton, but I have to say that I don't like the thought of him in Amherst, either.'

There was a silence Nora chose not to fill.

'I've been learning a very unhappy truth, the past hour or so.'

'What's that?'

'It is extremely unpleasant to be afraid,' Tidy said.78

'Davey?'

The shocked silence, which rode atop a swell of violins and horns, continued until Nora filled it herself. 'Davey, it's me.'

'Nora?'

'Can you talk to me?'

'Where are you?' His voice sounded a little slower than usual.

'Is it safe to talk?'

'How did you know I was here?'

'That's not important. Is this line tapped?'

'How should I know? No, I don't think it is. My father got rid of Jeffrey and the Italian girl, so that's why I'm in Jeffrey's apartment.' A blast of music obliterated his next few words.

'Davey, please turn down the music. I can't hear you.'

He must have waved a remote control, because the music instantly subsided. 'So how are you? Are you okay? You sound okay.'

'It's a little complicated. How are you?'

'Lousy,' Davey said. 'I've been worried sick ever since Dart grabbed you out of the police station. I thought he was going to kill you. You know how I found out? The receptionist saw it on television on her break! She called me, and I ran downstairs. There were about twenty people around her desk. For half an hour they were showing stuff about you and Dick Dart, and then Dad took me back to Westerholm. Ever since, all we do is watch the news channel and talk to cops. And Mr Hashim and Mr Shull, boy, do we ever talk to those guys. Mr Shull is sort of cool in a dumb kind of way. They both really hate Holly Fenn. They'd like to skin him alive.'

Nora heard the sound of ice cubes chiming against glass. 'Holly Fenn should get canned, he messed up big-time on this one. Hey, Nora, are you really all right?'

'In some ways, Davey.'

'When Mr Shull told us you got away, I was really glad.'

'Glad.'

'I was relieved. Don't you think I was relieved?'

'Davey, can I come home?'

'What do you mean?'

Her heart sank at the suspicion in his voice. 'Is Natalie still accusing me of kidnapping her?'

'From what I hear, Natalie still isn't saying anything at all. Mr Hashim and Mr Shull still think you're guilty.' He hesitated. 'Natalie took a lot of drugs, did you know that?'

'No.'

'One of those cops found a coke stash taped to the back of a drawer in her bedroom. Remember her refrigerator magnets? I guess they should have told us something.' Again she heard ice cubes rattling in a glass. 'Were you in Holyoke?'

'Yes,' Nora said.

'You drove to Holyoke and ditched that dead man's car?'

'I didn't intend to. I went into a restaurant and had something to eat, and when I came out the police were all over the place.'

'You went into a restaurant? You had something to eat? What is this, a field trip?'

'I have to eat now and then,' Nora said.

'But you could have come home. It makes you look so guilty when you hide out like this.'

'Come home where - to the Poplars?' Nora asked. 'I suppose Alden would greet me with shouts of joy.'

'Come home and face the music, I mean. My father doesn't have anything to do with that. He didn't do anything wrong.'

'Neither did I,' Nora said. 'But I bet your father is trying his damnedest to make you think I did.' Another chink of ice cubes. 'What are you drinking, Davey?'

'Vodka. Did you know that Jeffrey supposedly wrote plays that were put on at the Public Theater? I asked him about these posters he has up in his living room, and he claimed he wrote these plays, under the name Jeffrey Mannheim. I don't think he did, do you? They got awfully good reviews.'

'Jeffrey has hidden depths,' Nora said.

'He's the Italian girl's nephew, for God's sake! What kind of hidden depths could he have?' He took another chiming mouthful of the drink. 'Yeah, forget Dad. Of course my father is running you down all over the place. Mom is even worse. She thinks you arranged to be kidnapped by Dick Dart. She wishes she'd thought of it. I think Mr Hashim almost sort of believes her.'

'Wonderful.'

'I tell you, Nora, I've been really worried about you, but I have no idea what you think you're doing.'

This had the ring of an accusation. 'Mainly, Davey, I've been trying to stay away from Dick Dart and avoid the police until it's safe to come back home.'

'The cops found a lot of new clothes from a fancy men's store in that car, and when they went to the shop, the salesman remembered the two of you very well. Dick Dart tried on a bunch of new suits, and you just sat there and watched him. Then the cops went up and down the street, and they find out that the two of you have been in half the shops in town. Everybody remembers this nice lovey-dovey couple.'

'Dick Dart is a lunatic, Davey. Do you think I cooperated with him because I like him? I hate him, he makes my skin crawl. If I had done anything to call attention to myself, he would have killed me.'

'Not if he couldn't see you,' Davey said. 'Like if he was in a changing room.'

'I wasn't feeling all that confident, Davey. Just before we went on our shopping expedition, he raped me. I wasn't actually thinking too clearly. I felt like I'd been broken in half, and I wasn't up for any heroics.'

'Oh God, oh no, I'm so sorry, Nora.'

'I didn't cooperate with him, in case you're wondering. I was trying too hard not to pass out. Besides, my hands were tied behind my back and my mouth was taped shut.'

'You must have been scared to death.'

'It was even worse than that, Davey, but I'll spare your feelings.'

'Why didn't you tell me before?'

'Because you didn't ask me any real questions. You went on and on about Jeffrey and watching the receptionist's television. Also because you didn't sound too sympathetic, and now I know why. You imagined that I was having all that fun with Dick Dart. You want to know how I got away from him? I hit him on the head with a hammer. I thought I'd killed him. I got outside and started the car, but what do you know, I didn't kill him after all, because he came charging out of the motel room, and I steered toward him and hit him with the car.'

'My God. That's terrific.'

'It would have been terrific if I'd killed him, but I didn't. He's still wandering around trying to find people who might help prove that your beloved Hugo Driver didn't write Night Journey.'

Davey made a strangled sound of protest and outrage, but Nora ignored it. 'He just found out where I am, and now he's probably sharpening his knives so he can do a really good job on me.'

'Where are you?'

'If I tell you, you can't tell anyone else. You can't even tell them we had this conversation,'

'Sure.'

'I'm serious, Davey. You can't tell anyone.'

'I won't. I just want to know where you are.'

'I'm in Northampton, in a room in the Northampton Hotel.'

'Hold on a sec.'

She heard him put down the receiver. A refrigerator door opened, and ice cubes chinked into a glass. Liquid gurgled from a bottle. He came back to the telephone. 'What are you doing in Northampton?'

'I'm hiding, what do you think I'm doing?'

'Hold on, does this have anything to do with Jeffrey? Did he tell you I was staying in his apartment? Are you with Jeffrey? What the hell are you doing with Jeffrey?'

'I needed help and I called him.'

'You called Jeffrey? That's crazy.'

'I couldn't call you, could I? All the lines are tapped. And once Jeffrey realized that I'd been asking questions about Katherine Mannheim, he insisted on picking me up.'

'I'm lost. Jeffrey is a servant, he's Maria's goddamned nephew, what can he possibly have to do with Katherine Mannheim?' A slosh, a chinking of ice cubes. 'I'm beginning to hate the sound of that woman's name. I hope she died a horrible death. Why are you asking questions about her?'

'Dick Dart is doing more than buying new clothes.' For a little while she explained Dart's mission, and Davey responded with moans of disbelief. 'I don't care if you don't believe it, that's what's going on, Davey. As for Jeffrey, he's Katherine Mannheim's nephew because his mother, Helen Day, was her sister.'

'His mother? Helen Day?'

'She met your grandfather at Shorelands when she went there to see if she could find Katherine. Her husband had died, and she wasn't happy in her work, and he hired her.' She went on to explain the connections between Helen Day, Jeffrey, and Maria.

'Do these people think Katherine Mannheim wrote Night Journey? That could ruin us!'

'But Chancel House is in plenty of trouble even without a scandal about Hugo Driver. According to Dick Dart -'

'That expert on the publishing industry.'

'He knows a lot about Chancel House. Your father is running it into the ground, and he's been trying to sell it to a German firm. This Katherine Mannheim business is driving him crazy, because it could wreck the German deal.'

'There is no German deal. Dick Dart made it all up.'

'He passed along another interesting story, too. About the Hellfire Club.'

'Oh,' Davey said. 'Well, okay.'

' "Well, okay"? What does that mean?'

'Okay, I didn't exactly tell you the truth.'

'You belonged to the Hellfire Club.'

'There was no Hellfire Club, not really. That was just what we called it.'

'But there's a branch in New York, isn't there? And you're a member.'

'It isn't like that. You keep making it sound like a real club, when it's just these guys who get together to mess around. They do hire a good chef now and then, or they used to, and they did have a concierge and a coat-check woman. There was a bar, and you could take girls to the rooms upstairs. I only went a couple of times after Amy and I broke up.'

'Who was the girl you took to the Hellfire Club in New Haven?'

'The same little menace who turned up in the art department. At Yale she called herself Lena Ware. Every time I saw her, she was reading Night Journey. I think she came to New Haven looking for me.'

'Why didn't you tell me you'd met her twice?'

'It would have sounded so strange. And I didn't want to tell you about… you know… about what Dart probably told you.'

'About hitting her with the car.'

'I didn't hit her. Well, I thought I did, but I didn't. When I met her at Chancel House a couple of years later, and she was calling herself Paddi Mann, she said she was so mad at me that she wanted to scare me. Nora, she was nuts. I love Hugo Driver, but she never thought about anything else. You should have seen her friends! There are Driver houses, did you know that? I went to one with her. It was in a tenement over a restaurant on Elizabeth Street. It was really bizarre. Everybody was high all the time, and they had cave rooms, and people who dressed up like wolves, and all this stuff.'

'That was what you described to me, wasn't it?'

'Uh huh. Anyhow, she kept trying to get me to go to Shorelands because she had this screwball theory that Shorelands was in Night Journey.'

'How?'

'She said she thought you couldn't understand the book unless you went to Shorelands, because Shorelands was in it. Something about the places, but that's all she said. The whole idea was goofy. I got a book about Shorelands by a guy with a funny name, and it didn't say anything new about Night Journey.'

'Just out of curiosity, what really happened the last time you went to her place?'

'I found the book under her bed, and I really did think that something bad had happened to her, because she just disappeared. Her room was completely empty. The other Driver people who lived there didn't know where she had gone, and they didn't care. She wasn't a girl to them, she was Paddi Mann, the real one, the one in the book. When I left, I felt so depressed that I couldn't stand the thought of going home, so I did check into a hotel for a couple of nights. When we moved into our house, the book turned up in a carton I took out of the Poplars.'

'It was in our house?'

'I remember opening it up and seeing her name. For a second, Nora, I almost fainted. Every time that girl turned up, my life went haywire. I put it in the Chancel House bookcase in the hallway. The day I met Natalie in the Main Street Delicatessen, she mentioned that she'd never read Night Journey. She liked horror novels, but Driver always seemed too much like fantasy to her, so she'd never tried him. The next day I pulled one of the Night Journeys out of the bookcase and gave it to her, and it turned out to be that one.'

'Oh, Davey,' she said. He took another swallow of his drink. 'So you wanted to get it before the cops saw it.'

'I told you that. It had my name in it, too.'

'So to cover up your affair, you told me this story instead of saying, "Well, Nora, after we bought the house I gave this book to Natalie."'

'I know.' He groaned. 'I was afraid you'd figure out that I was seeing her. Anyhow, why are you asking me all this stuff? You don't care about Hugo Driver.'

'I bought all three of his books today.'

'No kidding. After you finish the first one, you have to read Twilight Journey. It's really great. God, it would be wonderful to talk to you about it. Want to know what it's about?'

'I have the feeling you want to tell me,' Nora said.

As ever, Davey instantly became more confident when given the opportunity to talk about Hugo Driver. 'Like in the first book, he has to go around talking to all these people and piece together what really happened out of their stories. He learns that his father killed a bunch of people, and almost killed him because he was afraid he'd find out. Anyhow, early in the book he hears that his parents aren't his real parents, they just found him in the forest one day, which in some ways is a tremendous relief, so off he goes in search of his real parents, and a Nellad, which is a monster that owns a gold mine and looks like a man but isn't, slices him with its claws, and the old woman who dresses his wounds tells him that his mother really is his mother. His parents left him in the forest when he was a baby, but she went out that same night and brought him back. He says, "My mother is my mother."'79

For the second time that night, an enormous recognition seemed to gather in the air around Nora's body, cloudy, opaque, awaiting the moment to reveal itself. 'Incredible,' she said.

'It's a fantasy novel - what do you want, realism?' The ice cubes rang in the glass, and music rustled in the background. 'It's so strange. You've been through all this terrible shit, and we're talking about Hugo Driver. I'm pathetic. I'm a joke.'

'No, what you're saying is interesting. Tell me what happens in the third one.'

'Journey into Light! Pippin learns that the real reason they're living way out in the forest at the foot of the mountains is that his grandfather was even worse than his father. He tried to betray his country, but the plot failed, and they escaped into the woods before their part in it was discovered. The Nellads are some other descendants of his grandfather's, and they have all his evil traits. They're so bad they turned into monsters. Pippin's grandfather killed a whole lot of people to gain control of a gold mine, but that was a secret, too. The gold mine has to be taken back from the Nellads, and Pippin has to reveal the truth, and then everything is all right.'

It was not merely incredible; it was stupefying: Hugo Driver had structured his last two novels around the best-kept secrets of his publisher's family. No wonder they were published posthumously, Nora thought, and then wondered why they had been published at all. She marveled at the grandeur of Alden Chancel's cynicism; certain that no one but himself and his wife would understand the code, he had cashed in on Driver's popularity. Probably his audacity had amused him.

'Your father published these books,' she said, as much to herself as to Davey.

'They don't sound like his kind of thing, do they? But you know how proud he is of never reading the books he publishes. He always says he wouldn't be able to publish them half as well if he actually had to read them.'

Davey was right. Alden took an ostentatious pride in never reading Chancel House books. He had not known the contents of Hugo Driver's posthumous novels.

'Why are we talking about this?' Davey asked. 'Nora, come home. Please. Come here, and we'll settle everything.' With these words, he had produced his own golden key. He wanted her back; he would not abandon her during the ordeal of Slim and Slam. 'I'll drive up there and bring you back. You could stay the night in the house, and I'd come over in the morning to take you to the station. Everybody's going to be pissed as hell at me, but I don't care.'

He wanted her to stay in the house while he returned to the Poplars. He wanted her back, but only so that he wouldn't have to worry about her. 'You can't drive, Davey,' she said. 'You've been drinking.'

'Not that much. Two drinks, maybe.'

'Four, maybe.'

'I can drive.'

'No, don't do it. I don't want to come back until I know I'm not going to be arrested.'

'What about not getting killed? Isn't that a little more important?'

'Davey, I'll be fine.' Nora promised herself to leave Northampton early the next morning. 'Listen, I was looking at those books I bought today, and there's something I can't figure out. On the paperbacks of the last two, the copy on the back cover says that the manuscripts were discovered among the author's papers.'

'Where else do you find manuscripts?'

'Hugo Driver's haven't exactly been easy to find, have they? Hugo Driver is about the only writer in history who didn't leave any papers behind when he died.'

'Well, they didn't just drop down out of the sky.'

The recognition hovering about Nora streamed into her in a series of images: a baby left in a forest, then reclaimed by his mother; an old man, the baby's grandfather, wearing a Nazi uniform; Daisy Chancel exhaling smoke as she fondled a copy of Driver's last book. You're not one of those people who think Journey into Light is a terrible falling off, are you?

The last two Driver novels had not fallen from the sky; they had flowed from the busy typewriter just off the landing of the Poplars' front staircase. Twenty years before he had turned to Daisy to produce the Blackbird Book. Alden had cajoled her into giving him two imitation Hugo Driver novels. He had needed money, and sly Daisy, knowing he would never read the books, had vented her outrage while she saved his company. Alden - Adelbert - was a fraud in more than one way. This was the real reason for her hysteria and his rage at Nora's discovery that Daisy had written the Blackbird books.

'What's going on?' Davey asked. 'I don't like this. I know you, you have something up your sleeve. You could have come home this afternoon, and instead you get Jeffrey to drive you around the Berkshires so you can meet the Cup Bearer and ask a lot of questions about Hugo Driver. Are you trying to help these Mannheim people destroy my father?'

'No, Davey-'

'Jeffrey is like a spy, he came here to burrow around for proof his aunt wrote Night Journey, Helen Day was probably doing the same thing, they both wanted the money, only my father figured out what the Cup Bearer was up to and he fired her, but he's such a good guy he hired half her family anyhow.'

'That's wrong. Neither one of them wants anything from you. Helen Day is convinced that her sister didn't write Night Journey.'

'They're using you. Can't you see that? God, this is horrible. I used to love the Cup Bearer, and she lied to my parents, she lied to me, and she lied to you. Her whole goddamned life is a lie, and so is Jeffrey's. I'm coming up there tonight and taking you away from these people.'

'No, you're not,' she said. 'Helen Day is not a liar, and you're not coming up here just to drive me back to the police.'

'Hold on, I'll be right back.' The clunk of the telephone against the desk, the opening of the refrigerator. The rattle of ice cubes, the gurgle of vodka. 'Okay. Now. Helen Day, damn her to hell. Can't you see that if she was Katherine Mannheim's sister, she's also the sister of these two old bats who are suing us?'

'She never even liked her other sisters. She won't have anything to do with them.'

'Sure, that's what she told you, and you're so naive you believed her. What's this "Day" business, anyhow? That can't be her name. She came here under an alias. I suppose that isn't suspicious.'

Nora explained how and why his grandfather had shortened her name.

'But she's still a liar.'

'Helen Day isn't the liar in this story, Davey.' She immediately regretted having been provoked into making this statement.

'Oh, it's me, isn't it? Thank you so much, Nora.'

'I didn't mean you, Davey.'

'Who's left? I was right the first time, you have something up your sleeve. Oh God, what else? You hate my father and you'd like to ruin him, just like these Mannheims or Deodatos or whatever their real names are. I should hang up and tell the cops where you are.'

'Don't, Davey, please.' She drew in a large breath. 'You're right. There is something I'm not saying, but it doesn't have anything to do with Night Journey.'

'Uh huh.'

'I found out something about you tonight, but I'm not sure I should tell you now because you won't believe me.'

'Swell. Good-bye, Nora.'

'I'm telling you the truth. Helen Day knows this thing, this fact about you. She kept it secret all her life, but now she thinks you ought to know it.'

Davey abused and insulted Helen Day for the space of several sentences, and then asked, 'If this information is so important, why didn't she tell it to me?'

'She promised not to.'

'Then why did she tell you? I hear the faint sound of tap Dancing, Nora.'

'She didn't tell me. She made me guess until I got it right.'

He gave a weary chuckle.

'Why do you think Helen Day left the Poplars?'

After another couple of abusive sentences, he said, 'At the time, what my parents told me was that she decided to go away and open her own businesis. Which I guess is what she did, right?'

'On her savings? Do you think she could have saved up that much money?'

'I see. The story is that my father paid her to keep quiet, right? This secret must be right up there with the key to the Rosetta stone.'

'For you it is the Rosetta stone,' Nora said.

'I know, I'm the real author of Night Journey. No, too bad, it was published before I was born. Nora, unless you spit out this so-called secret right now, I'm going to hang up on you.'

'Fine,' she said. 'I just have to work out a way to say it.' She thought for a moment. 'Do you remember what your mother did all during your childhood?'

'I do believe we're about to go to Miami by way of Seattle here. Fine. I'll play along. Yes, I remember. She sat up there in her office and she drank.'

'No, when you were a child, she wrote all day long. Your mother got a lot of work done in those days, and not all of it was put into the book she asked me to read.'

'Okay, she wrote the Morning and Teatime books. You're right about that. I went through four or five of them, and all those things you mentioned were there. It's kind of funny, because I also found some expressions I must have heard her say a thousand times. They just never registered before. Like "sadder than a tabby in a downpour" - stuff like that. "We wore out a lot of shoe leather." That's one reason the old man came down on you so hard. He overreacted, but he doesn't want anybody to know. I can see why. It wouldn't make him look very good.'

'Thank you.'

'But she wrote those books in the eighties, and we're talking about the sixties.'

'Do you have copies of the last two Driver novels with you?'

'No way, you hear me? If you're trying to tell me my mother wrote the later Drivers, you belong in a loony bin.'

'Of course I'm not,' she lied. 'The whole point is in the difference between the two styles.'

'I am really not following you.'

'I'm going to Miami by way of Seattle, remember? Unless I do it this way, you'll never believe me. So humor me and get the books.'

'This is nuts,' Davey said, but he put down the receiver and came back in a few seconds. 'Boy, I haven't read these in probably fifteen years. Okay, now what?'

Nora had pulled the two books from her bag, and now she opened Twilight Journey, looking for she knew not what, with no assurance of finding it. She turned over some thirty pages and scanned down the paragraphs without finding anything useful.

'What do you want to show me?'

'Some lines on page 42 rose up to meet her eye. 'Too true,' said the wrinkled creature squatting on the branch. 'Too true, indeed, dear boy.' She had to get Davey to notice these Daisyish sentences without seeming to point them out. 'Turn to page forty-two,' she said. 'About ten lines down from the top. See that?'

'See what? "He looked up and scratched his head." There?'

'A few lines down.'

Davey read, '"Pippin turned slowly in a circle, wishing that the path were not so dark, nor the woods so deep." That?' This was the sentence immediately below those with Daisy's trademarks.

'Read that paragraph out loud, and then read the whole page to yourself.'

'Fine by me.' He began reading, and Nora frantically searched through random pages.

'Now I should read the page to myself ?'

'Yes.' She scanned another page and saw a second indeed.

'All right, what about it?'

'That didn't sound a lot like your mother's writing, did it?'

'No, not really,' Davey said, sounding uneasy. 'Of course not. How could it? What's your point, Nora?'

'Look on page eighty-four, right below the middle of the page.'

'Huh,' Davey said. 'That long paragraph, beginning with "All the trees seemed to have moved"!'

She told him to read it aloud, then read the whole of the page to himself, as before.

'I'm getting a funny feeling about this.'

'Please, just do it.'

He began reading, and Nora turned to the back of the book and found, just above the final paragraph, the proof she needed. 'With a shock. Pippin remembered that only a day before he had felt as bereft as a long-haired cat in a rainstorm.' She waited for Davey to finish reading page 84.

'Are you being cute or something?' he asked. 'You told me you weren't trying to tell me that my mother wrote this. A few piddly coincidences don't prove anything. I'm starting to get highly ticked off all over again.'

'What coincidences? Did you see something in those paragraphs you didn't mention?'

'I'm getting fed up with your games, Nora.'

Time to raise the ante: she had to give him part of the truth. 'I don't think Hugo Driver wrote this book,' she said. 'It really did appear out of nowhere, didn't it? There were no papers. You would have seen them long ago, if they existed.'

'Are you ever on thin ice. What's next? Hugo Driver was my mother in male drag?'

Nora seized on a desperate improvisation. 'I think Alden wrote these books.'

'Oh, come on. I never heard anything more ridiculous.'

'Just consider the possibility. Alden knew he could make a whopping amount of money in a hurry if he brought out posthumous Driver novels. Because there weren't any real ones, he had to provide them. Nora continued improvising. 'No one could know that they weren't real, so he couldn't farm them out. He couldn't even trust Daisy. Haven't you always thought these were different from the first one?'

'You know I have. They're good, but not like Night Journey. A lot of writers never come up to their first successes.'

'The same person wrote these two, isn't that right?'

'And the same person wrote Night Journey. Who sure as hell wasn't my father.'

'What's the name of that monster who cuts Pippin with his claws?'

'He doesn't have a name. He's a Nellad.'

'Nellad. Remind you of anything?'

'No.' He considered it for a moment. 'It does sort of sound like Alden, if that's what you mean.' He laughed. 'You're telling me he put his own name in the book?'

'Wouldn't it be just like him to thumb his nose at everybody that way?'

'I have to give you credit for ingenuity. All these other people are trying to show that Driver didn't write Night Journey, and you're saying, yes, he: did write that one, but not the other two. Which is almost possible, Nora. I'll grant you that much. If you weren't all wrong you could actually be right.'

'Some of this really does sound like Alden to me. Look at the last page.'

'All right.' He read in silence for a time. 'Come on. You mean that cat?'

Nora said that she meant the entire page. 'I think Alden wrote this. I didn't even notice about the wet cat until you mentioned it.'

'Well, it sounds more like my mother than my father, because my father never wrote anything except business letters.'

'I don't think it sounds like your mother's writing,' Nora said.

'God damn, you haven't been listening to me. I told you, someone's as sad as a wet cat in a couple of those Blackbird Books, and she used that phrase all the time when I was a kid. She still does sometimes.'

'I had no idea.'

'It still can't be true. My mother?'

'Alden used some of her favorite phrases. He wouldn't trust her that much.'

'She's about the only person he would trust. I have to look at more of this.' She heard him turning pages, breathing loudly, now and then taking a sip of his drink. 'It can't be, can it? There are a million different ways to explain…' He let out a noise halfway between a wail and a bellow. 'NO!'

'What?'

'One of the villagers, right here, page one fifty-three, says, "You may ask me twenty-seven times, and the answer will never change." Twenty-seven times! My mother used to say that all the time. It was her expression for infinity. Holy shit.'

'Your mother wrote it?'

'Holy shit, I think she did,' Davey said. 'Holy shit. She really did. Holy shit. It's no wonder they were so freaked when you accused her of writing the horror novels. This could absolutely finish us off.'

'I don't see why,' Nora said. 'Doesn't it put your mother in a good light? If she did write those books, that is.'

'God, you're naive. If this gets out, my father gets accused of fraud, and Night Journey immediately becomes suspect. There'll be lawyers all over the place.'

'If it gets out.'

'It better not. This has to stay secret, Nora.'

'I'm sure it does,' she said.

'At least we finally got to Miami. If the Cup Bearer knew my mother wrote those books, I guess I'm not surprised that they had to buy her off and get rid of her. Wow.'

'Hold on to your hat,' Nora said.80

As she told Jeffrey early the next morning in the restaurant off the terrace, the rest of their long conversation had lasted half an hour, and in the course of it Nora had felt Davey's universe spin and wobble. His past had been yanked inside out; Nora had questioned the central theme of his life. He ridiculed, protested, denied. He had hung up after ten minutes and picked up the telephone again only after it had rung a dozen times. Think about what she wrote/ Nora had said, and listening to her account while spreading damson preserves on a croissant, Jeffrey shook his head. He, too, at first had been suspicious of the night's discoveries. Think about what your grandfather was like and what your father did to us, but first of all, think about what Daisy put in that book. That's your story, Davey. It's a message to you.' No, no, no. Helen Day had lied. Nora had brought him back again and again to the child abandoned in and rescued from the forest, to My mother is my mother. 'If it's true, I'm Pippin,' Davey had said, sounding the first note of the awe which follows all great revelations. Nora had told him, 'You've always been Pippin,' and she had not added what she told herself: Me, too. 'I feel like Leonard Gimmel or Teddy Brunhoven,' he had said. There is a code, and I can read it.'

'Yes. There is a code, and it's about you.'

'She wanted me to know. Even though she couldn't tell me.'

'She wanted you to know.'

'Should I confront him? Should I go over there and tell him I know?'

For the first time in their marriage, Nora advised Davey not to confront his father. 'You'd have to tell him how you found out, and I don't want anybody to know where I am.'

'That's right. I'll wait until whenever. Until I can.'

This had left unspoken more than Nora liked. 'You believe me, anyhow, don't you?'

'It took me a while, but, yeah, I do. I guess I really ought to thank you. I know that sounds funny, but I am grateful, Nora.'

Fine, but gratitude isn't enough is what she had said to herself when the conversation had limped to an inconclusive end.

She tore a flaky section off a croissant and put it in her mouth. Less than a quarter of the pastry, her second, now remained on her plate, and she was still hungry. Three tables away, a pair of heavyset men in windbreakers stoked in enormous breakfasts of scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes. Nora felt as though she could have eaten both of their meals.

On the other side of the window wall to her right, a tall boy in a blue shirt was washing the terrace flagstones with a bucket, a long broom, and a hose. Rivulets sparkled and gleamed between the shining stones. Another boy was flapping pink tablecloths over the tables like sails and smoothing them out with his hands. It was as humble as the two men and their breakfasts, but to Nora this scene suddenly seemed to overflow with significance. Then she remembered a photograph Dick Dart had shown her in the Springfield library. The golden key.

'To change the subject, you think Dart called Ev Tidy,' Jeffrey said.

She nodded and reached for another section of croissant, but she had eaten it all.