The Hellfire Club (14 page)

“
No!
” Natalie shrieked.
“Get her away!”

Appalled, Nora stepped back.

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

Fenn said, “Barbara?”

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

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

“That’s Natalie, but what happened to her?” Nora said. “She’s so—”

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

“You think I know?”

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

“No, none at all. We were friends.”

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

“Sure,” Davey said.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“Whatever I did?” This was really beyond her.

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

30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m scrambling some eggs, too,” she said.

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

“Page one,” Nora said. “There’s another long article inside.”

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

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

“Live and learn.”

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

“Made?”

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

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

“I don’t know. It was what we did.”

“And why did you call her the Cup Bearer?”

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

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

“Lots of things are upsetting for me.”

“Go on,” she said. “Read.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought we were getting at it,” she said.

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

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

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

“I didn’t go crazy. I saved a little boy’s life.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess I can hardly wait,” she said.