The Hellfire Club (5 page)

10

“ARE YOU UPSET?”
she asked. Davey had traveled the entire mile and a half of Churchill Lane without speaking.

It was a question she asked often during their marriage, and the answers she received, while not evasive, were never straightforward. As with many men, Davey’s feelings frequently came without labels.

“I don’t know,” he said, which was better than a denial.

“Were you surprised by what your father said?”

He looked at her warily for about a quarter of a second. “If I was surprised by anybody, it was you.”

“Why?”

“My father gets a kick out of exaggerating his point of view. That doesn’t mean he should be attacked.”

“You think I attacked him?”

“Didn’t you say he was disgusting? That he cheapened every-thing?”

“I was criticizing his ideas, not him. Besides, he enjoyed it. Alden gets a kick out of verbal brawls.”

“The man is about to be seventy-five. I think he deserves more respect, especially from someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the publishing business. Not to mention the fact that he’s my father.”

The light at the Post Road turned green, and Davey pulled away from the oaks beside the stone bridge at the end of Churchill Lane. Either because no traffic came toward them or because he had forgotten to do it, he did not signal the turn that would take them down the Post Road and home. Then she realized that he had not signaled a turn because he did not intend to take the Post Road.

“Where are you going?”

“I want to see something,” he said. Evidently he did not intend to tell her what it was.

“This might come as a surprise to you, but I thought your father was attacking me.”

“Nothing he said was personal. You’re the one who was personal.”

Nora silently cataloged the ways in which she had felt attacked by Alden Chancel and selected the safest. “He loves talking about my age. Alden always thought I was too old for you.”

“He never said anything about your age.”

“He said I was the oldest person at the table.”

“For God’s sake, Nora, he was being playful. And right then, he was giving you a compliment, if you didn’t notice. In fact, he complimented you about a hundred times.”

“He was flirting with me, and I hate it. He uses it as a way to put people down.”

“That’s crazy. People in his generation all give out these heavy-handed compliments. They think it’s like offering a woman a bouquet of flowers.”

“I know,” Nora said, “but that’s what’s crazy.”

Davey shook his head. Nora leaned back in the seat and watched the splendid houses go by. Alden had been right about one thing: in front of every estate stood a metal plaque bearing the name of a security company. Many promised an
ARMED RESPONSE.

He gave her a brief, flat glare. “One more thing. I shouldn’t have to say this to you, but apparently I do.”

She waited.

“What my mother does up in her studio is her business. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, Nora.” Another angry glare. “Just in case you didn’t get what Dad was telling you. Pretty damn tactfully, too, I thought.”

More dismayed than she wished to appear, Nora inhaled and slowly released her breath as she worked out a response. “First of all, Davey, I wasn’t interfering with her. She was happy to see me, and I enjoyed being with her.” In Davey’s answering glance she saw that he wanted to believe this. “In fact, it was like being with a completely different person than who she was at lunch. She was having a good time. She was funny.”

“Okay, that’s nice. But I really don’t want you to wind up making her feel worse than she already does.”

For a moment, Nora looked at him without speaking. “You don’t think she does any work up there, do you? Neither does your father. Both of you think she’s been faking it for years, and you go along because you want to protect her, or something like that.”

“Or something like that.” Some of his earlier bitterness put an edge on his voice. “Ever hear the expression ‘Don’t rock the boat’?” He glanced over at her with an unhappy mockery in his eyes. “You believe she goes up there to work? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I think she’s writing
something
, yes.”

He groaned. “I’m sure that’s nice for both of you.”

“Wouldn’t you like your mother and me to be, maybe not friends, but more like friends than we are now?”

“She never had friends.” Davey thought for a second. “I suppose she was friends, as close to it as she could get, with the Cup Bearer. Then she quit, and that was that. I was devastated. I didn’t think she’d ever leave. I probably thought Helen Day was my real mother. The other one certainly didn’t spend much time with me.”

“I wish you could have seen the way she was with me. Sort of . . . lighthearted.”

“Sort of drunk,” Davey said. “Surprise, surprise.” He sighed, so sadly that Nora wanted to put her arms around him. “For which, of course, she has a very good reason.”

Alden,
Nora thought, but Davey would never blame the great publisher for his mother’s condition. She tilted her head and quizzed him with her eyes.

“The other one. The one before me, the one who died. It’s obvious.”

“Oh, yes.” Nora nodded, suddenly seeing Davey, as she had a hundred times, seated in the living room under a lamp from Michaelman’s with
Night Journey
in his hands, staring into pages he read and reread because, no less than the killers Leonard Gimmel and Teddy Brunhoven, in them he found the code to his own life.

“You think about that a lot, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He checked to see if she was criticizing him. “Kind of—thinking about it without thinking about it, I guess.”

She nodded but did not speak. For a moment Davey seemed on the verge of saying more. Then his mouth closed, his eyes changed, and the moment was over.

The Audi pulled up at a stop sign before a cluster of trees overgrown with vines that all but obscured the street sign. Then across the street a gray Mercedes sedan rolled toward the intersection, and as Davey flicked on the turn signal before pressing the accelerator and cranking the wheel to the left, the name of the street chimed in her head. He had taken them to Redcoat Road, and what he wanted to see was the house in which the wolf had taken Natalie Weil’s life and caused her body to disappear.

11

BESIDE NATALIE’S DRIVE
was a metal post supporting a bright blue plaque bearing the name of a local security firm more expensive than the one the Chancels had chosen. Natalie had taken account of the similarities between herself and the first victims and spent a lot of money for state-of-the-art protection.

Davey left the car and walked up along the grassy verge of Redcoat Road toward the driveway. Nora got out and followed him. She regretted the Bloody Mary and the single glass of wine she’d taken at lunch. The August light stung her eyes. Davey stood facing Natalie’s house from the end of the driveway, his trousers almost brushing the security system plaque.

Set far back from the road, the house looked out over a front yard darkened by the shadows of oaks and maples standing between grassy humps and granite boulders. Yellow crime scene tape looped through the trees and sealed the front door. A black-and-white Westerholm police car and an anonymous-looking blue sedan were parked near the garage doors.

“Is there some reason you wanted to come here?” she asked.

“Yes.” He glanced down at her, then looked back toward the house. Twenty years ago it had been painted the peculiar depthless red-brown of information booths in national parks. Their own house was the same shade of brown, though its paint had not yet begun to flake. In design also Natalie’s house replicated theirs, with its blunt facade and row of windows marching beneath the roof.

A white face above a dark uniform leaned toward a window in the bedroom over the garage.

“That cop’s in the room where she was killed,” Davey said. He started walking up the driveway.

The face retreated from the window. Davey came to the point where the yellow tape wound around a maple beside the drive, and continued in a straight line toward the house and garage. He put out his hand and leaned against the maple.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to help you.” The policeman came up to the living room window and stared out at them. He put his hands on his hips and then swung away from the window.

“Maybe this is crazy, but do you think that you wanted to come here because of what you were talking about in the car?”

He gave her an uncertain look.

“About the other one. The other Davey.”

“Don’t,” he said.

Again the Chancel tendency to protect Chancel secrets. The policeman opened the front door and began moving toward them through the shadows on Natalie Weil’s lawn.

12

NORA WAS CERTAIN
that Davey’s fascination with
Night Journey
, a novel about a child rescued from death by a figure called the Green Knight, was rooted in his childhood. Once there had been another David Chancel, the first son of Alden and Daisy. Suddenly the infant Davey had died in his crib. He had not been ill, weak, or at risk in any way. He had simply, terribly, died. Lincoln Chancel had saved them by suggesting, perhaps even demanding, an adoption. Lincoln’s insistence on a grandson was a crucial element of the legend Davey had passed on to Nora. An adoptable baby had been found in New Hampshire” Alden and Daisy traveled there, won the child for their own, named him after the first infant, and raised him in the dead boy’s place.

Davey had worn the dead Davey’s baby clothes, slept in his crib, drooled on his bib, mouthed his rattle, taken formula from his bottle. When he grew old enough, he played with the toys set aside for the ghost baby. As if Lincoln Chancel had foreseen that he would not live to see the child turn four, he had purchased blocks, balls, stuffed bunnies and cats, rocking horses, electric trains, baseball gloves, bicycles in graduated sizes, dozens of board games, and much else besides” on the appropriate birthdays these gifts had been removed from boxes marked
DAVEY
and ceremoniously presented. Eventually Davey had understood that they were gifts from a dead grandfather to a dead grandson.

Ever since the night drunken Davey had careered around the living room while declaiming this history, Nora had begun to see him in a way only at first surprising or unsettling. He had always imagined himself under the pitiless scrutiny of a shadow self—imagined that the rightful David Chancel called to him for recognition or rescue.

13

THE DETECTIVE SKIRTED
a dolphin-colored boulder and came forward, regarding Nora with a combination of official reserve and private concern. She could not imagine how she could have mistaken his blue suit and ornate red necktie for a police uniform. He had a heavy, square head, a disillusioned face, and a thick brown mustache that curved past the ends of his mouth. When he came close enough for her to notice the gray in the Tartar mustache, she could also see that his dark brown eyes were at once serious, annoyed, solicitous, and far down, at bottom, utterly detached, in a way that Nora assumed was reserved for policemen. Some portion of this man reminded her of Dan Harwich, which led her to expect a measure of sympathetic understanding. Physically he was not much like Harwich, being blocky and wide, heavy in the shoulders and gut, a Clydesdale instead of a greyhound.

“Are you okay?” he asked, which corresponded to her unconscious expectations, and when she nodded, he turned to Davey, saying, “Sir, if you’re just being curious, I’d appreciate your getting this lady and yourself away from here,” which did not.

“I wanted to see Natalie’s house again,” Davey said. “My name is Davey Chancel, and this is my wife, Nora.”

Nora waited for the detective to say,
I thought you were brother and sister,
as some did. Instead he said, “You’re related to the family on Mount Avenue? What’s that place? The Poplars?”

“I’m their son,” Davey said.

The man stepped closer and held out a large hand, which Davey took. “Holly Fenn. Chief of Detectives. You knew Mrs. Weil?”

“She sold us our house.”

“And you’ve been here before?”

“Natalie had us over a couple of times,” Nora said, for the sake of including herself in the conversation with Holly Fenn. He was a hod carrier, a peat stomper, as Irish as Matt Curlew. One look at this guy, you knew he was real. He leveled his complicated gaze at her. She cleared her throat.

“Five times,” Davey said. “Maybe six. Have you found her body yet?”

Davey’s
trait
, that which had caused Nora second and third thoughts about the man she had intended to marry, was that he stretched the truth. Davey did not lie in the ordinary sense, for advantage, but as she had eventually seen, for an aesthetic end, to improve reality.

Davey was still nodding, as if he had gone over their visits and added them up. When Nora added them up for herself, they came out to three. Once for drinks, a week after they started looking at houses” the second time for dinner” the third time when they had dropped in to pick up the keys to the house on Crooked Mile Road.

“Which is it?” Fenn asked. “A couple of times, or six?”

“Six,” Davey said. “Don’t you remember, Nora?”

Nora wondered if Davey had visited Natalie Weil by himself, and then dismissed the thought. “Oh, sure,” she said.

“When was the last time you were here, Mr. Chancel?”

“About two weeks ago. We had Mexican food and watched wrestling on TV—right, Nora?”

“Um.” To avoid looking at the detective, she turned her head toward the house and found that she had not been mistaken after all. The uniformed policeman she had seen earlier stood in the bedroom window, looking out.

“You were friends of Mrs. Weil’s.”

“You could say that.”

“She doesn’t seem to have had a lot of friends.”

“I think she liked being alone.”

“Not enough she didn’t. No offense.” Fenn shoved his hands in his pockets and reared back, as if he needed distance to see them clearly. “Mrs. Weil kept good records as far as her job went, made entries of all her appointments and that, but we’re not having much luck with her personal life. Maybe you two can help us out.”

“Sure, anything,” Davey said.

“How?” Nora asked.

“What’s in the jar?”

Nora looked down at the jar she had forgotten she carried. “Oh!” She laughed. “Mayonnaise. A present.”

Davey gave her an annoyed look.

“Can I smell it?”

Mystified, Nora unscrewed the top and held up the jar. Fenn bent forward, took his hands from his pockets, placed them around the jar, and sniffed. “Yeah, the real thing. Hard to make, mayonnaise. Always wants to separate. Who’s it for?”

“Us,” she said.

His hands left the jar. “I wonder if you folks ever met any other friends of Mrs. Weil’s here.”

He was still looking at Nora, and she shook her head. After a second in which she was tempted to smell the mayonnaise herself, she screwed the top back onto the jar.

“No, never,” Davey said.

“Know of any boyfriends? Anyone she went out with?”

“We don’t know anything about that,” Davey said.

“Mrs. Chancel? Sometimes women will tell a female friend things they won’t say to her husband.”

“She used to talk about her ex-husband sometimes. Norm. But he didn’t sound like the kind of guy—”

“Mr. Weil was with his new wife in their Malibu beach house when your friend was killed. These days he’s a movie producer. We don’t think he had anything to do with this thing.”

A movie producer in a Malibu beach house was nothing like the man Natalie had described. Nor was Holly Fenn’s manner anything like what Nora thought of as normal police procedure.

“I guess you don’t have any ideas about what might have happened to your friend.” He was still looking at Nora.

“Nora doesn’t think she’s dead,” Davey said, pulling another ornament out of the air.

Nora glanced at Davey, who did not look back. “Well. I don’t know, obviously. Someone got into the house, right?” she said.

“That’s for sure. She probably knew the guy.” He turned toward the house. “This security system is pretty new. Notice it the last time you were here?”

“No,” Davey said.

Nora looked down at the jar in her hands. What was inside it resembled some nauseating bodily fluid.

“Hard to miss that sign.”

“You’d think so,” Davey said.

“The system was installed a little more than two months ago.”

Nora looked up from the jar to find his eyes on hers. She jerked her gaze back to the house and heard herself saying, “Was it really just two weeks ago we were here, Davey?”

“Maybe a little more.”

Fenn looked away, and Nora hoped that he would let them go. He must have known that they had not been telling him the truth. “Do you think you could come inside? This isn’t something we normally do, but this time I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“No problem,” Davey said.

The detective stepped back and extended an arm in the direction of the front door. “Just duck under the tape.” Davey bent forward. Fenn smiled at Nora, and his eyes crinkled. He looked like a courteous frontier sheriff dressed up in a modern suit—like Wyatt Earp. He even sounded like Wyatt Earp.

“Where are you from, Chief Fenn?” she asked.

“I’m a Bridgeport boy,” he said. “Call me Holly, everybody else does. You don’t have to go in there, you know. It’s pretty bloody.”

Nora tried to look as hard-bitten as she could while holding a quart jar filled with mayonnaise. “I was a nurse in Vietnam. I’ve probably seen more blood than you have.”

“And you rescue children in peril,” he said.

“That’s more or less what I was doing in Vietnam,” she said, blushing.

He smiled again and held up the tape as Davey frowned at them from beside a bank of overgrown hydrangeas.