The Hellfire Club (56 page)

ONE DAY AT THE END OF AUGUST

One day at the end of August
, a formerly lost woman who asked the people she knew to call her Nora Curlew instead of Nora Chancel drove unannounced through the gates on Mount Avenue and continued up the curving drive to the front of the Poplars. After having been ordered out of the house by his father, Davey had been implored to come back, as Nora had known he would, and was living again in Jeffrey Deodato’s former apartment above the garage. Alone in the house on Crooked Mile Road, Nora had spent the past week dealing with endless telephone calls and the frequent arrivals of cameras, sound trucks, and reporters wishing to speak to the woman who had killed Dick Dart. She had also contended with the inevitable upheavals in her private life. Even after she told him that she wanted a divorce, Davey had offered to move back in with her, but Nora had refused. She had also refused his invitation to share the apartment above the garage, where Davey had instantly felt comfortable.
You told the FBI where I was,
she had said, to which Davey replied,
I was trying to help you.
She had told him,
We’re finished. I don’t need your kind of help.
Not long after this conversation, she had called Jeffrey, who was out of the hospital and convalescing at his mother’s house, to tell him that she would see him soon.

Alden Chancel, whose attitude toward Nora had undergone a great change, had tried to encourage a reconciliation by proposing to build a separate house, a mini-Poplars, on the grounds, and she had turned down this offer, too. She had already packed most of the surprisingly few things she wanted to keep, and she wished to go someplace where few people knew who she was or what she had done. Nora was already impatient with her public role” another explosion of reporters and cameramen would soon erupt, and she wanted to be far away when it did. In the meantime, she had three errands to accomplish. Seeing Alden was the first of these.

Maria burst into a smile and said, “Miss Nora! Mr. Davey is in his apartment.”

A few days after being suspended, Maria had been rehired. The lawsuit against Chancel House had been withdrawn, and Alden no longer feared revelations connected to Katherine Mannheim.

“I’m not here to see Davey, Maria, so please don’t tell him I’m here. I want to talk to Mr. Chancel. Is he in?”

Maria nodded. “Come in. He’ll like to see you. I will get him.” She went to the staircase, and Nora walked into the living room and sat down on one of the long sofas.

In a few minutes, radiating pleasure, affability, and charm, Alden came striding in. He was wearing one of his Admiral of the Yacht Club ensembles: white trousers, a double-breasted blue blazer, a white shirt, and a snappy ascot. She stood up and smiled at him.

“Nora! I was delighted when Maria told me you were here. I trust this means that we can finally put our difficulties behind us and start pulling together. Davey and I need a woman around this place, and you’re the only one who would possibly do.” He kissed her cheek.

A week ago, announcing that she had finally had enough of his abuse, fraudulence, and adulteries, Daisy had left the Poplars to move into a suite at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, from which she refused to be budged. She would not see or speak to Alden. She had emerged from her breakdown and subsequent immersion in soap operas with the resolve to escape her imprisonment and revise her book. During one of his pleading telephone calls, Davey said that his mother wanted “to be alive again” and had told him that he had “set her free” by learning the truth about his birth. He was baffled by his mother’s revolt, but Nora was not.

“That’s nice of you, Alden,” she said.

“Should we get Davey in on this talk? Or just hash things out by ourselves for a while? I think that would be useful, though any time you want to bring Davey in, just say the word.”

Alden had been impressed by the commercial potential of what she had done at Shorelands, and Nora knew from comments passed along by Davey that he was willing to provide a substantial advance for a first-person account of her travels with Dick Dart, the actual writer to be supplied later. The notion of her “true crime nonfiction novel” made his heart go trip trap, trip trap, exactly as Daisy had described. But the most compelling motive for Alden’s new congeniality was what Nora had learned during her night in Northampton. He did not want her to make public the circumstances of the births of either Hugo Driver’s posthumous novels or his son.

“Why don’t we keep this to ourselves for now?” she said.

“I love dealing with a good negotiator, love it. Believe me, Nora, we’re going to come up with an arrangement you are going to find very satisfactory. You and I have had our difficulties, but that’s all over. From now on, we know where we stand.”

“I agree completely.”

Alden brushed a hand down her arm. “I hope you know that I’ve always considered you a tremendously interesting woman. I’d like to get to know you better, and I want you to understand more about me. We have a lot in common. Would you care for a drink?”

“Not now.”

“Let’s go into the library and get down to the nitty-gritty. I have to tell you, Nora, I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“Have you?”

He linked his arm into hers. “This is family, Nora, and we’re all going to take care of each other.” In the library, he gestured to the leather couch on which she and Davey had listened to his ultimatum. He leaned back in the chair he had used that night and folded his hands in his lap. “I like the way you’ve been handling the press so far. You’re building up interest, but this is about when we should do a full-court press. You and I don’t need to deal with agents, do we?”

“Of course not.”

“I know some of the best architects in the New York area. We’ll put together a place so gorgeous it’ll make that house on Crooked Mile Road look like a shack. But that’s a long-range project. We can have fun with it later. You’ve been thinking about the advance for the book, haven’t you? Give me a number. I might surprise you.”

“I’m not going to write a book, Alden, and I don’t want a house.”

He crossed his legs, put his hand to his chin, and tried to stay civil while he figured out how much money she wanted. “Davey and I both want this situation to work out satisfactorily for all three of us.”

“Alden, I didn’t come here to negotiate.”

He smiled at her. “Why don’t you tell me what you want, and let me take it from there?”

“All I want is one thing.”

He spread his hands. “As long as it’s within my powers, it’s yours.”

“I want to see the manuscript of
Night Journey.
”

Alden stared at her for about three seconds too long. “Davey asked me about that, hell, ten years ago, and the thing’s lost. I wish I did have it.”

“You’re lying to me,” Nora said. “Your father never threw anything away. Just look at the attic of this house and the storeroom at the office. Even if he had, he would have kept that manuscript. It was the basis of his greatest success. All I want to do is take a look at it.”

“I’m sorry you think I’m not telling you the truth. But if that’s what you came here for, I suppose this conversation is over.” He stood up.

“If you don’t show it to me, I’m going to say things that you don’t want people to hear.”

He gave her an exasperated look and sat down again. “I don’t understand what you think you can get out of this. Even if I did have it, it couldn’t do you a bit of good. What’s the point?”

“I want to know the truth.”

“That’s what you came here for? The truth about
Night Journey
? Hugo Driver wrote it. Everybody knows it, and everybody’s right.”

“That’s part of the truth.”

“Apparently your adventures have left you more unsettled than you realize. If you want to come back in the next couple of days to talk business, please do, but for the present, we have nothing more to talk about.”

“Listen to me, Alden. I know you have that manuscript somewhere. Davey once came to you with an idea that would have made you even more money from the book, and you never even bothered to look for it. He did, but you didn’t. You knew where it was, you just didn’t want him to see it. Now I want to look at it. I won’t open my mouth to a single human being. I just want to know I’m right.”

“Right about what?”

“That Driver stole most of the story from Katherine Mann-heim.”

Alden stood up and looked at her in pity. Just when she could have turned things around and joined the team, Nora had turned out to be a flake after all, what a shame. “Let me say this to you, Nora. You think you know certain facts which could damage me. I would rather not have these facts come to light, that’s true, but while they might stir up some publicity I could do without, I’ll survive. Go on, do whatever you think you have to do.”

Nora took a folded sheet of paper from her bag. “Look at this, Alden. It’s a copy of a statement you probably won’t want made public.”

Alden sighed. He came across the room to take it from her. He was bored, Nora had thrown away her last chance to be reasonable, but he was a gentleman, so he’d indulge her in one final lunacy. He took his reading glasses from the pocket of the blazer, put them on, and snapped open the paper on his way back across the room. Nora watched this performance with immense pleasure. Alden read a sentence and stopped moving. He read the sentence again. He yanked off his glasses and turned to her.

“Read the whole thing,” Nora said. Until this moment, she had wondered if he had already known. The shock and dismay surfacing through his performance made it clear that he had not. She could almost feel sorry for him.

Alden moved behind the leather chair, leaned over it, and read Hugo Driver’s confession and Georgina Weatherall’s postscript. He read it all the way through, then read it again. He looked up at her from behind the chair.

“Where did you get this?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s a fake.”

“No, Alden, it’s not. Even if it were, would you want that story to get out? Do you want people to start speculating about your father and Katherine Mannheim and Hugo Driver?”

Alden folded the letter into one pocket, his glasses into another. He was still hiding behind his chair. “Speaking hypothetically, suppose I do have the manuscript of
Night Journey.
Suppose I satisfy your curiosity. If that were to happen, what would you do?”

“I’d go away happy.”

“Let’s try another scenario. If I were to offer you two hundred thousand dollars for the original of this forgery, solely for the protection of my father’s name, would you accept my offer?”

“No.”

“Three hundred thousand?”

Nora laughed. “Can’t you see that I don’t want any money? Show me the manuscript and I’ll go away and never see you again.”

“You just want to see it.”

“I want to see it.”

Alden nodded. “Okay. You and I are both honorable people. I want you to know I never had any idea that . . . I never had any idea that Katherine Mannheim didn’t just walk away from that place. You gave me a promise, and that’s my promise to you.” He recovered himself. “I still say that this is a forgery, of course. My father followed his own rules, but he wasn’t a rapist.”

“Alden, we both know he was, but I don’t care. It’s ancient history.”

He came out from behind his barricade. “It’s ancient history whether he was or wasn’t.” He moved along the bookcase and swung out a hinged section of a shelf at eye level to reveal a wall safe, another massy vault larger within than without. He dialed it open and with more reverence than she would have thought him capable of reached in and took out a green leather box.

Nora came toward him and saw what looked like the bottom of a picture frame on the top shelf of the safe. “What’s that?”

“Some drawing my father squirreled away.”

Alden pulled the drawing out and showed it to her before sliding it back into the vault. “Don’t ask me what it is or why it’s there. All I know is that when Daisy and I moved into the Poplars, he showed it to me and told me to keep it in the vault and forget about it. I think it must be stolen. Somebody probably gave it to him to pay off a debt.”

“Looks like a Redon,” Nora said.

“I wouldn’t know. Is that good?”

“Good enough.”

She took the box to the couch and looked inside. A small notebook with marbled covers sat on top of a lot of typed pages. She picked up the notebook. Katherine Mannheim’s signature was on the inside cover. She had written
“Night Journey, novel?”
on the facing page. Nora turned page after page filled with notes about Pippin Little” this was the embryo of Driver’s book, stolen from Katherine Mannheim’s bag.
He who steals my trash steals trash.
She put the notebook beside her and took the manuscript from the box. It seemed such a small thing to have affected so many lives. She opened it at random and saw that someone had drawn a line in the margin and written in a violent, aggressive hand,
p. 32, Mannheim notebook.
She turned to another page and saw in the same handwriting,
pp. 40–43, Mannheim.
Lincoln Chancel had demanded the stolen notebook, kept the manuscript, and marked in it everything Driver had stolen from Katherine Mannheim. If Driver ever ruined him, he would ruin Driver.

“Do you see?” Alden said. “Driver wrote the book. These Mannheim people don’t have a leg to stand on. He borrowed a few ideas, that’s all. Writers do it all the time.”

Nora returned the manuscript and notebook to the box. “I’m grateful to you, Alden.”

“I still don’t see why it was so important.”

“I just wanted to see it all the way through,” she said. “In a day or two, I’m going to be moving to Massachusetts for a little while. I don’t know where I’ll be after that, but you won’t have to worry about me.”

Alden told her he would say good-bye to Davey for her.

“I already did that,” Nora said.

The second of Nora’s errands took her to the post office, where she withdrew from an unsealed envelope addressed to
The New York Times
a letter describing Hugo Driver’s debt to the forgotten poet Katherine Mannheim and an account of the poet’s death and her burial a few feet north of the area known as Monty’s Glen in the Shorelands woods. To the letter she added, in her hasty hand, this note:
“Katherine Mannheim’s original notebook and Hugo Driver’s manuscript, with Lincoln Chancel’s marginal notes referring to specific passages taken from the notebook, are in a wall safe located in the library of Alden Chancel’s house in Westerholm, Connecticut.”
Having kept her promise never to speak of these matters, she refolded the letter, wrapped it around another copy of Hugo Driver’s confession, put them back into the envelope, sealed it, and sent it by registered mail to New York.