The Hellfire Club

don't think about anything except money - oh my God, there's Ric Flair, one day I am going to humiliate myself and write him a really lurid fan letter. And we have three synagogues, all booming. Ric sweetie, could you be true to me?'

After selling them the house on Crooked Mile Road - a house paid for by Alden and Daisy Chancel - Natalie took them for lunch at the General Sherman Inn, advised them to fill the family room with babies as soon as possible, and disappeared from their lives. From time to time, Nora had seen her spiraling one hand in the air as she steered two new prospects up the Post Road in her boatlike red Lincoln. Six months ago, she had come across Natalie dumping frozen pizzas into a shopping cart already piled with six-packs of Mexican beer and Diet Coke, and for ten minutes they caught up with each other. Natalie had said yes, she was seeing someone, but, no, it wouldn't amount to anything, the guy was a prune. She would call Nora, you bet, it would be great to get away from the Prune.

Two nights before, Natalie Weil had disappeared from a blood-soaked bedroom. Her body had not been left behind, like those of the other four women, but Natalie was almost certainly as dead as they. Like Natalie, they were divorced businesswomen of one kind or another, and they lived alone. Sophie Brewer was an independent broker, Annabelle Austin a literary agent, Taylor Humphrey the owner of a driver-service company, Sally Michaelman the owner-operator of a lighting-supplies company. All these women were in their mid to late forties. The younger Chancels had installed a security system soon after they moved into their new house, and after the first two deaths, on nights Davey came home late Nora punched in the code that turned it on before she went to bed. She kept all the doors locked when she was in the house. After Taylor Humphrey's murder, she began hitting the buttons as soon as it got dark.

Nora had heard about Sally Michaelman from an immaculate twenty-something two places in front of her at a checkout counter in Waldbaum's, the supermarket where she had last come across Natalie Weil. Nora first noticed the young woman because she had put on drop-dead makeup and a loose but perfectly fitted linen outfit to visit a supermarket at ten in the morning. She might have been drifting past fluted columns in an advertisement for a perfume named something like Arsenic.

In the baggy shorts and old blue shirt she had changed into after her morning run, Nora leaned over her cart to see what the twenty-something had put on the belt: thirty cans of gourmet cat food and two bottles of Swedish water, now joined by a third.

'Her cleaning woman called my cleaning woman' she was saying to the woman behind her, also an armored twenty-something. 'Can you believe this crap? It's that woman from Michaelman's, and I was in there last week, looking for a, you know -'

'That thing in your entry, that thing just inside the door.'

'For something like you have. Her cleaning woman couldn't get in, and with all the, you know-'

She took in Nora, glared, and swooped into her cart to drop a bag of plums on the moving belt. 'We might as well be living in the South Bronx.'

Nora remembered that woman from Michaelman's; she didn't know her name, but the woman had persuaded her to go ahead and buy the halogen lamp she wanted for the family room. She had been down-to-earth and handsome and comradely, the kind of person Nora instinctively thought of as a fellow traveler. Her first impulse was to defend this terrific woman to the two self-centered idiots in front of her, but what had they done besides call her that woman from Michaelman's? Her second impulse, almost simultaneous with the first, was to panic about whether or not she had locked the back door on her way to the car.

Then Nora had seen the bloody corpse of the terrific woman from the lamp store. This figure instantly mutated into that of a boy soldier on a gurney, his belly blown open and his life slipping out through his astonished eyes. Her knees turned to water, and she dropped her head, breathing hard until the twenty-somethings had moved away from the register.

The dying young man and others like him inhabited her better nightmares. The worse ones were much worse.3

Nora dismissed the nightmare, decidedly of the worse variety, and got out of bed. Because she wanted to look more in control of herself than Davey was likely to be, she rubbed her hands over her forehead and wiped her palms on her nightgown. Out in the hallway, the music no longer sounded like a string quartet. It had a wilder, more chaotic edge; Davey had put on one of the Mahler symphonies he had taught her to enjoy.

Nobody who did not enjoy classical music could stay married to Davey Chancel, who fled into music when troubled. Nora, the pride of the Curlews, had decided to marry Davey during his second proposal, six months after they met, one year after Springfield and her never-to-be-thought-of reunion with Dan Harwich.

Nora padded past a case filled with Chancel House books and reached the stairs to the front door. Beside it, the red light glowed reassuringly above the keypad of the security system. Nora went quietly down the stairs and checked that the door was still locked. When she started down the second set of stairs to the family room, the music came into focus. Indistinct voices sounded. She had been hearing a soundtrack. Davey, who never watched anything except the news, had turned on the television. She went down the last of the stairs, her sympathy hardening into anger. Again, Alden had again publicly humiliated his son.

She opened the family room door and leaned in. Startled but in no obvious distress, wide-eyed Davey stared at her, wearing a lightweight robe of Thai silk over his pajamas and holding a pencil upright over an open notebook. The surprise in his face echoed her own. 'Oh, honey,' he said, 'did I wake you up?'

'Are you all right?' Nora padded into the room and glanced at the screen. A ragged old man waved his staff in front of a cave. Pippin! Remember to be brave! You must be brave!

Davey aimed the remote control at the set, and the soundtrack disappeared. 'I didn't think you'd hear, I'm sorry.' As neat as a cat in the even light of the halogen lamp, he placed the remote on top of the notebook and looked at her with what seemed like real remorse. 'Today we ran into a problem, some nuisance Dad asked me to handle, and I thought I should watch this thing.'

'It wasn't the TV. I woke up.'

He tilted his head. 'Like last night?' The question may not have been perfectly sympathetic.

This business about Natalie - you know…' Nora cut herself off with a wave of a hand. 'All the hags in Westerholm have trouble sleeping these days.' She turned back to the television. A bedraggled boy of eight or nine shouldered a sack through a dripping swamp. Twisted, monstrous trees led into gleaming haze.

'And most of them have no more to worry about than you do.'

Last night Davey had listed the reasons why Nora should not worry: she did not live alone or run a business; she did not open the door to strangers. If anyone suspicious turned up, she could push the panic button above the keypad. And, though this remained tactfully unstated, wasn't she overreacting, letting the old problems get to her all over again?

'I wondered where you were,' she said.

'Well, now you know.' He tapped his pencil against the notebook and managed to smile. Faced with a choice, he chose kindness. 'You could watch this with me.'

She sat beside him on the sofa. Davey patted her knee and focused on the movie.

'What is this?'

'Night Journey. You were making so much noise I got out of bed, and when I looked at the paper, I saw it was on. I have to see the thing anyhow, so I might as well do it now.'

'You have to take notes on Night Journey?'

'We're having some trouble with the Driver estate.' He pointed the remote at the screen and raised the volume. Distant in the hazy swamp, wolves howled. More peeved than she wished to be, Nora watched the boy make his way beneath the monstrous trees. 'It'll be okay,' Davey said. For an instant he took her hand. She squeezed it and tucked up her legs and rested her head on his shoulder. Davey twitched, signaling that she was not to lean on him.

Nora slid away and propped her head on the back of the sofa. 'What kind of trouble?'

'Shh.' He leaned forward and picked up the pencil.

So she was not to speak. So she was a distraction. For some reason Davey had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to take notes on the film version of Night Journey, Hugo Driver's wildly successful first novel and the cornerstone of Chancel House, founded by Lincoln Chancel, Davey's grandfather and Hugo Driver's friend. Davey, who took enormous pride in the association, had read Night