The Hellfire Club

'I don't want to talk about that note,' Agnes said. 'Especially not to any policeman. You better wash yourself off and get into some real clothes, unless you want a lot of men staring at you. Not to mention tracking mud all over the house.'

Nora showered as quickly as she could, dried herself off, and trotted, envelope in hand, to Margaret's room. A few minutes later, wearing a loose black garment which concealed a long envelope in one of its side pockets, she went downstairs. Seated at the dining room table, Marian jumped up when Nora came in. She had changed clothes and put on fresh lipstick. 'I know I have to thank you,' Marian said. 'You and that man saved my life. What happened to everybody? What happened to him? Are the police on the way?'

'Leave me alone,' Nora said. She went to a chair at the far end of the table and sat down, not looking at Marian. A current of emotion too complicated to be identified as relief, shock, anger, grief, or sorrow surged through her, and she began to cry.

'You shouldn't be crying,' Marian said, 'you were great.'

'Marian,' Nora said, 'you don't know anything at all.' From the front of the building came the sounds of sirens and police cars swinging into the gravel court, bringing with them the loud attentions of the world outside.

 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.