The Hellfire Club

For Nora, the question represented another instance of Hugo Driver's amazing ability to go on making trouble long after his death. 'There's no reason to bring it up.'

Davey gave her an injured look. 'This is serious, Nora. Maybe I shouldn't go in with you. This woman can't be Natalie, but what if she is?'

'If she can't be, she isn't. And if somehow she is Natalie, she'll have a lot more to talk about than a copy of Night Journey.'

'I guess so.' He sighed. 'You said you had some idea about Spectre.'

'Oh!' she said. 'When I was running into the Bird Shelter, something about the writing occurred to me. But I could be wrong.'

Davey accelerated downhill toward the green light on the Post Road, signaled for a turn, and swung north into the fast lane.

'You know how you used to joke about Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime being the same person? I think they really could be.'

He gave her an incredulous glance.

'Last month, I read a Marietta Teatime novel, remember? The Grave Is Waiting!'

'The Waiting Grave,' Davey said.

'Right. Some things in the style struck me as funny. Marietta had people say 'too true' a couple of times when they agreed with something. Who says 'too true'? English people, maybe, or Australians, but Americans don't say it. In Spectre, people say 'too true' over and over.'

'Obviously Clyde reads her books.'

'But there's more. Marietta started half a dozen sentences with the word 'indeed.' The same thing happens in Spectre. And there's something about shoes. In the Marietta book, the gardener character, the one who kills the little boy, his shoes are crosshatched with scuff marks. That's how you find out later that he was impersonating a minister in the other town. Well, in Spectre, Morning keeps saying that George Whatshisname's shoes are crosshatched with scuff marks. It's not even a very good description.'

'Oh great, now you're an editor.'

Nora said nothing.

'You know what I mean. I don't think it's a bad description, that's all.'

'Okay, look at their joke names,' Nora said. 'Morning and Teatime, it's like being called six o'clock and four o'clock.'

'Hah,' Davey said. 'You know, maybe Morning invented Teatime as a pseudonym. It's not actually impossible.'

'Thank you.'

'If he had two names, he could unload twice as many books. God knows, he must have needed the money. All he had to do was set up Marietta's post office box and a separate bank account. Nobody ever saw either one of them, anyhow.'

'So if they were the same person, it wouldn't cause any problems?'

'Not if we don't tell anybody,' Davey said. 'When Spectre is edited, we take out all the 'indeeds' and 'too trues' and the crosshatches, that's all.'

'You could get a little publicity out of it,' Nora said.

'And make us look like fools. No thanks. The best thing is to keep quiet and let the problem go away by itself. Which is what I wish we could do with this stupid Driver business.'

'What Driver business?'

'It's so ridiculous I don't even want to talk about it.'

This is the problem your father told you about.'

The reason I had to watch that travesty. Okay, here goes.'

Davey turned off the Post Road and drove toward the stone building of the Westerholm police station. The adjacent parking lot seemed unusually full to Nora.

'How can that movie be a nuisance for Chancel House?'

'It can't be,' Davey said, sounding weary, 'not in itself. What happened was, these two screwball women in Massachusetts went out to see that dumb movie right after they were going through some family papers in their basement.' Davey came out of the main lot and turned into the police department lot, which was as crowded as the one they had just left. Cars and vans were parked in front of the station.

Nora said, 'Look at those vans.' She pointed at two long vans bearing the logos and call letters of network news programs in New York.

'Just what we need.'

'These women found old family papers?'

'They thought they found a way to scare a lot of money out of my old man. Their greasy lawyer did everything but admit it.'

Davey had now driven to the far end of the police lot without finding an opening, and he circled around toward the parking places reserved for police vehicles.

'I don't get it,' Nora said.

They found notes a sister of theirs was supposed to have made. Like three pages. In a suitcase.' He pulled into an empty spot between two police cars.

'They're claiming that their sister wrote Night Journey?'

Whatever the women in Massachusetts were claiming was apparently not to be discussed, because Davey immediately got out of the car. Nora opened her door, stood up, and saw Officer LeDonne approaching. He looked like a man under a great deal of pressure.

'I'm not moving this car,' Davey said. 'You asked us to come down here.'

'Will you follow me into the station, please? Mr Chancel? Mrs Chancel? I'll have to ask you to move pretty quickly, and not to talk to anyone until we're with Chief Fenn.' He came toward them as he spoke and halted about two feet away from Davey. 'Stick as close to me as you can.' He looked at them both, turned around, and set off toward the front of the building.

When they came around the side of the station, Nora noticed something she had not taken in earlier. Unlike the cars in the main lot, these were occupied. The men and women waiting in their cars watched LeDonne lead the Chancels toward the steps of the police station.

'Why, half the town is out here,' she said.

'Been here since dawn,' LeDonne said.

They hurried up the three long steps. Nora felt hundreds of avid eyes watching them from behind windshields and then was distracted by the commotion on the other side of the door. LeDonne sighed. 'Up to me? We'd put 'em all in the holding pen and let 'em out one at a time.' He faced the door, motioned them nearer, and lunged inside. Davey moved in behind Nora, put his hands on her hips, and pushed.

As Nora knew from her misadventure with the millionaire's child, the tall desk manned by a sergeant dominated one side of the space beyond the entrance, and on the other stood two long rows of wooden benches. A few steps ahead of her, LeDonne was pushing his way through a crowd surging forward from the benches. Two uniformed men behind the desk shouted for order. Davey's hands propelled her past an outheld microphone into a babble of questions and a sudden wave of bodies. Voices battered at her Davey seemed to lift her off the ground and speed her along into the narrow vacancy behind LeDonne. From behind her right ear, Nora heard a reporter asking something about the Chancel family, but the question vanished as they turned into a wide hallway, where, abruptly, they found themselves alone.

'Chief Fenn's office is up ahead,' LeDonne told them, seeming to promise that everything would be answered there, and started off again, leading them past a series of doors with pebbled glass windows. On the far side of a wide metal staircase he opened a door with the words CHIEF OF DETECTIVES written on the opaque window.

In the office stood a rolltop desk, a long, green metal desk facing two wooden chairs, and a gray metal table pushed up against a pale green cinder-block wall. Both the metal desk and the table were covered with papers, and more papers bristled from the open rolltop. A narrow window behind the green desk looked out on the police parking lot, where the Audi stood like a trespasser in the rows of black-and-white cars.