The Hellfire Club

the sink and massage the whole thing into your hair. After two minutes we'll rinse it out.'

Nora worked her fingers through her hair until a cap of white foam appeared, then lowered her head beneath the tap and washed it away.

'Amazing,' Dart said.

Nora looked up.

A drowned sixteen-year-old blonde stared at her from the other side of the mirror. Short, wet hair only slightly darker than Natalie Weil's lay flat against her head.

'I didn't think it'd be that good,' Dart said. 'Don't forget conditioner.'

Nora took her eyes from the drowned girl's and unscrewed the cap, then faced the strange girl again and squeezed the contents of the tube over the top of her head in a long, looping line. Together she and the girl worked their fingers through their hair.

'My turn.' Soon a black-haired Dick Dart was grinning at his image in the mirror. 'Should have done this years ago. Don't you think I look great?'

A greasy crow's wing flattened over his head. Stray feathers adhered to his temples and forehead.

'Great,' she said.

He pointed at the sink, and she came: forward to rinse out the conditioner.

'Okay, next step,' Dart pulled her toward the bedroom and sat her at the table. 'Watch what I'm doing so you'll be able to do it for yourself, later.' He flipped open a mirrored case and handed it to her. He smoothed a dab of makeup across her cheekbones and feathered it down her cheeks, stroked mascara into her eyelashes, brushed lipstick onto her mouth. 'When we're all done, I want you to clean up your nails and cuticles and put on that polish. I suppose you have done that before?'

'Of course.' She could not remember the last time she had applied nail polish.

'One last touch,' Dart said, putting a dime-sized dab of the sculpting spritz on his palm. Behind her, he began massaging her scalp. He combed, patted, combed, tugged at her hair. 'Impress myself. Go in the bathroom and take a look.'

Nora slipped into her blue shirt.

'You won't believe it.'

Nora stood in front of the mirror and lifted her eyes. A woman just beginning her real maturity, the second one, a woman who should have been selling expensive shampoo in television commercials, looked back at her. Her glowing gamine's hair had been teased into artful ridges and peaks. She had perfect skin, a handsome mouth, and long, striking eyes. She was what the lacquered twenty-somethings who lived on mineral water from Waldbaum's wanted to be when they grew up. For some reason, this woman wore Nora's favorite blue shirt.

Nora moved her face to within three inches of the mirror. There, lurking beneath the blond woman's mask, she saw herself. Then she pulled back and disappeared beneath the mask. A howl of rage came from the bedroom.

Dick Dart was seated at the table with the newspaper he had taken from the lounge. The bottle of Cover Girl Clean stood open on the bottom half of the paper, and he was jabbing the brush at a story, spattering the paper with tan flecks. 'Know what these idiots are saying?' He turned toward her a face from a trick photograph, its left half smoothed into a younger, unlined version of the right. 'I should sue the bastards.'

Nora went past the row of shopping bags outside the closets. 'What's wrong?'

The Times, that's what. They got everything wrong, they fouled up in every possible way.'

She sat on the bed.

'Know what you are, according to this rag? A socialite. If you're a socialite, I'm the Queen of Sheba. 'To abet his escape. Dart seized a hostage, Westerholm socialite Nora Chancel, 49, wife of David Chancel, executive editor at Chancel House, and son of the current president and C E O of the prestigious publishing company, Alden Chancel. Neither David nor Alden Chancel could be reached for comment.'' He read this in a mincing, sarcastic drawl which made every word seem a preposterous lie.

She said nothing.

'If you go by this article, the only criminal in Westerholm is me, and can you guess what they say I am? Go on, take a stab at it.'

'A murderer?'

'A serial killer! Are they so brain-dead they can't tell the difference between me and some psycho who goes around killing people at random?' Indignation brought a flush to the side of his face he had not made up. 'They're insulting me in print!'

'I don't really -'

Dart pointed the makeup applicator at her like a knife. 'Serial killers are scum. Even Ted Bundy was a nothing from a completely insignificant family of nowhere Seattle nobodies.'

He was breathing hard.

'I see,' Nora said.

'What's the point of doing anything if they're going to twist it around? What about credit where credit is due?'

She nodded.

'Here's another lie. They say I'm an accused serial killer. Excuse me, but when did that happen? I was brought into the station because of the allegations of a drunken whore, I spent about twelve hours with Leo Morris, but when during all that time was I accused? This is libel.'

She kept her eyes on his.

'Work like mad, put yourself in constant danger, accomplish things the ordinary jerk couldn't even dream of, and they go out and peddle these lies about you. It makes me so mad!'

'Do they have any idea of where we are? What about the car?'

'For what it's worth, it says here that the fugitive and his hostage - hostage, that's a good one - fled in the hostage's car, which was later discovered in the parking lot of a restaurant stop on 1-95. Probably they do know about that old asshole's Lincoln. I was going to get a new car tonight anyhow.' He picked up the makeup bottle and threw the newspaper at her. 'Serial killer.'

She sat back on her haunches. 'What are you going to do?'

He dipped the applicator back into the jar of makeup, positioned the mirror in front of him, and started working on the right side of his face. 'We're going to change into new clothes and pack up. Early tomorrow, we're going to await the arrival of a weary traveler, kill him, and steal his car. Move to another motel. Sometime before noon tomorrow, we'll locate Dr Foil. After that, we'll Journey on to Northampton and pay a call on Everett Tidy, son of poor Bill.'

He replaced the cap on the bottle and offered his face for inspection. 'What do you think?'

From the neck up, he was a different, younger man who might have been a doctor. Nurses would have flirted with him, gossiped about him. 'Remarkable,' she said.

He reached across the table for the rope and the duct tape.51

Nora returned to her body. Perhaps her body returned to her. The process was unclear. From an indefinite realm, she had fallen into a damp bed already occupied by a large male body sweating alcoholic fumes. Her body was sweating, too. She raised a tingling hand to wipe her forehead, and the hand jerked to a halt before it reached her face, restrained by a tight pressure encircling her wrist. On examination this proved to be a rope. The rope extended beneath the inert body of the man, whom Nora could remember linking them wrist to wrist as she passed through the interior of cloud after cloud. She was back with Dick Dart, and she was having the second hot flash of her life. A nice mixture of demons in high good humor squatted around the bed, sniggering and muttering in their rat-tat-tat voices.

A man half visible in the darkness crossed his legs ankle to knee in a chair near the window. She looked more closely at the man and saw that her father had found a way to join her in this netherworld.

Daddy, she said.

This is a pretty pickle you're in, said her father. Seems to me you could use a little good advice from your old man right about now.

Don't wake him up. You're talking too loud.