The Hellfire Club

in her family. She was unpredictable, and she'd previously disappeared from places where she'd felt uncomfortable. But her sister did have one huge worry.'

'That she was dead,' Nora said.

'You've heard about her weak heart. The sister was afraid that she might have wandered into the woods and suffered heart failure, so she insisted on calling in the police. Georgina was furious but gave in. For a couple of days, the Lenox police questioned the guests and staff at Shorelands. They searched the grounds and the woods. In the end, it seemed pretty clear that she had run off, and a week later, the summer was over.'

'And then all these deaths,' Nora said.

'Like a plague. Georgina must have felt some sort of renewal was called for, because she immediately paid for a lot of extensive renovations, but all those deaths cast a long shadow over the place.'

'There's going to be a long shadow over us,' Andrew Martindale said.

'One more minute.' Foil consulted his watch and skipped over a thick wad of pages. 'I want you to hear something from the end, so you'll know as much as I do about Creeley's death.' He looked up again. 'If you learn anything at all that might shed light on this, I'd appreciate being let in on it. I know it isn't likely, but I do want to ask.'

'I'll tell you about anything I find,' Nora said.

'It's so enigmatic. Here's what Creeley wrote in his journal three days before he killed himself.

'All at once, a beam of light pierces the depression I've been in since leaving Shorelands. It seems there is hope after all, and from a most Unexpected Quarter. Interest in high places! What a blessed turn, if all goes as it should.

'Then this, the next day.

'Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Done. Finished. I should have known. At least I did not babble to MF. How cruel, to be written only to be unwritten,

'And that's it, that's all, that's the last entry. I didn't hear from him on either of those days. When I tried to call the operator told me his phone was off the hook, and I assumed he was working. I knew he'd been unhappy for a long time, so it was good to think he was working hard. But he never let three days go by without at least talking to me, and the next day, when I still couldn't get through to him, I drove to his apartment after my last patient.'

Foil paused for a moment. 'It was a dark, miserable day. Freezing. We'd had a terrible winter. I don't think we'd seen sunlight for a month. I got to his building. Creeley had the top floor of a duplex, with a separate entrance to his part of the house. After I got out of the car, I climbed over a snowbank and looked up at his windows. All his lights were on. I went up the steps to the porch and rang his bell. His downstairs neighbors, the owners, were both out, and I could hear their dog barking. They had a collie named Lady - high-strung, like all collies. That's a desolate sound, you know, a dog barking in an empty house. Creeley didn't answer. I thought he'd turned up his radio to drown out the sound of the dog, which he had to do off and on during the day. He didn't mind, Creeley played music all the time when he was writing, and the only problem with turning it up was that sometimes he couldn't hear the bell. I rang it a few more times. When I still didn't hear him coming down the stairs, I took out my key and let myself in, just like a hundred times before.'

'As soon as I got in, I heard his radio going full blast. 'Let's Dance,' Benny Goodman's theme song. It was one of the remote broadcasts they used to do in those days. I went up the stairs calling out his name. Lady was going crazy. Before I got to the top of the stairs, I started smelling something. I should have recognized the smell right away.'

I opened his living room door, but he wasn't there. I hollered his name and turned the radio down. That blasted collie got even louder. I knocked on the bathroom door and looked in the kitchen. Then I tried the bedroom.

'Creeley was lying on his bed. Blood everywhere. Everywhere. He'd used the shotgun his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday, when he still had hopes of normal male hobbies for his son. I went into shock. I just shut down. It seemed like I stood there for a long time, but it could only have been a couple of minutes. After a little while, I called the police and waited like a robot until they came. And that was that. Try as I might - and I tried, all right - I never understood why he did it.'62

'Well, I understand why he did it.' Harwich turned out of the driveway onto Oak Street and rotated his shoulders several times, as if trying to shake off the atmosphere of the past thirty minutes. He leaned sideways to see himself in the rearview mirror and ruffled the tight gray curls on the side of his head. 'Mark is an okay guy, but he doesn't want to see the truth.'

Nora pointed at a driveway a little way ahead of them on the other side of the street. 'Pull in there.'

He stared at her. 'What?'

'I want to see them leave.'

'You want - Oh, I get it.' He pulled up slightly ahead of the driveway between two wings of a stone wall, and backed in. 'See? You think I don't know what this is about, but I do.'

'Good,' Nora said.

'You want to make sure they get away safely.'

'I'm glad you don't mind.'

'I didn't say I didn't mind. I'm just a very agreeable person.'

'So tell me why Creeley Monk killed himself.'

'It's obvious. This guy reached the end of his rope. First of all, he was a working-class kid who pretended to be high society. From the second he got into that school, his whole life was an act. On top of that, he couldn't sustain his initial success. Shorelands was supposed to raise him to a new level, but no one wanted to publish his next book. One flutter of interest sends him into ecstasies, and when it doesn't pan out, he's devastated. He takes the shotgun out of his closet and ends it all. Simple.'

This clever, rapid-fire dissection, as of a corpse under a scalpel, irritated Nora unreasonably; Harwich had reduced Mark Foil's account to the empty diagram of a case history.

'Anyhow, you did a good job in there,' Harwich told her. 'But there is this little issue about that editor who turns out to be part of the Homintern. Did you get that? We've met him a couple of times? Pretty soon Mark is going to know this book is just a smoke screen, and then he's going to have a lot of questions for me.'

'It's no big deal. I said I had a book contract, and it turns out I don't. I'm writing the book before I take it to a publisher.'

'I'm still in a tricky position. Anyhow, there they are, safe and sound.' He nodded toward a long, graceful- looking gray car moving down Oak Street in front of them. 'Not a care in the world, as usual.'

'You don't like them, do you?'

'What's to like?' he burst out. 'These two guys live in a world where everything's taken care of for them. They're so smug, so lovey-dovey, so pleased with themselves, tooling off to Cape Cod in Martindale's new Jaguar while his patients climb the walls.'

'I thought he was retired.'

'Mark's retired, except from all the important stuff, the state boards and the national committees. Andrew has about six jobs, as far as I can make out. Head of psychiatry here, professor of psychiatry there, chief of this and that, a great private practice full of famous painters and writers, plus his books. The Borderland of the Borderline Patient. The Text of Psychoanalysis. William James, Religious Experience, and Freud. I forget the others.' He pulled out of the drive, enjoying her amazement.

'I thought…' Nora did not want to admit what she had thought. 'How can he take a month off? Oh, I forgot. It's August, when all the shrinks go to Cape Cod.'

That's right, but Andrew spends his month off running a clinic in Falmouth. And writing. He's a busy lad.' He gave her a sidelong, appraising look. 'Hey, why don't you take some time off yourself ? You shouldn't run around on your own while your madman is on the loose. And there's no point in trying to find this Tidy character.'

'What do you think happened to Katherine Mannheim?'

'Easy. Everybody thought either she ran away or died in the woods, so they couldn't see that both things were true. She's carrying her suitcase through the woods at night, the weight is too much for her, an owl scares her, blooey. A couple of nitwit cops pretend to search the woods, and surprise, surprise, they don't find her. I've