The Hellfire Club

never been inside Shorelands, but I've seen it, and even now we're talking about two square miles of wilderness. An army couldn't have found her.'

'You're probably right,' she said, idly watching suburban houses grow closer together as the lots shrank and sprouted the swing sets, wading pools, and bicycles in the driveway she had seen while Dick Dart drove them into Fairfield in Ernest Forrest Ernest's car. 'Oh, my God.'

Harwich gave her a look of concern.

'I know why Lincoln Chancel went to Shorelands.'

'Money, I told you.'

'Not for the reason you think. He was trying to recruit Georgina Weatherall for his Fascist cause, the Americanism Movement. Lincoln Chancel secretly supported the Nazis. He got together a bunch of sympathetic millionaires, but they had to keep quiet during the war. In the fifties, Joe McCarthy roped them into anti- Communism, I guess, and they had to go along.'

He looked at her suspiciously. 'I have to say, you do liven things up. Let me take you out for dinner tonight, I know a great French place out near Amherst - a little bit of a drive, but it's worth it. Amazing food, candlelight, the best wines. Nobody'll see us, and we'll be able to have a good long talk.'

'Are you worried about somebody seeing us?'

'We have to keep you under wraps. In the meantime, I'll order a pizza. There's not much food in the house. You can get a nap, and I'll go to the hospital. Don't answer the phones or open the door for anyone, okay? We'll keep the world at arm's length for a while and get reacquainted all over again.'

Nora leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Instantly, she was standing in a forest clearing ringed by tall standing stones. Counting money into neat stacks at a carved mahogany desk placed between two upright stones, Lincoln Chancel glanced up and glared at her. Misery and sorrow overflowed from this scene, and Nora stirred and awakened without at first recognizing that she had fallen asleep. Longfellow Lane rolled past the windows like a painted screen.

'Right now you need to be taken care of,' Harwich said.

He pressed a button clipped to his visor to swing up the garage door and drove inside to park beside Sheldon Dolkis's green Ford. As soon as he got out of the car, he moved to the wall and flipped a switch to bring the heavy door rattling down, A bare overhead light automatically turned off, and the door clanked against the concrete. Nora felt almost too tired to move. Harwich's dim form moved past the front of the car toward the right side of the garage. 'You okay?' he said, and opened an interior door. A panel of gray light erased the front of his body and turned his hair to silver fuzz.

'Guess I didn't know how tired I was. She dragged herself out of the remarkably comfortable seat and noticed that a small figure like a white sparrow had perched atop the car's hood. No, not a bird, a winged woman, poised for flight. This had a meaning, but what meaning? Oh yes, what do you know, Dan Harwich numbered among his possessions a Rolls-Royce. How odd; the deeper into the world she descended, the further up she went. The car door closed with a bank vault's serious thunk, and Nora went past the waiting Harwich into the house.

'Everything caught up with you,' he said from behind her. He put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and squeezed past in the narrow space of the rear entry, lightly kissed her, and took her with him through the kitchen to the living room, where she stood embarrassed in the midst of a yawn while he darted forward and drew down on a cord which advanced dark curtains across the bow window. 'Let's get you settled,' he said, and ushered her gently up the stairs, past the linen closet, and into the guest room, where he conducted her toward the bed and removed her shoes once she had stretched out. She yawned again, hugely.

'You fell asleep in the car for about ten minutes.'

'I did not.' The protest sounded childish.

'You did,' Harwich said in an amused echo of her tone. 'Not very peacefully, though. You made a lot of unhappy noises.' He began massaging the sole of her right foot.

'That feels wonderful.'

'Why don't you take off that T-shirt and unbutton your jeans? I'll help you slide them off.'

'No.' She shook her head back and forth on the pillow.

'You'll be more comfortable. Then you can slide under the covers. Hey, I'm a doctor, I know what's best for you.'

Obediently she sat up and yanked off the white V-necked shirt, turning it inside out in the process, and flipped it toward him.

'Cute bra,' he said. 'Do the top of those jeans.'

Protesting, she flattened out and undid the button, pulled down the zip, and wiggled the jeans over her hips. Harwich yanked them down, and in one quick movement they whispered over her thighs, knees, feet. 'Matching panties! You're a fashion plate.' He raised the sheet and the cover so that she could wriggle under and then lowered them over her, not without a little tucking and parting. 'There you are, sweetie.'

'What a guy,' she heard herself say, and roused herself to add, 'Give me about an hour, okay?' The words sounded distant in her ears, and soft, slow-moving bands of color began to spill from the few objects visible through the slits of her eyes, one of them being Dan Harwich as he drifted toward the door.

The broad circle of grass within the tall stones looked like a stage. Nora moved forward as Lincoln Chancel wrapped bands around the stacks of bills before him and one by one placed them in a satchel as carefully as if they were raw eggs, He gave Nora a sharp, disgruntled look and returned to his task. 'You don't belong here, he said, seeming to address the satchel.

His ugliness outdid the famous photograph, in which it had seemed a by-product of rage. It was an entire ugliness, domineering in its force.

'No sand in your craw. A few setbacks and you're on your knees, whimpering Daddy, help me, I can't do it on my own. Pathetic. When people talk to you, all you hear is what you already know.'

'I understood why you went to Shorelands,' she said, doing her best to mask the fear and impotence she felt.

'Consider yourself fired.' He sent her a cold, ferocious glance of triumph and pulled a thick cigar from his top pocket, bit off the end, and lit it with a match which had appeared between his fingers. 'Go home. It's not a job for a little girl.'

'Screw you,' Nora said.

'Gladly.' He grinned at her like a dragon through a flag of smoke. 'Even though you're too scrawny for my taste. In my day we liked our women ample - womanly, we used to say. Tits like bolsters, buttocks you could sink your hands into, Women to make your pole stand up and beg for it. One other kind I liked, too - small ones. Every big man wants to roger a little thing. Get on top, you feel like you'll either snap their bones or split 'em in half. But you're not that type, either.'

'The Katherine Mannheim type.'

He drew on the cigar and blew out a quivering ring of smoke that smelled like rotting leaves. 'The runaway.' Instead of losing its shape and drifting upward, the trembling smoke ring widened and began shuddering toward Nora. 'Little bitch didn't have the manners of a whore.'

The smoke ring floated into the middle of the grassy circle, paused, and twisted into nothingness. Pretending that she had already followed orders and left. Chancel snapped the lock of the satchel over the last wad of bills, and her question spoke itself in her head. What did she say…

'What did she say to you while the photograph was being taken?'

He looked over at her and mouthed the cigar. 'Who?'

'Katherine Mannheim.'

'I graciously invited her to sit on my lap, and she said, 'I've already seen your warts, I don't have to feel one, too.' Tidy and that blockhead Favor both laughed. Even the pansy smiled, and so did that poser with the funny name. Austryn Fain. What kind of a handle is Austryn Fain?' He aimed the astonishing nose at her like a gun. 'You don't know anything. You don't even read the right books. Get out of here. Lose yourself in the woods.'

She cried out and found Harwich's shadowy, reassuring face inclining toward her. 'Ow, that hurt,' he said, maintaining his smile. 'You walloped me!'

'Sorry. Bad dream.' A long leg brushed hers, and she squinted at his face.

'Do you always make so much noise in your sleep?'