The Hellfire Club

rushing out without an explanation. However, I -'

'Why don't you try telling me, in simple words, where you are taking them?'

He tilted his head. 'How do you know that I'm taking them somewhere?'

'You're holding your car keys,' she said.

With all the dignity he could summon. Tidy said, 'We have to go to the college library, Sabina. I'll come back in half an hour or so, shall I?'

'Don't bother. Call me tomorrow, if you have anything to say. Jeffrey, will you be returning?'

'I'm sorry, but I'll have to get to Northampton I'll see you soon, I promise.'

'You are the most maddening person.' She gave Nora a look in which outright disapproval threatened to appear. 'I'll see you to the door.'70

There was so much space in front of the long backseat that the two men seemed to be twice the normal distance from her. 'That woman isn't happy with me.'

'It isn't just you,' Jeffrey said. 'Sabina's used to being unhappy with me.'

'Your aunt hasn't been happy with me since I dropped out of the Emily Dickinson Society,' Tidy said.

'Your aunt? Sabina Mann is your aunt?'

'You really do talk too much, Ev.'

Tidy swung his head sideways to stare at him, then looked forward again. 'Excuse me, Jeffrey, but I naturally assumed that your friend knew who you are. Why would she get in touch with you if -'

'That's enough.'

'Damn you, Jeffrey, let him talk,' Nora said. 'I tell you everything, and all you do is move me around like a puppet. I don't care if you won the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Prize, you hear me? You're not my golden boy. I'm really, really sick of this.'

What she really wanted to do, what every cell in her body told her to do, was open the door and jump out. If she didn't get out of the car soon, she would have to flail out, scratch their faces, bite whatever she could bite, because if she didn't something worse would happen to her.

'I don't blame you for being annoyed with me, Nora.'

'Stop the car.'

'I want you to think about two things.'

'I don't care what you want, Jeffrey. Let me out.'

'Calm down and listen. If you still want to get out afterwards, fine, do it.'

'To hell with you.' She gripped the door handle.

'You were fed up back at the house, too, weren't you? That was when this started when we were alone in the living room.'

Nora opened the door, but before she could jump out, Jeffrey had scrambled over the seat and was lunging toward her. Tidy shouted something from the front. As Nora leaned out of the door, Jeffrey caught her around the waist and pulled her back in. Holding her tight while she fought to get free, he slammed the door and locked it. She hit him in the arm, but he fastened his hands around her elbows and pushed her down into the seat.

'Let go of me!'

His face was a few inches from hers. She kicked at his ankle, missed, and tried again. Her foot banged against his leg. 'Ow,' he said, and his face came closer. 'Tell me why you're mad. It isn't because of me.'

She kicked out again, but he had shifted his leg and her foot shot into empty air. She tried with the other foot and missed again. He pressed her arms against her body and pinned her to the seat. 'Come on, tell me why you're mad.'

She yelled, 'Let go of me!'

'I'm letting go.' Little by little, his grip loosened as his face drew back, until finally he was no longer holding her at all. She raised her right hand, but it was too late to hit him. Her mind was already working. She lowered her hand and glared at him. Jeffrey fumbled with something beneath him which floated upward and became a jump seat.

'What kind of car is this, anyhow?' she said, collapsing back into the seat. 'A taxi?'

'A Checker,' said Everett Tidy. He had pulled over to the side of the road and was staring back at them with one arm over the top of his seat. 'My father used to drive one, and they're all I've ever owned. Had this one since 1972. Are you all right?'

'How could I be all right?' Nora said. 'People keep grabbing me and moving me from one place to another without ever telling me the truth. Even before the FBI showed up, my life turned into a catastrophe, and then horrible things happened to me and I just about lost my mind. People lie to me, they just want to use me, and I'm sick of all these secrets and all these plots.'

She stopped ranting and drew in a large breath. Jeffrey was right. She was not angry with him. It had come to her that she was still furious at Dan Harwich, or if not at the real Dan Harwich, the loss of the man she had imagined him to be. This loss felt like an enormous wound, and part of her fury was caused by the knowledge that the wound had been self-inflicted.

'Excuse me,' Tidy said.

'Wait a second,' Jeffrey told him. 'It's Dick Dart, isn't it? Plus Davey moving out of your house. You have been mistreated, of course you feel like you have no control over your life. Anybody would.'

'I suppose.' Another recognition moved within her: that her real resentment had to do with an almost impersonal aspect of her predicament. From the beginning, she had been forced to concentrate on a matter far more important to everyone else around her than to herself. A cyclone had smashed her life and whirled her away. The cyclone was named Hugo Driver, or Katherine Mannheim, or Shorelands, or Night Journey, or all of these together, and even though Dick Dart, Davey Chancel, Mark Foil, and the two men in the Checker cared enough about the cyclone to open their houses, ransack papers, battle lawsuits, drive hundreds of miles, risk arrest in its name, it had been she, who cared not at all, who had been taken over.

Tidy said, 'Jeffrey, I must -'

'Please, Ev. Nora, I didn't feel I could speak for my mother, so I had to postpone certain things until she could meet you. What would you like to do? It's up to you.'

She leaned back against the seat. 'I'm sorry I got wild. Why don't we just forget about it and go back to what we were doing?'

'I'm sorry,' Tidy said, 'but I can't do that until somebody tells me what you meant about the FBI.'

Jeffrey said, 'You heard her say she couldn't go to the police. You took that in stride, I remember.'

'I want to know why the FBI is involved. I'm not going anywhere until I do.'

'Nora?' Jeffrey said, and put a hand, one of the hands which had recently held her down, on her knee.

She jerked the knee from under his hand. 'No problem. I don't have any secrets, do I? You want to hear the story, Professor? Fine, I understand, you want to know if you'll be morally compromised by associating with me.'

'Nora,' Jeffrey said, 'Ev is only-'

'A neighbor of mine was kidnapped. We thought she was murdered, but she wasn't. When she turned up, she claimed that I kidnapped her. At least that's one of the things she says. She isn't very rational. Because it turned out my husband was sleeping with her, which was news to me, the FBI took her seriously. Is there anything else you'd care to know?'

Tidy scratched his beard. 'I think that will do. Are we still going to the college library, then?'

'I wouldn't dream of going anywhere else,' Nora said.71

Nora told Everett Tidy what she had learned about Creeley Monk in a monastic room on the top floor of the Amherst library. Beside her at a long wooden table. Tidy had listened with a gathering excitement which finally had seemed to freeze him into the inability to look at anything but the old upright typewriter at the end of the table and the photograph on the wall of his father seated before the same typewriter.

After Nora had finished. Tidy slid a file box forward and said, 'I'm grateful to you for sharing your information with me.'

'You're welcome,' she said, waiting to hear what the story had meant to him.

'My father did distrust Creeley Monk, and I should explain that first. He simply did not believe Monk's story of