The Hellfire Club

Nora seemed also to touch him.

'I see. That's the end of the line. Can you at least tell me about Paddi?'

'I can tell you part of it, but the rest will have to wait. You remember how Sabina feels about the Chancels. She blames them for a lot of things, but the main one is what happened to her daughter. She was a nice girl before she went off the tracks. Maybe she was a little like me, and that was why I liked her. Patty, which was her name then, was a lot younger than I, but I always enjoyed her company. Of course, I was gone a lot, so I wasn't around when she discovered Night Journey. The book took over her life. She change;ed the spelling of her name. Sometimes she pretended to be other characters in the book. I guess Patty got deeper and deeper into her obsession, to the point where she would disappear from home to visit other Driver people. There was a lot of drug abuse, fights at home, her entire personality changed, she wouldn't spend time with anyone who wasn't capable of spending day after day talking about nothing but Driver and the book, and when she was sixteen she ran away.'

'One Driver person told her about another, and she floated through this seedy underworld devoted to Pippin Little, living in Driver houses. These people spend their lives acting out scenes in the book. Nobody knew where she was. A couple of years later, she managed to fake her way into the Rhode Island School of Design, I can't imagine how, and Sabina sent her money, but Patty refused to see her. She was there maybe a year, then she vanished again. Sabina got one postcard from London. She was in another art school and living in another Driver house. Lots of drugs. Then she moved to California - same situation - and wound up in New York, moving back and forth between the East Village and Chinatown, completely submerged in this crazy Driver world. That must have been when she zeroed in on Davey. Anyhow, she took off again, and nobody knew where she was until she died of a heroin overdose in Amsterdam and the police got in touch with Sabina.'

There had been less decoration in Davey's story than Nora had thought. 'Thanks for telling me,' she said. 'But I still don't understand why she was so fixated on the manuscript and Catherine Mannheim.'

'Stop asking questions, and tell me about your childhood or how you met Davey. Tell me what you think of Westerholm.' He would go no further.

'I can't stand Westerholm, I met Davey in a Village bar called Chumley's, and my father used to take me on fishing trips. Jeffrey, where am I going to sleep tonight?'

'There's a nice old hotel in Northampton. You can stay there as long as you like.'

A few minutes later they passed beneath the highway and came into Northampton from the east. Rows of shops and grocery stores lined the street. At the bottom of a hill, the buildings became taller and more substantial, and the MG moved slowly amid a lot of other cars. They passed beneath a railway bridge, and young people moved along the broad sidewalks and stood in clusters at the immense intersections. Jeffrey pointed down a wide, curving street at the Northampton Hotel, an imposing brown pile with a flowery terrace before a glassy new addition.

'When we're all through at my mother's place, I'll bring you back, get you a room. Over the next couple of days we can talk about what you ought to do. We can probably have lunch and dinner together most of the time, if you like.'

'This great cook doesn't feed you?'

'My mother isn't very domestic.'

Nora looked out at pleasant, pretty Main Street with its lampposts and restaurants advertising wood-fired brick oven pizza, tandoori chicken, and cold cherry soup; at galleries filled with Indian art and imported beads; at the pretty throngs and gatherings of the attractive young, mostly women, strapped into backpacks in their sawed- off jeans and halter tops or T-shirts; and said to herself: What am I doing here?

'Almost there,' Jeffrey said, and followed a flock of young women on bicycles out of the traffic into a quieter street running alongside a tract like a parkland where dignified oaks grew alongside well-seasoned brick buildings connected by a network of paths. The young women on bicycles swooped down a drive with a Smith College plaque. Jeffrey executed a smooth U-turn in front of a large, two-story, brown clapboard building with a roofed porch wide enough for dances on the front and left side. It looked like a small resort hotel in the Adirondacks. A sign set back from the sidewalk said HEAVENLY FOOD & CATERING.

Jeffrey turned to her with an apologetic smile. 'Just let me go in and prepare her, will you? I'll be back in a couple of minutes.'

'She doesn't know I'm coming?'

'It's better that way.' He opened his door and put one leg out of the car. 'Five minutes.'

'Fine.'

Jeffrey got out, closed the door, and leaned on it for a moment, looking down at her. If he had been tempted to say something, he decided not to.

'I won't run away,' she said. 'Go on, Jeffrey.'

He nodded. 'Be right back.' He went up the long brick walkway, jumped up the steps, and glanced back at Nora. Then he walked across the porch and opened the front door. Before he went inside, he took off his cap.

Nora leaned back, stretched her legs out before her, and waited. An insect whirred in the grass beneath the sign. Across the street a dog woofed three times, harshly, as if issuing a warning, then fell silent. The air had begun faintly to darken.

After five minutes, Nora looked up at the porch, expecting Jeffrey to come through the door. A few minutes later, she looked up again, but the door remained closed. Suddenly she thought of Davey, at this moment doing something like arranging his compact disks on Jeffrey's shelves. Poor Davey, locked inside that jail, the Poplars. She got out of the MG and paced up and down the sidewalk. Could she call him? No, of course she couldn't call him, that was a terrible idea. She looked up at the porch again and felt an electric shock in the pit of her stomach. An extraordinarily beautiful young black woman with a white scarf over her hair was looking back at her from the big window. The young woman turned away from the window and disappeared. A moment later, the door finally opened and Jeffrey emerged onto the porch.

'Is there a problem?' Nora asked.

'Everything's all right, it's just sort of hard to get her attention.'

'I saw a girl in the window.'

He looked over his shoulder. 'I'm surprised you didn't see a dozen.'

She preceded him up the slightly springy wooden steps and walked across the breadth of the porch to the front door. Jeffrey said, 'Here, let me,' and leaned in front of her to pull it open.

Nora walked into a big open space with a computer in front of an enormous calendar on the wall to her right, and a projection-screen television and two worn corduroy sofas on its other side. At the far end a wide arch led into an even larger space where young women in jeans bent over counters and other young women carried pots and brimming colanders to destinations farther within. One of the pot carriers was the striking black woman she had seen in the window. A slender blonde in her mid-twenties who had been watching a cartoon looked up at Nora and said, 'Hi!'

'Hello,' Nora said.

'You're the first woman Jeffrey ever brought here,' the blonde said. 'We think that's cute.'

On the other side of the arch, ten or twelve young women chopped vegetables and folded dumplings on both sides of two butcher-block counters. Copper pots and pans hung from overhead beams. In front of two restaurant ranges, more women, most of them in white jackets and head-scarves, attended to simmering pans and bubbling vats. One briskly stirred the contents of a wok. A stainless-steel refrigerator the size of a Mercedes stood beside a table at which two young women were packing containers into an insulated carton. Beyond them, a long window looked out onto an extensive garden where a woman in a blue apron was stripping peas. All the women in the kitchen looked to Nora like graduate students - the way graduate students would look if they were all about twenty-five, slim, and exceptionally attractive. Some of the women at the counters glanced up as Jeffrey led her toward the cluster in front of the nearest range.

Slowly, like the unfolding of a great flower, they parted to reveal at their center a stocky woman in a loose black dress and a mass of necklaces and pendants stirring a thick red sauce with a wooden spoon. Her thick, iron- gray hair had been gathered into a tight bun, and her face was unlined and imposing. She looked at Jeffrey, gave Nora an appraising, black-eyed glance, and turned to the woman Nora had seen at the window. 'Maya, you know what to do next, don't you?'

'Hannah's mushrooms, then the other ones, and then it all goes into the pot with Robin's veal, five minutes, and bang, out the door.'