The Hellfire Club

mother's footsteps came down the stairs. 'Too bad they didn't send him out to Long Island. It might have done him some good.'

'Might have done him a lot of good,' Nora said, and turned toward the kitchen to see Helen Day, flanked by three of her assistants, leaning over a copper vat. She inhaled deeply, considered, and spoke to an anxious-looking girl who flashed away and returned with a cup of brown powder, a trickle of which she poured into the vat.

The long day caught up with Nora, and she felt an enormous yawn take possession of her. 'How rude,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

Helen Day marched back through the arch, apologizing for the delay. She sat a few feet away from Nora and lowered two objects onto the length of brown corduroy between them. Nora looked down at a framed photograph on top of a spring binder so old that its pebbled black surface had faded to an uneven shade of gray. 'Now. Look at that picture.'

Nora picked it up. Two little girls in frocks, one of them about three years old and the other perhaps eight, stood smiling up at the photographer in a sunny garden. The smaller girl held a doll-sized china teacup on a matching saucer. Both girls, clearly sisters, had bobbed dark hair and endearing faces. The older one was smiling only with her mouth.

'Can you guess who they are?' asked Helen Day.

'You and Katherine,' Nora said.

'I was playing tea party in the garden, and wonder of wonders, Katherine happened along and indulged me. My father came outside to memorialize the moment, no doubt to prove to Katherine at some later date that she was once a child after all. And she knows what he's doing, you can see it in her face. She can see right through him.'

Nora looked down at the intense self-sufficiency in the eight-year-old girl's eyes. This child would be able to see right through most people. 'Did you find this picture in her apartment?'

'No, that's where I found the manuscript. This picture was on her desk in Gingerbread, and it was the first thing I saw when I went there. Good heavens, I said to myself, look at that. You know what it means, don't you?'

Nora had no idea what it meant, but Helen Day's eyes and voice made clear what it meant to her. 'Your sister felt close to you,' she said.

The old woman reared back with a rustle of necklaces and pointed a wide pink forefinger at Nora's throat. 'Grand-slam home run. She felt closer to me than anyone else in our whole, all-balled-up family. Whose address and telephone number did she give in case of emergency? Mine, Whose picture did she bring to Shorelands and put right in the place of honor on her desk? Mine. It wasn't a picture with stuffy Charles, was it?'

Because the finger was still aimed at her throat, Nora shook her head.

'No. And it wasn't a picture of those two idiots who never read a book in their lives, Effie and Grace, not on your life. She never felt any closer to those three than she did to strangers on the street. At first, I couldn't understand Katherine going off and leaving our picture behind, but when I noticed she had left her silk robe and a bunch of books, too, I saw what she was doing. She knew I'd be coming to get everything for her. She left those things behind for me, because she knew I'd take care of them for her. And I bet you can guess why.'

Again Nora gave the answer Helen Day waited to hear. 'Because you understood her better than the others.'

'Of course I did. She never made any sense to them her whole life long. It was like Jeffrey with the Deodatos. I love them, and they're wonderful people, but they never could figure out some of the things Jeffrey did. People like Jeffrey and my sister always color outside the lines, isn't that right, Jeffrey?'

'If you say so. Mom,' Jeffrey said. 'But you've colored outside the lines a few times yourself.'

'That's what I'm saying! A couple of times in my life people said I was crazy. Charles told me I was crazy. Going with Lincoln Chancel! Giving up my son, and not even to him, but to people he thought were inferior! You must be as crazy as Katherine was, he said. Well, I said, in that case I'm not doing too badly. You can bet he changed his tune when Jeffrey got his scholarship to Harvard and did so well there. When people don't have a prayer of understanding you, the first thing they do is call you crazy. Grace and Effie still think I'm crazy, but I'm doing a lot better than they are. They thought Katherine was crazy, too. She embarrassed them, just like I did when I went to work for the Chancels.'

She folded her arms over her chest in a clatter of coins and beads and gave Nora a flat black glare. 'My sisters actually thought Katherine ran away with that drawing, changed her name, and lived off the money she got for it. Know what they told me? They said Katherine never had a bad heart in the first place. Dr Montross made a mistake when she was a little girl, and she's had special treatment ever since. Stole that drawing and took off, changed her name, now she's laughing at us all. They said Charles changed his name, didn't he? Didn't you? they said. Wasn't Mr Day you married, was it? I said I never changed my name, man I worked for did that, and when he spoke, you listened. All I did was get used to it, and it was only my married name anyway. All that writing, they said, that was crazy, too, but it wasn't, was it, Jeffrey?'

'Not at all,' Jeffrey said.

'She was invited to Shorelands. Nobody says those other people were crazy. And Dr Montross wasn't a fraud. Katherine had rheumatic fever when she was two, and her heart could have given out at any time. We all knew that. She died. Grace and Effie said, You never found her, did you, and neither did all those policemen, but they didn't see what it was like. You could have sent twenty men into those woods for a month, and they wouldn't find everything.'

'If she wanted to get out, why go through the woods instead of taking some easier way?'

'Didn't want to go past Main House,' said Helen Day. 'Katherine didn't want anyone to see her. And you know, maybe she did get to the road. Maybe she even got a ride and a room for the night, or took the train somewhere, but her heart stopped and she died. Because she never got in touch with me about her things. I waited two weeks, but neither Katherine nor anyone else called me, and I knew.'

'But your brother and your two older sisters didn't agree? They thought she might still be alive?'

'Charles didn't. He was sure Katherine had died, just like me. Dr Montross told our parents that it would be a miracle if Katherine lived to be thirty, and she was twenty-nine that year.'

'And Grace and Effie?'

They knew it, too, but they changed their minds when that book came out, almost saying in black and white that Katherine took that picture from the dining room. Katherine couldn't do anything right, as far as they were concerne d. They never had a good word to say for her until they started going through her papers before throwing them out - papers I gave them for safekeeping - and saw some scribbles on a few pieces of paper that reminded them of a movie they didn't even like! They still thought she was crazy, but they didn't mind the idea of making some money off of her. Old fools. Katherine didn't write that book, Hugo Driver did. If you want to know what my sister was writing, look in that folder.'

With a rush of expectant excitement, Nora opened the spring binder. Jeffrey stood up to get a better look.

74

UNWRITTEN WORDS

by

Katherine Mannheim

Patchin Place, #3

New York, New York

(copy 2)

She turned over the title page to find a poem titled 'Dialogue of the Latter Days,' heavily edited in green ink. Her heart sank. This was what Katherine Mannheim had been writing? The poem continued on to the second page. She flipped ahead and saw that it took up twenty-three pages. 'Second Dialogue,' also heavily edited, ran for twenty-six pages. Two more 'dialogues' of thirty to forty pages apiece filled out the book.

'It's one long poem, or so I've decided, divided up into those dialogues. She had two copies, and made changes to both of them. She must have taken the first copy to Shorelands to spend the month revising it there, and I think she was planning to type up a third and final copy with all the revisions when she got back.'