The Hellfire Club

get, with the Cup Bearer. Then she quit, and that was that. I was devastated. I didn't think she'd ever leave. I probably thought Helen Day was my real mother. The other one certainly didn't spend much time with me.'

'I wish you could have seen the way she was with me. Sort of… light-hearted.'

'Sort of drunk,' Davey! said. 'Surprise, surprise.' He sighed, so sadly that Nora wanted to put her arms around him. 'For which, of course, she has a very good reason.'

Alden, Nora thought, but Davey would never blame the great publisher for his mother's condition. She tilted her head and quizzed him with her eyes.

'The other one. The one before me, the one who died. It's obvious.'

'Oh, yes.' Nora nodded, suddenly seeing Davey, as she had a hundred times, seated in the living room under a lamp from Michaelman's with Night Journey in his hands, staring into pages he read and reread because, no less than the killers Leonard Gimmel and Teddy Brunhoven, in them he found the code to his own life.

'You think about that a lot, don't you?'

'I don't know. Maybe.' He checked to see if she was criticizing him. 'Kind of thinking about it without thinking about it, I guess.'

She nodded but did not speak. For a moment Davey seemed on the verge of saying more. Then his mouth closed, his eyes changed, and the moment was over.

The Audi pulled up to a stop sign before a cluster of trees overgrown with vines that all but obscured the street sign. Then across the street a gray Mercedes sedan rolled toward the intersection, and as Davey flicked on the turn signal before pressing the accelerator and cranking the wheel to the left, the name of the street chimed in her head. He had taken them to Redcoat Road, and what he wanted to see was the house in which the wolf had taken Natalie Weil's life and caused her body to disappear.11

Beside Natalie's drive was a metal post supporting a bright blue plaque bearing the name of a local security firm more expensive than the one the Chancels had chosen. Natalie had taken account of the similarities between herself and the first victims and spent a lot of money for state-of-the-art protection.

Davey left the car and walked up along the grassy verge of Redcoat Road toward the driveway. Nora got out and followed him. She regretted the Bloody Mary and the single glass of wine she'd taken at lunch. The August light stung her eyes. Davey stood facing Natalie's house from the end of the driveway, his trousers almost brushing the security system plaque.

Set far back from the road, the house looked out over a front yard darkened by the shadows of oaks and maples standing between grassy humps and granite boulders. Yellow crime scene tape looped through the trees and sealed the front door. A black-and-white Westerholm police car and an anonymous-looking blue sedan were parked near the garage doors.

'Is there some reason you wanted to come here?' she asked.

'Yes.' He glanced down at her, then looked back toward the house. Twenty years ago it had been painted the peculiar depthless red-brown of information booths in national parks. Their own house was the same shade of brown, though its paint had not yet begun to flake. In design also Natalie's house replicated theirs, with its blunt facade and row of windows marching beneath the roof.

A white face above a dark uniform leaned toward a window in the bedroom over the garage.

'That cop's in the room where she was killed,' Davey said. He started walking up the driveway.

The face retreated from the window. Davey came to the the drive, and continued point where the yellow tape wound around a maple beside in a straight line toward the house and garage. He put out his hand and leaned against the maple.

'Why are you doing this?'

'I'm trying to help you.' The policeman came up to the living room window and stared out at them. He put his hands on his hips and then swung away from the window.

'Maybe this is crazy, but do you think that you wanted to come here because of what you were talking about in the car?'

He gave her an uncertain look.

'About the other one. The other Davey.'

'Don't,' he said.

Again the Chancel tendency to protect Chancel secrets. The policeman opened the front door and began moving toward them through the shadows on Natalie Weil's lawn.12

Nora was certain that Davey's fascination with Night Journey, a novel about a child rescued from death by a figure called the Green Knight, was rooted in his childhood. Once there had been another David Chancel, the first son of Alden and Daisy. Suddenly the infant Davey had died in his crib. He had not been ill, weak, or at risk in any way. He had simply, terribly, died. Lincoln Chancel had saved them by suggesting, perhaps even demanding, an adoption. Lincoln's insistence on a grandson was a crucial element of the legend Davey had passed on to Nora. An adoptable baby had been found in New Hampshire; Alden and Daisy traveled there, won the child for their own, named him after the first infant, and raised him in the dead boy's place. Davey had worn the dead Davey's baby clothes, slept in his crib, drooled on his bib, mouthed his rattle, taken formula from his bottle. When he grew old enough, he played with the toys set aside for the ghost baby. As if Lincoln Chancel had foreseen that he would not live to see the child turn four, he had purchased blocks, balls, stuffed bunnies and cats, rocking horses, electric trains, baseball gloves, bicycles in graduated sizes, dozens of board games, and much else besides; on the appropriate birthdays :these gifts had been removed from boxes marked DAVEY and ceremoniously presented. Eventually Davey had understood that they were gifts from a dead grandfather to a dead grandson.

Ever since the night drunken Davey had careered around the living room while declaiming this history, Nora had begun to see him in a way only at first surprising or unsettling. He had always imagined himself under the pitiless scrutiny of a shadow selfimagined that the rightful David Chancel called to him for recognition or rescue.13

The detective skirted a dolphin-colored boulder ,and came forward, regarding Nora with a combination of official reserve and private concern. She could not imagine how she could have mistaken his blue suit and ornate red necktie for a police uniform. He had a heavy, square head a disillusioned face, and a thick brown mustache that curved past the ends of his mouth. When he came close enough for her to notice the gray in the Tartar mustache, she could also see that his dark brown eyes were at once serious, annoyed, solicitous, and far down, at bottom, utterly detached, in a way that Nora assumed was reserved for policemen. Some portion of this man reminded her of Dan Harwich, which led her to expect a measure of sympathetic understanding. Physically he was not much like Harwich, being blocky and wide , heavy in the shoulders and gut, a Clydesdale instead of a grayhound.

'Are you okay?' he asked, which corresponded to her unconscious expectations, and when she nodded, he turned to Davey, saying, 'Sir if you're just being curious, I'd appreciate your getting this lady and yourself away from here,' which did not.

'I wanted to see Natalie's house again,' Davey said. 'My name is Davey Chancel, and this is my wife, Nora.'

Nora waited for the detective to say, I thought you were brother and sister, as some did. Instead he said, 'You're related to the family on Mount Avenue? What's that place? The Poplars?'

'I'm their son,' Davey said.

The man stepped closer and held out a large hand, which Davey took. 'Holly Fenn. Chief of Detectives. You knew Mrs Weil?'

'She sold us our house.'

'And you've been here before?'

'Natalie had us over a couple of times,' Nora said, for the sake of including herself in the conversation with Holly Fenn. He was a hod carrier, a peat stomper, as Irish as Matt Curlew. One look at this guy, you knew he was real. He gaze at her. She cleared her throat.

'Five times,' Davey said. 'Maybe six. Have you found her body yet?'

Davey's trait, that which had caused Nora second and third thoughts about the man she had intended to marry, was that he stretched the truth. Davey did not lie in the ordinary sense, for advantage, but as she had eventually seen, for an aesthetic end, to improve reality.

Davey was still nodding, as if he had gone over their visits and added them up. When Nora added them up for herself, they came out to three. Once for drinks, a week after they started looking at houses; the second time for