The Hellfire Club

your mother did all during your childhood?'

'I do believe we're about to go to Miami by way of Seattle here. Fine. I'll play along. Yes, I remember. She sat up there in her office and she drank.'

'No, when you were a child, she wrote all day long. Your mother got a lot of work done in those days, and not all of it was put into the book she asked me to read.'

'Okay, she wrote the Morning and Teatime books. You're right about that. I went through four or five of them, and all those things you mentioned were there. It's kind of funny, because I also found some expressions I must have heard her say a thousand times. They just never registered before. Like 'sadder than a tabby in a downpour' - stuff like that. 'We wore out a lot of shoe leather.' That's one reason the old man came down on you so hard. He overreacted, but he doesn't want anybody to know. I can see why. It wouldn't make him look very good.'

'Thank you.'

'But she wrote those books in the eighties, and we're talking about the sixties.'

'Do you have copies of the last two Driver novels with you?'

'No way, you hear me? If you're trying to tell me my mother wrote the later Drivers, you belong in a loony bin.'

'Of course I'm not,' she lied. 'The whole point is in the difference between the two styles.'

'I am really not following you.'

'I'm going to Miami by way of Seattle, remember? Unless I do it this way, you'll never believe me. So humor me and get the books.'

'This is nuts,' Davey said, but he put down the receiver and came back in a few seconds. 'Boy, I haven't read these in probably fifteen years. Okay, now what?'

Nora had pulled the two books from her bag, and now she opened Twilight Journey, looking for she knew not what, with no assurance of finding it. She turned over some thirty pages and scanned down the paragraphs without finding anything useful.

'What do you want to show me?'

'Some lines on page 42 rose up to meet her eye. 'Too true,' said the wrinkled creature squatting on the branch. 'Too true, indeed, dear boy.' She had to get Davey to notice these Daisyish sentences without seeming to point them out. 'Turn to page forty-two,' she said. 'About ten lines down from the top. See that?'

'See what? 'He looked up and scratched his head.' There?'

'A few lines down.'

Davey read, ''Pippin turned slowly in a circle, wishing that the path were not so dark, nor the woods so deep.' That?' This was the sentence immediately below those with Daisy's trademarks.

'Read that paragraph out loud, and then read the whole page to yourself.'

'Fine by me.' He began reading, and Nora frantically searched through random pages.

'Now I should read the page to myself ?'

'Yes.' She scanned another page and saw a second indeed.

'All right, what about it?'

'That didn't sound a lot like your mother's writing, did it?'

'No, not really,' Davey said, sounding uneasy. 'Of course not. How could it? What's your point, Nora?'

'Look on page eighty-four, right below the middle of the page.'

'Huh,' Davey said. 'That long paragraph, beginning with 'All the trees seemed to have moved'!'

She told him to read it aloud, then read the whole of the page to himself, as before.

'I'm getting a funny feeling about this.'

'Please, just do it.'

He began reading, and Nora turned to the back of the book and found, just above the final paragraph, the proof she needed. 'With a shock. Pippin remembered that only a day before he had felt as bereft as a long-haired cat in a rainstorm.' She waited for Davey to finish reading page 84.

'Are you being cute or something?' he asked. 'You told me you weren't trying to tell me that my mother wrote this. A few piddly coincidences don't prove anything. I'm starting to get highly ticked off all over again.'

'What coincidences? Did you see something in those paragraphs you didn't mention?'

'I'm getting fed up with your games, Nora.'

Time to raise the ante: she had to give him part of the truth. 'I don't think Hugo Driver wrote this book,' she said. 'It really did appear out of nowhere, didn't it? There were no papers. You would have seen them long ago, if they existed.'

'Are you ever on thin ice. What's next? Hugo Driver was my mother in male drag?'

Nora seized on a desperate improvisation. 'I think Alden wrote these books.'

'Oh, come on. I never heard anything more ridiculous.'

'Just consider the possibility. Alden knew he could make a whopping amount of money in a hurry if he brought out posthumous Driver novels. Because there weren't any real ones, he had to provide them. Nora continued improvising. 'No one could know that they weren't real, so he couldn't farm them out. He couldn't even trust Daisy. Haven't you always thought these were different from the first one?'

'You know I have. They're good, but not like Night Journey. A lot of writers never come up to their first successes.'

'The same person wrote these two, isn't that right?'

'And the same person wrote Night Journey. Who sure as hell wasn't my father.'

'What's the name of that monster who cuts Pippin with his claws?'

'He doesn't have a name. He's a Nellad.'

'Nellad. Remind you of anything?'

'No.' He considered it for a moment. 'It does sort of sound like Alden, if that's what you mean.' He laughed. 'You're telling me he put his own name in the book?'

'Wouldn't it be just like him to thumb his nose at everybody that way?'

'I have to give you credit for ingenuity. All these other people are trying to show that Driver didn't write Night Journey, and you're saying, yes, he: did write that one, but not the other two. Which is almost possible, Nora. I'll grant you that much. If you weren't all wrong you could actually be right.'

'Some of this really does sound like Alden to me. Look at the last page.'

'All right.' He read in silence for a time. 'Come on. You mean that cat?'

Nora said that she meant the entire page. 'I think Alden wrote this. I didn't even notice about the wet cat until you mentioned it.'

'Well, it sounds more like my mother than my father, because my father never wrote anything except business letters.'

'I don't think it sounds like your mother's writing,' Nora said.

'God damn, you haven't been listening to me. I told you, someone's as sad as a wet cat in a couple of those Blackbird Books, and she used that phrase all the time when I was a kid. She still does sometimes.'

'I had no idea.'

'It still can't be true. My mother?'

'Alden used some of her favorite phrases. He wouldn't trust her that much.'

'She's about the only person he would trust. I have to look at more of this.' She heard him turning pages, breathing loudly, now and then taking a sip of his drink. 'It can't be, can it? There are a million different ways to explain…' He let out a noise halfway between a wail and a bellow. 'NO!'

'What?'

'One of the villagers, right here, page one fifty-three, says, 'You may ask me twenty-seven times, and the answer will never change.' Twenty-seven times! My mother used to say that all the time. It was her expression for infinity. Holy shit.'

'Your mother wrote it?'