The Hellfire Club

anything happened to me.

'I'm sorry to hear that,' he said, and signaled the waitress for their check.81

When the telephone rang, she was in the bathroom, considering the question of makeup. On the fourth ring she picked it up and heard Jeffrey answer her question.

'I hope you don't mind waiting about half an hour,' he said. 'I called my mother to tell her we were coming over, and she's in a high old state. Apparently I agreed to drive some of the girls over to a market this morning, and I'm already late. It'll take forty minutes at the most, and I'll swing by to pick you up as soon as we're back.'

'Perfect,' she said. 'I was just thinking that I'd be safer if I put my disguise back on.'

'Your… ? Oh, the war paint. Good idea. You're checked out of the hotel, and I booked you into Pepper Pot as Mrs Norma Desmond. I thought you were probably tired of being Dinah Shore.'

They agreed to meet in the lobby in forty minutes. Jeffrey would call up to her room if he returned before that. 'Do me a favor,' he said. 'Wait for me in the lobby, okay? I don't want to be responsible for all the skeletons in the Chancel closets.'

Half an hour later the young woman at the desk glanced at Nora as she came out of the elevator and then returned to explaining the hotel's charges to a flustered old couple complaining about their bill. A soft pinkish light suffused the otherwise empty lobby. Nora wheeled her case to an armchair next to a table stacked with brochures and sat down to read The 100 Most Popular Tourist Sites in Our Lovely Area.' The white-haired couple were still wrangling over their room charges, but now it was the clerk who was flustered. The husband, a pipestem with a natty blazer, ascot, and shining wings of white hair, was loudly explaining that the telephone charges had to be mistaken because neither his wife nor himself ever used the telephones in hotel roams. Why pay a surcharge when you could come down to the lobby and use the pay phone?

The clerk spoke a few words.

'Nonsense!' the old man bellowed. 'I've just explained to you that my wife and I don't use telephones in hotel rooms!'

His wife backed away from him, and the young woman behind the desk spoke again.

'But this is an error!' the man shouted. The clerk disappeared, and the old man whirled on his wife. 'You've done it again, haven't you? Too lazy to take the elevator, and what happens? Two dollars wasted, and here I am, making a scene, and it's all your fault.'

His wife had begun to cry, but she was too frightened to raise her hands and wipe her eyes.

Nora saw an echo of Alden Chancel in the domineering little Davey and could not bear to be in the same room with him. She left the suitcase beside the chair and went down the hallway to the exit onto the terrace. Through the windows, she saw half a dozen cars, none of them Jeffrey's, driving down King Street. Sunlight glittered on the washed flagstones, and yellow lilies nodded beside the steps down to the pavement. She pushed through the door into fresh, brilliant morning.

When she reached the top of the steps, she looked up King Street for the MG, wishing that she could have taken a run that morning. Her muscles yearned for exercise; her breakfast seemed to have vaporized into a need for work and motion. She looked back at the hotel and through the glass wall saw the elderly husband spitting invective as he put down his suitcase to open the door for his wife. He was a gentleman of the old school, complete with all the tyrannical courtesies, and he had parked on the street because he thought he might be charged for using the hotel lot. Gripping the strap of her handbag, Nora marched down and walked five or six feet up the block, looking for Jeffrey.

The MG did not appear. Nora glanced over her shoulder and saw the couple coming down the steps onto the sidewalk. The man's face was pink with rage. She put them out of her mind and concentrated on the pleasures of walking briskly through the air of a beautiful August morning, still nicely cool and scented with lilies.

When she reached Main Street she looked left toward the row of shops extending toward the Smith campus and Helen Day's house, by now expecting to see Jeffrey tooling along in the sparse traffic. Half the shops on both sides of Main had not yet opened, and none of the few cars was Jeffrey's. With the blunt abruptness of a heart attack, a police car appeared from behind a bread truck and came rolling toward

Nora. She forced herself to stand still. For a long moment the police car seemed aimed directly at her. She swallowed. Then it straightened out and came with no great urgency toward the intersection. Nora pretended to search for something in her bag. The car drew up before her, rolled past, and turned into King Street. She watched it move, still in no apparent haste, in the direction of the hotel. She decided to forget about exercise and wait for Jeffrey in the lobby.

Down the block, the dandy was standing beside an antique touring car with sweeping curves, a running board, and a massive grille decorated with metal badges. He opened the passenger door and extended his hand to his wife. Quivering, she hoisted herself onto the running board. The police car slid past them. The old man strutted around to the driver's side, giving the hood a pat. Down the street, the police car pulled up in front of the hotel, and two officers began moving up the steps.

King Street remained empty. When Nora turned back, the policemen were striding across the terrace toward the glass doors. Telling herself that they were probably after nothing more than coffee and apple turnovers in the cafe, she stepped into the street and began walking toward the shelter of a movie theater. The old man started up his extravagant car and pulled away from the curb. Standing near the middle of the street, Nora waited for him to go past. The car came to a halt before her, and the window cranked down. The old woman sat staring at her lap, and her husband leaned forward to speak. The crosswalks are designed for use by pedestrians,' he said in a pleasant voice. 'Are you too good for them, young: lady?'

'I've been watching you, you brutal jerk,' she said, 'and I hope your wife kills you in your sleep one night.'

His wife snapped up her head and stared at Nora. The old man jolted away with a grinding of gears. Either a laugh or a scream came through the open window. Nora hurried to the other side of the street and moved beneath the theater marquee to the concealment of an angled wall next to the ticket booth. She looked at the hotel without seeing the policemen, then back at the antique car, which sat waiting for the light to change at the top of the street. A red car, not Jeffrey's but familiar all the same, swung around the antique vehicle into King Street, followed by an inconspicuous blue sedan. It isn't, it can't be, Nora said to herself, but the Audi moved steadily toward her, and it was. She saw Davey's dark hair and pale face as he hunched over the wheel to stare at the Northampton Hotel.

She stepped out of the angle in the wall, then moved back. Davey drove by. The blue sedan followed him to the hotel. Both cars pulled into the lot and disappeared.

Nora hovered in the shelter of the wall, praying for the policemen to leave the hotel. If Jeffrey came by, she'd wave him down and explain that her plans had changed, she was going to go back to Westerholm after all. Shorelands represented someone else's past, and she had to tend to her present. The policemen stayed inside the hotel, and she hugged herself, watching the glass doors at the edge of the terrace.

Children ran back and forth on the flagstones, weaving around the waiters. The glass door swung open, and a waiter with a tray balanced on his shoulder and a folding stand in his hand came outside. Before the door could swing shut, Davey rushed out and looked over the tables. When he did not see Nora, he walked across the terrace and came to the steps to the sidewalk.

Nora moved forward. Another police car turned into King Street. Davey scanned the sidewalk in front of him. The police car approached. Nora left the angle of the wall and began walking back up toward Main. The patrol car went past without stopping. She turned around on the sidewalk to see Davey making his way back through the tables. When the car reached the front of the hotel, it made a U-turn and pulled up behind the first one. Two officers got out and jogged up the steps, and a third patrol car came up from the bottom of King Street and turned into the hotel parking lot.

Her only hope was that Davey would return to the terrace alone. She moved a little farther up the street and watched him go back into the hotel. The two policemen were pushing through the tables under the curious gazes of most of the people eating breakfast. Davey disappeared, and the policemen reached the door a few seconds after it closed.

Come back out, she said to herself. Get out of there and walk up the street.

Two hefty parents and three even larger teenagers crowded toward the door. Davey came out just as they