Read The Hellfire Club for Free Online

the table. “Is there anything else I can clear up for you?”
    For a moment nobody spoke. Then Daisy said, “Time for me to return to my cell. I’m feeling a little tired. Wonderful to see you, Davey. Nora, I’ll be in touch.”
    Alden glanced at Nora before pushing back his chair and getting up. Davey stood up a second later.
    Daisy grasped the top of her chair and turned toward the door. “Jeffrey, please thank Maria.
Lovely
lobster salad.”
    Jeffrey’s courtly smile made him look more than ever like a dapper second-story man disguised as a valet. He drifted sideways and opened the door for Daisy.

9
    ALDEN AND DAVEY took their chairs again. “Your mother’ll be right as rain after her nap,” Alden said. “Whatever goes on in her studio is her business, but I have the feeling she’s been working harder than usual lately.”
    Davey nodded slowly, as if trying to decide if he agreed with his father.
    Alden fixed Nora with a glance and took a sip of wine. “Planning something with Daisy?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    Davey flicked his hair out of his eyes and looked from Nora to his father and back again.
    “Call it an impression.”
    “I’d like to spend more time with her. Go shopping, have lunch someday, things like that.” Alden’s gaze made her feel as though she were lying to a superior.
    “Terrific,” Alden said, and Davey relaxed back into his chair. “I mean it. Nice thought, my two girls having fun together.”
    “Mom’s been working hard?”
    “Well, if you ask me, something’s going on up there.” He looked at Nora in an almost conspiratorial fashion. “Was that your impression, Nora?”
    “I didn’t see her working, if that’s what you mean.”
    “Ah, Daisy’s like Jane Austen” she hides all the evidence. When she was writing her first two books, I never even saw her at the typewriter. To tell you the truth, sometimes this voice in my head would whisper,
What if she’s just making it all up?
Then one day a box came from one of my competitors, and she whisked it away into her studio and came back out and handed me a book! Year after that, the same thing happened all over again. So I just let her do her thing. Hell, Davey, you know. You grew up in this crazy system.”
    Davey nodded and looked across the table as if he, too, wondered whether Nora possessed secret information.
    “All my life, I’ve dealt with writers, and they’re great—some writers anyhow—but I never understood what they do or how they do it. Hell, I don’t think even they know how they do it. Writers are like babies. They scream and cry and bug the hell out of you, and then they produce this great big crap and you tell them how great it is.” He laughed, delighted with himself.
    “Does that go for Hugo Driver, too? Was he one of the screaming babies?”
    Davey said, “Nora—”
    “Sure he was. The difference with Driver was, everybody thought his dumps smelled better than the other brats’.” Alden no longer seemed so delighted with his metaphor.
    “Daisy said you met him a couple of times. What was he like?”
    “How should I know? I was a kid.”
    “But you must have had some impression. He was your father’s most important author. He even stayed in this house.”
    “Well, at least now I know what you and Daisy were talking about up there.”
    She ignored this remark. “In fact, Driver was responsible for—”
    “Driver wrote a book. Thousands of people write books every year. His happened to be successful. If it hadn’t been Driver, it would have been someone else.” He struggled for an air of neutral authority. “You have a lot to learn about publishing. I say that respectfully, Nora.”
    “Really.”
    Davey was combing his hair off his forehead with his fingers. “What you say is true, but—”
    His father froze him with a look.
    “But it was a classic collaboration,” Davey continued. “The synergy was unbelievable.”
    “I’m too old for synergy,” Alden said.
    “You never