The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub

asked. “A couple of times, or six?”
    “Six,” Davey said. “Don’t you remember, Nora?”
    Nora wondered if Davey had visited Natalie Weil by himself, and then dismissed the thought. “Oh, sure,” she said.
    “When was the last time you were here, Mr. Chancel?”
    “About two weeks ago. We had Mexican food and watched wrestling on TV—right, Nora?”
    “Um.” To avoid looking at the detective, she turned her head toward the house and found that she had not been mistaken after all. The uniformed policeman she had seen earlier stood in the bedroom window, looking out.
    “You were friends of Mrs. Weil’s.”
    “You could say that.”
    “She doesn’t seem to have had a lot of friends.”
    “I think she liked being alone.”
    “Not enough she didn’t. No offense.” Fenn shoved his hands in his pockets and reared back, as if he needed distance to see them clearly. “Mrs. Weil kept good records as far as her job went, made entries of all her appointments and that, but we’re not having much luck with her personal life. Maybe you two can help us out.”
    “Sure, anything,” Davey said.
    “How?” Nora asked.
    “What’s in the jar?”
    Nora looked down at the jar she had forgotten she carried. “Oh!” She laughed. “Mayonnaise. A present.”
    Davey gave her an annoyed look.
    “Can I smell it?”
    Mystified, Nora unscrewed the top and held up the jar. Fenn bent forward, took his hands from his pockets, placed them around the jar, and sniffed. “Yeah, the real thing. Hard to make, mayonnaise. Always wants to separate. Who’s it for?”
    “Us,” she said.
    His hands left the jar. “I wonder if you folks ever met any other friends of Mrs. Weil’s here.”
    He was still looking at Nora, and she shook her head. After a second in which she was tempted to smell the mayonnaise herself, she screwed the top back onto the jar.
    “No, never,” Davey said.
    “Know of any boyfriends? Anyone she went out with?”
    “We don’t know anything about that,” Davey said.
    “Mrs. Chancel? Sometimes women will tell a female friend things they won’t say to her husband.”
    “She used to talk about her ex-husband sometimes. Norm. But he didn’t sound like the kind of guy—”
    “Mr. Weil was with his new wife in their Malibu beach house when your friend was killed. These days he’s a movie producer. We don’t think he had anything to do with this thing.”
    A movie producer in a Malibu beach house was nothing like the man Natalie had described. Nor was Holly Fenn’s manner anything like what Nora thought of as normal police procedure.
    “I guess you don’t have any ideas about what might have happened to your friend.” He was still looking at Nora.
    “Nora doesn’t think she’s dead,” Davey said, pulling another ornament out of the air.
    Nora glanced at Davey, who did not look back. “Well. I don’t know, obviously. Someone got into the house, right?” she said.
    “That’s for sure. She probably knew the guy.” He turned toward the house. “This security system is pretty new. Notice it the last time you were here?”
    “No,” Davey said.
    Nora looked down at the jar in her hands. What was inside it resembled some nauseating bodily fluid.
    “Hard to miss that sign.”
    “You’d think so,” Davey said.
    “The system was installed a little more than two months ago.”
    Nora looked up from the jar to find his eyes on hers. She jerked her gaze back to the house and heard herself saying, “Was it really just two weeks ago we were here, Davey?”
    “Maybe a little more.”
    Fenn looked away, and Nora hoped that he would let them go. He must have known that they had not been telling him the truth. “Do you think you could come inside? This isn’t something we normally do, but this time I’ll take all the help I can get.”
    “No problem,” Davey said.
    The detective stepped back and extended an arm in the direction of the front door. “Just duck under the tape.” Davey bent forward.