Not a Creature Was Stirring (18 page)

“As what?”

“A consultant. Why not? That jerk out in Oregon or whatever hired himself a phony psychic. I should be able to hire myself a nationally known murder expert, a guy who’s had his picture—”

“Jackman.”

“Well, I should. And you’re interested. And you’re bored stiff with being retired. I saw that as soon as I walked into this apartment. You’re living like a monk and you’ve got a pile of puzzle magazines in your bathroom that looks like delivery day at the local newsstand. You’d love to have me hire you.”

“I don’t have a detective’s license,” Gregor pointed out. “I have no intention of getting a detective’s license.”

“So who says you have to be a detective? Like I said, you could be a consultant.”

“Do you know what that is?”

“No,” Jackman said, “but that’s not the point. Neither does anyone else.”

Gregor poured himself another cup of coffee. He was being set up. He knew he was being set up. He just didn’t care. He hadn’t felt this good—this invigorated—since Elizabeth had gone into remission in 1982. He got his lonely bottle of Scotch off the bookshelf, poured a finger into his coffee, and handed the bottle to John Henry Newman Jackman.

“You have an ulterior motive for all of this?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” Jackman said. “You seen the newspapers lately?”

“Mmm.” Gregor didn’t know how “lately” Jackman meant.

“This is big-time publicity,” Jackman said. “It’s making the networks, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what happens when there’s big-time publicity?”

“Intimately,” Gregor said.

“Yeah,” Jackman said. “You would. Well, I’m taking a lot of heat. Be practical, Gregor. If you do this, the publicity will be terrific. I’ll look like an effing hero. And if I look like an effing hero, the bozos will stay off my back.”

“I see. So, which is it? Am I supposed to consult or am I only supposed to pretend to consult?”

“Oh, you’re supposed to consult.” Jackman looked alarmed. “If you’ve got any more ideas like the ones you had on the night, I want to hear about them.”

“Fine.” Gregor sat down again. “I have this idea. I think you’d better get yourself ready for another death.”

T
HE TROUBLE WITH ENGINE
House, Bennis Hannaford thought, is that it’s just like a self-winding watch. If you don’t do something in particular to stop it, it goes on and on and on and on and on. She looked down at the old-fashioned telephone she’d just hung up. It was eight o’clock in the morning, two days after Christmas, Tuesday, December 27. Back in Boston, it was a workday. Michael had just been getting out of the shower when she called. It bothered her he’d been so damn annoyed to hear from her, especially because he’d been expecting to. Eight o’clock was the time they’d agreed on, to get around the little problem of the telephones at Engine House. Cordelia Day Hannaford was an old-fashioned woman. She didn’t want phones in most of the rooms of her house. There was one in the kitchen, because Mrs. Washington would have quit without it. There was one in the study, because Daddy had insisted on it. There was one in Anne Marie’s room, in case of emergency. Other than that, there was this one small telephone stall off the sitting room on the first floor. Engine House was an enormous place, with wings spread out over the landscape. To make a call here, you sometimes had to hike through half a mile of corridors.

You’re exaggerating, Bennis told herself. It wasn’t the hiking she minded as much as the possibility of being overheard—or the certainty of it. She kept getting these urges to restrict her phoning to business calls, even though she had no business to call about. The new book was in the stores. The new tour was over. The radio and print interviews had been wrapped up months ago. She had nothing to do with her life but read other people’s novels and concentrate on Michael—except all this had come up, and she couldn’t concentrate on anything. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray she’d brought along from the kitchen and then put the ashtray on the upper shelf, where the maid was sure to see it.

This morning, Bennis thought Daddy’s dying was a lot like the ache you get after riding a horse for the first time. You ride. You feel fine. You think everything is going to be all right. Then, long after you have any reason to expect it, it gets you. They’d been cool enough the night it happened, and they’d been cool enough on Christmas Day—if you could call the way they were when they were together “cool.” Even yesterday hadn’t been too bad. Myra and Teddy had played chess, which they did every Christmas. They’d ended the chess with an argument, which they also did every Christmas. The rest of them had wandered aimlessly around, eating too much and talking about the Flyers.

Now, with the holiday over and the snow under control, the servants were back in force, and Engine House was having the Christmas Mother had planned for it. Sort of. Through the door of the telephone room, Bennis had seen silver serving tray after silver serving tray being delivered to the dining room. They would be set out on the sideboard and provided with silver serving spoons. The result would be something like the breakfast scene in Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca,
elaborate and barren. Even when Mother was in fine form and nothing out of the ordinary had happened and they were all on their best behavior—say once every ten years—that scene was barren. Today—

The prospect of today was so daunting, Bennis was almost ready to go back upstairs and hide herself in bed. She would have done it, but she knew she would never get back to sleep. Bennis was an early riser, when she wanted to be, and sometimes when she didn’t. Long, long ago—not so long, really; it just seemed like it—she’d trained herself to get up at four o’clock in the morning and get moving as soon as her feet hit the floor. That was when she was writing her first book and working as a secretary at First Boston Financial. If she’d been an ordinary typing-pool secretary, she might have been able to write when she got home, at six o’clock, like everybody else in her writers’ group. Instead, she was assistant to the second-highest officer in the corporation. She never got home before nine. By then, she was usually just this side of catatonic. Her boss was a full-fledged, manic-depressive, paranoid psychopath.

On the other hand, it might be just as well she hadn’t been able to write after work. None of the other members of her writers’ group had published as much as a short story.

Somehow, all this mental nattering about her career felt, well, disloyal to Daddy. Bennis had no idea how she could be disloyal to a man who had spent more than thirty years letting her know how much happier he’d have been if she’d never existed, but there it was.

She pushed through the green baize door to the dining room and looked at the overloaded sideboard, the overextended table, the huge poinsettia centerpieces with their chokers of holly and mistletoe. Then she looked at Emma, who was standing next to the coffee urn.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“It’s the music,” Emma said. “I want them to stop the music.”

Music was so much a part of Christmas at Engine House, Bennis hadn’t noticed it before. Ten years ago, Mother had made a single concession to modernity. She’d had all the common rooms in the house wired into a stereo system. At the moment, that system was pumping out an organ rendition of “Silent Night.”

“Idiot,” Bennis said. “He’s got to know there’s been a death in the house. What does he think he’s doing?”

“Who?”

“Marshall,” Bennis said. Marshall was the butler. Sometimes Bennis got the strangest feeling, just realizing her mother had a butler.

Emma looked into her empty coffee cup. “He’s just doing what he was told to do. Anne Marie wrote all the instructions on a piece of paper. I saw it hanging in the pantry.”

Bennis took Emma’s coffee cup, filled it from the urn, and put it on the table. “Sit,” she said. “You look ready to collapse.”

“I
am
ready to collapse,” Emma said.

The tea was set out in two large pots. One had brew so strong it looked black when it was poured. The other had plain hot water. You were supposed to mix the two. Bennis didn’t bother.

She shoved enough sugar into her tea to turn it into syrup and set the cup next to Emma’s on the table. “Silent Night” had become “Noel,” played on a harpsichord. The instrument sounded tinny, as if it had been discovered after being long abandoned, and played without being retuned.

Mother used to play the harpsichord.

Bennis got out her cigarettes, extracted a crystal ashtray from under the largest of the centerpieces, and lit up.

“You ought to get some sleep,” she said. “You’re not doing anybody any good staying awake in the night.”

Emma shrugged. “You’re not getting any sleep either. The rest of them walk around all night, too, you know. I heard them from my room. Bobby—”

“Bobby? Bobby stayed here again all night?”

“Myra says he’s going to stay all week. That’s not such a bad idea, Bennis. The weather’s been really terrible. And the news last night said there was going to be snow again tomorrow morning.”

“What was Bobby doing walking around?”

“I don’t know.” Emma took a tentative sip of her coffee and made a face. “I went to the upstairs library about two and he was there, working with his calculator. It was weird. He just kept punching buttons and punching buttons, but he didn’t have papers or anything to work with. It was like he knew all the numbers by heart. It made me wonder.”

“About what?”

“Well,” Emma said. She blushed and looked into her coffee cup again.

Overhead, “Silent Night” became “The Holly and the Ivy”—played on a virginal. Mother used to play the virginal, too. For all Bennis knew, Mother had played the music she was hearing now, and recorded it, against the time she would no longer be able to make the carols herself.

The idea was so depressing, Bennis could hardly stand it. She lit another cigarette, realizing too late that the one she’d lit before had hardly been smoked. She put them both out.

“I just talked to Michael,” she said. “He says that now the holiday’s officially over, the police will get in gear. Things will start to happen—”

“Things have already happened,” Emma said. “All that questioning.”

“Well, yes. He meant the wider investigation. Talking to the lawyers and the bank and the insurance company, that kind of thing. Looking for motives.”

“They don’t have to talk to all those people to get motives,” Emma said. “They just have to talk to us.”

“I don’t think they see it that way, Emma.”

Emma finished her coffee and got up to get some more. She fumbled with the spigot on the urn, then filled her cup until it was slopping over. Bennis frowned. That fumbling motion had made her think of something, but she couldn’t figure out what. She tried to see it again, replay it in her mind, but couldn’t make it happen.

Emma came back to the table. “I’d feel better if they acted as if they cared,” she said. “He was our father. It doesn’t matter if we loved him or hated him, does it?”

“It matters to the police,” Bennis pointed out.

“Oh, the
police
.” Emma waved a hand in the air. “Chris was walking around last night, too, you know. I found him in the hall, where the portraits are, with the candles under them, and he started talking to me about poetry. I mean, poetry. Hell. It’s like it never happened.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Bennis said.

“We should be sitting around in a bunch, trying to figure out which one of us did it. That’s what people do in books.”

“Maybe we don’t want to know which one of us did it.” Bennis lit yet a third cigarette, promising herself to actually smoke it this time. “I don’t think
care
is the word I’d use, but I think it matters to them. Matters that he’s dead. It’s just taken a little time to sink in, that’s all. It’s not like he was around all the time. Even when we were all home together, he spent most of his time hiding out in his study. He only emerged for meals and fights, and he didn’t always emerge for meals. His not being around isn’t all that strange, Emma.”

“It’s strange to me.”

“Maybe you’re more sensitive than the rest of us.”

Emma sighed. “I don’t like the way the house feels since he’s died. Bobby and Chris. And Myra—”

“Myra?”

“When I got up this morning, she was rummaging around in the cedar closet, looking for a pair of long Johns. Can you imagine Myra in long Johns?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“And she was wearing jeans,” Emma went on. “Jeans and a great big oversize sweater. When I first saw her, I thought she was you. Except not for long, you know. Because she’s dyed her hair that peculiar color.”

“I think she gets tired of all the dressing up she has to do. I think Dickie insists on it, and it annoys her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Bennis. Myra was born in spike heels.”

Emma took a cigarette out of Bennis’s pack and lit up herself. She was beginning to look haggard again. With those huge black bags under her eyes and the skin of her face gone slack, Emma looked fifty. It was a shock to realize it, but it was true.

Jesus Christ, Bennis thought. She’s younger than I am.

“Bennis?” Emma said. “I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re all thinking. You have to understand it isn’t true.”

If there was one thing Christopher Hannaford was sure of, it was that, once he got beyond the gates of Engine House, he was going to be scared out of his mind. He’d been anticipating it all morning—all night, really. He’d gone into the hall and taken the candlesticks from under the picture of old Robert Hannaford II. He’d gone back to his room and hidden the candlesticks in his blue nylon backpack. He’d told himself he was a complete fool. Once he was in the car and on his way to Philadelphia, he was going to be so terrified, he wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

As it turned out, he was nothing of the sort. Maybe he was too tired to summon the energy for fear. Christ only knew he hadn’t slept in days. First there was that long stretch in California, playing and replaying that phone call about his thumbs. Then there was that even longer stretch getting across the country, renting cars under assumed names, sleeping in motels so bug-ridden they should have declared themselves flea circuses. Then there was Engine House, with all its security, and one good night’s rest—and then, of course, there was the murder.