Not a Creature Was Stirring (22 page)

“I think that’s fairly normal.”

“Do you? I don’t think it was normal at all. And it was worse because of the alibis, or the lack of them, or whatever. We were all wandering around the house. And now this.”

“Now this,” Gregor agreed. “Was this sister the one you were closest to?”

“Of the sisters, yes. Not of the family. Emma was too much younger than me for that.”

“She looked up to you,” Gregor said.

“Oh, definitely. She looked up to Mother, too. She was a hero-worshiping kind of person. I don’t think I ever took her seriously, except once, and now I’m beginning to wonder about the once.”

“What happened that once?”

They had reached the top of the stairs and come out on a great, sweeping landing that reminded Gregor of the balconies at opera houses. It was that large and that formal. A waist-high railing ran across one edge of it, on either side of the stairs, decked out with clusters of bells and balls, cherubs, and full-grown angels. To the left and right and center there were doors. The one on the left was closed. The one on the right was open, but blocked off by a sawhorse and guarded by another young patrolman.

Gregor would have had no trouble finding his way to Jackman without a guide. He saw Bennis notice him notice and decided not to call her on it. He had a feeling it had happened not because she was practiced at deception, but because she was no good at it whatsoever.

She stood back to let him pass and said, “Maybe, when you’re done with Mr. Jackman, you should let me take you out and buy you a drink. Someplace away from the house.”

“And away from the police?”

“I don’t really care about the police, at the moment. I’m more worried about being overheard by the Lollipop Brigade. There isn’t one of them that’s going to have sense enough to realize everything’s changed.”

“I’m going to have to tell John Jackman anything you tell me,” Gregor said. “You must realize that.”

“I do and I still don’t care. I’m not trying to hand you information I don’t want the police to have. It’s just what I said. I’d find it easier talking to you than talking to him. And I don’t think what I have to say is unimportant.”

“It’s about this one time you took your sister Emma seriously?”

Bennis grimaced. “It’s about why I thought Emma killed Daddy,” she said. “It’s about why I was convinced of it. When Anne Marie came down today and told me she’d committed suicide, I thought it made perfect sense.”

John Jackman was standing in the middle of Emma Hannaford’s bedroom, waving his arms and delivering a lecture about Why Fingerprints Weren’t Going to Be Important in This Case. He had come in a good wool three-piece suit, but two of the pieces—vest and jacket—were now hanging on one of the posters of the bed. His tie was undone. His shirt was open at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves. He looked like a politician in a campaign commercial about “excellence.”

Gregor made a few pleasantries with the man at the door and slipped inside. The room was huge, an immense cavern of a space with a fireplace at one end. One wall was taken up with oversize windows, each double-curtained in damask and net. The bed was dwarfed, even though it was queen-size and postered and made of thick mahogany. There were half a dozen people in the room, but they didn’t come close to filling it.

“Check with what’s-his-name,” Jackman was saying, “you know, the lawyer guy, Evers. And check with the security people, too. I don’t want some prosecutor on the phone, making this sound like something out of Mickey Spillane. And bag that cup, for Christ’s sake. I’ve told you three times. And—” He saw Gregor and stopped. “You. I thought you’d had an accident. Why didn’t I hear the siren?”

“Because there was no siren to hear,” Gregor said. “I made your patrolman turn it off.”

“I’ll have that kid’s head.”

“If you do, I’ll have yours.” Gregor gave the dark back corners of the room another look, but they were just as empty as they’d seemed when he was standing at the door. He sighed. “It’s a lot like being with the Bureau. By the time you get to the scene, it isn’t really a scene anymore.”

“It wouldn’t have been in any case, this time,” Jackman said. “It’s like I told you on the phone. She wasn’t dead when we got here. Close, but not done. The ambulance guys worked her over for nearly half an hour.”

“They didn’t take her to the hospital?”

“They said it was too dangerous to move her. If I’d found her by myself, I wouldn’t have known she was breathing. I don’t know how long she’d been in here—”

“Where? On the bed?”

“That chair.” Jackman gestured across the room, toward the fireplace, where a chair had been pulled away from the rug and left standing on the hardwood. “Before you ask, nobody moved the chair. That’s where we found her. We’ve had a lot of luck this time. Starting with the fact that we got here at all.”

Gregor checked out the chair. Next to it was a side table, bare except for a large shiny cherub brooch.

“Since she wasn’t dead, I’m surprised you did get here,” Gregor said. “I was just talking to Bennis Hannaford. She said Anne Marie thought it was a suicide attempt, and she thought it was a suicide attempt, until you started saying otherwise. Why on earth did they call you?”

“They didn’t,” Jackman said. “I was listening to the police band. I do that sometimes. Believe it or not, it puts me to sleep. I told you we’ve had a lot of luck. In case you haven’t noticed, the weather’s turned nasty again.”

“I noticed.”

“The ambulance had trouble getting through. There was a traffic call. When I heard where it was for, I came running.”

“And found what?”

“This.” Jackman reached into his shirt pocket and came up with a small folded sheet of notepaper, the stiff kind sold by jewelry stores and overpriced gift shops. “It was lying over there on the night table next to the bed, weighted down by the alarm clock.”

Gregor unfolded it.
“Dear Bennis,”
it said.
“By now you must know this was all my fault, all of it, and the more I think about it the worse it makes me feel. I can’t understand why I cause all this trouble, or what I’m supposed to do about it afterward. Right now I’d rather be dead than alive. Sometimes I just get so confused. If I was dead, would it matter to you? Emma.”

Gregor folded it up again. “It’s a very credible note. More like what suicides actually write than most people would think. Fake notes tend to be—more direct.”

“I know. That’s because this isn’t a fake note.”

“I thought you said on the phone-—-”

“I did. I said I had a suicide note that wasn’t a suicide note. And that’s true. Emma Hannaford wrote that”—-Jackman gestured at the note again—” to Bennis Hannaford as a letter, about three months ago. It worried the hell out of Bennis, so she kept it. She says she’s been meaning to talk to Emma about it ever since they all got to Engine House, but she hasn’t had the chance. And this morning, that note was sitting in her pocketbook, on her bed, in her bedroom, just where she’s been keeping it since the day she got it. She says she saw it there at ten-forty-five.”

“I take it there’s some significance to ten-forty-five,” Gregor said.

Jackman shrugged. “Not as much as I’d like, but enough.” He looked around until he found his notebook, discarded absent-mindedly on top of the windowseat. He picked it up and flipped through the pages. “I took some time and made out a table, as far as I could, from the little questioning I’ve been able to do since I got here. It’s not complete, but it’s got some interesting points. You want to hear them?”

“Of course I do.”

“Good,” Jackman said. “In the first place, Teddy Hannaford saw Emma coming out of their mother’s room—that’s just down the hall here—at a little after ten-thirty. He was going to his own room, and she was going to the stairs. A few minutes after that, Bennis passed her in the foyer. According to Bennis, Emma looked ‘woozy and distracted’—and she should have. You didn’t see the body, or the not-quite-body, but I did. We’re talking about a drug overdose here, not a standard poisoning. Whatever killed her, she must have taken at least an hour before she died. Maybe longer.”

“Can you be sure of that before you get the medical examiner’s report?”

“I can’t be take-it-into-court sure even then,” Jackman said. “But you and I both know that doesn’t matter. You take into court what you can. You figure out what happened with a lot of things you’ll never use at a trial. The M.E.’ll tell me what kind of drug it was. Under the circumstances, I’m betting Demerol.”

“I would, too.”

“Yeah. At any rate, Bennis passed Emma in the foyer, and then Emma went to the kitchen. She talked to”—Jackman consulted his notes—“Mrs. Washington. The cook. She asked for some tea for her mother. She said she felt sick. She sat in the kitchen for a while. In the middle of all this, Bennis got to her own room, locked herself in and went looking through her pocketbook for a fresh pack of cigarettes. That’s when she saw the note. She says she even took it out and read it.”

“What was Emma doing?”

“Going back to her own room,” Jackman said. “Mrs. Washington says she sent her to bed. The Hannaford children are taking turns watching their mother. With the weather and the short notice, they haven’t been able to get a nurse. Or maybe Cordelia Day Hannaford doesn’t want them to. She’s supposed to have refused nurses before. The Hannaford children are taking a day each, sitting with Cordelia and getting her what she needs. This was supposed to be Emma’s day. Mrs. Washington says she told Emma to go to bed and she’d get one of the others to take over. And Emma went. Anne Marie says she saw Emma in the upstairs hall at about ten to eleven, and they talked. Emma said something about wanting to lie down and Anne Marie came downstairs to see if the mail had come in.”

“And Bennis?”

“Still in
her
own room. Now, at about eleven fifteen, Cordelia Hannaford buzzed the kitchen. She has a little button thing, electric, not the pull cords the rest of them have. Mrs. Washington hadn’t been able to get in touch with any of the others, and she’d just finished putting together the tea. She buzzed Anne Marie and asked her to look in on Cordelia—”

“Why hadn’t she buzzed Bennis, first?” Gregor said. “If she was looking for someone to take care of Mrs. Hannaford—”

Jackman shook his head. “Anne Marie’s the only one with a two-way intercom in her room. Her and her mother, that is. Those were put in specially when Mrs. Hannaford got so sick. With the other rooms, there are those pull cords, and if you want to get in touch from downstairs you have to come all the way up.”

“Why hadn’t she buzzed Anne Marie before?”

“Mrs. Washington? She says she had. No answer.”

“Where does Anne Marie say she was?”

“That, I haven’t got around to yet,” Jackman said. “It isn’t the relevant time.”

“It might be the relevant time if someone stole that note out of Bennis Hannaford’s pocketbook,” Gregor said. “If Emma didn’t do it herself—”

“Emma didn’t do it herself, and neither did anybody else, not then. Bennis was still in her room. In fact, she stayed in her room until eleven-twenty, when Anne Marie knocked on her door and told her something was wrong with Emma.”

“Eleven-twenty?”

“According to Anne Marie, she went into her mother’s room and found Cordelia very worried about Emma. She then went into Emma’s room and found Emma, sick all over the floor and nearly unconscious.”

“And all this time, Bennis was in her own room, and the note was in there with her.”

“Exactly.”

Gregor thought it over. “When I was talking to Bennis on the stairs,” he said, “she told me Anne Marie had told her that Emma had committed suicide. And she believed Emma had committed suicide. Why would Anne Marie think Emma had committed suicide, if the note wasn’t there?”

“According to Anne Marie, a note was there, but not the same note.”

“Better and better,” Gregor said.

“You mean more and more impossible,” Jackman said. “And don’t forget, we’ve got the three still unaccounted for, Bobby, Christopher and Myra Van Damm. They’re all supposed to have left the house around ten o’clock, but that doesn’t let any of them out of having drugged Emma Hannaford’s—whatever.”

“Does it let them out of stealing that note? Or both notes?”

“It seems to let Bobby and Christopher out,” Jackman said, “as far as I can tell, the way things stand now. Myra Van Damm was definitely back at Engine House in time to do that much.”

“Why would somebody start out with one note and replace it with another?”

“To suppress evidence in the note?” Jackman suggested. “There might have been something in the original somebody doesn’t want us to know about, even if it had nothing to do with Robert Hannaford’s murder. Or Emma’s death. Some mistake, maybe. On the other hand, there may have been no such note.”

Gregor nodded. “You like that,” he said. “I don’t blame you.”

“I’d have liked a real suicide even more,” Jackman said. “But here we are, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get one.”

“Maybe we ought to talk to the Hannafords before we decide what we’re going to get,” Gregor said. “They may even start making sense.”

Jackman sighed. “I believe in the tooth fairy, too,” he said. He started to leave the room, but stopped at the door.

“Just one more thing.”

“What more could there be?”

“Something we found in the room. I’d show it to you, but it’s been bagged for evidence. I think you ought to get a copy.”

“Why?”

Jackman was grinning. “It’s called
The Predator’s Ball
. It’s all about stock fraud and insider trading.”

W
HAT HE WANTED
, Gregor decided, was a mystery worthy of this house—or people worthy of it. That was the problem with the ancestral rich. No matter what the founding father had been like—and Gregor thought Robert I must have been remarkable, you had to have something to build a railroad 3,000 miles across the wilderness—the descendants always seemed to be wimps, weaklings, liars, and dilettantes. Maybe that was what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he’d come out so strongly against inherited wealth. Someone with enough money to buy and sell the government would have seemed like a fantasy in 1776. The liars and the wimps would have been present in force.