Not a Creature Was Stirring (28 page)

Still, Gregor liked the comparisons he could make between this and the last time he had eaten in a restaurant. Then, he had taken a poor man to an expensive place. Now, he was sitting with a rich woman in a relatively cheap one. The two experiences were a lot alike. Like Tibor, Bennis Hannaford was fearless when it came to food. Having told him she’d never eaten Armenian before, she then proceeded to order everything she liked the sound of on the menu, including a main course that must have been a mystery to her. Ethnic restaurants in tourist centers explained their food in plain English, but Ararat wasn’t in a tourist center. It was in an Armenian neighborhood, and its usual patrons had been eating the dishes it served since childhood. Bennis ordered cheerfully and without hesitation even so, then handed the menu to their waitress and asked for a cup of black coffee.

“Goodness,” she said, when the waitress left. “I think that woman’s going to have us married within the hour.”

“Within the week, at any rate.” Gregor smiled. “That’s Linda Melajian, youngest daughter of the house. They sent her over because she has the best memory.”

“The best memory?”

“The rumor is she’s better than a distance mike with a tape recorder attached. She can pick up conversations three miles away and repeat them verbatim.”

“It must be nice,” Bennis said, “to live in a place where everybody knows who you are.”

Linda Melajian came back with Bennis’s coffee, and Bennis drew the cup to her and started doctoring it with sugar. She put in a lot of sugar, as if she wanted to be not only awake but hyperactive.

“So,” she said, “on to the important part, the story of Emma and Daddy and how it all happened with the money. Do you know about the money?”

“About the living trusts?” Gregor said. “Yes, we know about that.”

“I thought you might. You were in there with Floyd Evers for a long time. Didn’t you think that was strange?”

“I thought it was very strange,” Gregor said.

“In case you aren’t used to dealing with people like us, let me tell you it isn’t the done thing to cut your daughters out of your estate. It wasn’t even in the old days—when the money was made, I mean. Conventional wisdom on the Main Line is that you provide your sons with opportunities and your daughters with escape routes. Husbands being what they are, that is.”

“Didn’t that lead to a lot of daughters being married for their money?”

“Nope,” Bennis said. “The Main Line rich have always had very good lawyers. The daughters got incomes outright and the capital was entailed. That’s what we thought was going to happen, Anne Marie and Myra and Emma and I. Daddy was a very old-fashioned man.”

“What about divorce?”

Bennis took a sip of her coffee and shuddered. “God, I hate it this sweet. But it’s the only thing that wakes me up. Look, Mr. Demarkian. The Main Line—the old Main Line—doesn’t get divorced. That’s as true today as it was in 1910. Oh, there have always been exceptions, women who ditched their husbands and went to live in the South of France or whatever. But there are at least four clubs in this city that won’t accept divorced people, and the Philadelphia Assembly won’t accept them, either. One of the girls my coming-out year had a mother who’d been married before, and she wasn’t allowed to attend her own daughter’s debut. And that was in—what?—1972? It’s even worse now. People are getting more conservative, not less.”

“That doesn’t sound like money would be much of an escape route.”

“You don’t have to get divorced to leave your husband, Mr. Demarkian. The Main Line is full of married-but-separated ladies.”

Gregor raised his eyebrows. This was like listening to a recap of a novel by Henry James. The odd thing was how real it sounded. He had no trouble at all imagining the old Main Line as just what Bennis said it was.

“But,” he said, “you and your sisters don’t have an escape route. Your brothers don’t have many opportunities, either.”

“That was just spite,” Bennis said. “Daddy was just as spiteful as he was old-fashioned. He thought the boys were a lot of mush-headed wimps. With us, with the girls, it was very different. And the thing is, I could hardly blame him. I mean, he did think one of us had tried to kill him.”

“Emma,” Gregor said.

“He didn’t know it was Emma. And maybe we didn’t either, but I’ll get to that. I think Anne Marie tried to tell him once, but he wasn’t about to listen. He just went out and bought fifteen editions of
King Lear
and put them up all over his study. And did all that with the money, of course. But if he’d been sure it was Emma, he would only have cut out Emma. He’d have loved that, really.”

“Not a nice man,” Gregor said.

“No,” Bennis agreed. “Daddy was not a nice man.”

“This was in 1980?” Gregor said. “Was that when he was confined to the wheelchair?”

“This was in 1980,” Bennis said, “but by then he’d been confined to the wheelchair for years. Since Teddy was ten, as a matter of fact. I was in Paris at the time. I remember, though, because Daddy ended up in the wheelchair and Teddy ended up in the leg brace because of the same accident. Of course, Teddy always claimed Daddy had tried to kill him.”

“Of course?”

Bennis smiled. “Teddy’s like that. One of those people who’s always being done to, if you know what I mean—and never by accident, either. No matter what happens in Teddy’s life, it’s not just somebody else’s fault, but somebody else’s plan. Mostly mine.”

“Your brother thinks you’re out to get him?”

“My brother thinks I’ve written and published nine fantasy novels—and landed them all on
The New York Times
best-seller list—in a deliberate attempt to keep him from getting a job in the Harvard University English department.”

“Why do I have this terrible feeling that you think what you just said is supposed to make sense?”

Bennis laughed. “It doesn’t make sense. None of the Hannafords makes sense, except maybe Mother. Teddy is sure Daddy tried to kill him. You couldn’t convince him that it isn’t true. But then, he’s convinced that the only reason he hasn’t had a brilliant academic career—he teaches in a small college in Maine—is because he’s being done out of it by nefarious plots. He likes to think I’m behind those plots because I do have a brilliant career, or what passes for one in popular literature. It would never occur to him it might have something to do with the fact that I work my butt off and he doesn’t. And if it did, he wouldn’t believe it.”

Linda Melajian came back to the table, her arms laden down with plates of stuffed vine leaves and sautéed eggplant. She laid the plates out between them, then took a moment to stare at them each in turn. The verdict of the street was in. Bennis Hannaford was too young for him and probably up to no good. Gregor wondered what the good ladies of Cavanaugh Street were going to do about it—and then reminded himself that they were only looking out for him, trying to protect him from himself. Awash in the atomized peculiarities of Hannaford family life, he didn’t know if he liked that or not.

Linda rearranged the plates, rearranged the salt and pepper shakers, and then, reluctantly, turned to go. Bennis and Gregor both watched her retreat, amused for different reasons.

“I should have worn my city clothes,” Bennis said. “I’d really have looked like a scarlet woman.”

“She doesn’t think you’re a scarlet woman,” Gregor said. “Just a fortune hunter.”

“Wonderful,” Bennis said.

Gregor speared a piece of eggplant. “Go back to this murder attempt. Are you sure it was a murder attempt? It couldn’t have been another accident?”

“It was reported as an accident,” Bennis said. “That goes without saying. If it had been reported any other way, Emma would have had to stand trial. She was over eighteen at the time. Mother wouldn’t have put up with that. But knowing the circumstances, I’d say it wasn’t possible. For it to be an accident, I mean.”

“What were the circumstances?”

Bennis speared a piece of eggplant of her own. “Well, this is early 1980, you understand. January. Usually the middle of miserable weather in Philadelphia. But that year, we had an exceptionally warm January thaw, and temperatures in the high sixties for about a week. The snow melted. Flowers started to come up. False spring.”

“I’ve lived through a few false springs,” Gregor said.

“Yes. Well. Daddy’s doctor was always telling him to get out into the air, so in the middle of this false spring he decided he wanted to sit out by the bluff. That’s to the back of our property, way to the south. There’s a place where the land just stops, a kind of dirt cliff. It’s not tremendously high, but it is straight down and there are a lot of jagged rocks at the bottom. Very jagged rocks. At any rate, Daddy decided he wanted to go sit out there, and Mother decided she wanted to have us all together for a family barbecue or something. Mother was always trying to get us together for something or the other. And we were all home—”

“Was that unusual?”

“Very unusual,” Bennis said. “It wasn’t a pleasant house to live in and none of us got along with Daddy. But this was Emma’s coming-out year. Mother wanted us around to give her a send-off, so we were there. All seven of us. Mother got this picnic together and told us all she wanted us to be there. Anne Marie and Emma and Myra and I gave in immediately. We always do when Mother asks us for something. The boys—”

“Somehow,” Gregor said, “I can’t believe the boys defied your mother.”

“They didn’t defy her. They just found excuses. Lots and lots of excuses. Good ones, too.”

“And they didn’t come?”

“They didn’t come.”

“I was wondering why your father was sure it was one of his daughters,” Gregor said. “I was imagining lipstick on his collar.”

“If there’d been lipstick on his collar, he’d have known it was Myra,” Bennis laughed. “She’s the only one who wears enough of it to have it smear off. No, it was just that the boys were other places.”

“As far as you know.”

“Excuse me?”

“As far as you know,” Gregor repeated. “It seems to me that no matter where they said they were, any one of them could have followed you out there and been hiding in the bushes.”

“I suppose they could have,” Bennis said. “I know we never checked up on them later. But it’s like I said. We thought—Anne Marie and Myra and I thought—we thought we knew what had happened.”

“What did happen?”

“We had lunch. And when that was finished we cleaned up, and Daddy said he wanted to sit out on the bluff, close, where he could see over. Anne Marie and I wheeled him as close as we liked, which wasn’t very close at all. We told the police later we’d put him right up to the edge, but it wasn’t true. We stopped the chair a good ten feet back. The ground there is flat, and before you get to the drop it goes up a little.”

“Meaning he couldn’t have just rolled off.”

“He would have had to have been pushed. And he would have had to have been pushed hard. And long. Anne Marie and I put him out there, and we put on the brakes—I saw the brakes on, Mr. Demarkian, and I didn’t make a mistake—and then he asked for a hot chocolate. So Anne Marie and I went back to the fire—”

“Could you see your father from the fire?”

“No. There’s a stand of trees out there. He was on the other side of it from where the rest of us were. We got back to the fire and told Mother he wanted some hot chocolate, and then Emma offered to bring it to him. So we let her.”

“You sound as if you don’t think you should have let her.”

“We shouldn’t have,” Bennis said, “even if it turns out she didn’t try to kill him, that time. They’d had a tremendous fight the night before. Emma was always very protective of Mother, and in those days, before Mother got seriously sick, Daddy could be very abusive to her. Not as abusive as he was with the rest of us, and not on purpose. If Daddy had known the effect the things he was saying were having on her, he’d never have said them. That’s one thing you have to give him. He did love Mother. But he was a cruel man, Mr. Demarkian, naturally cruel, so naturally he often didn’t know he was being cruel. And the night before this happened, he’d said something to Mother that Emma objected to, and Emma just lit into him. Then he lit into her, and they had a screaming match that lasted over two hours. At the end of which, by the way, Emma told him she thought he should be dead.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“Ah, indeed. Emma brought him his hot chocolate. Then she came back. Then we cleaned up around the fire. After a while, we all started to drift off. I know that sounds strange, in January. But it was a really warm day. I remember I was wearing a cotton turtleneck and a cotton sweater and no coat, and I felt overdressed.”

“Did you fall asleep?”

“We all did. Or we thought we all did.”

“And then?”

Bennis coughed. “I woke up. I’d been lying on a blanket, right next to the fire, and when I looked up I saw Emma’s place was empty. A few seconds later, Emma came out of the stand of trees.”

“Where did she say she’d been?”

“Where do you think? Taking care of necessary business, of course. It was a perfectly sensible explanation, and I didn’t think anything of it. We talked for a while. I gave her a lecture on diplomatic relations with Daddy. She was so much younger than the rest of us, she hadn’t lived through the very bad years, she had no idea how to handle him when he got out of hand. Then Mother got up, and looked at her watch, and said we’d better go tell Daddy what time it was. Because it was getting late.”

“Who went?”

“Anne Marie and I. Together.”

Gregor nodded. “And your father had been pushed over the bluff.”

“Very recently pushed, Mr. Demarkian. That’s a big part of it. If we’d been much later on the scene, he would have died. The doctor told us that, afterward.”

“Your father was unconscious?”

“In more ways than one. He was full of Demerol.”

Gregor was surprised. “How do you know? You say there wasn’t a criminal investigation—”

“I know because I asked the doctor to check,” Bennis said. “We were behind the trees, but we weren’t far away from him. We would have heard him if he’d cried out. And he should have cried out, attempted murder or not. Even if he’d gone over that bluff accidentally, and been asleep when he started moving, the drop should have woken him up.”