Not a Creature Was Stirring (29 page)

“Miss Hannaford, did you tell the police about this Demerol?”

Bennis picked up a grape leaf and studied it. “We told them he’d taken some, yes. Daddy was always taking some painkiller or the other. He was paralyzed, but “the nerves in his lower body weren’t entirely dead. They hurt him, often.”

Gregor got a grape leaf of his own, but he ate his. It was good. Everything at Ararat was always good.

Across the table, Bennis Hannaford was looking tired and sad. She kept picking up food and putting it down again, as if she’d forgotten what it was for.

“I asked her about it,” she said finally. “I confronted her with it, really, that same week. After we knew Daddy was going to live. She said she hadn’t done it.”

“You didn’t believe her?” Gregor asked.

“No. Emma was always—sketchy, sort of. Not too stable, I suppose you’d say. When she was a child, she’d have terrible tantrums, hold her breath until she passed out, I don’t know what. Anne Marie and Myra and I were all so—practical, I guess.”

“Was that what the note was about? The one the police found in her room? About the fact that she knew you suspected her?”

“Yes.”

“What about the other note?” Gregor said. “The one Anne Marie found originally?”

“I don’t know. I never saw it.” Bennis blushed. “I didn’t go into the room. The room where Emma was. I didn’t want to see her—”

“It’s all right. I understand that. You weren’t in the house when the note was finally discovered?”

“I left about half an hour after you started talking to Evers. Do you remember what it said?”

Gregor sighed. “Let’s just say I found it less convincing, as a suicide note, than the one that had been sent to you.”

“Which wasn’t a suicide note at all,” Bennis pointed out.

“I know that.” Gregor slapped his hand against the table. Simplicity. That was what this pointed to. Simplicity. Somewhere, in all this mess of motives and secrets and plots, there was a perfectly straightforward course of action, a person who killed or tried to kill, over and over again, always in much the same way. And that meant there was also a perfectly straightforward reason for it all. Not Hannaford Financial and a complex embezzling scheme. Not Teddy’s baroque fantasies of persecution. Something else, something simple, something obvious—but not obvious enough for him to see what it was.

Linda Melajian came to clear the appetizer and put out the salads. Gregor sat back while she wiped the table in front of him. She scrubbed too long and too vigorously, but he had been expecting that.

When she was gone, he leaned across his salad bowl and said, “Would you do me a favor? I’d like to come to Engine House, on my own, without John Jackman. Would you invite me?”

“Of course I will,” Bennis said. “When do you want to come?”

Gregor thought about it. “Tomorrow morning. We might as well not waste time. I don’t think you want to waste time, either.”

“Mr. Demarkian, for ten years, I thought Emma had tried to kill Daddy. When Daddy died the way he did, I thought she’d tried again and succeeded. I had nothing to worry about as long as I thought that was true. Emma wasn’t dangerous to the rest of us. And she wasn’t dangerous to Mother.”

“And you’re worried that whoever is really doing these things is dangerous to your mother?”

“I don’t know. But she’s the most vulnerable one. And she’s helpless.”

Gregor understood. But he had something much more immediate to worry about, immediate and frightening. He saw the swish of skirts. He saw the glint of lights on hair. He heard the rustling of a fur coat.

“Krekor!” Lida Arkmanian trilled. “It is
you
! And a friend of yours I haven’t
met
!”

Which took care of what the good ladies of Cavanaugh Street were going to do about his dinner with Bennis Day Hannaford.

A
T SIX O’CLOCK ON
the morning of Wednesday, December 28, Christopher Hannaford woke up on the floor of his bedroom. He turned over onto his back, looked up at his bed, and decided it might not be such a bad idea to get stoned again right away. Then he realized that, bad idea or good one, it was impossible. He had finished the dope he’d brought from California. He was dead broke. And after his experiences yesterday afternoon, he had no damn intention of leaving Engine House again for any reason whatsoever.

He sat up, looked around, and touched his hair. It was stiff with dried sweat and very clammy. Through his bedroom windows, he could see the glow of security lamps on the back terrace and chart the passage of a heavily falling snow. He didn’t bother looking in the other direction. Over there was the writing desk, with the top left drawer sitting slightly ajar, where he’d tried to close it and hadn’t been able to. In that drawer were Mother’s candlesticks. Every once in a while, it would hit him: what he had done and what he had tried to do, first in attempting to sell them and then when he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. The picture that came to him most clearly was of the pavement just outside the main doors of Pennsylvania Station. The derelict with the mud in his beard. The crazy lady with the vest and no shirt. The fake veteran with the American flag sewn across his chest. Most of all, the people going in and out with the trains, so different from what they would have been like if this were Los Angeles. Out there you got a lot of kids, teenage and stupid. Here it was mostly well-dressed men in middle age, with somewhere in particular to go. He hadn’t been able to classify himself, although he had tried. He had tried again last night, in the wake of Emma’s dying, nearly catatonic with dope and guilt. Now he decided not to bother again, not yet. It was too much. He didn’t have the energy and he didn’t have the courage.

He got up, crossed the room, turned on his night-table lamp, and sat down on the edge of his bed. Down the hall, a door opened and closed, letting padded footsteps into the corridor. He got up, stuck his head out the door, and caught Anne Marie just as she was disappearing into the bathroom. She looked terrible, her hair snarled, her body—much fatter than he’d realized, seeing her in clothes—squeezed into a yellow velour bathrobe that made her look like a stuffed canary covered in Saran Wrap. Her face was as sour as he’d ever seen anybody’s. Looking at it, he realized sour wasn’t an expression he had much experience with, these days. Menacing, yes. Seductive, certainly. Exasperated, every day. But sour—that was an emotional territory confined exclusively to Engine House.

He shut the door of his room again and then, on impulse, went to check the writing desk. The candlesticks were still there, wrapped in a thin plastic bag from a Pathmark in the Jersey town where he had spent half an hour getting gas and lunch. He took them out, felt their weight, and thought about putting them back where they belonged. Then he wrapped them in the plastic bag again and pitched them into the drawer.

Last night, wallowing in the precursor to this condition, he had promised himself that as soon as he got up this morning, he would talk to Bennis. As soon as. Now he was up, and it wasn’t even dawn yet. Bennis was on vacation. Did it make sense to wake a woman from a sound sleep when you wanted to ask for her help?

He got off the bed again, opened his door again, stuck his head into the hall again. He felt like one of those souvenir gooney birds they sold in the Stuckey’s off southern highways, going up and down, up and down, in a senseless imitation of perpetual motion. He stepped into the hall and closed his bedroom door behind him.

All around, between all the candlesticks on all the chests in the hall, there were holly baskets: Mother’s traditional first preparation for Twelfth Night. He squinted into the distance and saw there was a holly basket on the chest without candlesticks, too—but of course, there would be. Christmas decorations at Engine House were orchestrated with all the battlefield solemnity the manager of Rockefeller Center brought to the lighting of the giant tree. Now someone knew those candlesticks were gone, and he only had to worry about who.

He crossed the hall and started counting doors, until he came to the fourth to the north of his. He raised his hand to knock, then thought better of it. No use waking Bennis the way the volunteer firemen would. Christ only knew what she’d think was going on, before he had a chance to tell her it was only him. He opened the door very slowly and stuck his head in.

Bennis’s bed was empty. It had been slept in—or wrestled in, from the look of it—but it was empty. He opened the door wider and tried to search the room.

“Bennis?”

“Here,” she said.

The voice came from behind him, and he jumped. Just like a bad actor in an even worse comedy.

“Jesus
Christ
,” he said.

Bennis slipped under his arm—she was small enough and he was tall enough so she hardly had to stoop—and went to turn on the night-table lamp.

“I was in the bathroom,” she said. She picked up her cigarettes and started fumbling with the paraphernalia: lighter, ashtray, butt. “I couldn’t sleep. I take it you couldn’t sleep either.”

“I slept like a log, I just didn’t do it long enough. I guess it was mostly the dope.”

“Are you still smoking dope?”

“I have to do something, Bennis. I don’t smoke anything else. I don’t drink. Last couple of months or so, I don’t even get laid.”

“Shut the door,” Bennis said. “If Anne Marie sees us, she’ll want us to do something.”

Chris shut the door. Behind him, Bennis was sitting cross-legged on her bed, draped in a man’s red football jersey, her hair pinned to the top of her head in a haphazard way that told him she’d stuck it up there to get it out of the way, without looking in a mirror to be sure she got it right. She was unbelievably beautiful—and that made him feel even guiltier than being here. It was the kind of thing he ought to remember about Bennis, but never did.

He came over and sat at the foot of her bed. “So,” he said. “So. Hell. Why do I have this terrible feeling you know why I’m here?”

“You look terrible, Christopher.”

“I could look terrible because Daddy died. And Emma. Especially Emma.”

“You looked terrible before any of that happened. I remember seeing you when you first came in. I thought what Teddy thought. I thought you had AIDS.”

“I don’t have AIDS.”

“I could ask you how you’re sure you know, under the circumstances. But I won’t.”

“Good. And if you want to get technical about it, I don’t know. I just know I’ve got an ulcer—same one I had at Yale—and it’s acting up and I can’t eat. There’s a lot of reasons I can’t eat.”

“How much?” Bennis said gently.

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“Ouch.”

He stood up. “Believe it or not, I’m not asking you for it. I came in here to ask you for money, but not for that money.”

Bennis brushed stray hair off her neck, impatient. “Don’t be idiotic,” she said. “The problem with you and money for that is that you always start out borrowing it from the wrong people. And I asked Michael about it—round about, don’t worry, I didn’t tell him it was you. He says they really do the things people say they do in novels.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Chris said. “They threaten to do them.”

“Somebody has been threatening to kill you?”

“Somebody’s been threatening to cut off my thumbs. Why would they want to kill me? How could they get paid back out of that?”

Bennis took a long drag on her cigarette. “It’s funny,” she said. “I took this course in college, introduction to psych or something like that, and when we got to all the nature-nurture theories I thought the whole argument was silly. Especially the nurture part. But look at us. The children of a psychopath—”

“You’re not a psychopath, Bennis.”

“Neither are you.”

“I’m something.” He sighed. It was getting harder and harder to talk to her. He went to the windows and looked out. It was snowing out there again. Hard. “I don’t think I’m crazy because I got Daddy’s genes,” he said, “and I don’t think I’m crazy because Daddy warped my mind, either. I think I’m crazy because I’m a jerk.”

“I don’t think that kind of attitude is going to get us anywhere.”

“I think it’s going to get us a hell of a lot farther than the attitude I’ve been taking, which is that I just can’t help myself, no explanations necessary.”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

“Let me tell you what I did yesterday,” he said. “Just so you get the picture.”

Bennis took another drag. He could hear it. “I know about the candlesticks,” she said quickly. “I saw you take them.”

“I still have them. I tried to sell them, but I couldn’t do it. They’re some kind of custom antique.”

Bennis laughed. “They’re that, at least. They’re great-grandmother Eleanor’s Georgian wedding silver. I’m surprised a pawnbroker knew that.”

“Pawnbrokers are not dumb. That’s how they stay out of jail. It’s what I did after I couldn’t sell them that bothers me. You want to hear about my day?”

“Of course.”

He leaned close to the window, letting his forehead touch the glass. “I had about twenty-five dollars on me at the beginning. I went to a house I knew of, a gambling place—”

“This was in the morning?”

“These places never shut down. Anyway, this was a place I knew about from someone else, but not a place that knew me. So I went there and I played my twenty-five dollars and I lost it. When it was gone, I didn’t dare ask for credit. I’ve got too bad a rep, all across the country. If I’d given my name, they’d have made a phone call, and—well, you know the and. So I left.”

“And?”

Deep breath, ten count, deep breath again. It was so hard to keep going. “I wanted to play,” he said. “I didn’t have any money, but I wanted to play. So I went to Penn Station, and I stood outside the front doors, and I tried to panhandle—”

“Oh, dear
Lord
.”

He turned around. “Bennis, what do you think I do? How do you think I live? This isn’t the first time—”

“But they let you borrow so much money—”

“They let me borrow until they get nervous and then they don’t let me borrow any more. But I still want to play. I still have to play. Bennis, I want to go out and play now.”