Not a Creature Was Stirring (7 page)

“For God’s sake,” Anne Marie said. “What are you staring at?”

“You’re the one who was a million miles away.” Myra sounded uncharacteristically reasonable. “I’ve just been trying to get you to tell me what you meant by saying everybody was here.”

Anne Marie sighed. “Everybody’s here. Bennis and Emma came in right after dinner yesterday. Teddy wandered through at about midnight. Chris called up from Newark at two o’clock in the morning because his car broke down and I had to wake Morgan to go get him. Everybody’s here, Myra.”

“Are they up yet?”

“Of course they’re not up yet. I wouldn’t be up myself if Bobby hadn’t come banging on the door at quarter to six.”

“Have you talked to any of them?”

“If you mean did I sit them down and grill them about their lives, Myra, the answer is no. I never did much go in for gestapo tactics.”

“You never did much go in for self-denial, either,” Myra said. “You’d better put away the chocolates for a while, sweetie. You’re getting positively grotesque.”

Somewhere down at the end of the main hall, a bell started ringing: the bell Daddy used when he was in his study and particularly annoyed or particularly hurried. Anne Marie hesitated—God, how she wanted to give Myra a little of it back;
God
how she wanted to—but not for long. Myra was a pain in the ass. Daddy was something worse.

Sometimes, lying alone in bed and thinking about him down here with his paneling and his books, thinking about his flat black eyes staring at the bulge at her waist or the trunklike roundness of her thighs, Anne Marie had visions. She saw those eyes broken and blood all over his face.

In one thing, Anne Marie and Myra were in perfect agreement. It really was too bad Daddy had done all that with the money. It was even worse there was no one with an excuse to murder him for it.

Almost the first thing Bobby Hannaford did when he realized he’d be alone in the kitchen was take out the half dozen loose pieces of paper he kept his personal accounts on. First he laid them out on the kitchen table in a line. Then he got his calculator from his pocket and put it right beside them. Then he got his fist grip and began to exercise his left hand. It was very quiet in the kitchen, much quieter than it had been at the front of the house. Through the kitchen window, he could see the long line of garages with their swing-out, barnlike doors, every one decorated with silver and gold tinsel wreaths. The kitchen itself was a forest of evergreen and holly. There were the standard Hannaford decorations—the shiny tin balls, bells, angels, and cherubs. Mrs. Washington had even put a miniature crèche on the utility table next to the main stove. Mrs. Washington being Catholic, and there still being forty-two hours to go before Christmas Day, the manger was empty.

Wednesday, December 23.

Bobby looked down at his papers, and his calculator. If he hadn’t been so tired, and so floaty, he would probably have been scared. The item that had appeared in last night’s paper had been small and buried on a back page, but Bobby had become adept at divining the true nature of the obscure. In the kind of enterprise he was involved in, an early warning system was essential. Now he had his warning—four short lines about a man he’d never met, but knew McAdam had—but no driving need to do anything about it.

In fact, at the moment, he had no driving need to do
anything.
The rational part of his brain kept sending him instructions—he’d seen the item and he had the time; a week of good fast work could get him out of this both rich and untouchable; if he could just get Daddy off his back he’d be fine—but they fell over the rest of him like smoke.

What held his attention was the memory of the Christmas he was ten, the first time he had really understood the way the world worked. He had been hearing about his special status since infancy. He was the Oldest Son, the Hannaford Heir. Sometime in the distant future, he’d be Head of the Family. He’d treated the information the way he’d treated grade-school rumors of high-school algebra classes. He didn’t have to worry about it at the moment. When he did have to, he would.

That year, when he was ten, he’d come downstairs before anyone else was up. The tree was in the larger sitting room, a twenty-four-foot Douglas pine weighed down with five generations of Hannaford ornaments. Because he wanted to get a good look at the crystal angel on top, he came at it from the balcony that opened off the west wing. He stood on the balcony for a while, wondering how they got glass to make the dips and swirls of angels’ wings. Then he went down the balcony stairs to look at his presents.

He was halfway down the staircase when he realized one pile of presents was larger, much larger, than all the rest. He was stupefied when he reached the tree and found that pile belonged to him. It should have belonged to his father. Back on the stairs, he had assumed it had. His father was the Atlas of his world, part ogre and part god, unassailable and eternal. When Bobby thought of growing up, he saw himself getting taller and stronger year by year and his father getting taller and stronger still.

He opened the three boxes at the top of the pile, wondering if he had so much because the things they’d bought him were cheap and inconsequential. They weren’t. He’d asked for a pair of air force binoculars, and he’d got them. He’d asked for a Greenwich gyroscope, and he’d got that, too. He looked across the room at his stocking, hanging from the mantel over the dead ashes of a cold fire and saw the pale blue envelope that should contain a notice saying five thousand dollars had been deposited in his trust account at the First National Bank. Just to make sure it did, he crossed the room and opened it up.

He was stuffing the envelope back into the stocking when he heard the balcony door moving above him. By the time he managed to turn around, his father was coming down the balcony stairs. Bobby backed up a little. He wasn’t surprised at the ritual hatred in the old man’s eyes—he knew his father hated him; he’d always known it—but there was amusement there, too, and Daddy amused scared Bobby Hannaford to death.

He’d taken a Hershey’s Kiss out of his stocking when he’d put the envelope back in. Now he put his fist around it and pumped until the chocolate turned to liquid.

“Things,” Daddy said, stopping halfway down the stairs.

“Excuse me?”

“Things,” his father said. “That’s the only way I know you exist.”

“That’s why I think you’re losing it,” Myra said. “You never listen to me anymore.”

Bobby came to. He was sitting in the kitchen at Engine House, at some ungodly hour of the morning, looking through the window at a thick and furious fall of snow. He was forty-four.

He caught sight of his papers laid out along the table and started to gather them up. “Sorry,” he said.

“
Are
you all right?” Myra said. “I thought you were
comatose
.”

“I’m fine, Myra. I’m just a little tired.”

“I suppose you are. Although what got you here at six o’clock in the morning, I don’t know.”

Bobby let this pass—he always ended up letting a lot of things pass, with Myra—and put his calculator back in its slip case. He was feeling better. The torpor that had paralyzed him for most of the last twelve hours was gone. He could see everything he would have to do in the next week, and he could see himself doing it.

He put his fist grip into the pocket of the jacket he had thrown over the back of his chair and said, “Teddy’s here, in case Anne Marie didn’t tell you. He called me last night—woke me up from a sound sleep—trying to find out something about Mother. I think he got fired.”

“Really?” Myra didn’t sound interested. She was fussing with the Dripmaster, making the coffee Bobby had intended to make himself and then forgotten about.

She unhinged the pitcher, carried it to the sink, and started filling it with water. “Listen,” she said, “can I tell you a secret? An absolute, dead dark, don’t tell anyone secret?”

“Yours or somebody else’s?”

“Don’t be nasty, Bobby. I’ve been very good to you, the last couple of years.”

“I’m not being nasty, Myra. You’re just not very good at keeping secrets.”

“I’ve kept
yours
.”

Myra had kept his secret because it was also hers, and she had no more interest in landing in jail than he did. Bobby didn’t tell her that. He just watched her taking the pitcher back to the Dripmaster and pouring the water through the hole at the top.

When she was done and the pitcher was back in place, she came to the kitchen table and took the seat across from him.

“There’s going to be a divorce,” she said.

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

Bobby blinked. “Dickie Van Damm wants to divorce you?” The idea of Dickie, the stuffiest, most pompous, most antediluvian asshole on the Philadelphia Main Line wanting to divorce anybody was like Ronald Reagan joining the struggle for worldwide Communism. Divorced people weren’t allowed to attend the Philadelphia Assembly, for God’s sake. Dickie mainlined the Philadelphia Assembly.

Bobby groaned inwardly at the awful pun, and Myra started tapping her long glittered nails on the tabletop.

“Of course Dickie doesn’t want to divorce me,” she said. “I want to divorce Dickie. That’s where I have a problem.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I need money, Bobby. I want to file papers January second, and when I do I have to have enough in the mattress to keep me going until I get what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“Half of everything.”

“Naturally.” Bobby sighed. “I told you last week, Myra. If you can keep Daddy out of my hair until New Year’s, I’ll have this thing wrapped up and ready to go. You can take your money and abscond to Tahiti, for all I care.”

“New Year’s.”

“That’s what I said, Myra.”

“And you’re sure.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“You’d better be more than sure,” Myra said. “The divorce laws aren’t what they used to be. Dickie can fight this and he probably will. And you know Daddy won’t be any help at all.”

“Daddy never is.”

A current of understanding passed between them, a compound of body language and race memory, made up of the thousand and one horrors they had survived together in this house. Then the water started to come through the Dripmaster, shooting a muddy stream into the pitcher, and Myra got up to get them both coffee.

“Did you say you thought Teddy had been fired?” she asked him.

“That I did.”

“That’s interesting,” Myra said. “I wonder what he got fired for.”

Upstairs in the west wing, Emma Hannaford was finding it hard to sleep. She was, in fact, finding it impossible to sleep. Unlike her brothers and sisters, she had no consistently terrible memories of Engine House. The one really awful thing that had happened to her here had happened and been done with, except in the minds of the people involved. Emma didn’t see what she could do about that. She preferred to forget the incident altogether, whenever she was able. She felt better concentrating on the good things that had happened to her here. Her relationship with her mother, her relationship with Bennis: in a world where parents were distant figures, always on their way in from or out to parties, she had been lucky enough to have two people who put her ahead of everyone and everything else. When Emma thought about her childhood, she always saw it as the One Brief Shining Moment of the
Camelot
song. She even knew the moment it had ended, to the minute.

She looked at the glowing face of the digital clock on her bedside table. 6:15. It was too early to go downstairs. Mrs. Washington wouldn’t be in the kitchen for another quarter hour, and she’d be too busy to talk for the half hour after that. It was too early to wake Bennis, too. Bennis had made it quite clear she intended to spend most of the next week conked. Emma sat up and turned on the table lamp, wondering why mornings in winter were always so dark.

(There’s a scientific explanation for that, Emma. It’s the kind of thing you were supposed to learn in school.)

Emma threw the covers off and hopped to the floor, feeling a little silly in her oversize sleep shirt. The hall outside her door was quiet, but she opened the door a crack and peered out anyway, just to check. The sleep shirt came down only to her knees and was made of a very thin material. She didn’t like the idea of being caught in it while she wandered around the house. She’d been living alone so long—and in girls’ dormitories for so long before that—she didn’t own a robe. Even Bennington, coed and “progressive” as it was, hadn’t been able to drag her out of this particular kind of isolation.

She let herself into the hall and headed for the center section of the house. There was a serious library downstairs, full of hardcover editions of Plato and Thomas Aquinas, but there was a smaller one up here, full of what her mother called “diversionary books.” Her father had standing accounts at half a dozen book-stores in Philadelphia and New York, and every week a little rainfall of current best-sellers arrived at Engine House, to be unwrapped by Marshall and put up here by whatever maid was available. Emma thought she would get one of these books, bring it back to her room, and read until she could decently go down to breakfast.

She was just edging out of the west wing into the upstairs center hall when she heard the noise. At first, she thought it was birds. It was that kind of noise, faint and fluttery, mutely quarrelsome. Then she realized there couldn’t be any birds—Mrs. Washington kept a much cleaner house than
that
—and she began to wonder what someone was doing up here, trying to get away with something in secret.

Aside from the little library, the upstairs center hall held two other small rooms. Emma looked into the tea room first, registering dust-cover covered love seats and shrouded candelabra. She crossed the carpet to the writing room and stood in the door. She saw Anne Marie. She saw the Sargent portrait of Great-Grandmother Eleanor Devereaux Hannaford standing away from the wall and the wall safe open. She stood silent for at least a full minute before she realized what was wrong. There was no reason on earth why Anne Marie should be doing what she was doing in the dark.