Not a Creature Was Stirring (12 page)

“Did you find a briefcase?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Jackman said.

Gregor almost hated to do it. He could only remember one case like it, in Yellowstone Park in 1971. It shamed him a little to remember how excited it had made him: not potential spies or low-rent drug dealers or even homicidal maniacs, but real people pushed to the edge and over. Pushing themselves over, to be honest. That was how it happened.

In this case, Robert Hannaford himself may have done the pushing. He sounded to Gregor like a man who played dangerous games on a regular basis. But whoever had done the pushing, here they were.

He pointed across the room toward the body and said, “Do you see that thing on the floor? That flat metal thing?”

“What thing?”

“It’s buried in the carpet to our side of the patch of blood.”

Jackman gave Gregor an odd look, but he put on a pair of white cotton gloves, crossed the room, and knelt where Gregor was pointing. A moment later, he stood up again, holding a piece of tin about the size of his palm. It was a very flimsy piece of tin, and old. It had begun to crumble around the edges.

“What is this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I know what it looks like. There are Christmas decorations on the walls outside. Old-fashioned bells and angels. They’re made of that kind of tin. But they’re the wrong shape.”

“A Christmas decoration.”

“There aren’t any in here,” Gregor said. “In fact, from the look of this room, I think Mr. Hannaford may have belonged to the bah, humbug school of holiday celebrations.”

Jackman let the piece of tin drop. “I think it’s time I got you out of here,” he said. “You’re beginning to make me feel weird. You always made me feel weird.”

“Why? I’m just—”

“Don’t,” Jackman said. “I’ve heard your lecture on internal consistency. I’ve memorized your lecture on internal consistency. I don’t want to hear it now.”

“I wasn’t going to deliver a lecture,” Gregor said.

“You aren’t going to get the chance.” Jackman took off the gloves and put them in the pocket of his jacket. They made a bulge that reminded Gregor of the bulges guns made.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Jackman said, “you are a suspect in this case. As a suspect in this case, I think you ought to meet the other suspects in this case.”

“You mean you think I ought to get out of your hair.”

“Interpret it any way you want to. You’re going to get out of here. Now.”

C
ORDELIA DAY HANNAFORD WAS
sitting in a yellow wing chair next to the fireplace, directly in line with the open door. She was the first thing Gregor saw when he came into the room. She was the only thing he saw for many minutes afterward. She had her arms propped up on the arms of the chair, her back propped up by its back, and her feet flat on the floor. In repose, she was perfect, a Lady of the Manor as imagined by Turner. Her bones were fine and delicate. Her eyes were large and widely spaced and deeply blue. Her hair was white, but thick and glossy, as if it had turned early. It was only when she moved that Gregor realized something was wrong. She tried to turn her head when he came into the room. Her effort was not only slow and painful, but completely without control. First she jerked right. Then she jerked left. Then her hands and arms began to shake. Once they started, she couldn’t make them stop. It was like watching that terrible old movie,
Lost Horizon
. Cordelia Day Hannaford was physically disintegrating in front of his eyes.

With Elizabeth, until the last year, reality had been less obvious. In fact, it hadn’t been obvious at all. In the early days, living with Elizabeth’s dying had been an almost hallucinatory experience. She looked well. She almost always felt well. Every once in a while, she went off to the hospital for chemotherapy—and then she was sick. Gregor had come to hate the chemotherapy with a fine hot passion he’d never been able to work up for serial murderers. Or presidential assassins. Elizabeth looked terrible when she came back from the hospital and felt worse. He would leave for work in the morning and hear her vomiting in the bathroom, vomiting and vomiting, like someone who had swallowed poison. When he got drunk enough—and there had been nights; he hadn’t been able to help himself—he started to think they
were
giving her poison. Then the chemotherapy would be over, and she would be fine again. So fine, he might as well have imagined the whole thing.

Elizabeth’s last year had been a shock. After five years of sick-and-well, well-and-sick, he hadn’t been prepared for it. Cordelia Day Hannaford’s children would have no such problem. Gregor didn’t know what she had, but looking at Cordelia Day he was sure it had been a progressive disease. Muscles didn’t melt into Silly Putty overnight—and if they did, their owner didn’t accept the change without a lot of panic and denial. Cordelia Day was in pain, but she was at peace, at least about herself.

The room was very hot. The fire was blazing. Gregor became suddenly aware of a number of unpleasant things. He was still wearing his heavy winter coat over his best winter wool suit. All those layers of insulation were making rivers of sweat run down his back. Then there was Cordelia Day. She was staring at him and he was staring at her—and her children were staring at both of them. Now the movie all this reminded him of wasn’t
Lost Horizon
, but something by Antonioni, or maybe Bergman, one of those endless black-and-white productions with very little dialogue and a lot of long silences.

He tried to pull himself back emotionally, and in the process noticed a few things he should have noticed right off. Cordelia Day Hannaford was covered with blood. There was so much of it soaked into the skirt of her pale blue dress, it had probably been wet when Jackman first saw her. Now it was drying. Thick, stiff clots of it were webbed across the material that covered her knees. They made the dress look embroidered.

The other people in the room, the children, were not as hostile as he’d expected them to be. Bennis he recognized from her author photos. She was almost too cordial. The tall, lanky young man with the weak mouth and the frightened eyes wasn’t frightened of Gregor. The very young woman who looked so much like Bennis, but wasn’t as pretty, barely registered his existence. What animosity there was, and it was palpable, came from the man with his left leg in a brace and the stout middle-aged woman who stood behind Cordelia Day Hannaford’s chair.

He looked around the room. There were holly bows everywhere, and candles and ribbons, and clusters of the same kind of decorations he had seen near the study, the ones that were too small to account for the piece of tin on Robert Hannaford’s study floor. There were miniature Christmas trees and miniature Santa Clauses. There was even a miniature crèche, with the Christ child missing from the manger. Tibor would have approved.

He turned his attention back to the Hannafords, shrugging off his coat as he did so. The two people in the room he hadn’t paid attention to before—a man who epitomized the Complete Corporate Yuppie and a woman dressed like a thirties movie star playing a tramp—were just shell-shocked. Gregor turned to the stout middle-aged woman. Her manner said he’d have to deal with her first. He thought he’d give her what she wanted. Besides, he felt a little sorry for her. She was a mess. Her tweed skirt was wrinkled. Her cashmere sweater was stained and out of true. Even her pearl necklace was hanging out-of-kilter. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who usually allowed herself to look out of control.

He got his coat as far as his wrists, and Bennis came to life.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t even take your coat. Nobody took your coat.”

“Why should anyone take his coat?” the Movie Star said. “Who is he? Why is he staying?”

Bennis sighed. “I’m Bennis Hannaford,” she told Gregor. “That’s my sister Myra Hannaford Van Damm. Mrs. Richard Van Damm. Can I put that somewhere for you?”

Gregor handed her the coat. Bennis folded it over her arm, looked around the room, and finally settled on laying it out across a vacant chair. There were a lot of vacant chairs. The room was enormous, and stuffed as full of furniture as an exhibit in a second-rate museum.

“This must be Gregor Demarkian,” Bennis said. Gregor nodded, and she smiled. When the rest of them looked blank, she added, “Daddy’s dinner guest, remember? In all the confusion, we forgot to head him off at the pass.”

“Of course,” the Yuppie said. “Anne Marie strikes again. Efficiency in action.”

“Oh, shut up,” the stout woman said. “I’m as efficient as you’ve got any right to expect me to be. It’s not as if I had any help.”

Bennis shot Gregor an apologetic look, then stepped into the middle of them and started pointing. “That’s my brother Bobby,” she said, indicating the Yuppie, “and you and Myra have already been introduced. The man on the floor is Theodore,” (the brace, Gregor thought) “and the woman behind Mother is Anne Marie. You probably guessed. The person who looks like he just came back from a Grateful Dead concert is Christopher. And this,” she waved her hand over the very young woman’s head, “is Emma.”

“Every time you introduce me to anyone,” Emma said, “you always make it sound as if I’m Sarah Bernhardt.”

“Well, you are Sarah Bernhardt, sweetie. It’s just that nobody knows it yet but me.”

Emma had been sitting on the floor, with her back against the legs of a Victorian sofa. Now she stood up, in a single fluid dancer’s motion, and went to Cordelia Day Hannaford’s chair.

“This is our Mother,” she said. “Mrs. Robert Hannaford. She—”

“She’s very ill,” Anne Marie said.

Emma flushed. “He can see that she’s very ill,” she said angrily. “Anyone could see it. I was just trying—”

“She’s only trying to be polite,” Myra said. “God, Anne Marie. Sometimes I wonder what goes on in your head. You know how Mother feels about manners.”

“Stop talking about her as if she can’t hear,” Emma said. “There’s nothing wrong with her ears, and there’s nothing wrong with her mind, either.”

“Oh, Christ,” Chris said.

In her chair, Cordelia Day Hannaford stirred. Her movement stopped all other movement in the room. The pain of it was a tangible thing. Gregor had to go rigid to keep himself from rushing to her aid. Her children knew her far better than he did. If she liked help, they would help her.

Surprisingly, when she began to talk her voice was clear, almost steady. “Mr. De
mark
-ian,” she said. Her hesitation was so slight, Gregor wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t been listening for it. “My husband—was look-ing—for-ward—to—your—visit.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said.

“You must—have—a—seat.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Thank you again. I think I need one.”

Cordelia raised her hand, very slowly, and touched Anne Marie’s arm where it rested against the back of her chair. “Ring for Marsh-all,” she said. “We must—have the—the
cart
.”

“The cart,” Anne Marie repeated.

“It’s only right,” Emma said. “We have a guest. We can’t just let him sit there like—”

“What are you talking about?” Anne Marie said. “We’ve got a corpse, that’s what we’ve got, lying not a thousand feet from this room—”

Cordelia Day Hannaford jerked her hand away. Anne Marie jerked in response, frightened. “Oh, God. Oh, Mother. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Marsh-all,” Cordelia said.

“Yes,” Anne Marie said. “I’ll go get Marshall. I’ll go get the cart. Just—just rest, please. I won’t be a moment.”

“You could ring,” Christopher said.

“Don’t be an ass,” Anne Marie said. She hurried out of the room, taking a door at the back Gregor hadn’t noticed before.

Once she was gone, the rest of them relaxed a little, but not much. If Gregor read them right, they were more concerned with their mother than they were with each other, or with the fact that their father was dead in another room. Their principal reason for being so angry at Anne Marie was her insistence on referring to the “corpse.” They wanted it safely out of sight, in another universe.

He turned his attention back to Cordelia, and decided—sentimentally—that she’d come to the same conclusions he had. It would be odd if she hadn’t. Most people overreacted to violent death, and when they were past that they overreacted to their connection to it. He’d have understood if they’d talked obsessively about the murder, or about the father they hadn’t liked very much. It was worse than strange to find them like this.

Cordelia was drooping. Her head had fallen forward. Her eyes had closed. Her hands had curled in on themselves, like the hands of a quadriplegic. Bennis got up and went over to her, checking her out carefully, as if she were a baby.

“Asleep,” she said.

“Thank God,” Myra said. “What’s that idiot policeman thinking of? She should have been medicated hours ago.”

“I told him that,” Bennis said. She moved her mother’s head so that it was resting more comfortably on the back of the chair. “I wonder how much of a horse’s ass he really was. Does she have medical insurance? Does she have survivorship? Did he consider for one single moment that he might get run over by a truck?”

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t think he was going to end up murdered,” the man in the brace said. “Although he should have.”

“Shut up, Teddy,” Myra said.

“Why?”

“She’s got a survivorship.” This came from Bobby, the Complete Yuppie. He was sitting straight up like the rest of them now, but Gregor was interested to note that only the mention of money had gotten him that way. A dead father, a dying mother—none of that had moved him to action. “She hasn’t got medical insurance, because she was diagnosed before he bought his policies. But she gets the annuity incomes as long as she lives, and that should take care of medical expenses. And running the house. Hell, he put everything he had into those annuities.”

“No he didn’t,” Myra said.

Bobby ignored her. “There’s a life insurance policy, too,” he said. “A million dollars worth. I don’t know if it has a double indemnity clause for murder. But she can use that money any way she wants to. She isn’t going to need it.”

“She isn’t going to use it, either,” Bennis said. “She isn’t going to last till New Year’s.”