Not a Creature Was Stirring (20 page)

She stepped onto the sidewalk, raised her hand for a cab, and had a very troublesome thought.

That Gregor Demarkian person was an FBI man.

The FBI worked on federal bank and stock investigations.

What if Daddy had known about this, too?

T
HERE WAS A GRANDFATHER
clock in the hall outside her bedroom. When it began striking, Cordelia Day Hannaford began counting the notes. It was easier to do that than to get up and look at the bedside clock, or even lift her arm and look at the watch on her wrist. She had tried to do both those things when Emma left the room. She had succeeded with the watch, but the effort had left her nauseated and mentally fogged. And it had taken a very long time. She had no idea how many minutes it had been from the moment Emma left to get the tea tray to the moment she had got her wrist up high enough, and her mind cleared long enough, to see that it was 10:36.

It was now eleven o’clock. She had been at rest for twenty-four minutes, more time than she needed to make the sick feeling go away. As always when she felt well these days, her mind seemed to be detached from her body, floating and free, in her skull but not of it. She had felt much the same way on those mornings, long ago, when she had woken after a night of too many champagne cocktails. Champagne cocktails. She wished Anne Marie weren’t so conscientious about doctors’ orders. She was going to be dead before New Year’s. They weren’t telling her, but she knew. What she would like between now and then was a day on the chaise in the sitting room, listening to Cole Porter on the stereo and drinking champagne cocktails.

What she would like between now and then was to be at ease.

She stirred in bed, involuntarily, just enough to dislodge the blanket and send it puddling around her waist. She knew they wondered about it, all of them, not only the children but the people she met outside. They wanted to know why she had married Robert Hannaford. Some of them wanted to know why she had stayed with him. He could be an evil man. Some of the things that had happened in this house would scare the skin off a mercenary soldier. But the scenarios they invented for her were all wrong. She had been poor, yes—but she hadn’t married him for his money or stayed with him for it. By the time she had met him, she had had her life all planned. She would go through with the ridiculous charade of a debutante year, eating other people’s food, dancing in other people’s ballrooms, wearing hand-me-down Balenciagas that had graced the backs of the richest heiresses in town. Coming out could cost a quarter of a million dollars or nothing at all, depending. She was the last living representative of a great old Philadelphia name. She had the right connections, the right background and the right tale of woe. People wanted to do things for her, and she let them. She felt she owed it to herself-—and to her mother, who had cared so painfully much about all that sort of thing. When it was over, she had every intention of turning her back on it, coming up to Penn State, and getting sensible.

Instead, she met Robert Hannaford, at a dinner for a hundred and six given by a Rockefeller connection with ambitions. The dinner was idiotic: too much food, too many people, too little planning. Robert was seated beside her for no good reason either of them could tell. Because she was “horsey” and he was not, most hostesses would have assumed they had nothing to say to each other. Well, she had had nothing to say to him, but he had had a great deal to say to her—and she had recognized in him, right at the beginning, a quality she had encountered before only in her father. Robert Hannaford was a man who could attach himself to
one
person. If he never met that person, he would attach himself to no one at all.

She had let herself be attached. She had let herself stay attached. She had even been happy. Robert could be a good man, if he wanted to be—and he always wanted to be, with her. He bought her things. He took her places. He did everything but settle money on her, and she didn’t mind that. That was the measure of his fear. He was sure that if he ever gave her the chance, she would run away.

It was the children who changed everything. He had hated them from the beginning, even hated her pregnancies, always disappearing for the last four months before the births so that he didn’t have to witness either her agony or her joy. She had loved them more than she expected to. Sometimes she thought she should have stopped at one, or maybe two, as soon as she knew how they were affecting him. She couldn’t have done it. She’d had seven and she would have had more, if her body had held out. Even now, old and sick and almost dead, what would have made her happiest was to hear that she was pregnant.

By the time things started going seriously wrong, there was nothing she could do about any of it, except kill the man herself. That one of the children was going to kill him had been obvious for years—either that, or they were going to start killing each other. That was why she had been so relieved to find him dead.

Outside, the clock struck the quarter hour, a single bass-note chime that sounded like a dinner gong.

It was 11:15.

Cordelia Day Hannaford closed her eyes and told herself not to panic.

In the bedroom across the hall and three doors down from Cordelia’s, Emma Hannaford sat on the edge of a grey princess chair and watched a pool of her own vomit spread across the oak floor. It was an immense pool, bigger than an ocean, and the dimmer her sight got the bigger it seemed to become. She was seconds away from passing out. Once she passed out, she would be dead.

I should be afraid, she thought, and then she thought of all the things people did in situations like this in the books she read. Leave a dying message. Leave a dying clue. She ought to do something to warn the rest of them, but she couldn’t. She knew what had happened to her. That replayed itself, like a movie on a loop tape, over and over again in her mind. The teacup. The spoon. The back turned and the elbows moving oddly, in the wrong directions, for what was supposed to be going on. It must have been Demerol that got put into the tea. She was allergic to it, although she was the only one here who knew that. When they had given her a prescription for it in New York after she broke her leg, it had made her sick, then, too.

If she could get out of her chair and across the room, she could ring for a maid and the maid might be able to help her. She couldn’t get out of her chair. The room was very dark and very long, darker and longer than it had ever been before. She was having a hard time holding up her head. This must be what it was like to be Mother. Muscles that wouldn’t obey you. Nerves that had gone on strike. A mind that drifted from one thing to another, never catching hold of anything. That much had started back in the city, coming on her every month or two like a sudden chill. That much had frightened her, until she had seen Mother—and what was happening to her was instantly clear.

But that had nothing to do with this.

This was—

She fell back into her chair, feeling black.

She should do something to warn them. She should, she should, she should. She should do something heroic and very, very wise.

It was the middle of the afternoon and it was snowing and it was dark and she was dying. And she didn’t want to die.

She really didn’t.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27–WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28

THE THIRD MURDER

U
NTIL THE TELEPHONE CALL
came, Gregor Demarkian had been thinking about something else. That was odd, because for days he had been thinking of nothing but the Hannafords, even when he was ostensibly concentrating on something else. But it had been an interesting day, and an illuminating one. Ordinary things had crept up on him and finally taken him over. For once, his apartment seemed neither alien nor cold. It was just a place he was utterly incapable of taking care of.

It was two o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 27. Gregor had spent the morning talking to Donna Moradanyan, a soothing exercise if there ever was one. Unlike Tibor and Lida and everyone else on the street, the girl was not panicking. She wasn’t depressed, either. She’d knocked on his door just after he’d finished his breakfast, fresh from a snowball fight on the sidewalk, glowing and cold and happy in spite of everything. For the five hundredth time, Gregor told himself she was the least Armenian-looking woman he had ever seen. Tall and fair and athletic, she reminded him of the Swedish girls in 1930s movies.

She stood on his mat, stamping snow off her L. L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes, her hands balled into fists in the pockets of an oversize army flak jacket.

“I feel like I should whisper,” she told him. “You know, just to keep the spy motif going.”

“Spy motif?”

“Like the way it is with Mrs. Arkmanian. Every time I bring this up, she practically starts talking in code.”

Gregor let her in. Because she’d been in before, she spent no time looking over the apartment and wasted no breath telling him how bad it was for him. She just went straight to the kitchen and started fussing with the stove, the way some women will with men they think can’t cook. Gregor supposed this was a ritual that was now out of fashion. He thought that was too bad. Assuming the man involved was not a complete jerk—which was assuming a lot in some cases, he would grant that—fussing like this could be a great comfort to both parties.

Donna threw her coat over the back of one of his kitchen chairs and went to work on his dishes, few as they were. “So,” she said, “are you going to find Peter for me?”

“Is that his name?” Gregor said. “Just Peter?”

“Peter Desarian. It might have been Bagdesarian originally. I don’t know why I think that. Armenians don’t usually change their names unless they’re going to be actors. Like Mike Connors.”

“Mike Connors?”

“He was Krekor Ohanian. Originally.” She looked into the sink. He really hadn’t had a lot of dishes, just some coffee cups and some spoons and the chipped, dessert-size plate he put his toast on. These were now stacked neatly in his dish drainer, dripping small beads of water. “You know what bothers me about all this? How it happened. That’s what bothers me.”

Gregor had visions of arcane sexual practices, black magic rituals, God knew what. “I don’t think I understand,” he said.

Donna threw herself into an empty chair. “I don’t mean the mechanics of it. That was simple enough. Everything was simple enough, really, except the other thing was so stupid. Really stupid.”

“What other thing?”

“Being ashamed of being a virgin.”

Gregor’s astonishment must have shown on his face. Donna blushed furiously and looked away. “Maybe we should talk in code. You might find it easier.”

“No, no.” Gregor recovered himself, took a deep breath, and counted to ten.

“I know it wasn’t the same when you were young,” Donna was going on. “I mean, everybody was a virgin then, right? Until they got married. Either that or they were bad. But, Mr. Demarkian, I’m twenty-one. Until I met Peter, I was the only person in the whole Art Institute who’d never had sex.”

“I know it may have seemed that way,” Gregor said.

“Karen Arkmanian’s been on the pill since she was sixteen,” Donna said. “And most of the girls I knew in high school took the plunge before the end of senior year. Except me.”

“Why not you?”

Donna shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a boyfriend then. This was out in Ardmore. About a month before our prom, when everybody was buying tickets and looking for dresses, he gave me an ‘or else.’ And I just got so mad. I got so
mad
. It just seemed like the worst thing anybody had ever done to me. So I told him—”

“To go stuff it,” Gregor said.

“Exactly,” Donna said.

“Maybe that was common sense. If all your friends really were having, ah, making love, maybe that wasn’t common sense. Not everybody is ready for the same things at the same time.”

Donna sighed. “I don’t know about common sense, Mr. Demarkian, but I was getting really scared. Especially after I got to the Art Institute. Everybody there is so sophisticated. That was one of the reasons I got Daddy to buy me the apartment. I shared an apartment for a while, a rented one, with a girl from school. She was very nice, but she was always going to bars and bringing home men. And I started to feel, well—”

“Unpopular?”

“Repressed,” Donna said. “That was the other thing. I took this psychology course in the summer. And it was, like, I hadn’t even ever really felt the urge. If you see what I mean. It wasn’t just that I was a virgin. It was that I didn’t care I was a virgin.”

“Did you feel the urge with this Peter?”

“No. I just didn’t mind the whole idea. With most boys, you know, I’d get really turned off. I was beginning to think I was a lesbian.”

“Were you attracted to women?”

“I wasn’t attracted to anybody.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you’re a lesbian. For that, you have to be attracted to women. I don’t think you’re repressed, either, whatever that means. Excuse me. I don’t have a lot of respect for psychology.”

Donna laughed. “Right now, I don’t have
any
. I can’t believe I did this. I can’t believe it. And for what?”

“Did you at least enjoy yourself?”

“With the sex, you mean? I don’t know. It was all right, I guess. Kind of an anticlimax.”

“My wife used to tell me it often is. For women.”

“Not for men?”

“Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

“If men weren’t so crazy, I’d wish I was one.” Donna went back to the sink. There was a dish towel hooked over one of the knobs on the cabinet next to the window. She picked it up and started drying coffee cups. “Mrs. Arkmanian said you could find him for me,” she said. “Peter, I mean. She said you could find him and maybe get him to talk to you.”

Gregor nodded. “I can probably find him, if you’ll give me some information I need to get started. But right now I’m very confused. Why do you want to find him? You sound as if you don’t even like him.”