Not a Creature Was Stirring (25 page)

Downstairs, the front door opened and Teddy came in, limping painfully. Anne Marie bit her lip. She was very good at what she had just started to do to Dr. Borra, very good. Aside from the satisfaction it would have given her—sometimes she just wanted to smash this man’s face—it might have had its uses, in the long run. Now she was stopped, by Teddy planting himself down there at the bottom of the stairs. She marched past him, not looking at him, and pulled open the front doors.

“Good night,” she said to Dr. Borra.

Dr. Borra pulled up the collar of his coat and shrugged.

“Christ,” Teddy said. “What did you do to him?”

Anne Marie slammed the front doors and headed back up the stairs. “Mother’s better,” she said. “I have to go up and make sure she stays that way.”

Then she went on up to the second floor, stomping all the way, making the central well of the house reverberate as if it were being attacked by a wrecking ball…

For Teddy, the day had been futile and frantic. Worse, it had been insubstantial. Everything that had happened—from the phone calls he had made to “friends” in Boston and New York, to the searching he had done through the papers he had brought with him from Greer, to the candles nestled in evergreen boughs on every surface in the house, to Emma’s dying—had seemed less and less real. By the time he’d decided to go out for a walk, he had managed to convince himself he was wandering through a dream. It had to be a dream. Only in a dream would he have decided to go wallowing through the snow, especially on a day when his leg had been aching since the moment he woke up. It was aching even more now, going beyond dull throbbing to the dreaded territory of sharp, shooting pains. Teddy’s doctors always said those pains were imaginary, but they seemed real enough to him. And they made him angry. It was like Prometheus and the eagle, or whatever it was. Constant pain, constant torture, constant punishment—and for what? He’d never done a thing in his life to hurt another person. Even stealing his students’ papers hadn’t hurt the students. The little idiots had no use for the damn things once they’d been handed in—and Susan Carpenter was a fool for thinking otherwise. Why he’d ever decided to make an issue of his libido in her case, he’d never know. She wasn’t even all that attractive. She always had a big cluster of pimples on her butt.

He watched Anne Marie go upstairs, wrapped in the cocoon of her habitual bad temper, then headed for the living room. He liked it in the drawing room. The Christmas decorations were thicker there than anywhere else at Engine House, and with the fire going he could almost get into the holiday spirit. He thought about Emma and wondered why she hadn’t meant more to him. That didn’t seem to have an answer, so he gave it up. He’d never been close to any of his brothers and sisters, never liked them much, never wanted to know them well. They existed for him very much the way the characters existed in the novels he taught—as archetypes. Bennis The Golden One. Christopher The Tortured Poet. Anne Marie The Frustrated Spinster. He just wished one of them was a Knight in Shining Armor, so he’d have a hope in hell of being rescued from this mess.

What his “friends” had told him, evasively but firmly, was that there wasn’t a thing they could do for him. That was when he’d started putting quotation marks around that word. What they were handing him was a lot of nonsense. One of them was dean of faculty at a small college outside Albany. The place was always hard up for professors and never particular about the men it took. One of them was chairman of the English department at an even smaller place in Dedham, Massachusetts.
That
was a junior college where students weren’t even required to submit SAT scores for admission, because no one would have dared to ask for them. Listening to these two blither on for twenty minutes apiece about “standards” and “professional responsibility” had made Teddy sick—but not half as sick as he’d been when he’d realized they both already knew what was going on at Greer. The academic grapevine was efficient, but this was nothing short of paranormal. The Pregnant Frog must have been on the phone all Christmas week.

Teddy opened the living room door and stepped inside. The Christmas tree had been lit. Some servant must have done it automatically, not realizing how bad it would look to outsiders, shining away like that in a house where there had been two deaths in a little more than three days. On the other hand, the outsiders were all gone. The police had packed up their evidence cases and headed for the glories of downtown Bryn Mawr, and Mr. Gregor Demarkian had gone with them. The drawing room was fragrant with evergreen and wax, the picture of a Victorian dream Christmas. Teddy wanted it that way.

His glance stopped for a moment on the little collection of family photographs in Tiffany silver frames his mother kept on an occasional table and then passed on. The pictures would only get him started again. He liked looking at the harpsichord better. Someone had uncovered it, dusted it off, and propped back the shield that protected the keyboard. It looked ready to play.

He moved into the room. He wanted to find the family copy of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
and settle down in a chair for a nice long read. Logic and gaslight, that’s what he needed. He’d ring for Marshall and get himself a nice hot buttered rum. The rest of them—living, dead, and dying—could just go to hell.

He was making his way through the overcrowded cluster of furniture in the corner between the windows and the bookcase when he stepped on something he didn’t like the feel of at all. It was both too hard and too soft, too giving and too intractable. He looked down. His foot seemed to have landed on a long piece of green chamois cloth. If he followed that cloth toward the windows, it ended in a pale white hand.

He stepped away, shaking slightly. Then he leaned sideways a little to get a look over the back of a royal blue velvet love seat.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Christopher?”

Christopher was lying on the rug, flat on his back, with one of Mother’s Steuben glass ashtrays sitting in the middle of his chest. His eyes were closed, but the ashtray held a burning joint, rolled in pink-and-blue paper. His hair was a mess. Teddy couldn’t understand it. The room was so damn cold, even with the fire going. Christopher was oozing sweat like a glass of iced tea in high summer.

“Christopher,” Teddy said again.

“I’m fine,” Christopher said. “Go away.”

“I’m not going to go away.” Teddy sat down on the love seat. “It’s my house as much as yours. I want a book and a drink.”

“Have a joint instead.”

“You must be out of your mind. There are police all over this place. You’re going to get arrested.”

Christopher sighed, a sound like the wind rushing out of an overfilled balloon. Then he opened his eyes and sat up. “Teddy, the police left hours ago. And even if they were here, they wouldn’t care.”

“Of course they would care,” Teddy said. “This isn’t California.”

“It isn’t Wyoming, either. A kid with a joint in his high-school locker, they might care. A grown man smoking a little dope in his own living room, they wouldn’t even notice. The jails are full of hopheads, Teddy. Crack has made marijuana de facto legal in half the states in the Union.”

“You look terrible,” Teddy said.

Christopher lay back down. “I feel terrible. You should feel terrible, too. Emma was a little sweetheart, and now she’s dead.”

The joint had been smoked to a nothing-but-paper wedge. Eyes closed, still flat on his back, Christopher rolled another one. It was astonishing to watch. Like a high-wire artist or a professional bicyclist, like an athlete doing a routine he had trained for every day for a decade, Chris went through the motions as perfectly as if he’d been sitting up and cold straight.

Teddy got off the love seat and went to the bookcase. The Sherlock Holmes was where it was supposed to be, on the third shelf from the top, in the middle. Teddy took it out and stared at its plain brown cover.

“Chris?” he said. He tried to think of some way to word the question he wanted to ask without sounding like a jerk. There wasn’t one. He took a deep breath and asked it anyway. “Does it really bother you?” he said. “Emma’s dying, I mean. Do you really care?”

“Don’t you?”

The reaction was milder than Teddy had expected. Thank God for marijuana. “I hardly knew her,” he said. “She was around when we were children, and then I went off to college, and I almost never saw her again. You’re older than I am. It must have been the same for you.”

“Not exactly.” The joint rolled, Christopher lit it. He did that with his eyes closed, too. “I saw a lot of her in the last five years. She used to come and visit me in California, when she had the chance and the money. Or when Bennis had the money and would lend it to her. Maybe once a year.”

“And you got along?”

“Of course we got along. Why shouldn’t we? She really was a sweetheart.”

Teddy put the Holmes back in its place on the shelf. “That’s not what everybody said, you know. There was all that business, back when Daddy changed his mind about the money, that got us all in trouble. And everybody said—”

“That Emma was responsible for it?”

“Yes,” Teddy said. “That Emma was responsible for it.”

Christopher blew a stream of smoke into the air. “I asked her about it once. She said she had nothing to do with it. I believed her.”

“Bennis thinks—”

Christopher sat up. “So what’s this? Bennis thinks and it must be so?”

“Something like that.”

“Bullshit. Especially coming from you.”

“I just think Bennis knew Emma,” Teddy said. “Better than the rest of us. She may have gone out to visit you once a year, but she went to Boston once a month. Bennis was with her all the time.”

“So?”

“So Bennis should know,” Teddy insisted.

Chris took a monumental drag on the joint, held it in for interminable minutes, then let it out again. His eyes were getting very red, in a dry, cracked way that was different from what they were like when he’d been crying.

“Look,” he said, “if you think Emma was responsible for that, how do you explain all this? How do you explain Daddy? How do you explain Emma herself? Emma got herself murdered.”

“Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t.”

“The police have already been here, Teddy. They say it was murder.”

Teddy shook his head stubbornly. “They’re going by those notes. But there are lots of explanations for those notes. The one they found in Bobby’s room could be real—”

“Then why was it in Bobby’s room?”

“Bennis put it there,” Teddy said. “Bennis didn’t want anyone to think Emma had committed suicide. You know how protective Bennis always was of Emma. She saw that note and she took it, and later she got rid of it and substituted her own letter. Then she acted like the letter was the only thing she’d ever seen.”

“To make the police and everybody else believe Emma hadn’t committed suicide.”

“Right.”

“To make them believe Emma had been murdered.”

“Right again.”

“Crap,” Christopher said. “Bennis is the most straightforward person I know. And the most sane. She’d have known doing something like that would get one of the rest of us in trouble. She wouldn’t have done it.”

“She wouldn’t have done it to you maybe.” Teddy came back to the love seat. Now that Chris was sitting up, it was easier to look at him while talking to him. It was less like having a conversation with a hyperanimated dead body. “I know you and Bennis have always been friends, but she isn’t the same way with the rest of us as she is with you. Especially not with me.”

“The note wasn’t found in your room, Teddy.”

“I know it wasn’t. I was just trying to point out—”

“And you can’t complain about the way she treats you, either. For God’s sake. She loans you money. She lets you sleep on her floor—”

“Does she tell you everything we talk about?” Teddy said. “Does she call California and report every time she gets off the phone to me?”

“Of course she doesn’t. Teddy, be reasonable. You’ve got nothing at all to make you think Bennis is running around Engine House tampering with evidence in a murder case. Two murder cases. You’ve got everything to make you think otherwise. And in case you haven’t thought it out, the otherwise is much more interesting than the junk you’re handing me.”

“What ‘otherwise’?”

Christopher took another drag. Outside, it was getting late, growing darker. Teddy watched the snow come down, illuminated by the lights on the back terrace. He loved Engine House. If he could have cleared it of his family, exorcised it, he could have lived there forever. That was the one strong feeling he’d ever had for his sister Emma. If she hadn’t done what she’d done, he just might have been able to live there forever. Even now, thinking about this place as a haven instead of a threat, he wanted to break her neck.

Christopher said, “Think of this. We all hated Daddy. Somebody killed him. So what? Any one of us can understand why any of the others would have done it. Right?”

“Right,” Teddy said.

“Now,” Christopher said, “think about Emma. Emma never did anything to hurt anybody, not to hurt any of us, at any rate. Emma was a nice, sweet little girl. And somebody killed her.”

“Maybe,” Teddy said.

“If somebody did, we’re all in a lot of trouble. Somebody’s going around killing people for no reason at all. If somebody did it once, somebody’s going to do it again.”

Teddy sat straight up. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “That’s—”

“Crazy?”

“Of course it’s crazy.”

“Maybe somebody around here is crazy,” Christopher said. “That’s the otherwise, and that’s what worries me.”

Teddy looked down at the bag of grass now sitting in Christopher’s lap. Obviously, marijuana, like all other drugs, must make people paranoid.

Up in his bedroom, Bobby Hannaford looked down at the stacks of money laid out on his bedspread, counted through them one more time, and reached for his briefcase. In his briefcase, he had a cellular phone. He needed it.

Ever since the police had come to him with the story of the note and the money, he had been worrying. Ever since the police had left, he had been locked in his room, counting. He had bolted the door. He had pulled the Klee watercolor off the wall and dumped it on the writing table. He had left the safe standing open. Right from the beginning, he had found it hard to think. Now, with the money all counted and not a bill of it missing, he couldn’t think at all.