by Jane Haddam
“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.”
3
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.
Emma wrapped her arms around her body—for some reason, every time Emma had to talk to Anne Marie she had an uncontrollable desire to protect herself—and said,
“Anne Marie? Are you all right? What are you doing?”
Anne Marie’s shoulders stiffened—even through the dark, and under all that fat, Emma noticed—but they relaxed almost immediately. She put the papers she was holding into a pile on the mantel under the safe and turned.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Mother’s up. I’m just getting her some things she asked for.”
“In the dark.”
“I didn’t notice it was dark.”
“If Mother’s up, can I go in to see her?”
&nbs
p; Anne Marie turned around, closed the wall safe, put the picture back into position. Then she folded the papers into a square and put them in her pocket.
“Mother’s not in very good shape first thing in the morning,” she said. “Why don’t you give her about half an hour? She doesn’t like to see people when she’s—not well.”
“What does that mean, not well?”
“I thought Myra told you all about it. Mother has lateral multiple sclerosis.” Anne Marie came to the door of the writing room and stepped into the hall, ushering Emma out with her. “Lateral multiple sclerosis is a degenerative disease that results in the loss of control of—”
“She’s our mother, for God’s sake,” Emma said. “Stop sounding like a medical textbook.”
“You wanted to know what I meant by ‘not well.’”
“I still want to know.”
Anne Marie made a face. “Mother sometimes has difficulty lifting objects. Forks, for instance.”
“Forks?”
“Forks, knives, spoons. Pens, if they’re the metal kind. Glasses.”
“Mother has trouble lifting forks?”
“The doctor will be here the day after Christmas, Emma. He’ll give you all the information you want.”
The hall was drafty and too well lit. All around her, Emma saw globe lamps reflected in the polished surfaces of silvered-shined Christmas bells, balls, angels, and cherubs. She ran a hand through her hair, wondering if she was going crazy. Anne Marie sounded as if she were talking about something else—a cat, maybe, or a case that had come up in a volunteer nursing course.
Anne Marie brushed past her, on her way to the west wing, and Emma put out a hand to stop her.
“Anne Marie, please.”
“Please what? Mother’s been dying for years, and now she’s going to be dead. What did you think was happening?”
“Anne Marie, for God’s sake.”
But Anne Marie was gone, disappearing through the west wing doors, the solid stack heels of her shoes making an odd thudding noise on the carpet, the tin angel on her chest clacking against the pearls of her necklace. Emma stood staring after her, wondering now if it was Anne Marie who was crazy. God only knew, you had to be crazy to take the death of your mother like that.
Emma thought about going after her, but she had a funny feeling it wouldn’t do any good.
4
Half an hour later, Emma got back to her room, climbed into bed, and put the book she’d picked up in the little library on her lap. The book had taken her forever to find, because she hadn’t been able to concentrate on looking for it. She kept thinking about Mother and Anne Marie and Bennis. Her dearest wish in the world was that she’d go back to the west wing and find a light under Bennis’s door. She desperately needed someone to talk to. Then she reminded herself that if there wasn’t a light under Bennis’s door, it would be all that much worse if she was stuck in her room without a book.
The book she found was called The Predators’ Ball, all about insider trading and corporate takeovers. It was reasonably new and shelved toward the front. If she hadn’t been so distracted, she would have found it right away. When she did find it, she decided to take it as a godsend. Financial scandal was her absolutely favorite thing, better even than chocolate. She’d once read Ray Dirks’s book on the Equity Funding scam twice in one month. Coming back onto the wing, she found Bennis’s room dark. She stood outside the door for a few moments anyway. Bennis had always said Emma should call any time Emma needed her. They were sisters and they would stick together. But Bennis seemed to know all about this thing. She had tried to explain it in the car while they were driving down from New York. If Emma woke her now, what would she say? That the truth had finally sunk in and it had upset her?
Emma went back to her room, got into bed, found her cigarettes, lit up. She couldn’t make herself care about Michael Milken. She couldn’t make herself care about Ivan Boesky. She couldn’t even make herself care about smoking. There were diseases out there that could get you, and the care you had taken with your health wouldn’t matter at all.
For Emma, there was something intrinsically wrong with that. It was as if she’d just found out, for certain, that most of the people in jail hadn’t done what they were convicted of doing.
FOUR
1
SOMETIMES, GREGOR DEMARKIAN THOUGHT, the net result of spending a significant part of one’s life as a policeman was a kind of mania. No matter what else came along to distract you, including common sense, you kept insisting the world was supposed to be a rational place.
He looked down at the phone, lying off the hook on his bed, and thought about making his call again. He decided against it. It was eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, and he had already made that call twice since he got up. In fact, he’d made it over a dozen times in the last week. The first time had been very satisfactory. Robert Hannaford had picked up himself, and they’d had a short but suggestive discussion of what Gregor was supposed to do to get to Engine House—and what he was supposed to do after he got there.
“I have the money still in the briefcase,” Robert Hannaford had said. “You can count it when you get here. You can count it before you leave. Then you can take it with you.”
“And what do I do in the meantime?”
“Eat,” Robert Hannaford said.
Eat.
One of the things Gregor had been taught, and that he had in turn taught other people, was how to keep someone on the phone when they wanted to get off. He knew two dozen tricks for that purpose, and he had tried them all out on Robert Hannaford. None of them had worked. Like a politician or a surgeon, Hannaford knew how to cut off communication when he wanted it cut off. He knew even better how to say nothing when he wanted to say nothing. Gregor had been left, that first night, with the feeling that he had been snookered—and snookered by a man with a psychopath’s voice. He’d ended up so angry he hadn’t been able to sleep. He could still see himself, pacing from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom and back again, feeling more and more certain that what he really wanted to do was break Robert Hannaford’s neck.
It was his unaccustomed will to violence, and his feeling that he’d never sleep again if he didn’t get some answers, that had made him decide to make the first of the follow-up calls the next morning. Hannaford’s voice had had an unexpected effect on him. He was willing to grant Tibor all his nasty suspicions of the man’s character. If there was one thing Gregor understood, it was the psychopathic personality—not the brain-diseased delusionalism of the popular novel’s “homicidal maniac,” but the core of the men who had no emotions that were not in some way about themselves. And the women, too, Gregor thought. He’d never met a woman like that, but he’d read the files. What mattered here was that there had never been a normal man on earth with a voice like Hannaford’s, and there never would be.
He’d called Engine House at eight o’clock, even though he knew it would have been better to wait until nine. He’d been too edgy to wait. He’d been too tired to be alert, too. The phone’s ringing had had a different quality than it had the night before, but he hadn’t realized it until the call was over. When the phone was picked up, he still expected it to be answered by Robert Hannaford.
Instead, he’d got a woman’s voice. It was flat and nasal, with a tinge of resentment in it—the kind of voice he associated with the embittered and divorced. Because he knew none of Hannaford’s children had ever been divorced—it was amazing what you could find out just by going through the newspapers and Philadelphia magazine, especially when you borrowed the back copies from Lida, who never threw anything away—he’d assumed he was talking to Hannaford’s secretary. He gave his name and explained his business and waited to be put through.
There was a sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. The nasal voice said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t have the authorization to connect you.”
“What?”
“I don’t h
ave the authorization to connect you,” she repeated, sounding firmer. “I am allowed to put through calls only from the people named on this list. You are not named on this list.”
“But—”
“It’s very early, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sure you’ll understand why I have to now get off the line.”
There was a click in his ear and then the dial tone. And that was that.
Now he looked down at the mess on his bed—the phone and the newspapers and the magazines and the notes on yellow legal paper—and wondered what he was supposed to do about it all. This last call had been just like the first, and it had left him with the same feeling of residual anger and of residual apprehension. If it hadn’t also left him feeling that Elizabeth was closer to him now than she had been at any time since her death, he might have called the whole thing off. He had a precise understanding of just how dangerous it was to get involved with men like Robert Hannaford. Even when they weren’t engaged in physical homicide, they were heavily involved in murder.
He’d left a cup of coffee on his night table. He picked it up, took a drink out of it, and winced at the cold flatness of the liquid. Then he put it back. He wanted to get out of the bedroom. The place was full of Hannafords—Bennis in People and Life and The New York Times Book Review, Bobby in Forbes, Cordelia Day, Robert’s wife, in The Inquirer and the city magazines. He’d spent most of the last week collecting this stuff, drawn to it the way cocaine addicts were drawn to street corners, and he was sick of it. Elizabeth or no Elizabeth, he wanted to take the whole mess and shove it down the incinerator.
He had just stood up, and found himself staring at the lines of illness edged all too clearly in Cordelia Day Hannaford’s face, when the doorbell rang.
2
Caught in the opening door, Lida Arkmanian looked embarrassed. In fact, she looked devastated. She had a big holly wreath in one hand, a hammer in the other, and a collection of tiny nails sticking out of her mouth. Peeking out of one of the slash pockets of her chinchilla coat she had a card, with his name written across the envelope in Palmer Method script. Gregor found himself biting his lips to prevent a smile. He didn’t need The Process, as the Bureau had called it, to figure this one out. Lida had come by, expecting him to be out to lunch or over at Holy Trinity Church, meaning to decorate his life in secret.