Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  “Of course I do.”

  “Good,” Jackman said. “In the first place, Teddy Hannaford saw Emma coming out of their mother’s room—that’s just down the hall here—at a little after ten-thirty. He was going to his own room, and she was going to the stairs. A few minutes after that, Bennis passed her in the foyer. According to Bennis, Emma looked ‘woozy and distracted’—and she should have. You didn’t see the body, or the not-quite-body, but I did. We’re talking about a drug overdose here, not a standard poisoning. Whatever killed her, she must have taken at least an hour before she died. Maybe longer.”

  “Can you be sure of that before you get the medical examiner’s report?”

  “I can’t be take-it-into-court sure even then,” Jackman said. “But you and I both know that doesn’t matter. You take into court what you can. You figure out what happened with a lot of things you’ll never use at a trial. The M.E.’ll tell me what kind of drug it was. Under the circumstances, I’m betting Demerol.”

  “I would, too.”

  “Yeah. At any rate, Bennis passed Emma in the foyer, and then Emma went to the kitchen. She talked to”—Jackman consulted his notes—“Mrs. Washington. The cook. She asked for some tea for her mother. She said she felt sick. She sat in the kitchen for a while. In the middle of all this, Bennis got to her own room, locked herself in and went looking through her pocketbook for a fresh pack of cigarettes. That’s when she saw the note. She says she even took it out and read it.”

  “What was Emma doing?”

  “Going back to her own room,” Jackman said. “Mrs. Washington says she sent her to bed. The Hannaford children are taking turns watching their mother. With the weather and the short notice, they haven’t been able to get a nurse. Or maybe Cordelia Day Hannaford doesn’t want them to. She’s supposed to have refused nurses before. The Hannaford children are taking a day each, sitting with Cordelia and getting her what she needs. This was supposed to be Emma’s day. Mrs. Washington says she told Emma to go to bed and she’d get one of the others to take over. And Emma went. Anne Marie says she saw Emma in the upstairs hall at about ten to eleven, and they talked. Emma said something about wanting to lie down and Anne Marie came downstairs to see if the mail had come in.”

  “And Bennis?”

  “Still in her own room. Now, at about eleven fifteen, Cordelia Hannaford buzzed the kitchen. She has a little button thing, electric, not the pull cords the rest of them have. Mrs. Washington hadn’t been able to get in touch with any of the others, and she’d just finished putting together the tea. She buzzed Anne Marie and asked her to look in on Cordelia—”

  “Why hadn’t she buzzed Bennis, first?” Gregor said. “If she was looking for someone to take care of Mrs. Hannaford—”

  Jackman shook his head. “Anne Marie’s the only one with a two-way intercom in her room. Her and her mother, that is. Those were put in specially when Mrs. Hannaford got so sick. With the other rooms, there are those pull cords, and if you want to get in touch from downstairs you have to come all the way up.”

  “Why hadn’t she buzzed Anne Marie before?”

  “Mrs. Washington? She says she had. No answer.”

  “Where does Anne Marie say she was?”

  “That, I haven’t got around to yet,” Jackman said. “It isn’t the relevant time.”

  “It might be the relevant time if someone stole that note out of Bennis Hannaford’s pocketbook,” Gregor said. “If Emma didn’t do it herself—”

  “Emma didn’t do it herself, and neither did anybody else, not then. Bennis was still in her room. In fact, she stayed in her room until eleven-twenty, when Anne Marie knocked on her door and told her something was wrong with Emma.”

  “Eleven-twenty?”

  “According to Anne Marie, she went into her mother’s room and found Cordelia very worried about Emma. She then went into Emma’s room and found Emma, sick all over the floor and nearly unconscious.”

  “And all this time, Bennis was in her own room, and the note was in there with her.”

  “Exactly.”

  Gregor thought it over. “When I was talking to Bennis on the stairs,” he said, “she told me Anne Marie had told her that Emma had committed suicide. And she believed Emma had committed suicide. Why would Anne Marie think Emma had committed suicide, if the note wasn’t there?”

  “According to Anne Marie, a note was there, but not the same note.”

  “Better and better,” Gregor said.

  “You mean more and more impossible,” Jackman said. “And don’t forget, we’ve got the three still unaccounted for, Bobby, Christopher and Myra Van Damm. They’re all supposed to have left the house around ten o’clock, but that doesn’t let any of them out of having drugged Emma Hannaford’s—whatever.”

  “Does it let them out of stealing that note? Or both notes?”

  “It seems to let Bobby and Christopher out,” Jackman said, “as far as I can tell, the way things stand now. Myra Van Damm was definitely back at Engine House in time to do that much.”

  “Why would somebody start out with one note and replace it with another?”

  “To suppress evidence in the note?” Jackman suggested. “There might have been something in the original somebody doesn’t want us to know about, even if it had nothing to do with Robert Hannaford’s murder. Or Emma’s death. Some mistake, maybe. On the other hand, there may have been no such note.”

  Gregor nodded. “You like that,” he said. “I don’t blame you.”

  “I’d have liked a real suicide even more,” Jackman said. “But here we are, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get one.”

  “Maybe we ought to talk to the Hannafords before we decide what we’re going to get,” Gregor said. “They may even start making sense.”

  Jackman sighed. “I believe in the tooth fairy, too,” he said. He started to leave the room, but stopped at the door.

  “Just one more thing.”

  “What more could there be?”

  “Something we found in the room. I’d show it to you, but it’s been bagged for evidence. I think you ought to get a copy.”

  “Why?”

  Jackman was grinning. “It’s called The Predator’s Ball. It’s all about stock fraud and insider trading.”

  THREE

  1

  WHAT HE WANTED, Gregor decided, was a mystery worthy of this house—or people worthy of it. That was the problem with the ancestral rich. No matter what the founding father had been like—and Gregor thought Robert I must have been remarkable, you had to have something to build a railroad 3,000 miles across the wilderness—the descendants always seemed to be wimps, weaklings, liars, and dilettantes. Maybe that was what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he’d come out so strongly against inherited wealth. Someone with enough money to buy and sell the government would have seemed like a fantasy in 1776. The liars and the wimps would have been present in force.

  Politics. If he got onto politics, he’d start sounding like Tibor, and Tibor was an anarchist. He followed Jackman down the second floor hall, glancing right and left at the portraits that lined it. Somebody in this family had had a dynasty complex. The portraits were all framed in gilt and positioned over Queen Anne chests. The chests were covered by lace runner cloths and the cloths were anchored by pairs of candles in sterling silver candlesticks. In the dark, the chests looked like altars.

  “I’ve got half a mind to declare this whole damn hall a crime scene,” Jackman was saying. He was swinging along, five paces ahead, as briskly and self-confidently as a CEO in absolute control of his company. Jackman was like that: contradictory internally and externally. One minute, he was playing stupid and honestly feeling inadequate. The next, he was bright and unshakably self-assured. Gregor wondered what went through the man’s mind when he was alone.

  “I would declare it all a crime scene,” Jackman said, “if I thought I could get away with it, which I don’t. Technically, I don’t need a search warrant to go through a house w
here a murder’s been done, but I know what would happen if I tried that here. The place is so damned big.”

  “It is that,” Gregor said.

  “Fortunately, the Hannafords are either stupid or really in a mood to help. I got Cordelia Day to sign a waiver and then I got what’s her name, Anne Marie, to countersign it. Just in case. It may be a useless precaution, but if one of the boys turns up that other note—”

  “You still wouldn’t have a suicide, John.”

  They were coming near the end of the hall, Jackman droning on and on, the portraits getting more and more elaborate. The people in the portraits were getting more and more elaborate, too, and much less modern. The men in the pictures that had hung near Emma Hannaford’s room had been dressed in ordinary business suits or, at most, tuxedo jackets. The man in the picture that hung just inside the hall door was in full traditional white tie and tails. Gregor stopped in front of him and read the brass tag screwed into the bottom of the frame: Robert Hannaford II.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Jackman was already out of the hall onto the landing. He had to come back to answer. “Now what?” he said. “I’ve got a temporary office set up down in the study. I’ve had people looking over it, too. When I sent my guy down there today, he found the police seals broken.”

  “Did he?” Gregor said.

  “Breaking police seals isn’t a minor matter, Gregor.”

  “It’s an inevitable matter,” Gregor said. “What did you expect? They’ve probably all been in there once, just to look around. The only way you could have prevented that was to stake a man at the door. Since you didn’t do it, I’d guess you didn’t think there was anything left there to find.”

  “Okay,” Jackman said. “It was mainly a precaution.”

  “Look at this. What do you see?”

  Jackman stepped back from the portrait and looked up into Robert II’s face. “Well, it’s a fat old white man with a really evil face and sideburns long enough to braid.”

  “What’s under it?”

  “A chest. With a little lace thing on top.”

  “And no candlesticks,” Gregor said.

  “Candlesticks?”

  Gregor gestured back along the hall. “Look at them. One portrait between each pair of doors, on both sides of the hall. Each portrait is in a gilt frame. Each is above a chest. Each chest has a piece of lace on it and two candlesticks. Except for this one. This one doesn’t have any candlesticks.”

  Jackman walked back along the hall, turned around, and came back to Gregor. “You’re right,” he said. “Does it matter? Maybe they didn’t have enough for this one here. Or maybe the ones that belong here have been taken somewhere to be cleaned.”

  Gregor shook his head. “If they were going to leave one portrait without candlesticks, they’d have chosen one of the ones at the end of the hall. Look at them. The most important ones are at this end. By the time you get down to Emma Hannaford’s room, you’re looking at minor members of the family. But they wouldn’t have left a set out in any case. They’d have bought a pair to complete the effect.”

  “What about cleaning?”

  “In a house like this, silver wouldn’t be taken someplace else to be cleaned. If you have a butler, he’s in charge of the sterling. Once a week, once a month if the house is understaffed, he’ll come up here with an assistant or two and polish the candlesticks where they stand. He’ll do the same with the table silver downstairs. Just take it out of his drawers, put it on the nearest countertop, and wipe it down.”

  Jackman rubbed his face. “Are you telling me the damn things have been stolen? Are they worth anything? Who would take them? If you’re implying that some servant—”

  “No, no,” Gregor said. “Look at the hall, John. The minor portraits are down there, and so are the minor candlesticks. There’s a picture of a pretty, vacuous woman next to Bennis Hannaford’s door, and what’s under it is a pair of perfectly good but not very interesting Tiffany candlesticks, close to brand new. Now look at the candlesticks as you get closer to this door. Each set is more and more ornate, more and more individual, heavier and heavier. And older.”

  “So?”

  “So the candlesticks that belong under Robert Hannaford II must be very ornate, very heavy and very old. We’re probably talking a pair of antique Georgian sticks. John, a pair of antique Georgian candlesticks went at auction at Sotheby’s two years ago for over twelve thousand dollars.”

  “A pair of candlesticks?” Jackman said.

  Gregor smiled. “You don’t have to worry about the servants, either. If a servant was going to steal a pair, it would be one of the ones at the other end. Georgian silver was made to order, almost always in a design created especially for the lady of the house. It was as good as a signature. Better.”

  “If they were heavy enough, they could have been sold to someone to melt down—”

  “Would you want to turn something worth twelve thousand into something worth fifteen hundred?”

  “Maybe nobody involved knew it was worth twelve thousand.”

  “A professional fence would have guessed,” Gregor said. “He wouldn’t touch it. It would be asking to land in jail.”

  Jackman sighed. “Gregor, this is the crack age. The world is different now. People do the damnedest things these days. You wouldn’t believe it—”

  “I wouldn’t believe a servant on crack lasting half an hour around Anne Marie Hannaford,” Gregor said. “And Anne Marie Hannaford, from what you’ve told me, is the person who runs this house.”

  “True,” Jackman said.

  “If somebody took these candlesticks, and somebody must have, that somebody was one of the family. Only a member of the family had a hope in hell of taking them and not getting prosecuted for it. And that brings up a number of very interesting possibilities.”

  Jackman nodded. “One of them could be very strapped for money,” he said. “From what the Hannafords told me the other night, the estate goes to Cordelia Day on Robert Hannaford’s death, but Cordelia has to be a much softer touch than old Robert ever was.”

  “There’s also the possibility that this isn’t the first theft,” Gregor said, “and that Robert Hannaford knew about the others. Or even about this one. We should talk to that man, Marshall, and find out when he last saw the candlesticks here. But there has to be some explanation of Robert Hannaford’s inviting me to dinner in that strange way. Maybe this is it.”

  “You think this was worth a hundred thousand in cash to Robert Hannaford?”

  “No,” Gregor said, “but then, that may have been a hoax. You never did find the briefcase. Anything is possible if the man was eccentric enough. And the way they talk about him, he sounds eccentric enough for anything. Then there’s the third—”

  Gregor never got to the third. There was a thudding on the stairs, then a clatter and an echoing panting on the landing. Gregor and Jackman turned together toward the hall door. A uniformed patrolman was standing there, looking flushed, sweaty, and out of breath.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “There’s a man downstairs. A Mr. Evers. He’s pacing around the study and insisting on seeing you, and I think he’s about to lose control.”

  2

  Floyd Evers turned out to be a short man in good shape with sparse hair, dressed in the kind of suit Gregor always thought must be ordered from a lawyers’ uniform supply house. He was not, however, anywhere near losing control. When Gregor and Jackman came into the study, he was sitting in the chair behind Robert Hannaford’s desk, looking exasperated.

  Unlike most of the lawyers Gregor had met, Evers gave off neither a fog of evasion nor a bristle of self-importance. He didn’t even have many papers. There was a briefcase in front of him on the desk, but it was neither too thick nor too thin. It contained a small sheaf of typed, legal-size pages bound together with a paper clip. Gregor pegged him instantly as married, children, Bucks County. It was a stereotype, but not necessarily an inaccurate stereotype. There were two kind
s of lawyers in major cities like Philadelphia. Evers didn’t come off as a man who would do anything for money.

  In Gregor’s experience, the kind of man who did had a job in a firm with too many names on the masthead, a condominium in Radnor, and two mistresses.

  Evers stood up as soon as they came into the room and extended his hand. It was a mistake. Jackman was in a combative mood.

  “You,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you for a week.”

  Evers sat down again. Now Gregor saw what the patrolman might have meant by saying Evers was about to lose control. At the moment, the man’s good humor was only tenuously pasted on. Underneath the self-disciplined politeness, he was very angry about something.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “You’ve been looking for me for a week,” he said. “That’s just fine. You’ve been leaving messages for me all over creation, mostly at my office. That’s just fine, too. You’ve made my partners think I’m about to be indicted for child murder at the least. That’s just fine, fine, fine. In the meantime, Mr.—”

  “Jackman,” Jackman said.

  “Jackman,” Evers repeated. “It’s Christmas, in case you haven’t noticed. If you’d taken any time at all to think the thing through, you’d have known I was where everybody else is who can get the time off.”

  “Where?”

  “Visiting relatives, Mr. Jackman. In my case, visiting relatives in Vermont, where my wife has family, and in Connecticut, where she also has family. It is not a suspicious circumstance when someone isn’t spending Christmas in his own damned house.”

  “Don’t you leave a contact number with your office?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Jackman said.

  “And on top of it all, I can’t for the life of me see what you need me for.” Evers turned to Gregor. “Who are you?”

  Gregor introduced himself. Evers nodded, pleased. “That’s good. I’ve read about you. Are you working for the family or the police?”

  “The police,” Gregor said.