Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  She ought to look bemused, Gregor thought. She had drunk her way through half of one of George’s Yerevan Specials, a time bomb that consisted of vodka and just enough lime soda to make you think you had nothing but a nonalcoholic punch. Gregor had been ambushed by one of those himself, the first week he knew George. He recognized the glass.

  He shut the door behind him, shrugged off his coat, and hung it up on George’s coatrack. Bennis wasn’t wearing any shoes either. Hers, a pair of L. L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes just like Donna Moradanyan’s, were lying on the fireplace hearth.

  At least she wasn’t wearing reindeer socks.

  She went to sit on the floor at George’s feet and took a book off the hardcover stack.

  “Look, Krekor,” George said, “Martin brings me all the books in real hard covers for Christmas, and now Bennis, she signs them for me.”

  “All nine of them,” Bennis said.

  “Are either one of you sober?” Gregor said.

  Bennis made a face at him and bent over the book in her lap, writing. She wrote for a long time. Gregor wondered what she could be finding to say.

  He took a chair from the edge of the room and dragged it to the center. They looked comfortable together, these two—and he was surprised to find he was not surprised at that. He didn’t put much credence in the evidence of novels. Elizabeth had told him, over and over again, that a great many men who had written wonderful things had been terrible people in their private lives. It was the Bennis Hannaford of the stairs at Engine House whom Gregor had known would do so well on Cavanaugh Street. Now she finished with the book in her lap, put it aside, and picked up another one. All the books looked impossibly long.

  “Would you like me to get you a drink, Krekor?” George said. “I’m so tired, I keep forgetting myself.”

  “That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I don’t need a drink right now. Miss Hannaford here has offered to buy me one.”

  Bennis stopped writing. “Was everybody terribly angry at me for bugging out? I mean, I know I should have hung around for the police—”

  “It is customary in a murder investigation,” Gregor said.

  “—but everybody was getting crazy, and I knew it was just going to get crazier when Bobby got home, so I got out. I just did some shopping and then came over here as fast as I could. I wasn’t trying to avoid you.”

  “No,” Gregor said, “you were just trying to avoid John Jackman.”

  “I make it a policy to avoid men who are prettier than I am,” Bennis said. “If you were a woman, you would too.”

  “She was just standing out there in the cold,” old George said. “And I recognized her from her pictures.”

  “He’s been very nice,” Bennis said.

  Old George sighed. “We called Tibor, Krekor, but he was not home. He was not at the church, either. Somebody must be feeding him dinner.”

  “Did you try Lida’s?” Gregor said.

  “Is that Mrs. Arkmanian?” Bennis asked. “We did try her. She wasn’t home either.”

  Old George sighed again. “He will be very disappointed, Krekor. And I will be disappointed, too. I try and try, I can’t make her tell me what happens to Rogan le Bourne. Tibor, he could make her.”

  “No he couldn’t,” Bennis said. “I don’t know what happens to Rogan le Bourne. And stop worrying about your friend Tibor. I’ll come back and sign his books for him if he wants me to.”

  “I think he only has the paperbacks,” Gregor said.

  “I’ve got a supply of the others.” Bennis snapped shut the cover of the book she was writing in, abandoned it, and took another. “You are angry at me, aren’t you? I know I should have stuck around. And I know I shouldn’t be flip. Not about Emma. Emma—well, I don’t want to get into Emma.”

  “She’s told me all about it,” old George said. “This is a terrible thing, Krekor.”

  “This is a dangerous thing,” Bennis said. “That’s what worries me. And I did come here.”

  “It was dangerous from the beginning,” Gregor said.

  “No it wasn’t.” Bennis shook her head vigorously. “Not if what was going on was what I thought was going on. But now it can’t have been, and I just don’t know—” She threw up her hands.

  Gregor sat back and looked her over, curious. She had been crying again, recently enough so that her eyes were as red and puffy here as they’d been back at Engine House this afternoon. He would never have called her flip. Even when she tried to be sarcastic, the sarcasm didn’t come off. He had a feeling that Bennis and Donna Moradanyan might have more in common than hunting boots. Bennis was prettier, of course, and more intelligent and more accomplished and more sophisticated and more of everything else. Unlike Donna, she had developed a rock-hard foundation of self-confidence that the mere opinions of other people could not shatter. What was similar was that air of innocence. In Donna, Gregor had thought it was sexual innocence, and been wrong. Now he put another definition to it. Bennis Hannaford and Donna Moradanyan were two young women who believed, at the core, that the world was a good and righteous place where virtue triumphed and evil failed, where people always wanted to do the right thing and only did wrong out of ignorance or confusion. And no matter how much evidence they got to the contrary, they would go on believing it.

  Gregor watched as Bennis finished the last of the books and restacked the whole mess next to old George’s chair.

  “There,” she said, “finished. When I have the next one, I’ll send you a copy.”

  “No, no,” George said. “Send Father Tibor a copy. He can’t afford to buy them. I have Martin.”

  “Martin is his grandson,” Gregor said.

  “He told me. Electric carrot crinklers.” She stretched out her legs. “Do you still want that drink? I was thinking, under the circumstances, it might make more sense if I bought you a whole dinner.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “for one thing, I’m hungry.”

  “I’m hungry, too,” Gregor said. “I’ve been living on coffee all day.”

  Bennis waved her Yerevan Special in the air. “I’m also a little drunk,” she said.

  “True,” Gregor nodded.

  “But the real reason, of course, is that this story is going to take a little time. It may take quite a lot of time.”

  “What story?”

  “Ah,” Bennis said. “Well. Mostly, it’s the story of how Emma tried to do it once before—or how we all thought she did.”

  “Tried to do what?” old George asked.

  “Tried to kill our father, of course.” Bennis looked into her Yerevan Special, took a deep breath, and swallowed half of what was left.

  2

  Gregor didn’t know if taking Bennis to Ararat was foolishness or incitement to riot. It was certainly an experience. As soon as they had been seated in one of the back booths, heads began popping out of the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Old and young, the women of Ararat wanted to get a look at Gregor and his presumed “date.” The news—that Gregor was having dinner with a woman, and a much younger woman at that—would be all up and down the street in no time. Their only hope for an uninterrupted meal was the possibility that Lida was out because she’d gone to visit her grandchildren in Paoli. Even without Lida, they were going to have to suffer through better than average service.

  Still, Gregor liked the comparisons he could make between this and the last time he had eaten in a restaurant. Then, he had taken a poor man to an expensive place. Now, he was sitting with a rich woman in a relatively cheap one. The two experiences were a lot alike. Like Tibor, Bennis Hannaford was fearless when it came to food. Having told him she’d never eaten Armenian before, she then proceeded to order everything she liked the sound of on the menu, including a main course that must have been a mystery to her. Ethnic restaurants in tourist centers explained their food in plain English, but Ararat wasn’t in a tourist center. It was in an Armenian neighborhood, and its u
sual patrons had been eating the dishes it served since childhood. Bennis ordered cheerfully and without hesitation even so, then handed the menu to their waitress and asked for a cup of black coffee.

  “Goodness,” she said, when the waitress left. “I think that woman’s going to have us married within the hour.”

  “Within the week, at any rate.” Gregor smiled. “That’s Linda Melajian, youngest daughter of the house. They sent her over because she has the best memory.”

  “The best memory?”

  “The rumor is she’s better than a distance mike with a tape recorder attached. She can pick up conversations three miles away and repeat them verbatim.”

  “It must be nice,” Bennis said, “to live in a place where everybody knows who you are.”

  Linda Melajian came back with Bennis’s coffee, and Bennis drew the cup to her and started doctoring it with sugar. She put in a lot of sugar, as if she wanted to be not only awake but hyperactive.

  “So,” she said, “on to the important part, the story of Emma and Daddy and how it all happened with the money. Do you know about the money?”

  “About the living trusts?” Gregor said. “Yes, we know about that.”

  “I thought you might. You were in there with Floyd Evers for a long time. Didn’t you think that was strange?”

  “I thought it was very strange,” Gregor said.

  “In case you aren’t used to dealing with people like us, let me tell you it isn’t the done thing to cut your daughters out of your estate. It wasn’t even in the old days—when the money was made, I mean. Conventional wisdom on the Main Line is that you provide your sons with opportunities and your daughters with escape routes. Husbands being what they are, that is.”

  “Didn’t that lead to a lot of daughters being married for their money?”

  “Nope,” Bennis said. “The Main Line rich have always had very good lawyers. The daughters got incomes outright and the capital was entailed. That’s what we thought was going to happen, Anne Marie and Myra and Emma and I. Daddy was a very old-fashioned man.”

  “What about divorce?”

  Bennis took a sip of her coffee and shuddered. “God, I hate it this sweet. But it’s the only thing that wakes me up. Look, Mr. Demarkian. The Main Line—the old Main Line—doesn’t get divorced. That’s as true today as it was in 1910. Oh, there have always been exceptions, women who ditched their husbands and went to live in the South of France or whatever. But there are at least four clubs in this city that won’t accept divorced people, and the Philadelphia Assembly won’t accept them, either. One of the girls my coming-out year had a mother who’d been married before, and she wasn’t allowed to attend her own daughter’s debut. And that was in—what?—1972? It’s even worse now. People are getting more conservative, not less.”

  “That doesn’t sound like money would be much of an escape route.”

  “You don’t have to get divorced to leave your husband, Mr. Demarkian. The Main Line is full of married-but-separated ladies.”

  Gregor raised his eyebrows. This was like listening to a recap of a novel by Henry James. The odd thing was how real it sounded. He had no trouble at all imagining the old Main Line as just what Bennis said it was.

  “But,” he said, “you and your sisters don’t have an escape route. Your brothers don’t have many opportunities, either.”

  “That was just spite,” Bennis said. “Daddy was just as spiteful as he was old-fashioned. He thought the boys were a lot of mush-headed wimps. With us, with the girls, it was very different. And the thing is, I could hardly blame him. I mean, he did think one of us had tried to kill him.”

  “Emma,” Gregor said.

  “He didn’t know it was Emma. And maybe we didn’t either, but I’ll get to that. I think Anne Marie tried to tell him once, but he wasn’t about to listen. He just went out and bought fifteen editions of King Lear and put them up all over his study. And did all that with the money, of course. But if he’d been sure it was Emma, he would only have cut out Emma. He’d have loved that, really.”

  “Not a nice man,” Gregor said.

  “No,” Bennis agreed. “Daddy was not a nice man.”

  “This was in 1980?” Gregor said. “Was that when he was confined to the wheelchair?”

  “This was in 1980,” Bennis said, “but by then he’d been confined to the wheelchair for years. Since Teddy was ten, as a matter of fact. I was in Paris at the time. I remember, though, because Daddy ended up in the wheelchair and Teddy ended up in the leg brace because of the same accident. Of course, Teddy always claimed Daddy had tried to kill him.”

  “Of course?”

  Bennis smiled. “Teddy’s like that. One of those people who’s always being done to, if you know what I mean—and never by accident, either. No matter what happens in Teddy’s life, it’s not just somebody else’s fault, but somebody else’s plan. Mostly mine.”

  “Your brother thinks you’re out to get him?”

  “My brother thinks I’ve written and published nine fantasy novels—and landed them all on The New York Times best-seller list—in a deliberate attempt to keep him from getting a job in the Harvard University English department.”

  “Why do I have this terrible feeling that you think what you just said is supposed to make sense?”

  Bennis laughed. “It doesn’t make sense. None of the Hannafords makes sense, except maybe Mother. Teddy is sure Daddy tried to kill him. You couldn’t convince him that it isn’t true. But then, he’s convinced that the only reason he hasn’t had a brilliant academic career—he teaches in a small college in Maine—is because he’s being done out of it by nefarious plots. He likes to think I’m behind those plots because I do have a brilliant career, or what passes for one in popular literature. It would never occur to him it might have something to do with the fact that I work my butt off and he doesn’t. And if it did, he wouldn’t believe it.”

  Linda Melajian came back to the table, her arms laden down with plates of stuffed vine leaves and sautéed eggplant. She laid the plates out between them, then took a moment to stare at them each in turn. The verdict of the street was in. Bennis Hannaford was too young for him and probably up to no good. Gregor wondered what the good ladies of Cavanaugh Street were going to do about it—and then reminded himself that they were only looking out for him, trying to protect him from himself. Awash in the atomized peculiarities of Hannaford family life, he didn’t know if he liked that or not.

  Linda rearranged the plates, rearranged the salt and pepper shakers, and then, reluctantly, turned to go. Bennis and Gregor both watched her retreat, amused for different reasons.

  “I should have worn my city clothes,” Bennis said. “I’d really have looked like a scarlet woman.”

  “She doesn’t think you’re a scarlet woman,” Gregor said. “Just a fortune hunter.”

  “Wonderful,” Bennis said.

  Gregor speared a piece of eggplant. “Go back to this murder attempt. Are you sure it was a murder attempt? It couldn’t have been another accident?”

  “It was reported as an accident,” Bennis said. “That goes without saying. If it had been reported any other way, Emma would have had to stand trial. She was over eighteen at the time. Mother wouldn’t have put up with that. But knowing the circumstances, I’d say it wasn’t possible. For it to be an accident, I mean.”

  “What were the circumstances?”

  Bennis speared a piece of eggplant of her own. “Well, this is early 1980, you understand. January. Usually the middle of miserable weather in Philadelphia. But that year, we had an exceptionally warm January thaw, and temperatures in the high sixties for about a week. The snow melted. Flowers started to come up. False spring.”

  “I’ve lived through a few false springs,” Gregor said.

  “Yes. Well. Daddy’s doctor was always telling him to get out into the air, so in the middle of this false spring he decided he wanted to sit out by the bluff. That’s to the back of our property, way to the south
. There’s a place where the land just stops, a kind of dirt cliff. It’s not tremendously high, but it is straight down and there are a lot of jagged rocks at the bottom. Very jagged rocks. At any rate, Daddy decided he wanted to go sit out there, and Mother decided she wanted to have us all together for a family barbecue or something. Mother was always trying to get us together for something or the other. And we were all home—”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Very unusual,” Bennis said. “It wasn’t a pleasant house to live in and none of us got along with Daddy. But this was Emma’s coming-out year. Mother wanted us around to give her a send-off, so we were there. All seven of us. Mother got this picnic together and told us all she wanted us to be there. Anne Marie and Emma and Myra and I gave in immediately. We always do when Mother asks us for something. The boys—”

  “Somehow,” Gregor said, “I can’t believe the boys defied your mother.”

  “They didn’t defy her. They just found excuses. Lots and lots of excuses. Good ones, too.”

  “And they didn’t come?”

  “They didn’t come.”

  “I was wondering why your father was sure it was one of his daughters,” Gregor said. “I was imagining lipstick on his collar.”

  “If there’d been lipstick on his collar, he’d have known it was Myra,” Bennis laughed. “She’s the only one who wears enough of it to have it smear off. No, it was just that the boys were other places.”

  “As far as you know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “As far as you know,” Gregor repeated. “It seems to me that no matter where they said they were, any one of them could have followed you out there and been hiding in the bushes.”

  “I suppose they could have,” Bennis said. “I know we never checked up on them later. But it’s like I said. We thought—Anne Marie and Myra and I thought—we thought we knew what had happened.”