Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  “Oh, dear Lord.”

  He turned around. “Bennis, what do you think I do? How do you think I live? This isn’t the first time—”

  “But they let you borrow so much money—”

  “They let me borrow until they get nervous and then they don’t let me borrow any more. But I still want to play. I still have to play. Bennis, I want to go out and play now.”

  “Stress,” Bennis said.

  “I don’t care if it’s astrology. I thought about it last night. If Daddy hadn’t done all that with the money, and I’d come in for—what would it have been? Fifty million dollars? I could have gone through it in five years.”

  Bennis looked down at her cigarette. It was smoked to the filter. She dropped it into the ashtray. “I think we should deal with the seventy-five thousand,” she said. “For the moment.”

  “Deal with it, if you want. I’ll be grateful. But it’s really not what I came here for.”

  “What did you come for?”

  “Bennis, I want to borrow the money for a shrink. Don’t—I know how you feel about shrinks. I don’t mean some Viennese guy in an office in Beverly Hills. There’s a place in Vermont. For people who do what I do.”

  “A sanatorium?”

  “I guess you could call it that. A former friend of mine—former because he doesn’t play anymore, he goes to Gamblers Anonymous—this former friend went there. He calls it Camp Boredom.”

  “Would it be any good to you, if it made you bored?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I could use some boredom. The last five years or so, all I’ve been is scared. And stoned. This place is expensive, Bennis.”

  “I’m not worried about expensive.” She got out a new cigarette and lit up again. She always chain-smoked when she was tense. Christopher thought she’d probably been chain-smoking since the moment she walked into Engine House. She took a deep drag and blew the smoke into the air. “Let’s clean up the seventy-five thousand first,” she said again. “Let’s do that today—or at least let me make the phone calls today. I’ve got a couple of things on, but I can make time to call my bank.”

  “I don’t want to tap you out, Bennis.”

  “You won’t tap me out. I just signed a new contract.” She smiled. “Three million dollars a book, after agents’ commissions. Michael says I’m bound and determined to make as much as Daddy would have left me and then come back and thumb my nose at him. Or Michael used to say that. I don’t know what he’d say, now that Daddy’s dead.”

  “I’m impressed,” Chris said. “I had no idea so many people wanted to read about unicorns.”

  “I think it’s the sex, myself.”

  “Will you loan me the money to go to Camp Boredom?”

  “Yes,” Bennis said. “But thumbs first, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I know you think what you’re doing is terrible,” Bennis said, “but we can fix it, Chris. At least we can fix this part of it. I was up all night, thinking about Emma. That was what got to me. That there was no way to fix it.”

  “Maybe your Mr. Demarkian can fix it,” Chris said. He stood up. For the first time since he’d woken, he felt as dirty as he probably was—sweaty, sticky, foul. He had to take a shower.

  “Let me go throw myself under some water,” he said. “Then we can meet in the hall and go down to breakfast together. That ought to scare Anne Marie off.”

  Bennis’s face lit up for the first time in days. “Let’s go down and pretend I’m going to become a Rastafarian,” she said. “Let’s drive Anne Marie straight into cardiac arrest.”

  2

  Myra Hannaford Van Damm wanted to do something drastic Of course, Myra always wanted to do something drastic—and she didn’t mean breaking into Bobby’s house, or taking a lover, or even divorcing Dickie Van Damm. She certainly didn’t mean smoking one of Bennis’s cigarettes when she had Dickie on the phone. That was what she had been doing for the past half hour, from seven-thirty to eight. Actually, she had smoked five of Bennis’s cigarettes, one right after the other. The first had been an act of defiance. Smoking was the one thing Dickie could get himself worked up about. He literally screamed when he saw a cigarette in her hand. The other four had been simple, addictive need. Like a woman who has been starving long enough to lose her appetite and is given a little food, hunger was suddenly the only thing in her life—nicotine hunger, in her case. Sometimes Myra thought hunger was the defining emotion of her existence. Sometimes she thought Teddy had had a point, the other day, when he’d said Bennis’s life was perfect. Whatever was going on with Bennis, she certainly seemed to be at peace.

  At peace.

  Myra tapped the phone with the tips of her long fingernails, almost breaking one. What she wanted to do this morning was go into Bobby’s room and get the money out of his safe. That was what she’d decided to do, last night, after they’d had their little talk. She didn’t know how much he had in there, but she thought it must be a lot. It might even be enough to cover her losses, although she doubted it. Her losses were going to be huge. It made her crazy. Her plan was simple, and foolproof, but once it was blown it was blown. There could be no starting over again after a disaster.

  First, she and Bobby bought stock in Hannaford Financial under assumed names.

  Then they held it, for a year.

  Then Bobby started a very discreet rumor that Hannaford Financial was going to be the target of a takeover.

  Then the stock went up.

  Then they sold it.

  Perfect.

  Unfortunately, Bobby had been a much bigger fool than Myra had ever suspected. Instead of using his own money to buy secret stock, he’d embezzled it from the company. Instead of being content to wait and make a single killing, he’d gotten involved with that man McAdam. As soon as Myra had heard that name come floating through Bobby’s door, she had wanted to slit her throat. Business gossip wasn’t restricted to the dusty caverns of old-line men’s clubs. It was thrown around freely in the women’s clubs, too, and in the country clubs everyone on the Main Line belonged to. Rumors about McAdam were where Myra had gotten her idea in the first place. He was supposed to be doing what she was doing, but on a much bigger scale, and not with family. He was just paying people off, delivering thousands of dollars in $100 bills to confederates here, there and everywhere, delivering it in cash and in briefcases.

  There was all that cash in the safe in Bobby’s room.

  There was all that cash washing inexplicably through the accounts of Hannaford Financial over the past two years.

  There was no reason to forget, now, that this was exactly what had gotten Ivan Boesky arrested.

  Myra Hannaford Van Damm was not a hypocrite. The legal name for what she and Bobby were doing—and for what Bobby and McAdam were doing—was “insider trading,” but what it really was was simple fraud. She had no qualms about engaging in simple fraud. Or complicated fraud, for that matter. As far as she was concerned, Daddy had asked for it, by taking a fit and cutting her out of what should have been hers. She did have something against getting caught. That was why she had finally decided not to take the money out of Bobby’s safe. Bobby was asking to get caught. He’d been running around flashing warning lights at federal regulators for two years. They had to know what he was doing by now. He’d gone out to meet McAdam again this morning. If he didn’t manage to get himself arrested today, he’d do it next week, or next month. She had no way of knowing what the time frame was.

  Just in case it was very, very short—hours instead of weeks—she thought it would be a good idea not to have a lot of unexplained cash wandering around her life. She also thought it would be a good idea not to try to sell her Hannaford Financial stock right now. The price was going to be in the toilet as soon as Bobby’s little party hit the papers. She was going to be out almost a quarter of a million dollars. It didn’t matter. She would much rather be poor than arrested.

  She left the telephone room and looked into the kitchen, where Mrs
. Washington was having a “baking day.” There was flour everywhere, and no sign of any of the family. Mrs. Washington never liked company on baking days. Myra turned around and went down the hall in the other direction, to the dining room. That was where the family was, or what of it was awake and moving around and still in the house. Bobby, of course, was absent. The rest of them—Bennis, Teddy, Anne Marie, Chris—all looked depressed. The poinsettia centerpiece, decked out for Twelfth Night in candles and foil, looked lunatic.

  She came in, sat down at the table, and said, “Does somebody over there want to hand me some coffee?”

  Bennis, standing at the coffee urn with a cup and saucer in her hand, turned around. “Oh,” she said. “Myra.”

  “I see you got the music off,” Myra said. “God, it was driving me nuts. All that tinny harpsichord music.”

  “Mother loves harpsichord music,” Anne Marie said. She was standing at the coffee urn, too, or right beside it. Right beside her was Teddy, looking pained. Chris was the only one, besides Myra herself, sitting down. Myra thought he hardly looked capable of standing up.

  She took the cup Bennis passed to her and put it squarely in front of her on the table. “Just because Mother loves harpsichord music doesn’t mean I have to. And it was eerie, all those Christmas carols and everybody in mourning.”

  “Nobody was in mourning for Daddy,” Teddy said. He got his act together and sat down, too, right next to Chris. “It’s Emma who’s gumming up the works around here.”

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘gumming up the works,’” Bennis said.

  “Don’t you start,” Teddy said. “I don’t want to hear one more word about one of us being some kind of homicidal maniac. Daddy was the only homicidal maniac. And he’s dead.”

  Bennis put her coffee down on Chris’s other side. “I don’t think a homicidal maniac is what we have to worry about.” She turned to Myra. “That’s what we were talking about. We were trying to get a hold on what was going on here.”

  “You really don’t think Emma committed suicide?” Myra said.

  “No,” Bennis said. “I don’t. And Gregor Demarkian doesn’t, either.”

  “I think that’s just sentimentality,” Anne Marie said. “You liked Emma. You think suicide is a terrible thing. You’re just trying to make it easier on yourself, emotionally.”

  “I think she feels guilty,” Teddy said. “Emma wrote her that letter, and she didn’t do enough about it right away, and she thinks that if she had Emma wouldn’t have committed suicide at all.”

  “Don’t psychoanalyze,” Anne Marie said.

  Myra took out the pack of cigarettes she had borrowed from Bennis, got a cigarette, and lit up. “No matter what the police think, a suicide makes sense. After all, Emma tried to kill Daddy once before—”

  “Did she?” Bennis said.

  Myra was surprised. “Well, of course she did. Who else could it have been? I know I didn’t do it. And the boys weren’t even there.”

  “The boys could have been there,” Bennis said. “It’s not like they have iron-clad alibis, or whatever they’d have to have.”

  “Alibis?”

  “I know what this is,” Teddy said. “Demarkian again. Alibis, for Christ’s sake.”

  “That’s what they called them,” Bennis said, “last time I checked.”

  Anne Marie stirred uneasily in her chair. “I don’t think we should talk like this. If it wasn’t Emma—if somebody else killed Daddy and then somebody killed Emma—I don’t think—isn’t that what happens in books? Someone starts nosing around and finds out too much, and the next thing you know he’s dead.”

  Myra tapped impatiently against the side of her coffee cup. If she wasn’t careful, she really would break that nail. Honestly, Anne Marie was such a dork. “This isn’t a book. In real life, people don’t go around killing other people just because they know too much, or just because they suspect something, or whatever. In real life, people kill for money.”

  “Money,” Anne Marie said. “Nobody killed Daddy for money.”

  Myra could think of at least one person who could have killed Daddy for money, but she didn’t want to bring that up right now. It wouldn’t explain Emma’s dying, anyway. As to what would—she looked down at her coffee and pushed it away from her.

  She was being silly. After this debacle with Bobby, she had a good idea just how competent her family was at making and executing plots. She had a fair idea how most of the world was, at that. That was why she could never get behind conspiracy theories. Most people were much too stupid, and much too shortsighted, to work their way through the long haul. And for what she’d been thinking to be true, somebody would have had to be working a very long haul indeed.

  Still.

  She picked up her coffee cup, took it back to the sideboard, and poured the coffee in it into the utility urn. Then she poured herself another cup and went back to her place at the table.

  “Was there something wrong with the coffee?” Anne Marie said.

  “I put too much sugar in it.” She hadn’t put any sugar in it at all. She thought Anne Marie probably knew that. She could see Bennis did. She reached for the sugar bowl and carefully poured half a teaspoon into this cup, just to cover herself. “Are you sure you didn’t take that first note?” she said to Bennis.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Bennis said.

  “What about you?” This to Anne Marie.

  Anne Marie flushed. “I didn’t take anything. I got out of the room as fast as I could. There was vomit on the floor and the place stank.”

  “Well,” Myra said, “there’s probably a simple explanation for it. Maybe Emma didn’t leave a note. Maybe the one they found in Bobby’s wastebasket was on the floor somewhere, and a maid picked it up and threw it out without ever knowing what it was.”

  “That’s a thought,” Teddy said.

  “It’s a dumb one,” Bennis said.

  Myra shrugged. “Look at it this way. If Emma didn’t kill Daddy and then kill herself, this is just like Alice in Wonderland. One of us has to be crazy as a loon.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Washington’s crazy as a loon,” Teddy said. “I’d opt for Marshall, but I can’t see how he’d get to the hot chocolate. Mrs. Washington is always hanging around the food.”

  Myra sighed. The rest of them were taking him seriously and getting all worked up. She knew there was no reason to take any of them seriously. As to what she’d been thinking before…

  She looked back into her cup. Nonsense, really. Total nonsense. It would take too much intelligence, too much planning, and too much nerve. Daddy was the only one of them who had ever had all of that.

  Besides, she had nothing to worry about. She’d poured this coffee herself. She knew with absolute certainty that no one had had a chance to doctor it.

  It was 8:32.

  3

  At 9:35, Bobby Hannaford, white with cold and fear, walked into a Mercedes dealership off Route 9 outside Wayne. He had his car parked at the curb, and his briefcase locked inside the trunk of the car. The briefcase was full of money. His meeting with McAdam had not gone the way he’d expected it to. An out, that was what he’d been looking for. Instead, he seemed to have found a way further in, and he didn’t even know how. The briefcase had at least $50,000 in it. He didn’t want anything to do with it.

  The main building of the dealership was a huge concrete block warehouse with a facade wall of plate glass windows. Through them, Bobby could see SEs and SLs and SELs of every possible color and description, including one exactly the make, model, and color of his own. The similarities should have been exact, because Bobby had bought his car only four months before, at the beginning of the new product year. He had settled on a maroony red-purple. It wasn’t red enough to raise his insurance rates, but it wasn’t really any other color. He stopped at the main doors and looked back at it, rapidly being hidden under a fresh fall of heavy snow. The weather was god-awful.

  He went inside, looked around, and found a s
aleswoman at the back. She was dressed like an international banker. She looked like she was going to be just as hard to convince. He told himself she was in business to sell cars and went up to the counter anyway. Even international bankers got talked into nonsense sometimes. Look at all the bad loans they’d made to South America.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “There’s a car over there, a sort of maroon car? I’d like to buy it. I’d like to pay for it by check and drive it off the lot today.”

  EIGHT

  1

  AT 10:22, BENNIS HANNAFORD TOOK a telephone call in the kitchen. She had spent the last twenty minutes in there, getting Gregor Demarkian supplied with coffee, cookies, and rolls and delivering an endless monologue on just how awful her morning had been. She had been talking too much, because Gregor always made her nervous. He seemed to see so much, and say so little. Fortunately, Mrs. Washington had finished the mix-and-match part of her baking early. By the time the dining room had been cleared at nine, the kitchen had been more or less clean and ready for an onslaught of leftover food and dirty dishes. At ten, when Bennis brought Gregor in, there was nothing to be seen but dough molded into bread pans on the counter next to the stove and piles of hot fresh rolls in wicker baskets on the table. The wicker baskets were lined with linen napkins, red and green in honor of the season. The crèche on the other side of the room had been supplied with an infant Jesus, too. Murders or no murders, Mrs. Washington wasn’t about to lose her grip on Christmas.

  Bennis almost felt as if she were regaining her grip on Christmas. Emma was still at the back of her mind, and maybe always would be, but being around Gregor sometimes made her feel better. She wished she could be less ambivalent about him. He was, she thought, a very solid man. There was something about him that was steady, like a well-built house, something she had never come across in any other human being. Not even Michael. She pushed Michael into the well where she had trapped Emma and concentrated on finding the butter dish in the puzzle that was the “everyday” refrigerator. Her call to Michael this morning had been even worse than the one yesterday, which had been worse than the one the day before that. Their relationship was disintegrating rapidly. Bennis thought she knew why that was. In the first place, up-and-coming assistant DAs didn’t like being intimately connected with the suspects in a highly visible murder investigation—and the murders at Engine House were certainly highly visible. Bennis had caught a good two minutes of them on last night’s eleven o’clock news. In the second place, she wasn’t in Boston to tell him what a creep he was. Sometimes Michael needed to be reminded of the most commonplace things, like whether or not he was living up to the code of behavior he kept trying to impose on everybody else.