Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  “Dust?” Tibor said.

  “That’s how I think of it, all the extra clues that keep getting thrown at us. Stir up enough dust, and you can blind people to anything. I knew a faith healer like that once. He was about to go down for sexual misconduct, so he created a big brouhaha about his being the victim of racism, which wasn’t true, by the way, and then—”

  “I love this,” George said. “Agatha Christie.”

  Donna Moradanyan was shaking her head and looking stubborn. She had also stuck the Federal Express envelope out of sight under her jacket on the floor. “I don’t understand how it eliminates anybody,” she said. “It didn’t have to be the killer stirring up the dust, did it? Anybody could have stirred up the dust. Maybe one of them knows who did it, too. Maybe all of them do. They’re all brothers and sisters. Maybe they’re protecting someone.”

  “Not in that family,” Gregor said.

  “But Gregor,” Tibor said, “if all the clues are false, how can you know who is doing the killing?”

  Gregor shrugged. “It was something Cordelia Day Hannaford told me, and then I talked to Bennis and Teddy and they confirmed it. You’d like Mrs. Hannaford, Tibor. She’s an old-fashioned woman. She has a tremendous sense of family, of obligation. Like the grandmothers you’re always talking about.”

  “What are you saying about grandmothers?” Lida had come in from the kitchen, covered with flour, holding a pan full of stuffed grape leaves. Gregor bit back a smile. The grape leaves were as neat and organized as Lida herself was messy. Elizabeth’s sister was just the same way. She went into the kitchen, cooked like a maniac, and made sure she was a total wreck by the time she was done. It let her family know how much work she did.

  Gregor turned slightly, so that he was facing Lida, and said, “We weren’t saying awful things about grandmothers. We were talking about Cordelia Day Hannaford.”

  “Ah,” Lida said. “The mother. The poor woman.”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. “I think she is a poor woman.”

  “Tcha,” Lida said. “It’s bad enough to have one of your children go bad. It’s bad enough to have two of your children killed. It’s bad enough to lose a husband. But to have all that happen at the same time, and when you’re so near death yourself, with no time to wipe away the bad memories and replace them with good—”

  Gregor snapped to attention. He couldn’t have been more shocked if Lida had thrown a pail of ice water over his head. He couldn’t have felt more stupid if—he had nothing to follow that if. He felt like Pinocchio, a man with a head made of wood. When he’d first entered the Bureau, one of his training officers had told him, “You always forget something, and the something you forget is always the obvious.” But it had never happened to him before now.

  Lida had veered off her original subject and was into a monologue on the sorry life of mothers everywhere. She was tearful. She was pleading. She was speaking with her hands as eloquently as if she were a deaf person using sign language.

  “Wait,” Gregor told her. “Stop for a minute. Go back and say that again.”

  “Say what again?” Lida looked offended.

  “What you just said,” Gregor insisted. “About Cordelia Hannaford not having time.”

  “Well, Gregor. You’ve told me over and over again. The poor woman has a disease. She gets better sometimes but mostly she gets worse. She will die maybe before the year is out. And I tell you, if she dies that soon—”

  “Oh, dear sweet lord Jesus Christ,” Gregor said. “Cordelia Day Hannaford’s heir.” He stood up. They were all staring at him, and he didn’t blame them. He must look like a lunatic. In a minute, he was going to sound like a lunatic. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t have time to explain it to them. If he were right—and he knew he was right, it was the only way it all made sense, all of it, even old Robert Hannaford and his $100,000—if he were right, there was going to be another death and it was going to happen soon.

  He turned to Donna. “Get me your car,” he said. “Go take it out of the garage and get it warmed up and ready to go. I’ll be ready as soon as I make a phone call.”

  “Car?” Tibor said. “Gregor, look out the window. It’s snowing again.”

  Gregor was moving too fast to pay attention. He moved right out of the living room into his bedroom, shut the door, and sat down on his bed. Then he picked up the phone.

  Early this morning—so early now it almost felt like another day—he had told Jackman that the deaths of these three particular people must have changed something. He just hadn’t been able to think of what. Even after he knew who his murderer was, he hadn’t been able to think of what. That was the problem with the obvious. It never seemed to be important, but it always was.

  He flipped through his address book until he found the name of the man he always thought of as “that lawyer.” Floyd Evers. There it was.

  He was going to ask Floyd Evers what he should have asked him in the beginning. He was going to ask if Cordelia Hannaford had made a will.

  FIVE

  1

  ANNE MARIE HANNAFORD HAD never thought of Engine House as haunted before, but tonight she couldn’t think of it any other way. The place was so big, and so dark, and so quiet. With the weather as bad as it was, she had been forced to let the servants go early. They had packed up and gone back to Philadelphia right after the police had left. Things were so much easier in the old days, when servants lived in. Now they all wanted their own houses. Only Morgan lived on the grounds, and that was because the driver’s apartment was over the garages and well separated from the main building. There was no loyalty anymore, that was the problem. Servants wanted to take your money, but they didn’t want to live with you. They didn’t want to know you. It all came down to an exchange of cash.

  She looked into her mother’s face and sighed. It had been a bad evening. Only yesterday, Cordelia had been so much better. Even the doctor had said she might last three months or even a year. Now she was wondering if Cordelia would last the night. She ought to send for an ambulance. An hour ago, they had sat in this room—Chris, Teddy, Bennis, and herself-—keeping a death watch. If it hadn’t been for Bennis, she would have called the hospital then. But Bennis had been insistent, and when Bennis insisted—Bennis.

  Anne Marie put her hands up to her hair and began to fix it, automatically. In all the crisis and confusion, it had come down around her neck. She was being stupid, she knew. She had no reason whatsoever to be afraid of Bennis.

  She went to the side of her mother’s bed and switched on the intercom. It had special speakers that picked up the smallest sound in this room and amplified it through the rest of the house. When she left here, the house would seem to be breathing.

  She fixed the blankets, plumped the pillows, touched her mother’s forehead. Everything was as all right as it could be, meaning just all right enough for her to go down and have some dinner. Meaning awful. She left the lamp on and went into the hall.

  Long hall. Dark hall. Cold hall. Down there, Emma had died.

  Anne Marie went to the balcony, moving as fast as she could. The lights were dim there, too, but at least it wasn’t so closed in. Sometimes she thought the house was shrinking, closing in around her the way plastic did on cheap toys, cutting off her air.

  She left the hall door open and started down the stairs. Teddy and Chris were in the foyer. She hadn’t seen them before because they were sitting at opposite ends of the bottom step. She hadn’t heard them because they were talking quietly, and she couldn’t hear anything over the sound of Mother’s breathing. She kept telling herself everything would be all right as long as Mother didn’t stop breathing. Listening to that rasp and hitch was like listening to her own heartbeat. No matter how awful it sounded, it was better than no sound at all.

  Six o’clock. Maybe five after. The foyer was in shadow. It was hard to see the face of the clock.

  She got to the step where Teddy and Chris were sitting and stopped.

  “Maybe you
ought to come in to supper,” she said. “I think Bennis is making something.”

  Chris stretched his legs. He looked better now than he had earlier in the day, when that Detective Jackman had found the other candlestick in his room. He had been called in to talk to Jackman and Mr. Gregor Demarkian, and when he had come out he’d looked better than Anne Marie remembered seeing him in years. It made her wonder. Now he seemed to have taken a bath and trimmed his hair and put on a better set of clothes—clothes that looked suspiciously like Bobby’s. They hung on Chris.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “I don’t know how anybody can be hungry,” Teddy said.

  Anne Marie turned to him. He looked no different than he ever did, but maybe a little self-satisfied. What could he possibly have to be satisfied about, with Mother dying upstairs?

  As if answering her question, Chris said, “Teddy’s changing jobs. He got the news this evening.”

  “Changing jobs?” Anne Marie said.

  Teddy smirked. “I’m going to Landon College. It’s in Hudson, New York. Just about an hour from the city by train. Much better.”

  “Teddy has a friend on the faculty,” Chris said blandly. “A friend who owes him something.”

  “He doesn’t owe me anything,” Teddy said angrily. “He just appreciates me.”

  Chris smiled. “Teddy’s going to start right after Christmas. It’s not like when you and I were in school. They don’t hold the first semester over until after Christmas vacation any more.”

  “The semester starts January sixth,” Teddy said sullenly. “I’m going to have a lot to do between now and then.”

  Including attending your mother’s funeral, Anne Marie thought. She didn’t say it. The two of them seemed totally unreal to her, sitting here discussing job changes, sitting here in the dark with that ragged breathing all around them, not noticing it at all. She moved off the step into the foyer, wishing she wasn’t so cold.

  “I’m going to have supper,” she said. “I’m starving, and I’m probably going to be up all night. If you two have any decency, you’ll be up all night, too.”

  “Wouldn’t it make sense if some of us slept and one of us sat with mother?” Chris said. “I’ll go up and sit with mother now, if you want.”

  “I don’t know how you could sleep,” Anne Marie said.

  “He’ll smoke marijuana,” Teddy said. “That’s how he always sleeps.”

  Chris stood up. “I’ll go sit with Mother, Anne Marie. If you want, I’ll turn that thing off, so you don’t have to listen to it while you eat.”

  “No,” Anne Marie said. “Don’t turn it off.”

  “Isn’t it driving you crazy?”

  “It means she’s breathing,” Anne Marie said.

  Chris nodded and went up the stairs. Teddy said, “If I were breathing like that, I’d want myself to stop.”

  Anne Marie left him where he was sitting and let herself into the hall.

  2

  She had expected to find Bennis in the kitchen. When instead she found the kitchen empty—and clean; Bennis cleaned like a servant, when she was done the house looked as if nobody had ever lived in it at all—she went down the back hall to the dining room. She didn’t like being in the back hall. It really was a small space, narrow and low ceilinged. With the sound of Mother’s breathing, the walls seemed to suck in and out.

  She let herself through the baize door and found Bennis standing at the sideboard, small and thin and beautiful, the only one of them who had ever made sense. She had poured herself a cup of coffee and was putting too much sugar in it.

  “There you are,” she said. “I was beginning to think I’d made all this for myself.”

  “All this” was soup and a cold platter for sandwiches. Anne Marie looked at the soup and bit her lip.

  Bennis put her coffee cup on the table and sat down. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “About things—you know? About Daddy and Emma.”

  “I wish you’d turned the lights on,” Anne Marie said.

  “I turned some of the lights on. I didn’t want it to be too light. It didn’t fit, somehow.”

  “Nothing fits.” Anne Marie got a cup of coffee for herself and took the seat next to Bennis. Then she put the coffee down on her far side and stared at it. “I haven’t been able to think of anything but Mother. Maybe that’s all I ever think about. Mother.”

  “Maybe that’s true.”

  “It sounds terrible, listening to the breathing on the intercom. It sounds like something from a horror movie. Do you remember when you made me take you to that horror movie, when we were children?”

  “The old Empire Theater in Philadelphia. We went to see The Tingler. But you weren’t such a child.”

  “I was child enough. I can still remember that movie. Where the man scares his wife to death.”

  “You take things like that too seriously.” Bennis stood up and went to the sideboard again. She filled a bowl of soup and then another one, two immense bowls full of split pea Anne Marie didn’t think anyone could eat. Bennis put them on the table and went back for spoons. “Eat,” she said, handing Anne Marie a spoon. “You look terrible.”

  Anne Marie put the spoon down next to her bowl. The breathing seemed to be getting louder and louder. The house seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. She was so very tired, she didn’t understand how she was staying awake at all. She wished she could be Bennis, always ready for anything.

  “When she’s like this and I sit with her I talk to her. I tell her—things. About when we were children, you know, and about our coming out. You never liked coming out.”

  “I hated it,” Bennis said.

  “You never liked anything here,” Anne Marie said. “I never understood that. It’s the most wonderful life in the world.”

  Bennis stirred more sugar into her coffee. It had to be syrup by now. “I didn’t have any control over it. It had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t something I’d earned. It wasn’t something I’d invented. It was just a dance made up a million years ago by people I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have liked very much.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being rich, Bennis.”

  “I never said there was anything wrong with being rich. I like money.”

  “Just money?”

  “I like a man in Boston, but that probably won’t last very long.”

  “I don’t like men at all,” Anne Marie said, “but I don’t like women, either. That way.”

  “I know.”

  “I wish I knew what you thought about,” Anne Marie said. “I watch you walk around here and it’s—it’s like you came from Mars. And it shouldn’t be. You’re more like Daddy than any of the rest of us.”

  “I know,” Bennis said again.

  Anne Marie looked up. She had been staring at her plate of soup, thinking how thick and impenetrable it was. There could be rocks or ground glass in it, and she would never know. She wished Bennis would eat some. She wished Bennis would stop staring at her—except that Bennis wasn’t staring at her. Bennis was looking in the other direction entirely, fussing with her cigarettes and her green Bic lighter. A flame went up, too high, and Bennis jumped back. She didn’t turn around.

  “Do you like it,” Anne Marie said, “being like Daddy?”

  “I like the single-mindedness. It gets me a lot of things I couldn’t live without.”

  “Funny, I never thought of him as single-minded. He always seemed to have his hand in everything, to be everywhere. He always seemed to be spread out and spread thin.”

  Another flame went up. This time Bennis caught it, leaned close to it, sucked. Anne Marie watched. Bennis’s face was lit up more than her cigarette was. The flame shuddered and licked. Bennis’s cheekbones went in and out of shadow. She looked Slavic, or like a vampire.

  Yes, Anne Marie thought. That’s what they’re both like. Vampires. They suck people up.

  Except that Daddy was dead.

  Bennis put the cigaret
te lighter down. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Anne Marie said.

  Bennis got up and went back to the sideboard. Anne Marie could hear her putting together a sandwich, scraping a knife against the edge of the mayonnaise pot. The breathing got softer suddenly and louder suddenly, making them both jump.

  “She’s dying,” Anne Marie said.

  And Bennis said, again, “I know.”

  In and out, in and out, in and out. Normal. For just this second, it was going to be all right.

  Anne Marie looked down at her soup. She picked up her spoon. She put it down again. Split pea, heavy and thick.

  “Bennis?” she said.

  “I’m here, Anne Marie. I’ve always been here. I always will be here.”

  “Yes,” Anne Marie said.

  She felt very floaty, very floaty, adrift on an imaginary sea. It was all right. It really was. It was just Bennis here, after all. Nobody she had to be afraid of. Even though she was afraid.

  From the moment she had known Daddy was dead, she had been afraid. And what she had been afraid of was here, now, in this room.

  Anne Marie started to move. As she did, she turned away from the light. The hand was there, disembodied, a man’s hand. It hovered in the darkness, something that could not be real. I’m losing my mind, she thought.

  Then the hand came closer and touched her, circled her wrists, held them tight. It took a moment for her to realize what was happening, and then she screamed.

  She screamed and screamed and screamed. And as she screamed, the hand on her wrist tightened and twisted. She felt her own hand turn and her fingers loosen. She watched her hand come open in the air.

  What fell out of it was a tiny plastic bottle that had once held aspirin—and what fell out of that was powdered Demerol, spilling over the tablecloth like fine-grained snow on a pastel garden shelf.