Not a Creature Was Stirring (31 page)

It was 8:32.

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 saleswoman 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.”

A
T 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.

She had just gotten to the part where Myra was sitting at breakfast, insisting people only murdered other people for money, when the phone rang. She picked it up, expecting it to be her bank, saying the money she had asked to have transferred from her money market account to her checking account had come through. Instead, she got a high-pitched, whining litany of complaint that made her grit her teeth. In the middle of it, she put her hand over the mouthpiece and told Gregor,

“It’s Dickie. Doing his usual thing.”

“Dickie?” Gregor said.

“Dickie Van Damm. Myra’s husband.” She took her hand off the mouthpiece. “Dickie? This is Bennis, not Myra. … Yes, I thought you knew. … Well, it doesn’t do any good telling me, does it? Why don’t I go get… yes, of course she’s awake, she was at breakfast. … Yes, I understand your mother’s very ill. … Yes… but… I sympathize with you about the publicity, I really do. … I don’t think that’s likely, Dickie. … No… no… I know we’re in the middle of another blizzard. … Yes… yes… why don’t I just go get Myra and you can tell her yourself?”

She put the receiver down on the table and motioned Gregor to follow her, out of the kitchen and into the hall. When the kitchen door swung closed behind them, she rolled her eyes.

“He’s always like that,” she said. “He thinks there’s nobody in the universe but the Van Damms, and he’s such a bore he never has anybody to talk to, so when he gets you on the phone he refuses to shut up.”

“I’m surprised your sister stays married to him,” Gregor said.

“He’s got a lot of money. And it’s like I told you the other day. The Van Damms are very, very, very old Main Line.”

Bennis led him down the hall into the living room. “Myra will be in the television room, listening to soap operas,” she said.

“I don’t think there are soap operas on this early in the morning,” Gregor said.

Bennis smiled. “Myra won’t be listening to today’s soap operas, she’ll be listening to yesterday’s. On tape. Soap operas are on at the wrong time of day for Myra.”

She opened the door on the other side of the living room, ushered Gregor into another hall, and snaked around him so she could lead. “This is where Anne Marie went, to get the drinks tray, that first night you were here. If you go through that door,” she pointed to a large mahogany swing on their right, “you end up in a small butler’s pantry. One of four. My great-grandfather was a flaming alcoholic.”

She came to the end of the hall, opened the door there, and entered another hall. The hall they had just come through was visibly a service space. This was just as visibly a family one. The runner rug was custom cut and thick. The walls were hung with cloth instead of paper. Bennis was so unused to wallpaper, she still couldn’t make herself live with it, even after all these years away from Engine House. On her walls at home, she had paint.

She stopped in front of the last door on the left and listened. “There,” she said. “Can’t you hear it?
Days of Our Lives
.”

“I can hear it,” Gregor said.

Bennis opened the door, walked in, and stopped. She stopped so quickly, Gregor Demarkian plowed into the back of her, nearly tipping her over.

Days of Our Lives
was playing on the television, casting its strained portents of Sturm und Drang throughout the room.

It didn’t need to. The television room had enough Sturm und Drang of its own.

Gregor grabbed her by the shoulders. She could feel him pushing her toward the door.

“Get out of here,” he was saying. “Get out of this room
now
.”

But she couldn’t get out, she really couldn’t. She had to look at it and look at it, just to make sure it was there.

Myra’s body, lying on the floor, her face battered out of shape into gore. Myra’s big shiny-tin ball brooch, smeared so thickly with blood it looked like it had been painted red.

At Myra’s feet, a heavy cylinder of metal winked and glittered, in the thousands of tiny places where it hadn’t been smeared.

One of great-grandmother Eleanor’s Georgian silver candlesticks from the upstairs hall.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28

THE SOLUTION

I
F THERE WAS ONE
thing Gregor Demarkian understood, it was what to do when he was first at the scene of the crime. He could go through that drill on automatic pilot, and he did. God only knew he couldn’t have done it any other way. His mind was caught in the vision of the television room and the mistakes he had made that had allowed this murder to happen. Mistakes. God, how he hated mistakes. That was why he had walked off that last case of his. It wasn’t just that Elizabeth had been dying and he’d wanted to concentrate his energies on her. Both of those things were true, but there had been something else. He had been distracted. And, in his distraction, he had started to make mistakes. That was the last thing you wanted to do when faced with a man who was murdering five-year-old boys.

Women.

Gregor shut it out of his mind. Now was not the time. He had to figure out where he’d gone wrong, in this place, with these people. His fundamental discovery was not a mistake. He was convinced of that. Too much—the evidence of the money, the evidence of the notes, the evidence of the book in Emma Hannaford’s room—pointed in that direction. But somewhere along the line, he had made an error. If he hadn’t, Myra Hannaford’s face wouldn’t have been smashed. There would have been nothing about the death that pointed to murder.

The whole thing was making him distinctly jumpy. The only way he could make sense of this particular murder was to assume there was going to be another. That was bad enough, that was god-awful, but he kept getting stuck on the why. He knew what had happened. He even had a guess—and only a guess—as to who had made it happen. But a motive for this mess was beyond him.

Now he stood in the foyer, watching John Henry Newman Jackman getting out of an unmarked car in front of Engine House. Gregor hadn’t thought about it before, but he found Jackman’s personal response to this case very odd. He’d known cops who were intense, and cops who were scared, and cops who didn’t give a damn. Jackman was none of those things. He seemed to be operating on another plane altogether. Gregor had seen him exasperated, puzzled, annoyed, and impatient. He had never seen him angry, shocked, or appalled. Maybe Jack-man found it hard to accept people like the Hannafords as real. Gregor had had that problem himself the first time he’d been forced to deal with someone who didn’t have to work for a living.

Outside, the snow was falling with all the force of hurricane rain. They were in for a world-class blizzard. Even moving swiftly, Jackman couldn’t avoid snow piling up on his shoulders and coating his chest. Every once in a while it hit him in the face, and he blanched.

Gregor moved away from the foyer windows and opened the front doors. He’d had as much of servants as he could take in one day. Every time he turned around there was someone there, in uniform, looking studiously blank. And then there was Anne Marie. She drifted through the house, an omnipresent spirit. He didn’t like it. Lida Arkmanian knew everything there was to know about her cleaning lady: name, age, marital status, and medical history. Gregor Demarkian thought Anne Marie Hannaford knew no more about her maids than what she had to pay them.

The wind was blowing straight at his face, getting snow all over his suit and the foyer floor, so he stood back a little. Jackman came across the terrace to him, shivering.

“Christ,” Jackman said, “can’t these people ever have a murder in good weather?”

Gregor raised his eyebrows, but Jackman didn’t see him do it. He was too busy looking at the chandelier.

“I read a murder mystery once where someone got killed with one of those,” Jackman said. “It was held up with a chain and the chain had been cut through, and just at the right moment—”

“Do you think that’s really possible?” Gregor said.

“Hell, no. But things don’t have to be possible, in murder mysteries. They just have to be weird.”

The terrace was electrically heated, but the snow was coming down so fast it didn’t matter much. The uniforms and lab men coming up behind Jackman were plowing through minor drifts. Jackman stepped aside to give them room to enter. They stopped, each and every one of them, to wipe their feet on the mat.

“I think you ought to give me a minute,” Jackman said to a tall man in an overcoat so outsize it would have made him look like a Skid Row bum if it hadn’t been so new. “I want to get a look at the scene before you guys mess it up.”

The tall man shrugged. “Anything you say. You take long enough, we’ll be stuck here for the night. Or maybe the week.”

Jackman turned back to Gregor. “This is what it’s like out here. They worry about the weather. They worry about their clothes. They don’t worry about anything important. Which one was it?”

Gregor hadn’t been able to get through to Jackman directly when he called, but he had left a very detailed message. He found it hard to believe Jackman hadn’t gotten it in full.

He said, “It’s Mrs. Van Damm. Myra Hannaford Van Damm. And it’s more like the first one than the second one.”

“What do you mean, more like the first one?”

“Debris,” Gregor said. “Stage sets. Props. A lot of nonsense strewn all over the landscape.”

“To make it look like murder?” Jackman was interested.

“I think at this point, whoever it is knows we’re going to know it’s murder,” Gregor said. “The impression I got was that there was a lot of care being taken to give us clues about motive, say, and suspects. You’ll have to see the body, John.”

“I’m going to see the body. Where are the Hannafords?”

“Cordelia Day Hannaford is in her room. Anne Marie Hannaford is with her. Bennis and Christopher are in what they like to call the ‘living room.’ It’s got a tree worthy of Rockefeller Center in the middle of it. Teddy was asleep, last I heard. I don’t know where Bobby is. Bennis told me he’d left for work early this morning.”

Jackman frowned. “I don’t think we should leave them wandering around the house like this. On their own. Where’s the body?”