Not a Creature Was Stirring (37 page)

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 cigarette 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.

W
HEN THE LIGHTS CAME
on, Gregor Demarkian got hold of Anne Marie Hannaford’s other wrist. He blinked into the glare and told himself he was going to kill Bennis. He was going to kill her. He’d called her right after he’d called Evers and John Jackman. He’d explained the problem to her. He’d gotten her to call the gate and make sure they could get in without a call to the house. He’d involved her completely—but she was supposed to set things up for the police, and for him. She wasn’t supposed to go out and do everything possible to get herself murdered.

Instead, he looked at her standing against the sideboard, watching him hold down Anne Marie, and said, “Where’s Jackman? She’s in shock now, but she’s going to come out of it any minute. Then we’re going to have a problem.”

“No we’re not,” Bennis said. She was grinning.

“Miss Hannaford,” Gregor said, “once, just once, in this year of our Lord, I would like you to do what you’re supposed to do instead of what you want to do. I would like to be reasonably sure we’re not all going to get killed here—”

“We’re not all going to get killed here,” Bennis said. “What do you take me for? She’s not in shock, you fool. She’s stoked to the gills on Demerol.”

“What?” Gregor said.

“Well, she’s already killed three people, hasn’t she? She made herself a cup of tea about half an hour ago. She always fills it full of sugar. I put the Demerol in that. I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor. I’m not Nancy Drew. As soon as you told me what was going on, I wanted her out of commission.”

Gregor looked down at Anne Marie. She had stopped screaming. She had stopped everything. She was the next best thing to catatonic.

He dropped her back into her chair. “You,” he said to Bennis Hannaford, “are a very dangerous woman.”

Bennis shrugged. “There’s your Detective Jackman,” she said. “He’s out in the hall. Can’t you hear him screaming at Teddy to get out of his way?”

Now that he was no longer desperately concentrated on keeping Anne Marie in check, Gregor could certainly hear Jackman screaming. Or shouting, at any rate. He could have heard him back in Philadelphia.

And just for the moment, he no longer cared.

Bennis Hannaford, Gregor thought. Bennis Hannaford is not only dangerous, she’s crazy. She ought to be locked up for her own good.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 6

EPIPHANY

A
T SIX O’CLOCK ON THE
evening of January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, Gregor Demarkian stood in the snow in the courtyard behind Holy Trinity Church and rang the bell to Tibor’s apartment. He was feeling a little nervous. In the days since the Hannaford case had been brought to a close, he had been keeping out of sight. For one thing, he was tired. He had forgotten about murder cases. They took a lot of energy and they took a lot of emotion, and when they were over what you really wanted to do was sleep for a week. He hadn’t been able to manage that. He’d spent so much time thinking about the Hannafords, and about Donna Moradanyan and her little “problem,” he hadn’t paid bills or done laundry in he didn’t know how long. He had a lot of details to take care of, and he was too restless not to take care of them. That was the other thing. He was
very
restless. Now that he was no longer walking around in a fog, now that his life no longer felt like one long wound caused by the death of Elizabeth, he was in mortal danger of being terminally bored. What he was going to do about that, he didn’t know. There would be more Donna Moradanyans and more little problems in his life if he wanted to let them in, but that kind of thing wouldn’t really occupy his mind. And problems like the Hannaford case came up once or twice in a lifetime.

He pressed the bell again, readjusted the box of chocolates he was carrying under his arm, and waited. Because this was an Armenian neighborhood and Tibor was an Armenian priest, the Christmas decorations were still up. Tiny lights were strung through the one anemic tree that had grown up between the courtyard’s tiles. Holly wreaths and plastic Santa Clauses were stuffed into all the observable windows. He could even hear faint strains of Steve Lawrence singing “The Little Drummer Boy”—Tibor must have bought one of those mail-order Christmas records. Here was the great thing about being Armenian. If for some reason you couldn’t celebrate Christmas properly on December 25, all you had to do was wait for Epiphany and you got another shot at it.

In front of him, the doorknob rattled, the door frame shuddered, and finally the door came open. Tibor was standing just beyond it, a sprig of bright red plastic holly pinned to the shoulder of his “best” dayrobes.

“Gregor,” he said, “Gregor, Gregor, come in. We have everyone here now.”

“Everyone?” Gregor said.

“Yes, yes,” Tibor said.

Tibor stepped back, and Gregor came in from the cold. He found himself in a small, cramped foyer that looked even smaller and more cramped because it was stuffed with books, piles and piles of books, pushed against the walls in unsteady stacks that looked ready to avalanche. He saw Paul Johnson’s
History of Christianity
and Hardon’s
Catholic Catechism
and three paperbacks by Mickey Spillane. The paperbacks had been read to shreds.

Tibor came up behind him and said, “Mr. Spillane, yes. Mr. Spillane has a very interesting mind, Gregor.”

Gregor had read a book by Mickey Spillane once. It had been called
The Body Lovers
, and it had gone into sadomasochism in detail.

Tibor saw the look on his face and was hurt. “Gregor, Gregor. You must stop being so dependent on the obvious. Mr. Spillane has a very interesting moral sense. It is a form of barbarism, yes, but it is the right form of barbarism. It is a barbarism out of which civilization can grow.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Never mind,” Tibor said. “Thank you for the chocolates. I will put them out in the living room. Do you want to go into the living room? Donna Moradanyan is there with her Peter.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

Tibor nodded. “If she wants to marry him, we’ll just have to put up with it. But I will tell you. I have thought once or twice about giving him knockout drops and putting him on a train.”

“You’ve been reading too much Mickey Spillane.”

“Gregor,” Tibor said, “this Peter Desarian, he has a brain the size of a pea.”

“But we
knew
that,” Gregor pointed out. “If his brain had been any bigger, he wouldn’t have gotten her pregnant in the first place, and if he had gotten her pregnant, he wouldn’t have gone running home to his mother.”

“I think it was a much better thing when parents arranged the marriage,” Tibor said. “Donna’s mother would have known better than to arrange
this
one.”

Gregor wasn’t sure about that—growing up among immigrants, he had witnessed a few arranged marriages in his life—but he let it go. The music had changed from “The Little Drummer Boy” to “Silver Bells,” sung by a man whose voice had been trained out of all personality. He looked into the living room and saw Donna and her preppy Peter, George in the biggest armchair, Lida in red silk and diamond earrings. In the corner near the window was an overdecorated Christmas tree. As he watched, a very tiny child, a girl no more than two, walked up to it and took a candy cane.

“Who’s the baby?” he asked Tibor.

“Baby?” Tibor brightened. “Ah, Gregor. I’m so used to them. I forgot. My houseguests.”

“Houseguests?” Gregor said. And then he remembered. The day he had taken Tibor to lunch. The discussion about the “homeless problem.” Oh,
God
.

Tibor was moving to the other side of the foyer, to the door that led to the kitchen. “Come on, come on,” he was saying. “You will come in here, you will meet my houseguests, you will have a little talk with Bennis.”