Not a Creature Was Stirring (38 page)

“Bennis?” Gregor said. “Bennis
Hannaford
?”

“Yes, yes,” Tibor said. “George, he invites her here, she gets all dressed up and comes. She is a very nice woman, Gregor. I like her very much.”

Mickey Spillane and Bennis Hannaford.

Well, Gregor thought, why not?

The smallest houseguest was still in the living room, of course, but the other three were with Bennis in the kitchen, a couple in their teens and yet another baby daughter. This baby daughter looked to be about three, and she could talk. A lot. She was sitting on the kitchen table, next to Bennis’s piles of flour and eggs, singing “Jingle Bells” to herself in a high, clear, tuneless voice. Her father was sitting in a chair on the other side of the table, nearly hidden by yet more piles of books. Her mother was standing next to Bennis near the eggs. Gregor relaxed a little. When Tibor had first told him about taking in the homeless, Gregor had been half sure he’d gone off the deep end. A raving drunk who needed to be reformed. A crack addict who needed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Something. But this was all right. There were people like this all over Philadelphia, refugees from the hills of West Virginia and Kentucky, who had come north to look for work and not found it. Gregor came farther into the room and saw that at least one of the books on the table belonged to the male half of the couple. He was studying it.

Bennis, dressed in a beautiful red wool dress that was now covered with flour, was waving a rolling pin in the air. “It’s a pain in the ass,” she said, “but it saves a lot of money, and if you’ve got the time—”

“Oh, I’ve got the time,” the mother said, making the word come out
tahme
. She looked seventeen, if that. “Around here, all I’ve got is time. I try cleaning up a little, but Father gets so
addled
if I move his books.”

“Father
is
addled,” Bennis said, “but nice.” She put the rolling pin down and reached for a measuring cup. As she did, her head came up and she saw Gregor. “Oh,” she said. “You. Father Tibor said you’d be here.”

Gregor looked around for Father Tibor, but he was gone. “Do you mind?” he asked Bennis.

“Of course I don’t mind.” She pointed to the girl standing beside her. “This is Jenna Moore,” she said. “And this is Donnie Moore, her husband. And
this
,” she touched the three year old’s hair, “is Suzanna.”

“There’s another one in the living room,” Gregor said, “eating candy canes.”

“That’ll be Magdalena,” Jenna said, and blushed. “I got that name out of the Bible. I thought it sounded—”

“Pretty,” Bennis said.

Jenna nodded and turned away. Bennis put down the measuring cup. “So,” she said. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been thinking about you a lot, lately.”

“Not bad thoughts, I hope,” Gregor said.

“No.”

“I think I’m going to go find Maggie,” Jenna Moore said nervously, picking up her three year old. “Come on, Donnie. She’s probably in there eating all the decorations off that nice tree.”

The Moores disappeared through the door Gregor had come in by. Bennis and Gregor both watched them go.

“So,” Bennis said again, when they were alone. “How have you been?”

“How have
you
been?”

Bennis shrugged. “Better. I’ve been to see her, you know. They don’t seem to be inclined to let her out on bail.”

“They wouldn’t be.”

“No, they wouldn’t be. You know what I can’t get over? She hates me. She really
hates
me. And hard as I try, Gregor, I just can’t come up with a reason why.”

“What does she say?”

“Not much, and nothing that makes sense.” Bennis started cleaning up the table, brushing piles of flour into her hand. “I stood bail for Bobby. I did a little magic to make sure Teddy still had a job—”

“A little magic?”

“Don’t ask,” Bennis said. “You wouldn’t believe what it costs to get somebody appointed to the faculty of a tenth-rate college. Especially if that somebody is about to be drummed out of the profession by a seventh-rate college. Whatever. Gregor, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Anne Marie hates me. Bobby and Teddy—it’s like they wish I didn’t exist.”

“What about Chris?”

“Oh, Chris is all right,” Bennis said. “He went to that place in New England. I guess he’s going to be there about three months. He says when he’s out he may come and live in Boston.”

“I don’t think you ought to worry about Anne Marie,” Gregor said. “She’s a very disturbed young woman. Not insane in the legal sense, you understand, but very disturbed. And as for Bobby and Teddy—”

“They’re very disturbed, too?”

“They’re jerks. And the world is full of jerks, Bennis. Racist jerks. Sexist jerks. Envious jerks. If you worry about the jerks, you’ll never have any kind of life at all.”

Bennis put the measuring cup and the rolling pin in Tibor’s sink. “You never did tell me how you figured it out. When you called up that night, there wasn’t time, and since then—”

“We’ve both been occupied.”

“You could put it that way,” Bennis said. “Mostly I’ve been depressed. But you know, if I’d had to pick someone, the last person it would have been was Anne Marie.”

“That’s because you were worried about your mother. Anne Marie said to me once that nobody wanted to keep your mother alive as much as she did, and that was true. Your mother was Anne Marie’s life. Once your mother was dead, Anne Marie was going to have nothing. Not a home. Not an income. Not a profession. Nothing. She’s over forty, Bennis. When your parents were both gone, what was she going to do? Learn to type?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Anne Marie did.” Gregor took the dish towel off the refrigerator door. Bennis had started washing up, unthinkingly and automatically. He thought he could at least dry. “It was your mother who told me, you know, although she didn’t do it directly. She told me she knew
who
it was, but she couldn’t give me the name. She’s very attached to all of you, Bennis. I couldn’t understand why she’d shield one of her children when that child was killing the others. And then it hit me. She owed your sister Anne Marie. She owed her
everything
.”

“And?”

“She gave me some things,” Gregor went on. “One of those things was a folder with newspaper and magazine clippings in it, all pictures of her with her daughters. The other of those things was a file with notes your sister Emma had written to you, false starts on Engine House notepaper. Once I understood the file, I understood the debris.”

“Debris? Oh, I see. You mean candlesticks and all that sort of thing.”

“That’s right. It was all meant to point to Hannaford Financial—and to the boys. Once turning Emma’s death into a suicide didn’t work, everything was pointed at the boys. The only possible explanation for that was that the real murderer had to be one of the girls. And then that ‘first’ note—”

“There wasn’t one, was there?”

“No, there wasn’t one. There was just the note from your purse. But then you recognized it—you were never meant to see it, but you did. But your mother was better, there was no hurry at the moment. She wanted a suicide. Then, with Emma blamed, she could pick off you and Myra later. As accidents. So she said she’d found a different note, and she got one of the ones from the file and put it in Bobby’s wastebasket. With money from the briefcase she’d taken from your father’s study the night of the murder.”

“They still haven’t found it you know,” Bennis said. “I keep expecting it to turn up under one of the carpets or something.”

“Maybe it will,” Gregor said.

“But what about the brooch?” Bennis said. “Jackman said you’d found part of it right there in the study. I would have thought—”

“We’d see it immediately?”

“Well, those tin things are all over the house.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “They are. But the decorations are the wrong size. They’re too small. And I saw your sister Myra wearing one, and you wearing one—but not the right kind. You had a bell. Myra had a ball. Oh, there was one in Emma’s room, too. After she died. It was a cupid.”

“A cherub,” Bennis corrected.

“A cherub. You know, that day I went to talk to your mother, the day she gave me the file, she was wearing a hair comb with all four of the figures on it. It was so painful for me, to be there with her the way she was after the way my wife had died, that I noticed the comb but I didn’t process the information. My attention was—elsewhere, let’s say. And then I got home, and Lida Arkmanian started talking about your mother and how she was dying, and then it hit me. Always, four different things, the bell, the ball, the cherub,
and the angel
. Your mother had all four on her comb. You and two of your sisters had one each made into a brooch. It stood to reason that Anne Marie must also have had a brooch, and the only thing it could have been was an angel. And an angel brooch of a size comparable to the bell or the ball I’d seen would have been the right size and shape for that piece of tin.

“She snooped, didn’t she?” Bennis said. “That was how she knew about Bobby’s financial problems.”

“About the fact of them, yes,” Gregor said. “And about the money in Bobby’s safe, of course. I don’t think she had any details.”

Bennis laughed. “Bobby thinks she’s a witch. He thinks I’m a witch, too. Oh, well. We always knew he wasn’t too bright.”

Gregor took a spoon out of her hands and started wiping it. “It wasn’t until later that I understood about the folder. A mother and her daughters. A mother who loved her daughters, loved them extravagantly. Who protected them. And was married to a man who not only hated them, but had gone to equally extraordinary lengths to disinherit them. He couldn’t have done that with a will, you know. The courts wouldn’t have allowed it. So there it was, this woman with a tremendous sense of obligation, an old-fashioned woman with an old-fashioned sense of family.”

“And no money,” Bennis pointed out.

“That’s true,” Gregor said, “but she did have jewelry, and she had that insurance policy. You see, once you begin thinking of the implications of the fact that your mother is so ill—”

“Dying,” Bennis said shortly.

“Dying, yes. Once you start from
that
, everything begins to make sense. Your mother has no money, but if your father dies before her she has the proceeds from an insurance policy. Those proceeds are doubled if your father is murdered, and if she cannot be proved to have committed that murder. So, your father
is
murdered, and in a way that makes it blatantly clear that the one person in the house who cannot be guilty is the beneficiary of his insurance policy. Now, you see, your mother has two million dollars. Tax free.”

“Yes,” Bennis said.

“Anne Marie’s next problem,” Gregor said, “was to get hold of that money intact. You see, she knew what was in your mother’s will—”

“How?”

“She took it,” Gregor said. “It was in a wall safe in a room off the main balcony. That’s where Floyd Evers had seen her put it. Anne Marie took it, and read it, and found what you’d expect to find, if you thought seriously about your mother. Your mother had a need to compensate you—all of you daughters—for what your father had done to you. So she made a will leaving everything she had, unspecified as to particulars, to her girls.”

“But that gave any of the four of us a motive,” Bennis said.

“Oh, yes.” Gregor put down the spoon and took the measuring cup. “But two of you were already dead, Bennis. And you didn’t need money.”

“No,” Bennis said, “the one thing I don’t need is money.”

“There were other things, you know. Your mother didn’t have the depth of obligation to you she had to Anne Marie. I don’t think she would have felt such a duty to shield you. And there was the hundred thousand dollars.”

“The hundred thousand dollars?”

Gregor nodded. “We tried and tried to think of what might be important enough for your father to spend that kind of money, just to have me come to the house for one night. We won’t ever know for certain, of course, but my guess is that he already suspected Anne Marie of wanting to kill him, maybe even of having tried to kill him all those years ago.”

“Did she?” Bennis said.

“Try all those years ago?” Gregor said. “I think so. If she’s convicted, you can ask her. She’ll probably tell you. But the point is, if something was going on that your father needed help with—and there must have been—then that something was going on when you were away from the house, living in Boston. It had to involve someone your father saw frequently, you see, because the offer came to Tibor before you came home for the holiday. And then Chris kept telling me how paranoid your father was, and how much worse he’d gotten lately. Finally, I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the last time he’d talked to your father, your father had complained about someone coming in to his study and moving things, trying to make him think he was going senile.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “That was what was going on in Robert Hannaford’s life when he showed up at Tibor’s door with a suitcase full of money. And that made sense. Someone was thinking of killing him. He’d pay to get that to stop. But that had to be Anne Marie, Bennis. Nobody else went into that room except by invitation.”

“And Anne Marie had to make sure the other three of us were dead before Mother died,” Bennis said, “because if we weren’t and we’d made wills, we’d inherit the money and it would pass to our heirs. And mother was worse that night. That’s how you knew—”

“She was going to try then,” Gregor said. “Yes. She had to. But I’ll repeat what I said to you at the time. I told you to set me up for her, to put yourself in a position where she would try to put Demerol in your coffee. I did
not
ask you to goad her beyond all endurance. She could have picked up one of those centerpieces and brained you with it.”

“No she couldn’t,” Bennis grinned. “I
told
you about that.”

“About giving her one little Demerol pill, yes,” Gregor said. “It was intelligent as far as it went, Bennis, but that wasn’t very far.”

“It was far enough.”

Gregor threw up his hands. “Remind me never to involve you in something like this again. You’re much too much of a romantic.”