Not a Creature Was Stirring

ONE


1


“LISTEN,” MYRA SAID, AS soon as the phone was picked up, without waiting to find out who had answered it. “I’ve had a phone call from Bobby. Something’s screwy up at the House.”

There was a tiered set of wire baskets hanging from a hook in the kitchen ceiling, filled with boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas. Emma Hannaford took out the Morning Thunder and put it on the counter. Myra, for God’s sake. Emma kept in touch with only one of her sisters, and only because she and Bennis had always been close. She didn’t hear from the rest of the brood from one year to the next, and she thought that was just fine. Still, when she did hear from them, the one who called was always Myra. Myra was a combination gossip service and witch. She knew things about people they didn’t know themselves (usually because they weren’t true). She also knew things about people they’d never told anyone, which was—well, weird. Emma dumped a tea bag into the bottom of her best oversize ceramic mug, the one with I CAN BEAT THE WORLD in big red letters on both sides of it, and took the kettle off the stove. If she’d been asked to name the one thing she was least able to deal with after a day like today, she would have had to say Myra. If she’d been asked to name the second thing, she would have had to say a double dose of Morning Thunder (caffeine overload guaranteed) at eight o’clock in the evening.

“Emma?” Myra said. “Emma, are you there?”

“Yes, Myra. I’m here.”

“Well, good. For a minute there, I thought you were being raped or robbed or something and I had the mugger.”

Emma let that one pass. One of Myra’s major monologues, ever since Emma had graduated from Bennington and moved to New York, had to do with how long it would take before Emma got herself killed. Useless to explain to Myra that the Upper West Side, especially this part of it, was probably safer than Vermont had ever been. Useless to explain anything to Myra, really, because Myra only listened when she thought she was getting “important” information. The fact that her youngest sister was living in one of the fanciest neighborhoods in Manhattan was not “important” information.

Emma picked up her tea and the phone and went into the main part of the apartment. It was a room approximately ten by ten feet and, aside from the kitchen (which was an alcove) and the bathroom, it was the only room in the place. At $900 a month, in this neighborhood, it was even a bargain. One of the things Emma had decided when she moved to the city five years ago was that she was going to get along on her own money. Bennis was making a mint and Myra had married a rich husband and the boys had those trust funds, but she was going to have to make her own way eventually. Now she was settled and (she thought) comfortable. She never gave a thought to the fact that she’d grown up in a forty-room house. Or that her bedroom at home was three times the size of this apartment.

She sat down on the couch and stretched her legs, good dancer’s legs that wouldn’t be so good if she kept cutting class the way she had tonight. Emma Hannaford had good dancer’s legs and a good dancer’s body, even though she wasn’t a dancer, and wild black hair that was a throwback to the first Robert Hannaford, the one whose portrait was on the wall above the mantel in the main library back at Engine House. Engine House was what Robert Hannaford had called the place he’d built in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, after the railroads had made him rich. The first Robert Hannaford had been like that.

The fifth Robert Hannaford, otherwise known as Daddy, wasn’t like that at all.

“Emma?”

“I’m still here, Myra.”

“I saw that commercial of yours. The one where you get the cereal all over your hair? I thought it was silly.”

“It paid a lot of money. And it pays residuals.”

“Well, I suppose you need money. I just don’t understand why you don’t marry it, like everybody else.”

Emma let that one pass, too. Myra had married money, but Bennis had made hers, and the boys had been handed theirs courtesy of Daddy. Anne Marie had simply sidestepped the whole question. Anne Marie still lived at Engine House, like some kind of post-debutante twit.

Also, Emma had a fair idea how Myra felt, under all the verbiage and sisterly concern, about being married to Dickie Van Damm.

Emma took a sip of tea and tucked her legs under her. “Is this about something in particular, or did you just call?”

“Of course I didn’t just call,” Myra said. “There is something screwy up at the House.”

“Myra, there’s always something screwy up at the House. Our father is a fruitcake. He gets to be more of a fruitcake every year. What else is new?”