Not a Creature Was Stirring(108)

“Oh,” Donna said.

“That’s why the money was used,” Gregor said. “There were other ways to point us to Hannaford Financial. The note itself being put in Bobby Hannaford’s wastebasket was enough. Bobby has to have money, in hundred-dollar bills, somewhere in Engine House. And our murderer has to know it. If he didn’t, there’d be no reason to put these—you see what I mean.”

“Are murderers always so careful?” Tibor asked.

“Thank God, no,” Gregor said. “But this one is.”

“I think this is depressing,” Donna Moradanyan said. “There ought to be something you can do. Don’t you have any idea who did it?”

“I know who did it,” Gregor said. “The problem is, I don’t know why and without knowing why I can’t prove it. And the Bryn Mawr police department is not about to arrest a member of one of the founding families of the Main Line on evidence that could apply to five other people on my say so.”

“Oh,” Donna said.

Gregor dropped onto the couch. He caught Donna’s eye and pointed to the Federal Express envelope he was still carrying. She bit her lip and nodded. It hurt him to see the hope in her face. He put the envelope on the sofa cushion, so she could pick it up when nobody was looking.

“What I need,” he said, “is a link.”

They all stared back at him, confused. Even Tibor wasn’t ready to say anything, or even ready to want to. Gregor got off the couch again and started pacing, back and forth, back and forth, in front of his living room window.

“A link, a link, a link,” he said. “Given the people who were murdered, given the nature of that family, there are only two of them who could be doing this and still have it make sense. Of those two, one has no motive I can figure out, and one has no motive, period. I’m sure of it. The first one has to kill the second one, to make it come out right. Why, I don’t know. When, I don’t know. Add something here—only one of the two of them could be responsible for the dust.”

“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.