Not a Creature Was Stirring(17)

But.

He got out of the chair and headed down the back hall to his bedroom. The bed in there was unmade, something Elizabeth would have hated, but for once he didn’t let himself feel guilty about it. He went to the dresser and took her pictures out from under the laundry-folded piles of shirts.

Elizabeth in her wedding dress, covered with satin and petit-point lace. Elizabeth on the boat they’d rented that summer on Martha’s Vineyard, her fine grey hair blown into a cloud around her face. Elizabeth with her niece’s tiny daughters, painted white and orange to look like a clown. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth.

He would have to get the sweaters out of storage, and the furniture, too. He would have to get new frames for the pictures. He would have to do a lot of things. At the moment, he only had to remember how much she had liked hearing about his work. It had been over two years, and it was time.

He’d dropped Robert Hannaford’s card when he came into the bedroom. He bent over and picked it up off the floor. It was silly. It wouldn’t lead to anything serious. It wouldn’t provide him with something to do with his life. On the other hand—

On the other hand, at the moment, it was the only option he had.

There was a small black phone on the night table next to his bed. Gregor put Elizabeth’s pictures where he could see them, picked up the handset, and started dialing.





THREE


1


“LISTEN, MYRA SAID, THROWING overpacked pieces of Gucci luggage into the foyer with one hand and holding her sable jacket closed with the other, “I know what time it is. Of course I know what time it is. I just don’t care what time it is.”

Anne Marie Hannaford backed up until she was standing against the wall. It was six o’clock in the morning, a good half hour before any of the staff was due to be on call, a good two hours before the kind of staff Myra needed would be around to help her. Like all large and formal houses—and this was that: forty family rooms, 26,000 square feet in the main wings, six double garages, a servants’ wing the size of a small apartment building—Engine House was run on a rigid schedule. Anne Marie had been administrating that schedule for almost twenty years. She knew Mrs. Washington would “open” the kitchen at six-thirty and lay out breakfast on the sideboard in the dining room at seven. She knew Morgan, the driver, and Marshall, the butler, would both appear out of nowhere at exactly eight o’clock. She even knew which of the fourteen bedrooms each of the five upstairs maids would be cleaning at any given moment of the morning. What she didn’t know, and couldn’t figure out, was why Myra didn’t know.

Of course, Myra never seemed to know anything. That was one of the things Anne Marie thought of as “seminal” to Myra’s personality. There was a dress code on the Main Line, unofficial but tacitly enforced, and Myra always broke it. Instead of good tweeds and low shoes and a plain cashmere sweater, Myra had spikes and sable and large diamond earrings before dawn. Instead of a neat, little, hard-edged shoulder bag, she had a mammoth tote that could have been used to move furniture. Instead of a chignon, she had something that looked like a mushroom cloud in an advanced state of disintegration.

Anne Marie folded her arms over her chest, stroked the antique tin angel brooch on her collar, and waited. With Myra, waiting was always enough. The woman quite literally couldn’t keep her mouth shut. And that broke the code of the Main Line, too. For Myra, there was no line of demarcation between the public and the personal.

Myra had finally managed to get all her suitcases into the house. Now she turned around, grabbed the foyer door, and slammed it shut.

“There,” she said. “Now we can get down to serious business. Is there any coffee in this house?”

“Mrs. Washington’s coffee will be out in an hour,” Anne Marie said. “If you want something immediately, you’ll have to go to the kitchen and see if Bobby’s figured out how to use the Dripmaster yet.”

“Bobby’s here?”

“Everybody’s here, Myra. And none of them were due until this afternoon.”

“I wouldn’t complain about good luck if I were you, Anne Marie. You don’t have much of it.”

If Anne Marie could have backed up any farther, she would have. Things being what they were, she had to stay where she was. She felt the throb in her head and rubbed the heel of her hand against her temple. Myra always gave her a headache, and the headache was always impervious to aspirin. Or Tylenol. Or any of that stuff. Anne Marie thought of it as a physical manifestation of a moral complaint. In all justice, it was Anne Marie who should have been married to a rich husband and living in Wayne.