Not a Creature Was Stirring(18)

Through the long, narrow windows on either side of the front doors, Anne Marie could see snow, the thick kind that fell for hours and stuck for weeks. She patted stray hair back into her chignon and tried not to think of all the other things that gave her headaches. Mother, upstairs in her private suite, barely able to get herself out of bed in the morning. Daddy, fallen asleep in his wheelchair in his study for the third time this week, likely to awake at any moment in a perfectly foul mood. Even the sight of Engine House decked out for Christmas—the wreath on the outside panel of the door Myra had just slammed; the bowls of holly on the foyer tables; the delicate crystal angels hanging from invisible threads from all the common room ceilings—gave her no joy.

In the early days, when Mother was periodically ill instead of periodically critical, Anne Marie had almost always enjoyed her life. Where Mother went, Anne Marie went—visiting and charities, parties and volunteer work, all within the carefully proscribed circle of Main Line women of good family. Anne Marie had found that period far more satisfactory than her two aborted years at Wellesley College. At college, her roommate had been a scholarship student from Detroit with pronounced ideas on politics and personal hygiene, and all her professors had seemed to lean determinedly leftward.

Unfortunately, as Mother’s illness had worsened, her taste in charities had undergone a radical change. Benefit balls for the American Cancer Society and the Philadelphia Art League had been replaced by forays into the inner city—to free clinics, halfway houses, counseling centers, women’s shelters. Organizational luncheons had disappeared from Anne Marie’s schedule, supplanted by back-room meetings with middle-aged harridans who never wore makeup and smoked while they ate. Even the things she had enjoyed most, like her long conversations with the girls she’d once gone to school with at Agnes Irwin, had been crowded out of her life. These days, if she had a chance to have a long conversation with anybody, it would most likely be with a bag lady. Bag ladies littered the halls of all the “people’s projects” her mother now visited.

Bag ladies. Anne Marie shook her head. The last thing she wanted to do was get herself started on the bag ladies. Thinking about them always made her wonder if she was losing her mind.

She looked up, expecting to find herself alone—surely Myra had wandered off to rant and rave at Bobby by this time—and found instead that her sister was still with her, standing in the middle of the foyer’s checkerboard marble floor and looking her over like the head nurse at a diet center, eyes riveted on that damn tin angel. It made Anne Marie feel clammy and even fatter than she was.

“For God’s sake,” Anne Marie said. “What are you staring at?”

“You’re the one who was a million miles away.” Myra sounded uncharacteristically reasonable. “I’ve just been trying to get you to tell me what you meant by saying everybody was here.”

Anne Marie sighed. “Everybody’s here. Bennis and Emma came in right after dinner yesterday. Teddy wandered through at about midnight. Chris called up from Newark at two o’clock in the morning because his car broke down and I had to wake Morgan to go get him. Everybody’s here, Myra.”

“Are they up yet?”

“Of course they’re not up yet. I wouldn’t be up myself if Bobby hadn’t come banging on the door at quarter to six.”

“Have you talked to any of them?”

“If you mean did I sit them down and grill them about their lives, Myra, the answer is no. I never did much go in for gestapo tactics.”

“You never did much go in for self-denial, either,” Myra said. “You’d better put away the chocolates for a while, sweetie. You’re getting positively grotesque.”

Somewhere down at the end of the main hall, a bell started ringing: the bell Daddy used when he was in his study and particularly annoyed or particularly hurried. Anne Marie hesitated—God, how she wanted to give Myra a little of it back; God how she wanted to—but not for long. Myra was a pain in the ass. Daddy was something worse.

Sometimes, lying alone in bed and thinking about him down here with his paneling and his books, thinking about his flat black eyes staring at the bulge at her waist or the trunklike roundness of her thighs, Anne Marie had visions. She saw those eyes broken and blood all over his face.

In one thing, Anne Marie and Myra were in perfect agreement. It really was too bad Daddy had done all that with the money. It was even worse there was no one with an excuse to murder him for it.





2


Almost the first thing Bobby Hannaford did when he realized he’d be alone in the kitchen was take out the half dozen loose pieces of paper he kept his personal accounts on. First he laid them out on the kitchen table in a line. Then he got his calculator from his pocket and put it right beside them. Then he got his fist grip and began to exercise his left hand. It was very quiet in the kitchen, much quieter than it had been at the front of the house. Through the kitchen window, he could see the long line of garages with their swing-out, barnlike doors, every one decorated with silver and gold tinsel wreaths. The kitchen itself was a forest of evergreen and holly. There were the standard Hannaford decorations—the shiny tin balls, bells, angels, and cherubs. Mrs. Washington had even put a miniature crèche on the utility table next to the main stove. Mrs. Washington being Catholic, and there still being forty-two hours to go before Christmas Day, the manger was empty.