Not a Creature Was Stirring(26)

“Good lord,” Gregor said. “You’re making a dirty joke.”

“I’m making a dirty pun.” She took the photograph out of his hand and made a face at it, fierce, like an old woman chasing a raccoon away from her root cellar. “This,” she said, “is the nice Armenian boy who came from Boston and got Donna Moradanyan pregnant and just disappeared into thin air.”





FIVE


1


IT WAS AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK, full dark, when old Robert Hannaford finally backed his wheelchair away from the niche in the south wall of his study and gave up. In the niche, a black marble bust of Aristotle gleamed with polish and indifference, its base just a little out of true. Just a little. In the old days—no more than a year ago—he had been able to lift that bust straight into the air over his head, never mind the fact that it had to weigh at least forty pounds. Even six months ago he’d been able to get it out and hold it steadily in the air, arms straight to the front of him, for a good five minutes. He was an old man, and a cripple, but he worked at himself. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were massive and solid. From the back, he almost looked young.

From the front, he looked seventy-six, which he was. He drummed impatiently on the arm of his chair. And then, because that hurt, he stopped. His hands were going. The skin on them was slack, and the thickness at the joints was arthritis. Sometimes he woke in the night with pain so bad it reminded him of his accident, all those years ago, when every bone in his body seemed to have been powdered and the powder ground into his nerves.

A lot of things had been reminding him of the accident, lately. Weak or not—and he refused to think of himself as weak, or sick, or old; once you got started in that direction, your life came apart—there was nothing wrong with his mind. Too many things had been odd at Engine House in the last few weeks. It wasn’t Myra inviting the rest of them up for Christmas. He could have accepted that as a gesture to Cordelia, and put up with it—as far as he ever put up with anything. His children were a pack of idiots, and dangerous idiots as well. From the time of the accident, he had known that one or the other of them would always be trying to kill him. But Cordelia loved them, and Cordelia loved Christmas. And Christmas, as far as his wife was concerned, was a family holiday. Robert put his trust in truism: his children weren’t suicidal. They didn’t want to kill themselves, only him. And he’d made sure they knew what precautions he’d taken and just how hard it would be to get out of this house if they did anything stupid. This time.

He wheeled himself to the window and looked out at the drive, clear and wet even though the snow was coming down in sheets. Little things, that was the problem. A pen that moved itself to the living room. A cup of coffee that went from the top of the desk to the top of the mantel. The kind of thing that might be the result of his own forgetfulness, if he were a forgetful man. He wasn’t. Once, he’d had an eidetic memory. That had gone—his own father had warned him it would—but he had been left with much better recall than most people started out with. He could no longer flip through a book he had never seen before and then recite it, word perfect. He could tell anyone who wanted to know exactly what he’d done with his day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, inconsequential act by inconsequential act.

A letter that went from the “finished” pile to the “unfinished” one. A sweater left lying on the love seat in front of the fire transposed to the wing chair near the door. Little things.

He leaned back, grabbed the buzzer he had left on the occasional table near his private bar, and jabbed at the button. He was bored, and when he got bored he got angry. He punched the button four or five times, then looked at the red numbers on the digital clock on his desk. If it took Anne Marie at least five minutes to get here, he’d have a perfect excuse to rip into her. What with having to come from the other end of the house, it often took her a good deal more than five minutes. Fat stupid cunt.

This round, it took her no time at all. Robert had barely checked the exact time—5:17:06—when he heard footsteps in the hall. The door swung open, moving on hinges so well oiled they couldn’t be heard at all, and Anne Marie was there. Fat stupid cunt, Robert thought again. Trussed up like a Town and Country centerpiece in cashmere and tweeds. Vulgarized by one of those crude tin brooches Cordelia had made as a child. The woman was becoming grotesque. She looked gelatinous.

She was also used to his complaints. She shut the door behind her and said, “Are you all right? You sounded frantic.”