Not a Creature Was Stirring(27)

“Of course I’m all right. Where’s that man? It’s after five o’clock.”

Anne Marie sighed. “Morgan was supposed to pick him up at five o’clock, Daddy. It’s only twenty past. You can’t get up here from Philadelphia in twenty minutes.”

“When he gets here, I want you to bring him straight to me. I have something I want to talk to him about before dinner.”

Anne Marie nodded, looking bored—which she probably was. She was not only a fat stupid cunt, but a singularly uncurious one.

“Is that all?” she asked him. “If it is, I’m going to get some work done in the kitchen. We do have a guest for dinner.”

Robert rubbed his face, trying the line of the dent where Marshall had nicked him that morning. “How’s your mother?” he asked. “She hasn’t been down to see me once today.”

“She’s been tired,” Anne Marie said. “She’s taken at least two naps. She knows she’s going to want to stay up later than usual tonight. I think she just wants to be in good shape.”

“Will she be in good shape?”

“She’s better than she’s been in weeks.”

Robert flicked this away, using his hands, as if ideas were physical entities. What Cordelia had been “for weeks” was in a state of collapse. What Anne Marie had just said could mean anything. “What about the rest of them?” he asked. “Have they been in to see her?”

“Haven’t they told you? You’ve had almost every one of them in here for one thing or another today.”

“I didn’t ask you what they told me. I asked you what you know.”

Anne Marie hesitated. “Most of them have,” she said finally. “Emma and Bennis—”

“I didn’t tell you to get most of them to see her. I told you to get all of them. Jesus God, Anne Marie, what do you want? Emma having hysterics at the dinner table when Cordelia drops a glass?”

“Emma has seen her,” Anne Marie said. “She and Bennis went up together right after lunch. And Myra’s been in, and Bobby. It’s Teddy and Chris I can’t seem to find.”

“What do you mean, can’t seem to find?”

“What does it sound like I mean, Daddy? They’ve disappeared someplace. I haven’t had a call from Baylor at the gate, so I suppose they’re still on the property, but I don’t know where. They were down for lunch and then they were gone.”

“Have you looked for them?”

“Of course I’ve looked for them. I went to both their rooms and I checked all the common rooms and I even went out to the garage, about half an hour ago, just in case.”

“What in the name of hell would they be doing down in the garage?”

“I have no idea,” Anne Marie said. “It was just somewhere I hadn’t looked.”

“Assholes,” Robert Hannaford said. “What time’s your mother due to come downstairs?”

“Six.”

“Try to get them both up to see her before she comes down. Try. I don’t want either one of them making a scene while that man’s here. And your mother probably wants to see them anyway. She always does.”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said, “she does.”

“Then go look for them. What are you hanging around here for?”

Anne Marie seemed about to say something, but thought better of it. She always did. Robert watched her get the doorknob turned and the door opened, every movement an agony of clumsiness. Fat stupid cunt. At least the rest of them looked all right.

“Fat stupid cunt,” Robert Hannaford said aloud.

Anne Marie turned to look at him, her eyes flat. Then she walked into the hall and closed the door behind her.

Robert Hannaford wheeled himself back to the window to keep watch on the drive, burning money by the second in an orgy of electrical heat.





2


At 5:17:09, only seconds after Anne Marie entered Robert Hannaford’s study, Christopher Hannaford lit the fourth of six joints he had brought out to the stables after lunch, took a monumentally huge drag on the slick end of it, and passed it to Teddy. Like the three joints that had come before it, and the two still resting in the breast pocket of Chris’s blue cotton workshirt, it was as big as a cigar, and safe. Its safety resided in the fact that Chris had grown the marijuana himself. That was a necessity. Out in California, marijuana dealers tended to deal in other things as well, and because of that they also tended to spray their grass with substances no sane person would want. Heroin. Crack. If you couldn’t get your clients hyped by fair means, use foul. It was for that reason—and not just because he liked the stuff so damned much himself—that Chris was in favor of legalizing grass.