“To give you a lecture on nouvelle cuisine?”
“Wanted to know if I knew where Bobby was. Looked right through the pantry, like he was going to be hiding in the potato bin. Came out and called him an ugly name. Things are tense around here when she shows up.”
“Has she been showing up a lot?”
“Once a week or so since your mother got out of the hospital. I’d put it down to worry about Mrs. Hannaford, but she never goes up to see Mrs. Hannaford. Nobody does. Even he waits for her to come down.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to impose on her,” Bennis said.
Mrs. Washington snorted. “Take one of these ham and cheese things,” she said. “Then get out of my kitchen. With all the coming and going around here today, I’m half an hour late.”
4
Bennis wandered into the back hall, and then into the foyer, and then—for no reason in particular—into the east wing corridor. She was bone tired. She’d spent most of the day with her muscles tight and her breath coming in hitches, wondering when one or the other of them was going to go too far. It was one thing to moan and wail about your family to strangers, or even nonstrangers, like Michael, who didn’t know them. When you did that you just came off like somebody in a sitcom and gave the impression you were Just Too Hip not to be alienated. The truth was, there was nothing sitcom-ish about this place, and never had been. Too much had happened. Too much had gone unresolved and unforgiven. Even elementary conversations about the weather generated currents of history and hate.
There was a door open near the other end of the corridor, a light spilling out into the amber discretion of the hall. Bennis went toward that, unthinking. She wished she knew where Emma was. Bennis had gone looking for her half an hour ago, but Emma hadn’t been in her room or the library or Mother’s sitting room, her usual places. Then Anne Marie had come roaring out of nowhere, absolutely insisting on having help finding Teddy and Chris. Anne Marie had been looking for those two all day, making everyone’s life hell. She would go on making everyone’s life hell until she found them. So Bennis, who had seen them slip out the east wing rear door just after lunch, went to collect them.
The open door at the end of the corridor was the door to Daddy’s study. Bennis was sure of it. She stopped, confused. From what she remembered, that door was never left open unless Daddy was out and about in the house, and he wouldn’t be now. He’d left instructions with everyone on earth, through Anne Marie, that he wanted that Mr. Demarkian person brought directly to the east wing as soon as he arrived, and that he intended to be there. Bennis thought of the bathroom and rejected it. The study had a bathroom en suite. She advanced down the corridor and stared at the light on the floor.
If she barged in there and there was nothing wrong, he’d have her head. He’d been looking for an excuse to have it, anyway.
On the other hand, he was an old man, and old men had strokes.
Crap.
Bennis Hannaford had never been a ditherer. She had never liked ditherers. She couldn’t understand what she was doing here, shifting back and forth on her feet like a grade-school child who needed, but was too embarrassed to ask, to go to the toilet.
Making up her mind, she went down the hall to the door, pushed it open wide, and stepped into the study.
Her father was lying halfway across the room from his wheelchair, sprawled out on the fieldstone overlap of the fireplace base.
Her mother was sitting on the raised hearth, the broad skirt of her blue silk dress wet and heavy with very fresh blood.
Robert Hannaford’s head had been crushed into pulp.
SIX
1
AT TWENTY-TWO MINUTES PAST six, Gregor Demarkian, sitting in the back of Robert Hannaford’s custom stretch Cadillac limousine, passed through the front gates of Engine House. The main house was so far from the road, he couldn’t see it at first. The landscape around him reminded him of stories of the forest primeval. Every once in a while, a hailstone came down in the muck of thick snow falling from the sky. It struck the windshield or the roof of the car and disappeared into the surrounding white.
“This driveway’s heated,” the driver said, producing the observation in the smooth upbeat rhythm of a tour guide. “That’s why we haven’t been skidding since we got through the gate.”
Gregor said, “Mmmmm.” He hadn’t noticed they hadn’t been skidding since they got through the gate. He hadn’t even noticed they had been before they got through it. His mind was on a number of things, all of them anchored back on Cavanaugh Street. Donna. Lida. Those telephone calls. He sat a little forward, trying to see where they were going.