Not a Creature Was Stirring(34)

“A Christmas decoration.”

“There aren’t any in here,” Gregor said. “In fact, from the look of this room, I think Mr. Hannaford may have belonged to the bah, humbug school of holiday celebrations.”

Jackman let the piece of tin drop. “I think it’s time I got you out of here,” he said. “You’re beginning to make me feel weird. You always made me feel weird.”

“Why? I’m just—”

“Don’t,” Jackman said. “I’ve heard your lecture on internal consistency. I’ve memorized your lecture on internal consistency. I don’t want to hear it now.”

“I wasn’t going to deliver a lecture,” Gregor said.

“You aren’t going to get the chance.” Jackman took off the gloves and put them in the pocket of his jacket. They made a bulge that reminded Gregor of the bulges guns made.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Jackman said, “you are a suspect in this case. As a suspect in this case, I think you ought to meet the other suspects in this case.”

“You mean you think I ought to get out of your hair.”

“Interpret it any way you want to. You’re going to get out of here. Now.”





TWO


1


CORDELIA DAY HANNAFORD WAS sitting in a yellow wing chair next to the fireplace, directly in line with the open door. She was the first thing Gregor saw when he came into the room. She was the only thing he saw for many minutes afterward. She had her arms propped up on the arms of the chair, her back propped up by its back, and her feet flat on the floor. In repose, she was perfect, a Lady of the Manor as imagined by Turner. Her bones were fine and delicate. Her eyes were large and widely spaced and deeply blue. Her hair was white, but thick and glossy, as if it had turned early. It was only when she moved that Gregor realized something was wrong. She tried to turn her head when he came into the room. Her effort was not only slow and painful, but completely without control. First she jerked right. Then she jerked left. Then her hands and arms began to shake. Once they started, she couldn’t make them stop. It was like watching that terrible old movie, Lost Horizon. Cordelia Day Hannaford was physically disintegrating in front of his eyes.

With Elizabeth, until the last year, reality had been less obvious. In fact, it hadn’t been obvious at all. In the early days, living with Elizabeth’s dying had been an almost hallucinatory experience. She looked well. She almost always felt well. Every once in a while, she went off to the hospital for chemotherapy—and then she was sick. Gregor had come to hate the chemotherapy with a fine hot passion he’d never been able to work up for serial murderers. Or presidential assassins. Elizabeth looked terrible when she came back from the hospital and felt worse. He would leave for work in the morning and hear her vomiting in the bathroom, vomiting and vomiting, like someone who had swallowed poison. When he got drunk enough—and there had been nights; he hadn’t been able to help himself—he started to think they were giving her poison. Then the chemotherapy would be over, and she would be fine again. So fine, he might as well have imagined the whole thing.

Elizabeth’s last year had been a shock. After five years of sick-and-well, well-and-sick, he hadn’t been prepared for it. Cordelia Day Hannaford’s children would have no such problem. Gregor didn’t know what she had, but looking at Cordelia Day he was sure it had been a progressive disease. Muscles didn’t melt into Silly Putty overnight—and if they did, their owner didn’t accept the change without a lot of panic and denial. Cordelia Day was in pain, but she was at peace, at least about herself.

The room was very hot. The fire was blazing. Gregor became suddenly aware of a number of unpleasant things. He was still wearing his heavy winter coat over his best winter wool suit. All those layers of insulation were making rivers of sweat run down his back. Then there was Cordelia Day. She was staring at him and he was staring at her—and her children were staring at both of them. Now the movie all this reminded him of wasn’t Lost Horizon, but something by Antonioni, or maybe Bergman, one of those endless black-and-white productions with very little dialogue and a lot of long silences.

He tried to pull himself back emotionally, and in the process noticed a few things he should have noticed right off. Cordelia Day Hannaford was covered with blood. There was so much of it soaked into the skirt of her pale blue dress, it had probably been wet when Jackman first saw her. Now it was drying. Thick, stiff clots of it were webbed across the material that covered her knees. They made the dress look embroidered.

The other people in the room, the children, were not as hostile as he’d expected them to be. Bennis he recognized from her author photos. She was almost too cordial. The tall, lanky young man with the weak mouth and the frightened eyes wasn’t frightened of Gregor. The very young woman who looked so much like Bennis, but wasn’t as pretty, barely registered his existence. What animosity there was, and it was palpable, came from the man with his left leg in a brace and the stout middle-aged woman who stood behind Cordelia Day Hannaford’s chair.