Not a Creature Was Stirring(38)

By the time she’d gotten the strangers out of the house and Mother settled and the rest of them packed off to bed, she’d been so tired she’d thought she was going to pass out in her clothes. She hadn’t. She’d never gotten to sleep at all. As soon as the light was out, she stared at the ceiling, and once the light was on again she stared at her hands. It was impossible. The corpse was still walking, but there were nightmares waiting for her on the other side of consciousness. She wanted nothing to do with them. Bloody and dead, bloody and dead, bloody and dead. It was odd how you could hate someone so much when he was alive, and then be so—upset—when he was dead.

She stepped out of the pantry hall into the kitchen to find Bennis standing at the counter next to the sink, throwing what looked like raw mushrooms into a mixing bowl. She bit her lip. Bennis was dressed in her hanging-around-home uniform—-jeans, turtleneck, knee socks, baggy flannel shirt—and it was so damn inappropriate for Engine House. On the other hand, Bennis also seemed to be doing something about dinner, and Anne Marie didn’t want to get in the way of that.

Bennis saw her, looked up, and waved her over. “Celery,” she said. “I can’t finish this without celery.”

“Celery,” Anne Marie repeated.

Bennis sighed. She looked as tired as Anne Marie felt. “Is that the only refrigerator we have? Is there cold storage someplace else? It takes six or seven hours to cook a turkey this size. If we don’t get our acts together, we’re not going to be able to eat until New Year’s.”

“Oh,” Anne Marie said. She turned around and headed back to the pantry hall—ran, really, losing her cool all over again. There were a lot of extra refrigerators at Engine House. There was a whole wall of them, built in, opposite the pantry closet. Anne Marie rummaged around in the carrots and parsnips and green beans, found two stalks of celery—or was it heads?—and grabbed them. Myra always claimed not to know one vegetable from another in its undoctored state, but Anne Marie thought that was a lie. Myra was always on a diet.

Back in the kitchen, Bennis took the celery, laid it down next to a pile of onions, and said, “Mrs. Washington called. She can’t get in today. She’s got half a foot of snow in front of her door.”

“I was expecting that,” Anne Marie said.

“And I went in to see Mother,” Bennis said. “She was practically coherent. I still think it was shitty of that doctor to refuse to come out last night.”

Anne Marie shrugged. “It isn’t as if Mother hasn’t been in that state before. And he wouldn’t be negligent, Bennis. He’d be too afraid of getting sued.”

“If anything happens to her, he is going to get sued. That’s one of the nice things about having a lot of money you’ve made yourself. You can spend it any way you want to.” She threw the last of the mushrooms into the bowl and reached for the onions.

“Look,” she said, “there’s something we have to talk about.”

Anne Marie stepped away from the counter. Quickly. “I know what you want to talk about. I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to hear a thing.”

“Anne Marie, you’re going to have to hear about it. Believe me—to cop an attitude out of the latest private-eye fiction—you’d much rather hear it from me than from the police.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t,” Anne Marie said. “Teddy might be right. It might have been an accident. That policeman could just be grandstanding or something. Trying to get his name in the papers.”

“It’s Bobby who was right. And that Gregor Demarkian. The Bryn Mawr police don’t want to investigate people like us. It’s a pain in the ass. It would be like the Boston police going after somebody named Cabot. There had to be something in that scene last night that made murder the inevitable conclusion, and it had to be something obvious, because they hit it right away. And that means we’re in big trouble.”

“I don’t see why we have to be in any trouble at all. Somebody got in from the outside—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Bennis threw chopped onion into the bowl and reached for the celery. “Look, the police may not know it yet, but you’ve been around Daddy for years. You know what the security is like at Engine House. There’s a seven-foot wall around this property, and the top of it’s electrified. There are guys patrolling the gate. I was still living here when the police tried to make Daddy stop arming them. The old man was a paranoid nut. Nobody got in or out of here yesterday without being signed, timed, stamped, and dated.”