Not a Creature Was Stirring(39)
“So?”
“So there’s going to be a list, and there’s going to be nobody on it but us. One of us killed him, all right?”
Anne Marie turned away. She was so tired, the room seemed to be swimming. “You shouldn’t say that. Not out loud where people can hear you.”
“If I don’t say it, maybe it will go away?”
“Maybe.”
“Anne Marie, I called Michael last night.”
Anne Marie turned around just in time to see Bennis throw chopped celery into the bowl and reach for a bag of commercially packaged croutons. God only knew where they had come from. “Am I supposed to know who Michael is?” she said.
“He’s the man I’ve been seeing the last couple of years.”
“And?”
“He happens to be a lawyer. With the Boston DA’s office. I got him out of bed at three o’clock in the morning because I wanted to cry on his shoulder, and I ended up getting a lot of information instead.”
“I can’t believe you wanted to cry on anybody’s shoulder,” Anne Marie said. “Not about Daddy.”
“Never mind what I wanted to cry about. Michael spent half an hour giving me chapter and verse on one Mr. Gregor Demarkian. Get the turkey. If you hold it up for me, I’ll be able to stuff it faster.”
Anne Marie looked at the turkey. The idea of touching its cold, wet skin made her physically ill. She never touched raw meat. She never touched anything slimy. She never even looked at the cuts she got in her hands when she was gardening.
Bennis had poured a large measuring cup of water into the mixing bowl, and now she was staring at her. Anne Marie grabbed the turkey around its thickest part and held it as far away from her as she could.
“I didn’t like Mr. Gregor Demarkian,” Anne Marie said.
“I did,” Bennis said. That was only half true. Sometimes, he made her very nervous. Anne Marie could tell. “But that’s not the point. Do you know why Daddy invited him to dinner?”
“No.”
“You’re not just saying that because you promised to keep it secret?”
“No. He never told me anything, Bennis, except what it was he wanted me to do, when he wanted me to do something. I spent a week arguing with him about Demarkian. Mother’s so damn sick. I couldn’t imagine her surviving a full-scale dinner party. It was like talking to a deaf mute.”
“Was it Daddy’s idea to have us all here for Christmas?”
“It was Myra’s.”
“Could he have asked Myra to make it look like her idea?”
“The only word Daddy has addressed to Myra in the last three years is ‘cunt.’ Scratch that. Sometimes he said ‘stupid cunt.’”
“Marvelous.”
“Daddy was a marvelous man.”
Bennis flipped back the flap of skin at the turkey’s neck and started filling the cavity with soft brown mush. “The thing is,” she said, “Mr. Demarkian is not your ordinary retired FBI agent. Michael says he’s famous. He was the best man they had at investigating murders for twenty years. Apparently the FBI investigates murders that take place on federally owned land and in kidnapping cases and things. When I mentioned his name, Michael practically croaked.”
“So?”
“So why did Daddy invite a murder expert to dinner on Christmas Eve?”
Anne Marie sighed. “Daddy wasn’t rational, Bennis. You know that. He put up a good front for the lawyers, but if he hadn’t had so much money he’d have been institutionalized years ago.”
“Look at it from that Detective Jackman’s point of view. Daddy invited Demarkian for dinner, and the night Demarkian is supposed to show up, Daddy got himself killed. A murder expert and a murder.”
“Bennis, what are you talking about?”
“If I were Detective Jackman, I’d be sitting at home right now, doing a lot of thinking about premeditation. Anne Marie, on the surface of this, right now, it looks like Daddy knew somebody was trying to murder him.”
The turkey was very slippery. It was so slippery, it fell right out of her hands and crashed into the pan she’d been holding it steady in, scattering pieces of brown mush all over the counter. “But that’s ridiculous,” Anne Marie said, wondering what had gone wrong with her head. Her ears seemed to be ringing. “If Daddy thought somebody was trying to kill him, he’d never have everybody here. He’d throw us all out until he calmed down.”
“Anne Marie, I knew Daddy. You knew Daddy. Jackman didn’t know Daddy.”
“But—”
“And there are a couple of other things. If Jackman doesn’t get happy very soon, he’s going to investigate everything. If he investigates everything, he’s going to start looking into the money. When he starts looking into the money, he isn’t going to stop with where it went, he’s going to want to know why it went that way, and then—”