Not a Creature Was Stirring(53)

The prospect of today was so daunting, Bennis was almost ready to go back upstairs and hide herself in bed. She would have done it, but she knew she would never get back to sleep. Bennis was an early riser, when she wanted to be, and sometimes when she didn’t. Long, long ago—not so long, really; it just seemed like it—she’d trained herself to get up at four o’clock in the morning and get moving as soon as her feet hit the floor. That was when she was writing her first book and working as a secretary at First Boston Financial. If she’d been an ordinary typing-pool secretary, she might have been able to write when she got home, at six o’clock, like everybody else in her writers’ group. Instead, she was assistant to the second-highest officer in the corporation. She never got home before nine. By then, she was usually just this side of catatonic. Her boss was a full-fledged, manic-depressive, paranoid psychopath.

On the other hand, it might be just as well she hadn’t been able to write after work. None of the other members of her writers’ group had published as much as a short story.

Somehow, all this mental nattering about her career felt, well, disloyal to Daddy. Bennis had no idea how she could be disloyal to a man who had spent more than thirty years letting her know how much happier he’d have been if she’d never existed, but there it was.

She pushed through the green baize door to the dining room and looked at the overloaded sideboard, the overextended table, the huge poinsettia centerpieces with their chokers of holly and mistletoe. Then she looked at Emma, who was standing next to the coffee urn.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“It’s the music,” Emma said. “I want them to stop the music.”

Music was so much a part of Christmas at Engine House, Bennis hadn’t noticed it before. Ten years ago, Mother had made a single concession to modernity. She’d had all the common rooms in the house wired into a stereo system. At the moment, that system was pumping out an organ rendition of “Silent Night.”

“Idiot,” Bennis said. “He’s got to know there’s been a death in the house. What does he think he’s doing?”

“Who?”

“Marshall,” Bennis said. Marshall was the butler. Sometimes Bennis got the strangest feeling, just realizing her mother had a butler.

Emma looked into her empty coffee cup. “He’s just doing what he was told to do. Anne Marie wrote all the instructions on a piece of paper. I saw it hanging in the pantry.”

Bennis took Emma’s coffee cup, filled it from the urn, and put it on the table. “Sit,” she said. “You look ready to collapse.”

“I am ready to collapse,” Emma said.

The tea was set out in two large pots. One had brew so strong it looked black when it was poured. The other had plain hot water. You were supposed to mix the two. Bennis didn’t bother.

She shoved enough sugar into her tea to turn it into syrup and set the cup next to Emma’s on the table. “Silent Night” had become “Noel,” played on a harpsichord. The instrument sounded tinny, as if it had been discovered after being long abandoned, and played without being retuned.

Mother used to play the harpsichord.

Bennis got out her cigarettes, extracted a crystal ashtray from under the largest of the centerpieces, and lit up.

“You ought to get some sleep,” she said. “You’re not doing anybody any good staying awake in the night.”

Emma shrugged. “You’re not getting any sleep either. The rest of them walk around all night, too, you know. I heard them from my room. Bobby—”

“Bobby? Bobby stayed here again all night?”

“Myra says he’s going to stay all week. That’s not such a bad idea, Bennis. The weather’s been really terrible. And the news last night said there was going to be snow again tomorrow morning.”

“What was Bobby doing walking around?”

“I don’t know.” Emma took a tentative sip of her coffee and made a face. “I went to the upstairs library about two and he was there, working with his calculator. It was weird. He just kept punching buttons and punching buttons, but he didn’t have papers or anything to work with. It was like he knew all the numbers by heart. It made me wonder.”

“About what?”

“Well,” Emma said. She blushed and looked into her coffee cup again.

Overhead, “Silent Night” became “The Holly and the Ivy”—played on a virginal. Mother used to play the virginal, too. For all Bennis knew, Mother had played the music she was hearing now, and recorded it, against the time she would no longer be able to make the carols herself.