Not a Creature Was Stirring(56)

“Don’t tell me. For Christ’s sake, Bobby, don’t tell me.”

“Somebody has to tell you.”

“Bennis tells me,” Chris said. “She appointed herself my surrogate mother years ago. Emma tells me—”

“There’s something wrong with Emma, too. I saw her in the foyer when I was coming out. She looks—I don’t know how she looks. I don’t like the way this family is disintegrating.”

“Right,” Chris said.

“There’s something else. The police seals have been broken. The ones on the door in the study. I was down in that hall this morning, and—”

Bobby was going on and on, trying to explain his way out of what it was impossible to explain his way out of, but Chris wasn’t listening to him. Chris had been looking at the car ceiling all this time. Now he pulled his head down, caught sight of the backpack, picked up no bad vibrations, and turned his attention to Bobby. Bobby was sweating as heavily as a construction worker pounding rivets on a hot August day, and that was very odd.

“Wait a minute,” Chris said. “What do you mean, the police seals have been broken?”

Bobby got a handkerchief out and wiped his face. “They’ve been broken. It’s like I said. I went into that hall to—”

“Don’t tell me why you went into that hall.”

“But it’s important.”

“No it isn’t,” Chris said. “The police seals are important.”

“Chris, there’s nothing to say about the police seals. They were broken, that’s all. Somebody’s gone into the study. I noticed it right away. You know how they were, strips of paper stretched across the door like they do with toilets in bad hotels?”

“I know.”

“Well, they’d been ripped. Very carefully, so that the tears were straight. And then the ripped parts had been taped back together again. If you were standing at the end of the hall, you wouldn’t necessarily notice it. But when you got right up to the door, there it was.”

Chris thought about it. “Which side had they been ripped on?” he asked finally. “The side with the knob or the other one?”

“Why is that important?”

“It shows what kind of trouble whoever it was went to,” Chris said. “If they’re ripped on the knob side, whoever it was just did it and wasn’t thinking clearly. You know the police are going to notice if they’ve been ripped on that side. But if they were ripped on the other—”

“It was the side with the knob,” Bobby said.

“Interesting.”

Bobby turned away. “I don’t see what’s so interesting about it. This is a serious business. You don’t seem to realize. None of you seem to realize. The police are going to want to arrest somebody for this murder, and if we don’t watch out—”

“What?”

Bobby stared down at his black, polished, archaic wing-tip shoes. “It was Myra,” he said. “I saw her coming out of that hall. Just before I went in.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday.”

“When?”

“Around three o’clock. In the afternoon, I mean.”

“I thought you said you went into that hall today.”

“Well, I did. I noticed the police seals today. But I was there yesterday, too, I wanted something from the supplies closet, and Myra was just coming out as I was going in. And you know where the supplies closet is. It’s way up at the foyer end of the hall. I couldn’t see anything from there. But this morning—”

“Bobby,” Chris said, “you’re talking about seventeen, eighteen hours. Or more. If you don’t even know if the seals were broken when you went into the hall yesterday—”

“They weren’t broken at one o’clock,” Bobby said.

Chris raised an eyebrow. “One o’clock?”

Bobby turned away. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do anything. I just went down and looked at the door. I couldn’t help myself.”

“Grief for dear old Dad,” Chris said.

Bobby got his briefcase off the floor and put it in his lap. “Just go screw yourself. Just turn right around and stuff it up your own—”

“My own what?”

“Asshole. This is my office, Chris. I have to get out.”

Bobby’s office was half a block up—half a block of slush and grit, the kind of thing Chris was sure Bobby never walked into, no matter what. Even so, Bobby was putting on his coat and rearranging the pieces of his suit. His suit seemed to need a lot of rearranging.

“You sit out in California,” Bobby said, “and you don’t realize what’s happening out here. You don’t realize. Some of our dear bosom relatives have been losing their marbles for years.”