Not a Creature Was Stirring(58)

She had left her coat lying over the banister at the bottom of the stairs. She picked it up, put it on, and went out the front door. The door snicked closed behind her, locking automatically.

What could you do with a man who didn’t even notice his keys were missing when he left for the office in the morning?

She stepped onto the sidewalk, raised her hand for a cab, and had a very troublesome thought.

That Gregor Demarkian person was an FBI man.

The FBI worked on federal bank and stock investigations.

What if Daddy had known about this, too?





SEVEN


1


THERE WAS A GRANDFATHER clock in the hall outside her bedroom. When it began striking, Cordelia Day Hannaford began counting the notes. It was easier to do that than to get up and look at the bedside clock, or even lift her arm and look at the watch on her wrist. She had tried to do both those things when Emma left the room. She had succeeded with the watch, but the effort had left her nauseated and mentally fogged. And it had taken a very long time. She had no idea how many minutes it had been from the moment Emma left to get the tea tray to the moment she had got her wrist up high enough, and her mind cleared long enough, to see that it was 10:36.

It was now eleven o’clock. She had been at rest for twenty-four minutes, more time than she needed to make the sick feeling go away. As always when she felt well these days, her mind seemed to be detached from her body, floating and free, in her skull but not of it. She had felt much the same way on those mornings, long ago, when she had woken after a night of too many champagne cocktails. Champagne cocktails. She wished Anne Marie weren’t so conscientious about doctors’ orders. She was going to be dead before New Year’s. They weren’t telling her, but she knew. What she would like between now and then was a day on the chaise in the sitting room, listening to Cole Porter on the stereo and drinking champagne cocktails.

What she would like between now and then was to be at ease.

She stirred in bed, involuntarily, just enough to dislodge the blanket and send it puddling around her waist. She knew they wondered about it, all of them, not only the children but the people she met outside. They wanted to know why she had married Robert Hannaford. Some of them wanted to know why she had stayed with him. He could be an evil man. Some of the things that had happened in this house would scare the skin off a mercenary soldier. But the scenarios they invented for her were all wrong. She had been poor, yes—but she hadn’t married him for his money or stayed with him for it. By the time she had met him, she had had her life all planned. She would go through with the ridiculous charade of a debutante year, eating other people’s food, dancing in other people’s ballrooms, wearing hand-me-down Balenciagas that had graced the backs of the richest heiresses in town. Coming out could cost a quarter of a million dollars or nothing at all, depending. She was the last living representative of a great old Philadelphia name. She had the right connections, the right background and the right tale of woe. People wanted to do things for her, and she let them. She felt she owed it to herself-—and to her mother, who had cared so painfully much about all that sort of thing. When it was over, she had every intention of turning her back on it, coming up to Penn State, and getting sensible.

Instead, she met Robert Hannaford, at a dinner for a hundred and six given by a Rockefeller connection with ambitions. The dinner was idiotic: too much food, too many people, too little planning. Robert was seated beside her for no good reason either of them could tell. Because she was “horsey” and he was not, most hostesses would have assumed they had nothing to say to each other. Well, she had had nothing to say to him, but he had had a great deal to say to her—and she had recognized in him, right at the beginning, a quality she had encountered before only in her father. Robert Hannaford was a man who could attach himself to one person. If he never met that person, he would attach himself to no one at all.

She had let herself be attached. She had let herself stay attached. She had even been happy. Robert could be a good man, if he wanted to be—and he always wanted to be, with her. He bought her things. He took her places. He did everything but settle money on her, and she didn’t mind that. That was the measure of his fear. He was sure that if he ever gave her the chance, she would run away.

It was the children who changed everything. He had hated them from the beginning, even hated her pregnancies, always disappearing for the last four months before the births so that he didn’t have to witness either her agony or her joy. She had loved them more than she expected to. Sometimes she thought she should have stopped at one, or maybe two, as soon as she knew how they were affecting him. She couldn’t have done it. She’d had seven and she would have had more, if her body had held out. Even now, old and sick and almost dead, what would have made her happiest was to hear that she was pregnant.