Not a Creature Was Stirring(59)

By the time things started going seriously wrong, there was nothing she could do about any of it, except kill the man herself. That one of the children was going to kill him had been obvious for years—either that, or they were going to start killing each other. That was why she had been so relieved to find him dead.

Outside, the clock struck the quarter hour, a single bass-note chime that sounded like a dinner gong.

It was 11:15.

Cordelia Day Hannaford closed her eyes and told herself not to panic.





2


In the bedroom across the hall and three doors down from Cordelia’s, Emma Hannaford sat on the edge of a grey princess chair and watched a pool of her own vomit spread across the oak floor. It was an immense pool, bigger than an ocean, and the dimmer her sight got the bigger it seemed to become. She was seconds away from passing out. Once she passed out, she would be dead.

I should be afraid, she thought, and then she thought of all the things people did in situations like this in the books she read. Leave a dying message. Leave a dying clue. She ought to do something to warn the rest of them, but she couldn’t. She knew what had happened to her. That replayed itself, like a movie on a loop tape, over and over again in her mind. The teacup. The spoon. The back turned and the elbows moving oddly, in the wrong directions, for what was supposed to be going on. It must have been Demerol that got put into the tea. She was allergic to it, although she was the only one here who knew that. When they had given her a prescription for it in New York after she broke her leg, it had made her sick, then, too.

If she could get out of her chair and across the room, she could ring for a maid and the maid might be able to help her. She couldn’t get out of her chair. The room was very dark and very long, darker and longer than it had ever been before. She was having a hard time holding up her head. This must be what it was like to be Mother. Muscles that wouldn’t obey you. Nerves that had gone on strike. A mind that drifted from one thing to another, never catching hold of anything. That much had started back in the city, coming on her every month or two like a sudden chill. That much had frightened her, until she had seen Mother—and what was happening to her was instantly clear.

But that had nothing to do with this.

This was—

She fell back into her chair, feeling black.

She should do something to warn them. She should, she should, she should. She should do something heroic and very, very wise.

It was the middle of the afternoon and it was snowing and it was dark and she was dying. And she didn’t want to die.

She really didn’t.





PART THREE


TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27–WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28

THE THIRD MURDER





ONE


1


UNTIL THE TELEPHONE CALL came, Gregor Demarkian had been thinking about something else. That was odd, because for days he had been thinking of nothing but the Hannafords, even when he was ostensibly concentrating on something else. But it had been an interesting day, and an illuminating one. Ordinary things had crept up on him and finally taken him over. For once, his apartment seemed neither alien nor cold. It was just a place he was utterly incapable of taking care of.

It was two o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 27. Gregor had spent the morning talking to Donna Moradanyan, a soothing exercise if there ever was one. Unlike Tibor and Lida and everyone else on the street, the girl was not panicking. She wasn’t depressed, either. She’d knocked on his door just after he’d finished his breakfast, fresh from a snowball fight on the sidewalk, glowing and cold and happy in spite of everything. For the five hundredth time, Gregor told himself she was the least Armenian-looking woman he had ever seen. Tall and fair and athletic, she reminded him of the Swedish girls in 1930s movies.

She stood on his mat, stamping snow off her L. L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes, her hands balled into fists in the pockets of an oversize army flak jacket.

“I feel like I should whisper,” she told him. “You know, just to keep the spy motif going.”

“Spy motif?”

“Like the way it is with Mrs. Arkmanian. Every time I bring this up, she practically starts talking in code.”

Gregor let her in. Because she’d been in before, she spent no time looking over the apartment and wasted no breath telling him how bad it was for him. She just went straight to the kitchen and started fussing with the stove, the way some women will with men they think can’t cook. Gregor supposed this was a ritual that was now out of fashion. He thought that was too bad. Assuming the man involved was not a complete jerk—which was assuming a lot in some cases, he would grant that—fussing like this could be a great comfort to both parties.