“They said it was too dangerous to move her. If I’d found her by myself, I wouldn’t have known she was breathing. I don’t know how long she’d been in here—”
“Where? On the bed?”
“That chair.” Jackman gestured across the room, toward the fireplace, where a chair had been pulled away from the rug and left standing on the hardwood. “Before you ask, nobody moved the chair. That’s where we found her. We’ve had a lot of luck this time. Starting with the fact that we got here at all.”
Gregor checked out the chair. Next to it was a side table, bare except for a large shiny cherub brooch.
“Since she wasn’t dead, I’m surprised you did get here,” Gregor said. “I was just talking to Bennis Hannaford. She said Anne Marie thought it was a suicide attempt, and she thought it was a suicide attempt, until you started saying otherwise. Why on earth did they call you?”
“They didn’t,” Jackman said. “I was listening to the police band. I do that sometimes. Believe it or not, it puts me to sleep. I told you we’ve had a lot of luck. In case you haven’t noticed, the weather’s turned nasty again.”
“I noticed.”
“The ambulance had trouble getting through. There was a traffic call. When I heard where it was for, I came running.”
“And found what?”
“This.” Jackman reached into his shirt pocket and came up with a small folded sheet of notepaper, the stiff kind sold by jewelry stores and overpriced gift shops. “It was lying over there on the night table next to the bed, weighted down by the alarm clock.”
Gregor unfolded it. “Dear Bennis,” it said. “By now you must know this was all my fault, all of it, and the more I think about it the worse it makes me feel. I can’t understand why I cause all this trouble, or what I’m supposed to do about it afterward. Right now I’d rather be dead than alive. Sometimes I just get so confused. If I was dead, would it matter to you? Emma.”
Gregor folded it up again. “It’s a very credible note. More like what suicides actually write than most people would think. Fake notes tend to be—more direct.”
“I know. That’s because this isn’t a fake note.”
“I thought you said on the phone-—-”
“I did. I said I had a suicide note that wasn’t a suicide note. And that’s true. Emma Hannaford wrote that”—-Jackman gestured at the note again—” to Bennis Hannaford as a letter, about three months ago. It worried the hell out of Bennis, so she kept it. She says she’s been meaning to talk to Emma about it ever since they all got to Engine House, but she hasn’t had the chance. And this morning, that note was sitting in her pocketbook, on her bed, in her bedroom, just where she’s been keeping it since the day she got it. She says she saw it there at ten-forty-five.”
“I take it there’s some significance to ten-forty-five,” Gregor said.
Jackman shrugged. “Not as much as I’d like, but enough.” He looked around until he found his notebook, discarded absent-mindedly on top of the windowseat. He picked it up and flipped through the pages. “I took some time and made out a table, as far as I could, from the little questioning I’ve been able to do since I got here. It’s not complete, but it’s got some interesting points. You want to hear them?”
“Of course I do.”
“Good,” Jackman said. “In the first place, Teddy Hannaford saw Emma coming out of their mother’s room—that’s just down the hall here—at a little after ten-thirty. He was going to his own room, and she was going to the stairs. A few minutes after that, Bennis passed her in the foyer. According to Bennis, Emma looked ‘woozy and distracted’—and she should have. You didn’t see the body, or the not-quite-body, but I did. We’re talking about a drug overdose here, not a standard poisoning. Whatever killed her, she must have taken at least an hour before she died. Maybe longer.”
“Can you be sure of that before you get the medical examiner’s report?”
“I can’t be take-it-into-court sure even then,” Jackman said. “But you and I both know that doesn’t matter. You take into court what you can. You figure out what happened with a lot of things you’ll never use at a trial. The M.E.’ll tell me what kind of drug it was. Under the circumstances, I’m betting Demerol.”
“I would, too.”
“Yeah. At any rate, Bennis passed Emma in the foyer, and then Emma went to the kitchen. She talked to”—Jackman consulted his notes—“Mrs. Washington. The cook. She asked for some tea for her mother. She said she felt sick. She sat in the kitchen for a while. In the middle of all this, Bennis got to her own room, locked herself in and went looking through her pocketbook for a fresh pack of cigarettes. That’s when she saw the note. She says she even took it out and read it.”