He watched Anne Marie go upstairs, wrapped in the cocoon of her habitual bad temper, then headed for the living room. He liked it in the drawing room. The Christmas decorations were thicker there than anywhere else at Engine House, and with the fire going he could almost get into the holiday spirit. He thought about Emma and wondered why she hadn’t meant more to him. That didn’t seem to have an answer, so he gave it up. He’d never been close to any of his brothers and sisters, never liked them much, never wanted to know them well. They existed for him very much the way the characters existed in the novels he taught—as archetypes. Bennis The Golden One. Christopher The Tortured Poet. Anne Marie The Frustrated Spinster. He just wished one of them was a Knight in Shining Armor, so he’d have a hope in hell of being rescued from this mess.
What his “friends” had told him, evasively but firmly, was that there wasn’t a thing they could do for him. That was when he’d started putting quotation marks around that word. What they were handing him was a lot of nonsense. One of them was dean of faculty at a small college outside Albany. The place was always hard up for professors and never particular about the men it took. One of them was chairman of the English department at an even smaller place in Dedham, Massachusetts. That was a junior college where students weren’t even required to submit SAT scores for admission, because no one would have dared to ask for them. Listening to these two blither on for twenty minutes apiece about “standards” and “professional responsibility” had made Teddy sick—but not half as sick as he’d been when he’d realized they both already knew what was going on at Greer. The academic grapevine was efficient, but this was nothing short of paranormal. The Pregnant Frog must have been on the phone all Christmas week.
Teddy opened the living room door and stepped inside. The Christmas tree had been lit. Some servant must have done it automatically, not realizing how bad it would look to outsiders, shining away like that in a house where there had been two deaths in a little more than three days. On the other hand, the outsiders were all gone. The police had packed up their evidence cases and headed for the glories of downtown Bryn Mawr, and Mr. Gregor Demarkian had gone with them. The drawing room was fragrant with evergreen and wax, the picture of a Victorian dream Christmas. Teddy wanted it that way.
His glance stopped for a moment on the little collection of family photographs in Tiffany silver frames his mother kept on an occasional table and then passed on. The pictures would only get him started again. He liked looking at the harpsichord better. Someone had uncovered it, dusted it off, and propped back the shield that protected the keyboard. It looked ready to play.
He moved into the room. He wanted to find the family copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes and settle down in a chair for a nice long read. Logic and gaslight, that’s what he needed. He’d ring for Marshall and get himself a nice hot buttered rum. The rest of them—living, dead, and dying—could just go to hell.
He was making his way through the overcrowded cluster of furniture in the corner between the windows and the bookcase when he stepped on something he didn’t like the feel of at all. It was both too hard and too soft, too giving and too intractable. He looked down. His foot seemed to have landed on a long piece of green chamois cloth. If he followed that cloth toward the windows, it ended in a pale white hand.
He stepped away, shaking slightly. Then he leaned sideways a little to get a look over the back of a royal blue velvet love seat.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Christopher?”
Christopher was lying on the rug, flat on his back, with one of Mother’s Steuben glass ashtrays sitting in the middle of his chest. His eyes were closed, but the ashtray held a burning joint, rolled in pink-and-blue paper. His hair was a mess. Teddy couldn’t understand it. The room was so damn cold, even with the fire going. Christopher was oozing sweat like a glass of iced tea in high summer.
“Christopher,” Teddy said again.
“I’m fine,” Christopher said. “Go away.”
“I’m not going to go away.” Teddy sat down on the love seat. “It’s my house as much as yours. I want a book and a drink.”
“Have a joint instead.”
“You must be out of your mind. There are police all over this place. You’re going to get arrested.”
Christopher sighed, a sound like the wind rushing out of an overfilled balloon. Then he opened his eyes and sat up. “Teddy, the police left hours ago. And even if they were here, they wouldn’t care.”
“Of course they would care,” Teddy said. “This isn’t California.”