Not a Creature Was Stirring(85)

“They didn’t come.”

“I was wondering why your father was sure it was one of his daughters,” Gregor said. “I was imagining lipstick on his collar.”

“If there’d been lipstick on his collar, he’d have known it was Myra,” Bennis laughed. “She’s the only one who wears enough of it to have it smear off. No, it was just that the boys were other places.”

“As far as you know.”

“Excuse me?”

“As far as you know,” Gregor repeated. “It seems to me that no matter where they said they were, any one of them could have followed you out there and been hiding in the bushes.”

“I suppose they could have,” Bennis said. “I know we never checked up on them later. But it’s like I said. We thought—Anne Marie and Myra and I thought—we thought we knew what had happened.”

“What did happen?”

“We had lunch. And when that was finished we cleaned up, and Daddy said he wanted to sit out on the bluff, close, where he could see over. Anne Marie and I wheeled him as close as we liked, which wasn’t very close at all. We told the police later we’d put him right up to the edge, but it wasn’t true. We stopped the chair a good ten feet back. The ground there is flat, and before you get to the drop it goes up a little.”

“Meaning he couldn’t have just rolled off.”

“He would have had to have been pushed. And he would have had to have been pushed hard. And long. Anne Marie and I put him out there, and we put on the brakes—I saw the brakes on, Mr. Demarkian, and I didn’t make a mistake—and then he asked for a hot chocolate. So Anne Marie and I went back to the fire—”

“Could you see your father from the fire?”

“No. There’s a stand of trees out there. He was on the other side of it from where the rest of us were. We got back to the fire and told Mother he wanted some hot chocolate, and then Emma offered to bring it to him. So we let her.”

“You sound as if you don’t think you should have let her.”

“We shouldn’t have,” Bennis said, “even if it turns out she didn’t try to kill him, that time. They’d had a tremendous fight the night before. Emma was always very protective of Mother, and in those days, before Mother got seriously sick, Daddy could be very abusive to her. Not as abusive as he was with the rest of us, and not on purpose. If Daddy had known the effect the things he was saying were having on her, he’d never have said them. That’s one thing you have to give him. He did love Mother. But he was a cruel man, Mr. Demarkian, naturally cruel, so naturally he often didn’t know he was being cruel. And the night before this happened, he’d said something to Mother that Emma objected to, and Emma just lit into him. Then he lit into her, and they had a screaming match that lasted over two hours. At the end of which, by the way, Emma told him she thought he should be dead.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“Ah, indeed. Emma brought him his hot chocolate. Then she came back. Then we cleaned up around the fire. After a while, we all started to drift off. I know that sounds strange, in January. But it was a really warm day. I remember I was wearing a cotton turtleneck and a cotton sweater and no coat, and I felt overdressed.”

“Did you fall asleep?”

“We all did. Or we thought we all did.”

“And then?”

Bennis coughed. “I woke up. I’d been lying on a blanket, right next to the fire, and when I looked up I saw Emma’s place was empty. A few seconds later, Emma came out of the stand of trees.”

“Where did she say she’d been?”

“Where do you think? Taking care of necessary business, of course. It was a perfectly sensible explanation, and I didn’t think anything of it. We talked for a while. I gave her a lecture on diplomatic relations with Daddy. She was so much younger than the rest of us, she hadn’t lived through the very bad years, she had no idea how to handle him when he got out of hand. Then Mother got up, and looked at her watch, and said we’d better go tell Daddy what time it was. Because it was getting late.”

“Who went?”

“Anne Marie and I. Together.”

Gregor nodded. “And your father had been pushed over the bluff.”

“Very recently pushed, Mr. Demarkian. That’s a big part of it. If we’d been much later on the scene, he would have died. The doctor told us that, afterward.”

“Your father was unconscious?”

“In more ways than one. He was full of Demerol.”

Gregor was surprised. “How do you know? You say there wasn’t a criminal investigation—”