“That’s a thought,” Teddy said.
“It’s a dumb one,” Bennis said.
Myra shrugged. “Look at it this way. If Emma didn’t kill Daddy and then kill herself, this is just like Alice in Wonderland. One of us has to be crazy as a loon.”
“Maybe Mrs. Washington’s crazy as a loon,” Teddy said. “I’d opt for Marshall, but I can’t see how he’d get to the hot chocolate. Mrs. Washington is always hanging around the food.”
Myra sighed. The rest of them were taking him seriously and getting all worked up. She knew there was no reason to take any of them seriously. As to what she’d been thinking before…
She looked back into her cup. Nonsense, really. Total nonsense. It would take too much intelligence, too much planning, and too much nerve. Daddy was the only one of them who had ever had all of that.
Besides, she had nothing to worry about. She’d poured this coffee herself. She knew with absolute certainty that no one had had a chance to doctor it.
It was 8:32.
3
At 9:35, Bobby Hannaford, white with cold and fear, walked into a Mercedes dealership off Route 9 outside Wayne. He had his car parked at the curb, and his briefcase locked inside the trunk of the car. The briefcase was full of money. His meeting with McAdam had not gone the way he’d expected it to. An out, that was what he’d been looking for. Instead, he seemed to have found a way further in, and he didn’t even know how. The briefcase had at least $50,000 in it. He didn’t want anything to do with it.
The main building of the dealership was a huge concrete block warehouse with a facade wall of plate glass windows. Through them, Bobby could see SEs and SLs and SELs of every possible color and description, including one exactly the make, model, and color of his own. The similarities should have been exact, because Bobby had bought his car only four months before, at the beginning of the new product year. He had settled on a maroony red-purple. It wasn’t red enough to raise his insurance rates, but it wasn’t really any other color. He stopped at the main doors and looked back at it, rapidly being hidden under a fresh fall of heavy snow. The weather was god-awful.
He went inside, looked around, and found a saleswoman at the back. She was dressed like an international banker. She looked like she was going to be just as hard to convince. He told himself she was in business to sell cars and went up to the counter anyway. Even international bankers got talked into nonsense sometimes. Look at all the bad loans they’d made to South America.
“Excuse me,” he said. “There’s a car over there, a sort of maroon car? I’d like to buy it. I’d like to pay for it by check and drive it off the lot today.”
EIGHT
1
AT 10:22, BENNIS HANNAFORD TOOK a telephone call in the kitchen. She had spent the last twenty minutes in there, getting Gregor Demarkian supplied with coffee, cookies, and rolls and delivering an endless monologue on just how awful her morning had been. She had been talking too much, because Gregor always made her nervous. He seemed to see so much, and say so little. Fortunately, Mrs. Washington had finished the mix-and-match part of her baking early. By the time the dining room had been cleared at nine, the kitchen had been more or less clean and ready for an onslaught of leftover food and dirty dishes. At ten, when Bennis brought Gregor in, there was nothing to be seen but dough molded into bread pans on the counter next to the stove and piles of hot fresh rolls in wicker baskets on the table. The wicker baskets were lined with linen napkins, red and green in honor of the season. The crèche on the other side of the room had been supplied with an infant Jesus, too. Murders or no murders, Mrs. Washington wasn’t about to lose her grip on Christmas.
Bennis almost felt as if she were regaining her grip on Christmas. Emma was still at the back of her mind, and maybe always would be, but being around Gregor sometimes made her feel better. She wished she could be less ambivalent about him. He was, she thought, a very solid man. There was something about him that was steady, like a well-built house, something she had never come across in any other human being. Not even Michael. She pushed Michael into the well where she had trapped Emma and concentrated on finding the butter dish in the puzzle that was the “everyday” refrigerator. Her call to Michael this morning had been even worse than the one yesterday, which had been worse than the one the day before that. Their relationship was disintegrating rapidly. Bennis thought she knew why that was. In the first place, up-and-coming assistant DAs didn’t like being intimately connected with the suspects in a highly visible murder investigation—and the murders at Engine House were certainly highly visible. Bennis had caught a good two minutes of them on last night’s eleven o’clock news. In the second place, she wasn’t in Boston to tell him what a creep he was. Sometimes Michael needed to be reminded of the most commonplace things, like whether or not he was living up to the code of behavior he kept trying to impose on everybody else.