She had just gotten to the part where Myra was sitting at breakfast, insisting people only murdered other people for money, when the phone rang. She picked it up, expecting it to be her bank, saying the money she had asked to have transferred from her money market account to her checking account had come through. Instead, she got a high-pitched, whining litany of complaint that made her grit her teeth. In the middle of it, she put her hand over the mouthpiece and told Gregor,
“It’s Dickie. Doing his usual thing.”
“Dickie?” Gregor said.
“Dickie Van Damm. Myra’s husband.” She took her hand off the mouthpiece. “Dickie? This is Bennis, not Myra. … Yes, I thought you knew. … Well, it doesn’t do any good telling me, does it? Why don’t I go get… yes, of course she’s awake, she was at breakfast. … Yes, I understand your mother’s very ill. … Yes… but… I sympathize with you about the publicity, I really do. … I don’t think that’s likely, Dickie. … No… no… I know we’re in the middle of another blizzard. … Yes… yes… why don’t I just go get Myra and you can tell her yourself?”
She put the receiver down on the table and motioned Gregor to follow her, out of the kitchen and into the hall. When the kitchen door swung closed behind them, she rolled her eyes.
“He’s always like that,” she said. “He thinks there’s nobody in the universe but the Van Damms, and he’s such a bore he never has anybody to talk to, so when he gets you on the phone he refuses to shut up.”
“I’m surprised your sister stays married to him,” Gregor said.
“He’s got a lot of money. And it’s like I told you the other day. The Van Damms are very, very, very old Main Line.”
Bennis led him down the hall into the living room. “Myra will be in the television room, listening to soap operas,” she said.
“I don’t think there are soap operas on this early in the morning,” Gregor said.
Bennis smiled. “Myra won’t be listening to today’s soap operas, she’ll be listening to yesterday’s. On tape. Soap operas are on at the wrong time of day for Myra.”
She opened the door on the other side of the living room, ushered Gregor into another hall, and snaked around him so she could lead. “This is where Anne Marie went, to get the drinks tray, that first night you were here. If you go through that door,” she pointed to a large mahogany swing on their right, “you end up in a small butler’s pantry. One of four. My great-grandfather was a flaming alcoholic.”
She came to the end of the hall, opened the door there, and entered another hall. The hall they had just come through was visibly a service space. This was just as visibly a family one. The runner rug was custom cut and thick. The walls were hung with cloth instead of paper. Bennis was so unused to wallpaper, she still couldn’t make herself live with it, even after all these years away from Engine House. On her walls at home, she had paint.
She stopped in front of the last door on the left and listened. “There,” she said. “Can’t you hear it? Days of Our Lives.”
“I can hear it,” Gregor said.
Bennis opened the door, walked in, and stopped. She stopped so quickly, Gregor Demarkian plowed into the back of her, nearly tipping her over.
Days of Our Lives was playing on the television, casting its strained portents of Sturm und Drang throughout the room.
It didn’t need to. The television room had enough Sturm und Drang of its own.
Gregor grabbed her by the shoulders. She could feel him pushing her toward the door.
“Get out of here,” he was saying. “Get out of this room now.”
But she couldn’t get out, she really couldn’t. She had to look at it and look at it, just to make sure it was there.
Myra’s body, lying on the floor, her face battered out of shape into gore. Myra’s big shiny-tin ball brooch, smeared so thickly with blood it looked like it had been painted red.
At Myra’s feet, a heavy cylinder of metal winked and glittered, in the thousands of tiny places where it hadn’t been smeared.
One of great-grandmother Eleanor’s Georgian silver candlesticks from the upstairs hall.
PART FOUR
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28
THE SOLUTION
ONE
1
IF THERE WAS ONE thing Gregor Demarkian understood, it was what to do when he was first at the scene of the crime. He could go through that drill on automatic pilot, and he did. God only knew he couldn’t have done it any other way. His mind was caught in the vision of the television room and the mistakes he had made that had allowed this murder to happen. Mistakes. God, how he hated mistakes. That was why he had walked off that last case of his. It wasn’t just that Elizabeth had been dying and he’d wanted to concentrate his energies on her. Both of those things were true, but there had been something else. He had been distracted. And, in his distraction, he had started to make mistakes. That was the last thing you wanted to do when faced with a man who was murdering five-year-old boys.