by Jane Haddam
Gregor waved a hand in the air. “For serious espionage, you need access. From what I’ve been able to figure out so far, neither Hannaford himself nor any of his children have it. As for the other things—Tibor thinks this man is, I wouldn’t say an agent of the devil, but close. He didn’t like Hannaford at all.”
“Then there’s probably nothing to like,” George said. “Tibor isn’t a practical man, but I would listen to him about people.”
“So would I,” Gregor said. “Tibor thinks Hannaford hates his children. Hates them unreservedly.”
“And?”
“And a man who hates his children doesn’t throw a hundred thousand dollars in cash around to get them out of trouble.”
“Ah,” George said.
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “I thought about the wife, but Tibor says she’s some kind of invalid. Very social and very involved in good works, but basically domestic and too ill to get around and do things. I think she gets written up on the society pages a lot.”
George sighed. “So,” he said. “Here we are. Maybe the man is just crazy in the real way. Maybe he belongs in an institution.”
“I don’t know, George. I just know I don’t like this thing. I don’t like him involving Tibor, and I don’t like—well, what it feels like.”
“Do you know what you’re going to do about it?”
“No.”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do about it, either. Have a little more rum, Krekor. It’s good for the brain.”
Gregor doubted it, but he knew it was good for the nerves. He needed something for those.
2
Half an hour later, Gregor climbed the stairs to the third floor, unlocked the door to his apartment, turned on his foyer light, and found himself staring at Robert Hannaford’s card. The damn thing seemed to have appeared in his hand of its own volition.
He shut the door behind him, threw his coat on the rack, and walked down the narrow hall to his living room. It looked white and dead, but through its windows he could see the decorations on Lida Arkmanian’s town house. Lida had outdone herself—she had a plastic Santa with eight reindeer and Rudolph on the roof; a curtain of red and silver tinsel hanging from the fourth-floor balcony; string after string of colored lights—and it was a good thing. The reflected glory of her facade was all that made Gregor’s bare space look habitable.
Bare walls, bare floor, one couch, two chairs, and a coffee table in a thirty-by-twenty-seven-foot room. It reminded him of the way dance studios looked between classes.
He dropped into a chair, stretched his legs, and turned his body slightly so he could go on looking out the window. They had warned him he would lose the details of her—the way she looked, the way she talked, the way she moved—but it hadn’t happened. In the dark, he could always hear her voice.
In this dark, he could hear her half-singing, half-humming under her breath, the way she had every night while washing dishes. She was in the kitchen, stacking plates away in tall oak cabinets. If he didn’t try to follow her, she would stay.
Gregor closed his eyes. He had started out afraid of this. He had put her pictures in a drawer, put the sweaters she’d made him into storage with their furniture, taped her books into packing boxes. He’d thought he was losing his mind, and every time he’d felt her with him he’d wanted to drink.
Now he hoped only that she’d never leave him. He needed her as much as he ever had, beyond all considerations of pain and comfort. Better to ache for her than to feel nothing at all.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth.
He opened his eyes again. The apartment was full of her, but for some reason that no longer relaxed him. He was restless and dissatisfied, distracted and tense. Listen, she’d told him once. You need to do what you do. You need it more than you need me. That wasn’t true, of course. Before she died, he hadn’t believed there was pain like that in the universe. But—
But.
He got out of the chair and headed down the back hall to his bedroom. The bed in there was unmade, something Elizabeth would have hated, but for once he didn’t let himself feel guilty about it. He went to the dresser and took her pictures out from under the laundry-folded piles of shirts.
Elizabeth in her wedding dress, covered with satin and petit-point lace. Elizabeth on the boat they’d rented that summer on Martha’s Vineyard, her fine grey hair blown into a cloud around her face. Elizabeth with her niece’s tiny daughters, painted white and orange to look like a clown. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth.
He would have to get the sweaters out of storage, and the furniture, too. He would have to get new frames for the pictures. He would have to do a lot of things. At the moment, he only had to remember how much she had liked hearing about his work. It had been over two years, and it was time.
He’d dropped Robert Hannaford’s card when he came into the bedroom. He bent over and picked it up off the floor. It was silly. It wouldn’t lead to anything serious. It wouldn’t provide him with something to do with his life. On the other hand—
On the other hand, at the moment, it was the only option he had.
There was a small black phone on the night table next to his bed. Gregor put Elizabeth’s pictures where he could see them, picked up the handset, and started dialing.
THREE
1
“LISTEN, MYRA SAID, THROWING overpacked pieces of Gucci luggage into the foyer with one hand and holding her sable jacket closed with the other, “I know what time it is. Of course I know what time it is. I just don’t care what time it is.”
Anne Marie Hannaford backed up until she was standing against the wall. It was six o’clock in the morning, a good half hour before any of the staff was due to be on call, a good two hours before the kind of staff Myra needed would be around to help her. Like all large and formal houses—and this was that: forty family rooms, 26,000 square feet in the main wings, six double garages, a servants’ wing the size of a small apartment building—Engine House was run on a rigid schedule. Anne Marie had been administrating that schedule for almost twenty years. She knew Mrs. Washington would “open” the kitchen at six-thirty and lay out breakfast on the sideboard in the dining room at seven. She knew Morgan, the driver, and Marshall, the butler, would both appear out of nowhere at exactly eight o’clock. She even knew which of the fourteen bedrooms each of the five upstairs maids would be cleaning at any given moment of the morning. What she didn’t know, and couldn’t figure out, was why Myra didn’t know.
Of course, Myra never seemed to know anything. That was one of the things Anne Marie thought of as “seminal” to Myra’s personality. There was a dress code on the Main Line, unofficial but tacitly enforced, and Myra always broke it. Instead of good tweeds and low shoes and a plain cashmere sweater, Myra had spikes and sable and large diamond earrings before dawn. Instead of a neat, little, hard-edged shoulder bag, she had a mammoth tote that could have been used to move furniture. Instead of a chignon, she had something that looked like a mushroom cloud in an advanced state of disintegration.
Anne Marie folded her arms over her chest, stroked the antique tin angel brooch on her collar, and waited. With Myra, waiting was always enough. The woman quite literally couldn’t keep her mouth shut. And that broke the code of the Main Line, too. For Myra, there was no line of demarcation between the public and the personal.
Myra had finally managed to get all her suitcases into the house. Now she turned around, grabbed the foyer door, and slammed it shut.
“There,” she said. “Now we can get down to serious business. Is there any coffee in this house?”
“Mrs. Washington’s coffee will be out in an hour,” Anne Marie said. “If you want something immediately, you’ll have to go to the kitchen and see if Bobby’s figured out how to use the Dripmaster yet.”
“Bobby’s here?”
“Everybody’s here, Myra. And none of them were due until this afternoon.”
“I wouldn’t complain about good luck if I were you, Anne Marie. Y
ou don’t have much of it.”
If Anne Marie could have backed up any farther, she would have. Things being what they were, she had to stay where she was. She felt the throb in her head and rubbed the heel of her hand against her temple. Myra always gave her a headache, and the headache was always impervious to aspirin. Or Tylenol. Or any of that stuff. Anne Marie thought of it as a physical manifestation of a moral complaint. In all justice, it was Anne Marie who should have been married to a rich husband and living in Wayne.
Through the long, narrow windows on either side of the front doors, Anne Marie could see snow, the thick kind that fell for hours and stuck for weeks. She patted stray hair back into her chignon and tried not to think of all the other things that gave her headaches. Mother, upstairs in her private suite, barely able to get herself out of bed in the morning. Daddy, fallen asleep in his wheelchair in his study for the third time this week, likely to awake at any moment in a perfectly foul mood. Even the sight of Engine House decked out for Christmas—the wreath on the outside panel of the door Myra had just slammed; the bowls of holly on the foyer tables; the delicate crystal angels hanging from invisible threads from all the common room ceilings—gave her no joy.
In the early days, when Mother was periodically ill instead of periodically critical, Anne Marie had almost always enjoyed her life. Where Mother went, Anne Marie went—visiting and charities, parties and volunteer work, all within the carefully proscribed circle of Main Line women of good family. Anne Marie had found that period far more satisfactory than her two aborted years at Wellesley College. At college, her roommate had been a scholarship student from Detroit with pronounced ideas on politics and personal hygiene, and all her professors had seemed to lean determinedly leftward.
Unfortunately, as Mother’s illness had worsened, her taste in charities had undergone a radical change. Benefit balls for the American Cancer Society and the Philadelphia Art League had been replaced by forays into the inner city—to free clinics, halfway houses, counseling centers, women’s shelters. Organizational luncheons had disappeared from Anne Marie’s schedule, supplanted by back-room meetings with middle-aged harridans who never wore makeup and smoked while they ate. Even the things she had enjoyed most, like her long conversations with the girls she’d once gone to school with at Agnes Irwin, had been crowded out of her life. These days, if she had a chance to have a long conversation with anybody, it would most likely be with a bag lady. Bag ladies littered the halls of all the “people’s projects” her mother now visited.
Bag ladies. Anne Marie shook her head. The last thing she wanted to do was get herself started on the bag ladies. Thinking about them always made her wonder if she was losing her mind.
She looked up, expecting to find herself alone—surely Myra had wandered off to rant and rave at Bobby by this time—and found instead that her sister was still with her, standing in the middle of the foyer’s checkerboard marble floor and looking her over like the head nurse at a diet center, eyes riveted on that damn tin angel. It made Anne Marie feel clammy and even fatter than she was.
“For God’s sake,” Anne Marie said. “What are you staring at?”
“You’re the one who was a million miles away.” Myra sounded uncharacteristically reasonable. “I’ve just been trying to get you to tell me what you meant by saying everybody was here.”
Anne Marie sighed. “Everybody’s here. Bennis and Emma came in right after dinner yesterday. Teddy wandered through at about midnight. Chris called up from Newark at two o’clock in the morning because his car broke down and I had to wake Morgan to go get him. Everybody’s here, Myra.”
“Are they up yet?”
“Of course they’re not up yet. I wouldn’t be up myself if Bobby hadn’t come banging on the door at quarter to six.”
“Have you talked to any of them?”
“If you mean did I sit them down and grill them about their lives, Myra, the answer is no. I never did much go in for gestapo tactics.”
“You never did much go in for self-denial, either,” Myra said. “You’d better put away the chocolates for a while, sweetie. You’re getting positively grotesque.”
Somewhere down at the end of the main hall, a bell started ringing: the bell Daddy used when he was in his study and particularly annoyed or particularly hurried. Anne Marie hesitated—God, how she wanted to give Myra a little of it back; God how she wanted to—but not for long. Myra was a pain in the ass. Daddy was something worse.
Sometimes, lying alone in bed and thinking about him down here with his paneling and his books, thinking about his flat black eyes staring at the bulge at her waist or the trunklike roundness of her thighs, Anne Marie had visions. She saw those eyes broken and blood all over his face.
In one thing, Anne Marie and Myra were in perfect agreement. It really was too bad Daddy had done all that with the money. It was even worse there was no one with an excuse to murder him for it.
2
Almost the first thing Bobby Hannaford did when he realized he’d be alone in the kitchen was take out the half dozen loose pieces of paper he kept his personal accounts on. First he laid them out on the kitchen table in a line. Then he got his calculator from his pocket and put it right beside them. Then he got his fist grip and began to exercise his left hand. It was very quiet in the kitchen, much quieter than it had been at the front of the house. Through the kitchen window, he could see the long line of garages with their swing-out, barnlike doors, every one decorated with silver and gold tinsel wreaths. The kitchen itself was a forest of evergreen and holly. There were the standard Hannaford decorations—the shiny tin balls, bells, angels, and cherubs. Mrs. Washington had even put a miniature crèche on the utility table next to the main stove. Mrs. Washington being Catholic, and there still being forty-two hours to go before Christmas Day, the manger was empty.
Wednesday, December 23.
Bobby looked down at his papers, and his calculator. If he hadn’t been so tired, and so floaty, he would probably have been scared. The item that had appeared in last night’s paper had been small and buried on a back page, but Bobby had become adept at divining the true nature of the obscure. In the kind of enterprise he was involved in, an early warning system was essential. Now he had his warning—four short lines about a man he’d never met, but knew McAdam had—but no driving need to do anything about it.
In fact, at the moment, he had no driving need to do anything. The rational part of his brain kept sending him instructions—he’d seen the item and he had the time; a week of good fast work could get him out of this both rich and untouchable; if he could just get Daddy off his back he’d be fine—but they fell over the rest of him like smoke.
What held his attention was the memory of the Christmas he was ten, the first time he had really understood the way the world worked. He had been hearing about his special status since infancy. He was the Oldest Son, the Hannaford Heir. Sometime in the distant future, he’d be Head of the Family. He’d treated the information the way he’d treated grade-school rumors of high-school algebra classes. He didn’t have to worry about it at the moment. When he did have to, he would.
That year, when he was ten, he’d come downstairs before anyone else was up. The tree was in the larger sitting room, a twenty-four-foot Douglas pine weighed down with five generations of Hannaford ornaments. Because he wanted to get a good look at the crystal angel on top, he came at it from the balcony that opened off the west wing. He stood on the balcony for a while, wondering how they got glass to make the dips and swirls of angels’ wings. Then he went down the balcony stairs to look at his presents.
He was halfway down the staircase when he realized one pile of presents was larger, much larger, than all the rest. He was stupefied when he reached the tree and found that pile belonged to him. It should have belonged to his father. Back on the stairs, he had assumed it had. His father was the Atlas of his world, part ogre and part god, unassailable and eternal. When Bobby thought of growing up, he saw himself getting
taller and stronger year by year and his father getting taller and stronger still.
He opened the three boxes at the top of the pile, wondering if he had so much because the things they’d bought him were cheap and inconsequential. They weren’t. He’d asked for a pair of air force binoculars, and he’d got them. He’d asked for a Greenwich gyroscope, and he’d got that, too. He looked across the room at his stocking, hanging from the mantel over the dead ashes of a cold fire and saw the pale blue envelope that should contain a notice saying five thousand dollars had been deposited in his trust account at the First National Bank. Just to make sure it did, he crossed the room and opened it up.
He was stuffing the envelope back into the stocking when he heard the balcony door moving above him. By the time he managed to turn around, his father was coming down the balcony stairs. Bobby backed up a little. He wasn’t surprised at the ritual hatred in the old man’s eyes—he knew his father hated him; he’d always known it—but there was amusement there, too, and Daddy amused scared Bobby Hannaford to death.
He’d taken a Hershey’s Kiss out of his stocking when he’d put the envelope back in. Now he put his fist around it and pumped until the chocolate turned to liquid.
“Things,” Daddy said, stopping halfway down the stairs.
“Excuse me?”
“Things,” his father said. “That’s the only way I know you exist.”
“That’s why I think you’re losing it,” Myra said. “You never listen to me anymore.”
Bobby came to. He was sitting in the kitchen at Engine House, at some ungodly hour of the morning, looking through the window at a thick and furious fall of snow. He was forty-four.
He caught sight of his papers laid out along the table and started to gather them up. “Sorry,” he said.
“Are you all right?” Myra said. “I thought you were comatose.”
“I’m fine, Myra. I’m just a little tired.”
