by Jane Haddam
SIX
1
WHEN THE LIGHTS CAME on, Gregor Demarkian got hold of Anne Marie Hannaford’s other wrist. He blinked into the glare and told himself he was going to kill Bennis. He was going to kill her. He’d called her right after he’d called Evers and John Jackman. He’d explained the problem to her. He’d gotten her to call the gate and make sure they could get in without a call to the house. He’d involved her completely—but she was supposed to set things up for the police, and for him. She wasn’t supposed to go out and do everything possible to get herself murdered.
Instead, he looked at her standing against the sideboard, watching him hold down Anne Marie, and said, “Where’s Jackman? She’s in shock now, but she’s going to come out of it any minute. Then we’re going to have a problem.”
“No we’re not,” Bennis said. She was grinning.
“Miss Hannaford,” Gregor said, “once, just once, in this year of our Lord, I would like you to do what you’re supposed to do instead of what you want to do. I would like to be reasonably sure we’re not all going to get killed here—”
“We’re not all going to get killed here,” Bennis said. “What do you take me for? She’s not in shock, you fool. She’s stoked to the gills on Demerol.”
“What?” Gregor said.
“Well, she’s already killed three people, hasn’t she? She made herself a cup of tea about half an hour ago. She always fills it full of sugar. I put the Demerol in that. I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor. I’m not Nancy Drew. As soon as you told me what was going on, I wanted her out of commission.”
Gregor looked down at Anne Marie. She had stopped screaming. She had stopped everything. She was the next best thing to catatonic.
He dropped her back into her chair. “You,” he said to Bennis Hannaford, “are a very dangerous woman.”
Bennis shrugged. “There’s your Detective Jackman,” she said. “He’s out in the hall. Can’t you hear him screaming at Teddy to get out of his way?”
Now that he was no longer desperately concentrated on keeping Anne Marie in check, Gregor could certainly hear Jackman screaming. Or shouting, at any rate. He could have heard him back in Philadelphia.
And just for the moment, he no longer cared.
Bennis Hannaford, Gregor thought. Bennis Hannaford is not only dangerous, she’s crazy. She ought to be locked up for her own good.
EPILOGUE
FRIDAY, JANUARY 6
EPIPHANY
ONE
1
AT SIX O’CLOCK ON THE evening of January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, Gregor Demarkian stood in the snow in the courtyard behind Holy Trinity Church and rang the bell to Tibor’s apartment. He was feeling a little nervous. In the days since the Hannaford case had been brought to a close, he had been keeping out of sight. For one thing, he was tired. He had forgotten about murder cases. They took a lot of energy and they took a lot of emotion, and when they were over what you really wanted to do was sleep for a week. He hadn’t been able to manage that. He’d spent so much time thinking about the Hannafords, and about Donna Moradanyan and her little “problem,” he hadn’t paid bills or done laundry in he didn’t know how long. He had a lot of details to take care of, and he was too restless not to take care of them. That was the other thing. He was very restless. Now that he was no longer walking around in a fog, now that his life no longer felt like one long wound caused by the death of Elizabeth, he was in mortal danger of being terminally bored. What he was going to do about that, he didn’t know. There would be more Donna Moradanyans and more little problems in his life if he wanted to let them in, but that kind of thing wouldn’t really occupy his mind. And problems like the Hannaford case came up once or twice in a lifetime.
He pressed the bell again, readjusted the box of chocolates he was carrying under his arm, and waited. Because this was an Armenian neighborhood and Tibor was an Armenian priest, the Christmas decorations were still up. Tiny lights were strung through the one anemic tree that had grown up between the courtyard’s tiles. Holly wreaths and plastic Santa Clauses were stuffed into all the observable windows. He could even hear faint strains of Steve Lawrence singing “The Little Drummer Boy”—Tibor must have bought one of those mail-order Christmas records. Here was the great thing about being Armenian. If for some reason you couldn’t celebrate Christmas properly on December 25, all you had to do was wait for Epiphany and you got another shot at it.
In front of him, the doorknob rattled, the door frame shuddered, and finally the door came open. Tibor was standing just beyond it, a sprig of bright red plastic holly pinned to the shoulder of his “best” dayrobes.
“Gregor,” he said, “Gregor, Gregor, come in. We have everyone here now.”
“Everyone?” Gregor said.
“Yes, yes,” Tibor said.
Tibor stepped back, and Gregor came in from the cold. He found himself in a small, cramped foyer that looked even smaller and more cramped because it was stuffed with books, piles and piles of books, pushed against the walls in unsteady stacks that looked ready to avalanche. He saw Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity and Hardon’s Catholic Catechism and three paperbacks by Mickey Spillane. The paperbacks had been read to shreds.
Tibor came up behind him and said, “Mr. Spillane, yes. Mr. Spillane has a very interesting mind, Gregor.”
Gregor had read a book by Mickey Spillane once. It had been called The Body Lovers, and it had gone into sadomasochism in detail.
Tibor saw the look on his face and was hurt. “Gregor, Gregor. You must stop being so dependent on the obvious. Mr. Spillane has a very interesting moral sense. It is a form of barbarism, yes, but it is the right form of barbarism. It is a barbarism out of which civilization can grow.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“Never mind,” Tibor said. “Thank you for the chocolates. I will put them out in the living room. Do you want to go into the living room? Donna Moradanyan is there with her Peter.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Tibor nodded. “If she wants to marry him, we’ll just have to put up with it. But I will tell you. I have thought once or twice about giving him knockout drops and putting him on a train.”
“You’ve been reading too much Mickey Spillane.”
“Gregor,” Tibor said, “this Peter Desarian, he has a brain the size of a pea.”
“But we knew that,” Gregor pointed out. “If his brain had been any bigger, he wouldn’t have gotten her pregnant in the first place, and if he had gotten her pregnant, he wouldn’t have gone running home to his mother.”
“I think it was a much better thing when parents arranged the marriage,” Tibor said. “Donna’s mother would have known better than to arrange this one.”
Gregor wasn’t sure about that—growing up among immigrants, he had witnessed a few arranged marriages in his life—but he let it go. The music had changed from “The Little Drummer Boy” to “Silver Bells,” sung by a man whose voice had been trained out of all personality. He looked into the living room and saw Donna and her preppy Peter, George in the biggest armchair, Lida in red silk and diamond earrings. In the corner near the window was an overdecorated Christmas tree. As he watched, a very tiny child, a girl no more than two, walked up to it and took a candy cane.
“Who’s the baby?” he asked Tibor.
“Baby?” Tibor brightened. “Ah, Gregor. I’m so used to them. I forgot. My houseguests.”
“Houseguests?” Gregor said. And then he remembered. The day he had taken Tibor to lunch. The discussion about the “homeless problem.” Oh, God.
Tibor was moving to the other side of the foyer, to the door that led to the kitchen. “Come on, come on,” he was saying. “You will come in here, you will meet my houseguests, you will have a little talk with Bennis.”
“Bennis?” Gregor said. “Bennis Hannaford?”
“Yes, yes,” Tibor said. “George, he invites her here, she gets all dressed up and comes. She is a very nice woman, Gregor. I like he
r very much.”
Mickey Spillane and Bennis Hannaford.
Well, Gregor thought, why not?
2
The smallest houseguest was still in the living room, of course, but the other three were with Bennis in the kitchen, a couple in their teens and yet another baby daughter. This baby daughter looked to be about three, and she could talk. A lot. She was sitting on the kitchen table, next to Bennis’s piles of flour and eggs, singing “Jingle Bells” to herself in a high, clear, tuneless voice. Her father was sitting in a chair on the other side of the table, nearly hidden by yet more piles of books. Her mother was standing next to Bennis near the eggs. Gregor relaxed a little. When Tibor had first told him about taking in the homeless, Gregor had been half sure he’d gone off the deep end. A raving drunk who needed to be reformed. A crack addict who needed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Something. But this was all right. There were people like this all over Philadelphia, refugees from the hills of West Virginia and Kentucky, who had come north to look for work and not found it. Gregor came farther into the room and saw that at least one of the books on the table belonged to the male half of the couple. He was studying it.
Bennis, dressed in a beautiful red wool dress that was now covered with flour, was waving a rolling pin in the air. “It’s a pain in the ass,” she said, “but it saves a lot of money, and if you’ve got the time—”
“Oh, I’ve got the time,” the mother said, making the word come out tahme. She looked seventeen, if that. “Around here, all I’ve got is time. I try cleaning up a little, but Father gets so addled if I move his books.”
“Father is addled,” Bennis said, “but nice.” She put the rolling pin down and reached for a measuring cup. As she did, her head came up and she saw Gregor. “Oh,” she said. “You. Father Tibor said you’d be here.”
Gregor looked around for Father Tibor, but he was gone. “Do you mind?” he asked Bennis.
“Of course I don’t mind.” She pointed to the girl standing beside her. “This is Jenna Moore,” she said. “And this is Donnie Moore, her husband. And this,” she touched the three year old’s hair, “is Suzanna.”
“There’s another one in the living room,” Gregor said, “eating candy canes.”
“That’ll be Magdalena,” Jenna said, and blushed. “I got that name out of the Bible. I thought it sounded—”
“Pretty,” Bennis said.
Jenna nodded and turned away. Bennis put down the measuring cup. “So,” she said. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been thinking about you a lot, lately.”
“Not bad thoughts, I hope,” Gregor said.
“No.”
“I think I’m going to go find Maggie,” Jenna Moore said nervously, picking up her three year old. “Come on, Donnie. She’s probably in there eating all the decorations off that nice tree.”
The Moores disappeared through the door Gregor had come in by. Bennis and Gregor both watched them go.
“So,” Bennis said again, when they were alone. “How have you been?”
“How have you been?”
Bennis shrugged. “Better. I’ve been to see her, you know. They don’t seem to be inclined to let her out on bail.”
“They wouldn’t be.”
“No, they wouldn’t be. You know what I can’t get over? She hates me. She really hates me. And hard as I try, Gregor, I just can’t come up with a reason why.”
“What does she say?”
“Not much, and nothing that makes sense.” Bennis started cleaning up the table, brushing piles of flour into her hand. “I stood bail for Bobby. I did a little magic to make sure Teddy still had a job—”
“A little magic?”
“Don’t ask,” Bennis said. “You wouldn’t believe what it costs to get somebody appointed to the faculty of a tenth-rate college. Especially if that somebody is about to be drummed out of the profession by a seventh-rate college. Whatever. Gregor, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Anne Marie hates me. Bobby and Teddy—it’s like they wish I didn’t exist.”
“What about Chris?”
“Oh, Chris is all right,” Bennis said. “He went to that place in New England. I guess he’s going to be there about three months. He says when he’s out he may come and live in Boston.”
“I don’t think you ought to worry about Anne Marie,” Gregor said. “She’s a very disturbed young woman. Not insane in the legal sense, you understand, but very disturbed. And as for Bobby and Teddy—”
“They’re very disturbed, too?”
“They’re jerks. And the world is full of jerks, Bennis. Racist jerks. Sexist jerks. Envious jerks. If you worry about the jerks, you’ll never have any kind of life at all.”
Bennis put the measuring cup and the rolling pin in Tibor’s sink. “You never did tell me how you figured it out. When you called up that night, there wasn’t time, and since then—”
“We’ve both been occupied.”
“You could put it that way,” Bennis said. “Mostly I’ve been depressed. But you know, if I’d had to pick someone, the last person it would have been was Anne Marie.”
“That’s because you were worried about your mother. Anne Marie said to me once that nobody wanted to keep your mother alive as much as she did, and that was true. Your mother was Anne Marie’s life. Once your mother was dead, Anne Marie was going to have nothing. Not a home. Not an income. Not a profession. Nothing. She’s over forty, Bennis. When your parents were both gone, what was she going to do? Learn to type?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Anne Marie did.” Gregor took the dish towel off the refrigerator door. Bennis had started washing up, unthinkingly and automatically. He thought he could at least dry. “It was your mother who told me, you know, although she didn’t do it directly. She told me she knew who it was, but she couldn’t give me the name. She’s very attached to all of you, Bennis. I couldn’t understand why she’d shield one of her children when that child was killing the others. And then it hit me. She owed your sister Anne Marie. She owed her everything.”
“And?”
“She gave me some things,” Gregor went on. “One of those things was a folder with newspaper and magazine clippings in it, all pictures of her with her daughters. The other of those things was a file with notes your sister Emma had written to you, false starts on Engine House notepaper. Once I understood the file, I understood the debris.”
“Debris? Oh, I see. You mean candlesticks and all that sort of thing.”
“That’s right. It was all meant to point to Hannaford Financial—and to the boys. Once turning Emma’s death into a suicide didn’t work, everything was pointed at the boys. The only possible explanation for that was that the real murderer had to be one of the girls. And then that ‘first’ note—”
“There wasn’t one, was there?”
“No, there wasn’t one. There was just the note from your purse. But then you recognized it—you were never meant to see it, but you did. But your mother was better, there was no hurry at the moment. She wanted a suicide. Then, with Emma blamed, she could pick off you and Myra later. As accidents. So she said she’d found a different note, and she got one of the ones from the file and put it in Bobby’s wastebasket. With money from the briefcase she’d taken from your father’s study the night of the murder.”
“They still haven’t found it you know,” Bennis said. “I keep expecting it to turn up under one of the carpets or something.”
“Maybe it will,” Gregor said.
“But what about the brooch?” Bennis said. “Jackman said you’d found part of it right there in the study. I would have thought—”
“We’d see it immediately?”
“Well, those tin things are all over the house.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “They are. But the decorations are the wrong size. They’re too small. And I saw your sister Myra wearing one, and you wearing one—but not the right kind. You had a bell. Myra had a ball. Oh, there was one in Emma’s
room, too. After she died. It was a cupid.”
“A cherub,” Bennis corrected.
“A cherub. You know, that day I went to talk to your mother, the day she gave me the file, she was wearing a hair comb with all four of the figures on it. It was so painful for me, to be there with her the way she was after the way my wife had died, that I noticed the comb but I didn’t process the information. My attention was—elsewhere, let’s say. And then I got home, and Lida Arkmanian started talking about your mother and how she was dying, and then it hit me. Always, four different things, the bell, the ball, the cherub, and the angel. Your mother had all four on her comb. You and two of your sisters had one each made into a brooch. It stood to reason that Anne Marie must also have had a brooch, and the only thing it could have been was an angel. And an angel brooch of a size comparable to the bell or the ball I’d seen would have been the right size and shape for that piece of tin.
“She snooped, didn’t she?” Bennis said. “That was how she knew about Bobby’s financial problems.”
“About the fact of them, yes,” Gregor said. “And about the money in Bobby’s safe, of course. I don’t think she had any details.”
Bennis laughed. “Bobby thinks she’s a witch. He thinks I’m a witch, too. Oh, well. We always knew he wasn’t too bright.”
Gregor took a spoon out of her hands and started wiping it. “It wasn’t until later that I understood about the folder. A mother and her daughters. A mother who loved her daughters, loved them extravagantly. Who protected them. And was married to a man who not only hated them, but had gone to equally extraordinary lengths to disinherit them. He couldn’t have done that with a will, you know. The courts wouldn’t have allowed it. So there it was, this woman with a tremendous sense of obligation, an old-fashioned woman with an old-fashioned sense of family.”
“And no money,” Bennis pointed out.
“That’s true,” Gregor said, “but she did have jewelry, and she had that insurance policy. You see, once you begin thinking of the implications of the fact that your mother is so ill—”
