Not a Creature Was Stirring Read online

  Not a Creature Was Stirring

  A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery

  Jane Haddam

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media

  Ebook

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part One

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  1

  2

  Three

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Four

  1

  2

  Five

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Six

  1

  Part Two

  One

  1

  2

  Two

  1

  2

  Three

  1

  2

  3

  Four

  1

  2

  Five

  1

  2

  3

  Six

  1

  2

  3

  Seven

  1

  2

  Part Three

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  1

  2

  Three

  1

  2

  3

  Four

  1

  2

  3

  Five

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Six

  1

  2

  Seven

  1

  2

  3

  Eight

  1

  Part Four

  One

  1

  2

  Two

  1

  2

  Three

  1

  2

  Four

  1

  2

  Five

  1

  2

  Six

  1

  Epilogue

  1

  2

  3

  Preview: Act of Darkness

  PROLOGUE

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1

  THE TELEPHONE CALLS

  ONE

  1

  “LISTEN,” MYRA SAID, AS soon as the phone was picked up, without waiting to find out who had answered it. “I’ve had a phone call from Bobby. Something’s screwy up at the House.”

  There was a tiered set of wire baskets hanging from a hook in the kitchen ceiling, filled with boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas. Emma Hannaford took out the Morning Thunder and put it on the counter. Myra, for God’s sake. Emma kept in touch with only one of her sisters, and only because she and Bennis had always been close. She didn’t hear from the rest of the brood from one year to the next, and she thought that was just fine. Still, when she did hear from them, the one who called was always Myra. Myra was a combination gossip service and witch. She knew things about people they didn’t know themselves (usually because they weren’t true). She also knew things about people they’d never told anyone, which was—well, weird. Emma dumped a tea bag into the bottom of her best oversize ceramic mug, the one with I CAN BEAT THE WORLD in big red letters on both sides of it, and took the kettle off the stove. If she’d been asked to name the one thing she was least able to deal with after a day like today, she would have had to say Myra. If she’d been asked to name the second thing, she would have had to say a double dose of Morning Thunder (caffeine overload guaranteed) at eight o’clock in the evening.

  “Emma?” Myra said. “Emma, are you there?”

  “Yes, Myra. I’m here.”

  “Well, good. For a minute there, I thought you were being raped or robbed or something and I had the mugger.”

  Emma let that one pass. One of Myra’s major monologues, ever since Emma had graduated from Bennington and moved to New York, had to do with how long it would take before Emma got herself killed. Useless to explain to Myra that the Upper West Side, especially this part of it, was probably safer than Vermont had ever been. Useless to explain anything to Myra, really, because Myra only listened when she thought she was getting “important” information. The fact that her youngest sister was living in one of the fanciest neighborhoods in Manhattan was not “important” information.

  Emma picked up her tea and the phone and went into the main part of the apartment. It was a room approximately ten by ten feet and, aside from the kitchen (which was an alcove) and the bathroom, it was the only room in the place. At $900 a month, in this neighborhood, it was even a bargain. One of the things Emma had decided when she moved to the city five years ago was that she was going to get along on her own money. Bennis was making a mint and Myra had married a rich husband and the boys had those trust funds, but she was going to have to make her own way eventually. Now she was settled and (she thought) comfortable. She never gave a thought to the fact that she’d grown up in a forty-room house. Or that her bedroom at home was three times the size of this apartment.

  She sat down on the couch and stretched her legs, good dancer’s legs that wouldn’t be so good if she kept cutting class the way she had tonight. Emma Hannaford had good dancer’s legs and a good dancer’s body, even though she wasn’t a dancer, and wild black hair that was a throwback to the first Robert Hannaford, the one whose portrait was on the wall above the mantel in the main library back at Engine House. Engine House was what Robert Hannaford had called the place he’d built in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, after the railroads had made him rich. The first Robert Hannaford had been like that.

  The fifth Robert Hannaford, otherwise known as Daddy, wasn’t like that at all.

  “Emma?”

  “I’m still here, Myra.”

  “I saw that commercial of yours. The one where you get the cereal all over your hair? I thought it was silly.”

  “It paid a lot of money. And it pays residuals.”

  “Well, I suppose you need money. I just don’t understand why you don’t marry it, like everybody else.”

  Emma let that one pass, too. Myra had married money, but Bennis had made hers, and the boys had been handed theirs courtesy of Daddy. Anne Marie had simply sidestepped the whole question. Anne Marie still lived at Engine House, like some kind of post-debutante twit.

  Also, Emma had a fair idea how Myra felt, under all the verbiage and sisterly concern, about being married to Dickie Van Damm.

  Emma took a sip of tea and tucked her legs under her. “Is this about something in particular, or did you just call?”

  “Of course I didn’t just call,” Myra said. “There is something screwy up at the House.”

  “Myra, there’s always something screwy up at the House. Our father is a fruitcake. He gets to be more of a fruitcake every year. What else is new?”

  “Emma, listen. Bobby called me. Mother was in the hospital—now, don’t jump to conclusions. She’s out again now. But from what Bobby’s been telling me, things are very strange. She stays in her room all the time and Anne Marie won’t let anyone see her and Daddy’s going crazy. He’s doing things. Financially.”

  Emma stared into her tea. Mother sick. Mother in the hospital. It was like seeing those pictures of baby seals dead on the ice. It made Emma feel sick and numb and very, very frightened.

  “Myra?” she said. “What was Mother in the hospital with?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t
you think you ought to find out? That’s the important thing. Daddy can’t really do anything, financially or otherwise. He’s in that wheelchair. And he took care of the money years ago.”

  “Bobby’s worried,” Myra said stubbornly.

  “Bobby’s always worried,” Emma said. “That’s what he does with his life. What does Anne Marie say?”

  Myra paused so long, Emma thought she’d hung up. When her voice came back, it sounded strangled.

  “Anne Marie,” she said, “is hysterical. You know Anne Marie.”

  Actually, Emma didn’t know Anne Marie. There was fifteen years’ difference between them and an even wider gulf in personality. Emma did whatever came into her head. Anne Marie thought things through and found some reason not to do them.

  “Emma,” Myra said. “You know Bobby. He’s not an alarmist. If he says something’s wrong, something’s wrong.”

  “Maybe,” Emma said, “but he’s an old lady about money. And there’s nothing to worry about. The money’s all locked up. Daddy did it himself.”

  Emma waited for Myra to say it was all her, Emma’s, fault. Instead, Myra said, “Emma, I really think we all ought to go out there.”

  Emma paused with her mug of tea halfway to her lips. She had heard that tone in Myra’s voice only once or twice before. Mostly, Myra was harmless, but there were times. … Emma put her mug back on the floor, feeling distinctly uneasy. She thought of her family as a collection of benign kooks. Too much money over too many generations had left them a little addled, but in pleasant, amusing ways. Of course, there was nothing pleasant about Daddy. He was a nasty, vindictive old man. But—

  But. When Myra got started—and praise God in Heaven it didn’t happen often—things could get damn near lethal.

  “Myra,” Emma said carefully, “I don’t think—”

  “Oh,” Myra said, “you never do. But I do. And I think we ought to go up there. For Christmas.”

  “Daddy will throw us out,” Emma said.

  “No, he won’t. You know how Mother is about Christmas. We could go up Christmas Eve and stay till New Year’s. By then we’d have everything straightened out.”

  “Maybe Daddy doesn’t want everything straightened out.”

  “Daddy doesn’t know what he wants. If he did, he wouldn’t have done all that about the money. Now, Emma, I don’t want any arguments. Just be on the five-seventeen when it gets to Bryn Mawr December twenty-third. I’ll pick you up at the station.”

  “Myra—”

  “Bring woolies. It gets cold up there this time of year.”

  Emma stared into the phone and sighed. It was infuriating. No matter what she did, they always got to her. Family, home, position, security, money—she hated to admit it, but the thought of going home for Christmas had improved her mood enormously. Even after all that terrible stuff about Mother.

  Even after Myra had made her think about the money.

  Emma stretched out on the couch and stared at the ceiling. Large rooms. Fireplaces. Mattresses and box springs. Four-hundred-dollar down comforters. Oh, Lord.

  She felt about as independent as a baby kangaroo.

  2

  When Bennis Hannaford hung up on her sister Myra, she was thinking not about what Myra had said (Myra never made any sense), but about the phone call she’d had only half an hour earlier, the one from the nut. She put her hand to the back of her head and released her black wiry hair from its barrette. Through an accident of genetics, she had all the really good Hannaford features and none of the bad ones. Her bones were fine and fragile. Her eyes were large and widely spaced and almost a deep purple. Her cheekbones were high and her cheeks just a little hollow. She was a beautiful woman, and she knew it.

  The nut on the phone had given her a flawless description of her living room as it had existed six months ago, which meant he was one of the people who had attended the fantasy fan convention in Chicago last June. That meant he could be either harmless or not, depending. Depending on where he was. Depending on his psychiatric history. Depending…

  Bennis brushed it off, irritated. The way she reacted to these calls always made her feel like a hypochondriacal old maid. And it was so asinine. This idiot hadn’t been in her apartment. If he had, he’d know it had been redecorated. Still…

  She headed for the living room, down the long hall bracketed by built-in bookshelves holding only the books she had written. One shelf was given over to copies of Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia, her second novel and the first fantasy ever to make The New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list. She prodded Michael Peteris with her toe as she passed his place on her Persian rug and dropped down on a green plush Louis XVI chair she’d bought because it “went with the room.” That was before she realized nothing would ever go with this room, because it had been built at a time when people who knew nothing about history were trying to invent it.

  “Michael,” she said, “tell me what to do about the nut.”

  Michael turned over and put his hands behind his head. If he hadn’t been as tall and broad as he was, he would have been ugly. He looked, as Bennis explained to Emma when Emma asked, “very Greek.”

  “What you’re going to do about the nut,” he said calmly, “is what you always do about the nuts. Call Jack Donovan down at the station. Get a tap put on your phone. Then—”

  “I’m tired of this, Michael. I really am. I want to be Stephen King and not have to go to conventions. I want—”

  “From what you tell me, Stephen King does go to conventions. And if you’re tired of this, move.”

  “Oh, hush,” Bennis said.

  Michael shrugged and turned away. This was an argument he had no interest in repeating. Of course she should move. She’d known that the first time a nut called—the one who said he’d put a rogue troll in her underwear drawer—even before she’d asked him and he’d told her.

  “Who else was on the phone?” Michael said. “I heard it ring twice.”

  “What?” Bennis said. “Oh. That was my sister.”

  “Emma, Myra, or Anne Marie?”

  “Myra.”

  “You are going to be in a bad mood tonight. Oh, well. What did she want?”

  “What?” Bennis said again. “I’m sorry. My mind’s wandering.” It was, too. She was thinking about Daddy. She shook it out of her head and said, “Myra. Well, she wanted me to come home for Christmas. For the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “But that’s wonderful,” Michael said. “You call Jack. You get the tap put on the phone. Then you pack up and go to Sewickley, or wherever.”

  “Wayne. That’s not what she wants me to do. She wants me to go out to Engine House. My mother just got out of the hospital.”

  Michael sat up. “Do you realize what you just did? You told me about the nut first.”

  “And that shocks you,” Bennis said.

  “It would shock anybody.”

  “Not if they grew up at Engine House.” Bennis stood, went to the drinks cabinet, and fished her cigarettes out from behind the gin. So much for cutting down on smoking by keeping your cigarettes in an inconvenient place. When she got a real nicotine fit, there was no such thing as an inconvenient place.

  She went back to the chair, lit up, and said, “Besides, this isn’t exactly news. I’ve been living with this thing of Mother’s for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “What’s she got?”

  “Some kind of multiple sclerosis. I don’t understand it exactly. She’s been in and out of hospitals for years.”

  Michael blew a stream of air into the room, like a pregnant woman hyperventilating to take her mind off labor. “Jesus God,” he said. “And half of you live out of town. What are you people, anyway?”

  “Down dirty furious at my father, for one thing,” Bennis said. “Besides, I don’t think the rest of them know. I mean, Anne Marie knows. That’s why she’s never left home. Daddy knows, because he�
�d have to. I know because I was home once when she had one of those attacks.” She considered it. “Bobby might know. I’m not sure.”

  “You mean your mother hasn’t told anybody?”

  “Of course not. She wouldn’t want to be an object of pity.”

  Michael shot her a look that said this attitude made no sense to him at all, and Bennis shrugged. Of course it didn’t. He came from an absurdly extended family, full of immigrant great-aunts and just-off-the-boat quasi uncles, people who stuck together because they were trying to get someplace. He would never understand how the Main Line worked.

  Bennis stretched her legs, crossed her feet at the ankles, and said, “The thing is, no matter how much I love my mother, a week at home with Daddy would just about kill me. That old son of a—never mind. If you could come with me—”

  “I can’t. I’ve got the Andrekowicz thing.”

  Bennis made a face. She didn’t want to hear about the Andrekowicz thing. Bodies in pieces all over the South Side. “Well, there you are. I don’t want to see my father, and no matter what Myra says, he doesn’t want to see me. He only talks to Bobby and Anne Marie because he has to. He wrote the rest of us off years ago.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say about an old man in a wheelchair.”

  “The old man in the wheelchair is going to last another twenty years,” Bennis said. “A lot longer than Mother. And he deserves it less.”

  “Which is supposed to mean what?”

  “Which is supposed to mean I think I’ll go call my brother Chris. Myra must have called him. Maybe he got more out of her than I did.”

  “I like your brother Chris,” Michael said. “Only don’t tell him I always think his poems are jokes. He gets weird about it.”

  Bennis hauled herself out of her chair and headed back toward the bedroom and the phone.

  3

  When the light went off on his console for the third time in fifteen minutes, Chris Hannaford told his listeners (all 226 of them) not to forget to boycott grapes, started a Grateful Dead record, took off his sweatband, and dropped the sweatband over his light. A little later, he would read some of his poetry, and that would be nice, but what he wasn’t going to do any more was answer the phone. Oh, no. First he’d been stuck with his sister Myra, which was a little like accidentally ingesting a triple dose of Benzedrine. Then—