Not a Creature Was Stirring by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page B

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