Free Not a Creature Was Stirring by Jane Haddam Page B

wanted to get out of the bedroom. The place was full of Hannafords—Bennis in People and Life and The New York Times Book Review , Bobby in Forbes , Cordelia Day, Robert’s wife, in The Inquirer and the city magazines. He’d spent most of the last week collecting this stuff, drawn to it the way cocaine addicts were drawn to street corners, and he was sick of it. Elizabeth or no Elizabeth, he wanted to take the whole mess and shove it down the incinerator.
    He had just stood up, and found himself staring at the lines of illness edged all too clearly in Cordelia Day Hannaford’s face, when the doorbell rang.
2
    Caught in the opening door, Lida Arkmanian looked embarrassed. In fact, she looked devastated. She had a big holly wreath in one hand, a hammer in the other, and a collection of tiny nails sticking out of her mouth. Peeking out of one of the slash pockets of her chinchilla coat she had a card, with his name written across the envelope in Palmer Method script. Gregor found himself biting his lips to prevent a smile. He didn’t need The Process, as the Bureau had called it, to figure this one out. Lida had come by, expecting him to be out to lunch or over at Holy Trinity Church, meaning to decorate his life in secret.
    Actually, he was just happy to see her. She took his mind off the fact that, the longer he looked at the pictures, the surer he was that Cordelia Day Hannaford was dying. She had an air he knew well, from all the years he had spent taking care of Elizabeth.
    Gregor took the hammer and wreath out of Lida’s hand and positioned the holly on his door, so that it surrounded the bell. It looked nice there, nice enough to make him wish he’d spent some time decking out the place in the proper Christmas spirit. It shamed him to think he hadn’t even considered it. Elizabeth would have started making tinsel balls right after Halloween.
    He looked up at Lida and gestured to the wreath. “Nail there,” he said. “If you’d brought bigger nails, we’d only have to use one.”
    Lida was blushing. “I didn’t bring the nails for the wreath,” she said. “I didn’t even bring the wreath. I was just—I mean, I was up—I mean, it was—”
    “Donna Moradanyan’s idea?”
    Lida clucked. “She’s a nice child, Gregor. She’s very worried about you. Here she has the whole building decorated in satin ribbons and silver bells, and you don’t have any decorations to speak of. Not any decorations anyone can see. It’s not healthy, Gregor.”
    “Nail there,” Gregor said again.
    Lida put the nail through the cluster of lacquered leaves, and Gregor pounded at it with the overlarge hammer. Then she put another nail up, and he pounded on that, too. Pounding made him feel good. Besides, if this was Donna’s idea, Gregor felt an obligation. Lida was right. Donna was a nice child, with child as the operative word. She was twenty-one and a student at the Art Institute—the top floor apartment, just above Gregor’s own, having been bought for her by her father when she had the “crazy” idea of moving into Philadelphia to go to school—but in Gregor’s mind Donna was inevitably a “girl” and not a “woman.” She behaved like a girl. She had snow fights with eight year olds in the street. She rode a skateboard to her bus stop in the summer. She seemed sexually as innocent as an Amish virgin. Like a fairy-tale heroine, she had more trust in the benevolence of the universe than she had in the law of gravity. And she had decorated the whole house, or at least the side of it that faced Cavanaugh Street. The building looked like a gigantic Christmas present, wrapped in ribbons and tied with bows.
    The last nail was in. Gregor stepped back, nodded at his handiwork, and said, “There. Now Donna Moradanyan won’t be disappointed.”
    Lida stooped down and came back up again with a bowl. She must have left it on the floor while she fiddled with the wreath. Gregor hadn’t noticed it.
    Lida plucked at the