Instruments of Night Page 7

  “Miss Davies asked me to bring you directly to the main house.” Saunders brought the car to a halt before the long flight of stairs that led to the main house. “I’ll take your things to the cottage.”

  “Thank you,” Graves told him, then headed up the stairs. A woman in a black dress with a wide white collar opened the door when he rang the bell.

  “Ah, you must be Mr. Graves.” She spoke in a friendly, welcoming tone. “Miss Davies said for me to tell you that she’d be down shortly.” With that, she escorted him to a set of double doors and opened them. “You can wait in here.”

  Graves stepped into a wood-paneled room with high windows through which shafts of sunlight fell over a parquet floor dotted here and there with Oriental carpets. Rows of bookshelves stood along the wall to his right, a vast array of books arranged behind tall glass doors. There were leather-bound editions of Dickens and Trollope, but as he strolled down the line of shelves, Graves saw no books dated further back than the nineteenth century. Instead, there was a large collection of more modern works. First editions, Graves assumed, of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, all in their original dust jackets, protected by plastic covers.

  “My father’s passion.”

  Allison Davies stood at the entrance of the room. She wore a loose-fitting white dress; her silver hair was tucked neatly beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat. In that pose she looked like an old movie star, composed, impeccable. An unmistakable elegance clung to her.

  “American first editions mostly,” she added, closing the door behind her. “He was a businessman, as you may know. My father. Too busy to read as much as he wished. But he loved to collect books.” She came forward gracefully. “I wanted to show you the room where I’ve kept everything that pertains to Faye’s murder. You’ll have a key to it. No one else will. You can use the room as your private study. Our other guest will use the library.” She added nothing else, but turned abruptly and led Graves to a door at the back of the room, where he waited until she’d unlocked it.

  “I think you’ll find it a good place to work,” she said as she waved him into the adjoining room. “Very private. A good place to think.”

  The room was adequate but not at all grand, the sort of space a powerful person might assign to a private secretary. It was furnished with a desk, reading lamp, bookshelves, mostly empty, and a small file cabinet, which, as Miss Davies quickly demonstrated by pulling out its top drawer, was nearly full of neatly arranged files and folders.

  “Everything having to do with Faye’s murder is in this drawer,” she told him. “All the original reports are here, the police investigation, everything that could be located, even the newspaper clippings from the time. I’ve also instructed Saunders to be available for interviews. Saunders can tell you a great deal about Riverwood. He’s sort of our unofficial historian.”

  Graves decided to mention the only name he’d come upon so far, look for a response as he knew Slovak would. “Saunders mentioned a young girl who came to Riverwood just after the war. Greta Klein. She was here the summer of the murder.”

  “She’s still here,” Miss Davies said. “Unfortunately, Greta hasn’t been in good health for the last several years. She stays in her room most of the time. I think Saunders is probably a considerably better source. He remembers everything. And as you’ve probably garnered, he doesn’t mind talking.”

  A second name occurred to him. “What about Mrs. Harrison? Faye’s mother. Would she talk to me?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Miss Davies said. “But I suppose Mrs. Harrison might be helpful to you. She lives at a place called The Waves. It’s a home for elderly people just outside Britanny Falls. I can arrange for you to meet her, of course. As early as this afternoon, if you like.”

  Graves nodded, his eyes drifting over the top of the desk, where a green blotter had been placed, along with a stack of notepads and a tray of fine-point pens. But it was something other than these that drew his attention—a small silver frame that held a photograph of Faye Harrison.

  “Faye was only thirteen when I took this,” Miss Davies said as she picked up the photograph and handed it to him. “I thought you might glance up from your desk from time to time and see how lovely she was.” She smiled slightly. “It’s something Slovak does, isn’t it? He studies pictures of the victims, imagines the lives they might have had.”

  This was true enough, but Graves knew that there was a rather serious problem with the way Slovak imagined the abruptly shortened lives of Kessler’s victims. In Slovak’s mind, the unjustly dead would always have had good lives, happy, fulfilled, brimming with achievement. Unlike real life, murder never saved them from something even worse.

  “I sometimes think of what she lost,” Miss Davies added. “The future she would have had. I suppose one always does that. It’s part of the curse, don’t you think? This sense of what might have been.”

  Graves glanced back down to the photograph. “In the pictures you sent me in New York, one of them is of Faye in front of a big rock. Was that Indian Rock, the place you thought of as a secret place?”

  “Yes, it was,” Miss Davies answered. “We’d gone for a walk in the woods that day.” She drew the picture from Graves’ hand and stared at it. “Faye was quite wise. Beyond her years. She understood life better than anyone I’ve met since.” She returned the photograph to the desk, then looked at Graves pointedly. “There was nothing naive about Faye.”

  Graves’ question came spontaneously, something thrown up by his own experience. “Then why would she have gone into the woods alone?”

  “I wish she hadn’t done that,” Miss Davies said brusquely. She seemed reluctant to go on, but forced herself to do so. “Faye came to the house that morning. The last one. She came to the front door. I’d been sitting in the dining room, when I heard my father and my brother talking in the foyer. I walked to the entrance of the dining room. You can see the front door from there. That’s when I saw Faye. Through that window by the door. She was wearing her blue dress. The one I’d given her for her birthday the year before. She saw me too. I know she did, because she gave a little nod. I think perhaps she wanted me to meet her at Indian Rock.” She shook her head. “I’ve often wondered what might have happened if I’d gone to the door. Or stepped outside to meet her. We might have gone into the woods together. Up to Indian Rock. The two of us. I might have saved her life.”

  “Or been murdered with her,” Graves said. He felt the bony hand on his shoulder, heard the voice, hard, raspy, What you doing here, boy? “It’s as easy for two people to be at the wrong place as it is for one.”

  She studied him intently. “You’re a true Manichean, Mr. Graves. You believe that the world is divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil, and that in the end, it’s the evil forces that always win.”

  Graves said nothing. It was not a charge he could deny.

  “But the fact is, evil men are not always as strong and clever as the villain in your books,” Miss Davies told him. “I can assure you that Jake Mosley was neither strong nor clever. He was just a workman. Ordinary.”

  “Did Faye know him?”

  “Only by sight. The second cottage was being built that summer. Mosley was one of the workmen my father hired for the job. Faye didn’t know him, but he alarmed her.”

  “Alarmed her?”

  “She said she didn’t like the way he stared at her. She thought he was creepy, and when he stared at her she said she felt like he was … touching her with his eyes.”

  Graves glanced toward the window, the mouth of the trail Faye had taken to her death. He saw a hand reach out, jerk her around. The fear was in her eyes, stark and terrible, as it had been in Gwen’s, the horror of her fate already fixed within them, that she was now the stuff of sport, would live only as long as her agony delighted.

  When he turned back toward Miss Davies, he saw that she was peering at him darkly.

  “You’re always imagining things, aren’t you?” she
asked. “Terrible things.” She glanced away suddenly, avoiding Graves’ eyes, as if through them she’d glimpsed some hidden chamber of his mind. “Well, I’ll leave you to your work,” she said. She started to leave, reached the door, then turned back. The look on her face was one Graves had seen before. In movies. In life. The moment when the victim presses herself against the door, listens for the footsteps of the intruder.

  CHAPTER 8

  Graves spent the next minutes trying to adapt himself to his new surroundings, moving around the room slowly, like a cat in an unfamiliar dwelling, wary and uncertain. He’d done the same thing the first night he’d spent at Mrs. Flexner’s house. He’d been taken there after Gwen’s murder, Mrs. Flexner arranging the small bedroom just across the hall from her own. He’d tried to sleep, huddled beneath the covers despite the sweltering summer air, but the dread had finally urged him out of bed and into the house, where he’d stalked from room to room, wondering if he was still there somewhere, watching him behind the window or the drawn curtain, crouching inside a closet, waiting to leap out. He’d made it to the kitchen by the time Mrs. Flexner heard him, turned on the light, and found him standing by the sink, his body draped in one of her husband’s white nightshirts, the knife in his hand, something he’d seized for his own protection and intended to take into his bed. She’d taken the knife from him gently, placed it on the old wooden cutting board, and escorted him back to his room. “Keep the light on in here if you want to, Paul,” she told him.

  And he had.

  For fourteen months.

  Although the office Miss Davies had made available to him at Riverwood was far different from any of the rooms he’d entered in Mrs. Flexner’s farmhouse that night, Graves found his current mood alarmingly similar to that earlier occasion.

  The same sense of impending evil had driven him to develop various strategies over the years. He’d applied some of them to his work, learning to read books about crime and police procedure with a studied, academic distance, always careful to maintain a clinical mood by flipping past the photographs of the victims and avoiding all textual references to their actual personalities. By that means he’d turned an otherwise unbearable world into a series of case histories, where letters could easily stand for names, “A” murdered in one way, “B” in another. In this way he could avoid the fact that “A” had actually been a college student slashed to death in her dormitory bed, “B” an eight-year-old tied to a chair and set on fire. Graves knew that it was this distancing that allowed him to write his books, live his life. For as Kessler had written in one of his grimly taunting letters to Slovak, If you truly felt their pain, you would die of their agony.

  But there were other strategies as well, means of adjustment that allowed him to proceed more or less unnoticed through the usual activities of daily life. Some had been consciously developed, like living on a high floor in a building that did not have exterior fire escapes. Others had been generated spontaneously and worked reflexively, so that he could feel his body turn away from a deserted street without consciously willing it. His ears closed against any of the songs he’d heard Gwen singing in the weeks before her murder, and his eyes fled from any teenage girl with chestnut hair.

  Most determinedly of all, he kept himself well within the bounds of the familiar. He frequented the same shops, took the same routes from place to place. Now, as he moved about his temporary office, he knew that he was doing what he had always done in an unfamiliar place. He was marking it as a frightened animal would, locked in that same primitive dread of a merciless and intensely violent world, his ears and eyes obsessively alert to the glide of the serpent, the shadow of the hawk.

  He circled the room once more, this time concentrating on the photographs that hung on the wall, stopping to peer closely at each one. They were black-and-white pictures of summer scenes at Riverwood, parties and excursions and picnics in the surrounding woods, the arrivals and departures of guests. Through the years a great many distinguished people had visited Warren Davies and his family. Graves recognized prominent politicians from the thirties and forties, along with a host of generals and diplomats, scientists and businessmen. There were a few writers and film stars as well, and for a time Graves lingered on a photograph of Mr. Davies pretending to hit Humphrey Bogart with a croquet mallet.

  There was a map of Riverwood and its environs along with two paintings, both of the main house. Graves briefly studied the map, then went on to the paintings.

  The first presented a close view of the house and appeared to have been painted from the near bank of the pond. It concentrated on the architectural details of the big house, the scrollwork above the door, the towering front windows, the long wooden walkway that had been built to resemble a New England covered bridge and led directly from the basement to the boathouse.

  The second painting rendered the mansion from a greater distance, with both the great sweep of the front lawn and the gently rippled surface of the pond in the foreground. In the far left corner Graves could make out a second cottage still under construction, its bare frame reflected hazily in the green surface of the water. It was this cottage that Jake Mosley had been hired to work on by Mr. Davies, and as he continued to gaze at the canvas, Graves realized that it must have been painted the summer of Faye Harrison’s death, and thus provided a fully detailed panorama of the house and grounds of Riverwood at the time of the murder.

  He glanced at the bottom of the painting. The signature that rested in its lower right corner was so small, it seemed as if the artist had been reluctant to reveal himself: Andre Grossman.

  Graves stepped closer, studying the painting’s details—the skeletal frame of the still-unfinished cottage, building materials scattered all around it, the sailboat that lolled in the water beside the boathouse, the vacant tennis court. It was clear that from Grossman’s vantage point on the other side of the pond, the artist would have been able to see anyone who came and went from the main house, strolled its grounds or lingered, however briefly, at the edge of the water.

  For a moment Graves imagined himself in Grossman’s place on the sunny morning of August 27, 1946. Glancing from behind his easel on the far side of the lake, the painter would have seen a young girl in a light blue dress as she made her way from the mansion to the woods. She would have passed the eastern edge of the house, then moved across the open lawn, her back to the mansion, a wall of green rising before her. She would have been able to see the single break in the wood, the trail’s narrow entrance, just as Graves could see it in Grossman’s painting, but all the rest of Riverwood, the house and grounds, the pond and the boathouse, even the uncompleted second cottage, would have been behind her.

  It was that second cottage that drew Graves’ attention now. As he continued to imagine the few short seconds during which Faye Harrison had walked toward the woods, he could hear the sounds of the hammers ringing across the water, hear the voices of the workmen as they called to each other. Grossman would have heard them too, perhaps even noticed how the men suddenly paused in their work, as men do when a beautiful young woman drifts by.

  One of those men would have been Jake Mosley.

  Graves had not yet seen a picture of Mosley, but he imagined him tall and very skinny, with deep-sunk eyes and a severe, hawkish face, the same form he’d given to Kessler many years before. He saw him in khaki trousers and sleeveless T-shirt, a battered carpenter’s belt drooping from his hips, hammers and screwdrivers hanging from its worn loops. To this bare physical outline Graves now added small, malicious eyes, dull and clouded, one of them cocked to the right, so that Jake Mosley forever looked as if he were glancing over his bony shoulder. When he smiled, it was mirthlessly, almost cruelly, a jagged line of yellow teeth behind thin, moist lips.

  In the scene Graves continued to imagine, Faye Harrison had now closed in upon the encroaching woods, a mountain trail opening before her like a small, dark mouth, Mosley still watching from a distance, swelling with desire, wanting her but una
ble to have her, so that she remained distant and untouchable, receding from his grasp tormentingly, as if his were the hands of Tantalus.

  In his mind, Graves saw Faye disappear into the green. At that moment he knew the sounds of the hammers would have begun to ring across the pond again, the workmen now returning to their work. Andre Grossman would have seen those hammers begin their steady rise and fall, and Graves envisioned them with a chilling vividness that surprised and disturbed him, all save the one gripped violently in Jake Mosley’s freckled hand.

  Once he’d finally pulled himself away from Grossman’s painting, Graves turned his attention to the file cabinet behind the desk. He knew that his initial imaginary recreation, its vision of a sinister Jake Mosley watching in silent maliciousness as Faye Harrison disappeared into the woods, was precisely that—something he’d imagined.

  The facts, as he came to discover them during the next few hours, were somewhat different.

  He began by reading through the contemporary newspaper accounts. He found them in the top drawer of the filing cabinet, the dippings gathered into a single black binder, neatly pressed beneath clear plastic covers and arranged chronologically.

  The first report had been published in the local paper on the morning of August 28. It was headed LOCAL GIRL MISSING and stated that “Miss Mary Faye Harrison, age sixteen, has been reported missing by her mother, Mrs. John Harrison, currently in residence on the Warren Davies estate, known locally as Riverwood.”

  The next day the paper reported Faye had last been seen on one of the many trails that wound through the surrounding hills. A hiker named Jim Preston reported having seen a girl whom he later identified as Faye Harrison at around ten-fifteen in the morning. She’d been walking down Mohonk Trail, Preston said, and she’d been alone.