Instruments of Night

by Thomas H. Cook

  Graves imagined them in precisely that way, a handsome young couple rowing on the pond or taking long romantic walks in the surrounding woods.

  “Faye never had a boyfriend,” Mrs. Harrison said softly. “Never had a chance to marry. To have kids.” She looked at Graves plaintively. “My girl wanted all of that. Husband. Children. She could have had it too. Everything.” The tragedy of her daughter’s death fell upon her with renewed heaviness. “Everyone loved Faye,” she whispered.

  Everyone loved Faye. They were the same words Saunders had used. In his mind Graves saw her body sprawled on the floor of the mountain cave. At least one person had not loved her.

  “Did Faye mention anything out of the ordinary that morning?” Graves asked.

  “No. She didn’t say much of anything. When the clothes were all pinned, she just walked back into the house.”

  Graves saw Faye walk away from the clothesline, toward the little house, her blond hair lifted by a scented breeze. She halted suddenly, then turned to ask a question she had not really asked, Why do I have to die?

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Faye?” Graves asked.

  A single hand rose shakily to Mrs. Harrison’s throat, replaying, as Graves imagined it, the strangulation of her only child. “No one would want to hurt my girl. I see her all the time. The way she was that morning. Just before she went into the house.”

  Graves saw Faye as he thought Mrs. Harrison must see her, a young girl with a haunted face, caught in some dark web. He heard the screen door slap against its frame as she went into the house, a final glimmer of blond hair as she disappeared into its shadows.

  “She left about an hour later,” Mrs. Harrison said. “I saw her walking toward the big house. Wearing that blue dress. The one Allison gave her for her fifteenth birthday. All dressed up, like she was going to a party. She looked like she was going to knock at the door. But she didn’t. She just turned and walked back down the stairs.” She turned toward the window, staring out in the slowly falling twilight. “Everyone loved my Faye.” She stiffened slightly, as if struck by an icy wave. “Why?” she blurted out angrily, a buried rage boiling up suddenly, as it sometimes did with Graves when he thought of Gwen, saw the rope snap taut, her feet lift from the floor, bare and bloody as they dangled over the wooden slats.

  “I don’t want it all dragged up again,” Mrs. Harrison repeated savagely. “I told that to Portman too. Leave my girl in peace, I told him. But he wouldn’t do it.”

  Graves saw the detective trudging wearily down the corridor toward Mrs. Harrison’s shadowed room, his shoulders slumped beneath the plastic raincoat, fat and wheezing, a wrinkled fist rapping softly at her closed door.

  “He said Jake didn’t do it,” Mrs. Harrison said exhaustedly.

  Graves leaned forward. “Why did he think that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Harrison answered. “He never said.” She slumped back into her chair. “I see him sometimes. Standing at the end of my bed. Looking down at me. The one who killed Faye.”

  Graves realized that Mrs. Harrison wasn’t speaking of any particular person, but of that form of evil that lies forever in wait, eternal and all-powerful, as malignantly skilled in small things as in great ones, the hand that expertly wields the blade and precisely guides the storm. Silently, he pronounced the name he had given it years before: Kessler.

  “You imagine him,” Graves told the old woman softly.

  Mrs. Harrison closed her eyes. They were still closed when Graves left the room.

  CHAPTER 10

  Once back at his cottage, Graves took a shower, dressed, then walked out onto the screened porch just as a black Mazda swept by. He watched as the car moved along the edge of the pond, then came to a halt in front of the cottage Jake Mosley had been working on the summer of Faye Harrison’s murder.

  A woman stepped out almost instantly. She wore a long navy blue dress with a burgundy shawl over her shoulders. She drew the shawl more tightly around her as she made her way toward the steps of the cottage. At the top she stopped and looked back. A breeze riffled her hair and lifted the edges of the shawl. She peered intently at the water, as if seeking to divine what lay just beneath its surface.

  Watching her as she now turned back toward the cottage, Graves knew that years before, the sight of such a woman might have urged him from his isolation, kindled the normal fires of physical desire. But such yearning seemed well past him now. His own flesh felt as dead as the carcasses that hung in the chambers of Malverna, motionless and void, gutted by the same ripping blade.

  Graves did not see the woman again until she arrived for dinner. She was dressed in a white linen skirt and short-sleeved khaki blouse, her feet in simple leather sandals. It was the fashionably casual attire suited for a remote artists’ colony, Graves supposed, quite different from his own style of dress, so uncompromisingly urban, the dark pants and shirt that tended to dissolve into any backdrop of brick or tinted glass, clothes that vaguely served as camouflage. There were gray wisps in her otherwise dark hair. Her eyes were dark too, and deeply sunken, the first hint of wrinkles in their corners allowing him to calculate her age at between thirty-five and forty.

  But it was the way she moved toward him that Graves noticed most, a masculine, curiously athletic stride, as if she expected to find obstacles in her path and had already determined to surmount them.

  He rose from his chair as she approached him. He could tell by the way she looked at him that she’d expected to recognize him but hadn’t.

  “Eleanor Stern” was all she said.

  “Paul Graves.”

  Eleanor glanced at the table. The center leaf had been removed so that it was just large enough for the two of them. “From the way the table has been arranged, I suppose we’re expected to talk during dinner,” she said as she pulled out her chair.

  She’d said it cheerfully, but with a hint of irritation, as if it were a trick someone had tried to play on her, a transparent attempt to make her more sociable than she was, to force her into a conversation she would have otherwise avoided.

  From her tone, Graves guessed that she’d been subject to a great many such ruses, had seen through them all, perhaps even come to despise them. It was his first insight into her, that she was a social director’s nightmare.

  She drew the napkin from the table and spread it across her lap. “I’m told it’ll be just the two of us. All summer.” She looked down at her plate, concentrating on the idyllic country scene that had been painted upon it, an English country house, men in scarlet sporting jackets, mounted on horses, the fox hunt about to commence. “We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to, of course,” she said, lifting her eyes toward him.

  Graves realized that he was still standing, hastily pulled out his chair, and sat down. “I’m not here for the same reason you are,” he replied, suddenly determined to clear the air. “I’m not really a guest here.”

  She stared at him without comment. He could make nothing of her gaze, nor in the least discern what she was thinking. All he noticed was that everything she looked at, she peeled back a little.

  “I’m more of an employee.” He heard the diffidence in his voice. It was a tone he didn’t like and hadn’t intended. He worked to find another way to express the distinction he recognized between them. Nothing came, however, so that he simply unfolded his napkin.

  “An employee.” Eleanor circled her fingers around the stem of a crystal water goblet to her right. “What’s the job?”

  Since no other answer appeared possible, Graves replied, “I’ve been hired to solve a murder. Of a young girl. Or at least imagine what might have happened to her.”

  Eleanor took a sip from the glass. “So, are you a policeman? Or a private detective, something like that?”

  “No, I’m a writer. Mysteries. A series. Set back in time.”

  She nodded and started to ask another question, but the same woman who’d directed Graves to the library earlier i
n the day suddenly entered the room. “Well now, I suppose you’d probably like a drink before dinner,” she said cheerily.

  Graves shook his head.

  Eleanor said, “A scotch, please,” then waited for the woman to leave before returning her attention to Graves. “I’ve never heard of a writer being hired to do something like that.”

  Graves could see her mind working, little lights in her dark eyes, subtle, nearly invisible, but unmistakably flashing, the mark, he recognized, of a very great intelligence.

  “Who was the murdered girl?”

  The turn in the conversation surprised Graves. Eleanor Stern’s mind worked like a grappling hook—seizing subjects, impaling them. He felt that he was now dangling from that hook, would not be released until he’d told her everything.

  “Her name was Faye,” he answered. “Faye Harrison. She was sixteen years old. She lived here on the estate with her mother. The mother taught at a local school. An old fashioned sort of teacher, I’ve been told. Heavy on grammar, punctuation, that sort of thing.”

  Eleanor nodded. For a moment Graves imagined her as a child, seated at a long dining table, brilliant people all around her, a welter of dazzling talk, her young eyes darting from one person to the next, effortlessly following several conversations at once.

  “When was she murdered?” Eleanor asked.

  “In August 1946.”

  “That’s a long time ago. Why is Miss Davies looking into it again?”

  Suspicious, Graves thought, she is already suspicious, already probing, poised to check the attic, then the cellar, draw open the forbidden door.

  “I mean, it’s been more than fifty years, after all,” Eleanor persisted. “That’s a long time to dwell upon a single event, don’t you think? Even one as striking as a murder.”

  The suspicion lingered in her voice. For that reason Graves sensed that Eleanor Stern’s suspiciousness was inherent in the way she saw things. For her, the human world was a landscape strewn with pits and snares, the mind her only means to maneuver through the bramble, avoid the iron traps.

  “Not long ago, Faye’s mother wrote Miss Davies a letter,” Graves told her. “She said she’d never have any peace until she found out what happened to her daughter.”

  “So the murderer was never found?” Eleanor’s eyes had narrowed slightly as she’d asked the question, a gesture of intensifying interest, as Graves recognized, a sense of drawing the subject inward, holding it in a subtle vise.

  “No. There was a suspect. A man named Mosley. But he was never arrested. He died not long after the murder.”

  Eleanor nodded. Graves saw something fire in her mind, a connection, two wires meeting in a sudden spark. “But if you found that the suspect had, in fact, done it, then you’d have to convince Mrs. Harrison of it?”

  “Yes, I suppose I would.”

  “But if the suspect didn’t do it, then you’d have to find the real killer?”

  “Not exactly. I’m only supposed to ‘imagine’ who it was.”

  “So it doesn’t have to be true,” Eleanor murmured. “Just believable. To give the girl’s mother closure.” She cast her eyes about the room, its stateliness and splendor. “Murder in a place like this,” she added thoughtfully. “A perfect world.”

  Graves was not sure what this woman might think of that world, the one he’d agreed to investigate while at Riverwood, and whose chief characteristic, according to Allison Davies, had been a tender innocence. He thought of the photographs he’d already studied, two girls in a boat, on a pier, lounging in a gazebo. What would Eleanor Stern think of such images? Would she see Faye and Allison as Miss Davies did? As two innocent, healthy, happy teenagers in a bright sunlight? Or would she see them already veiled in shadows?

  “Life sometimes takes a cruel twist,” Eleanor Stern said.

  Graves suddenly thought of the “cruel twist” that had destroyed his sister and devastated his life. To dull its building ache, he returned to the more distant murder of Faye Harrison. “Faye came to the house that morning.” In his mind he saw Faye at the entrance in her blue dress, her face wreathed in a curious dread. “Miss Davies saw her standing at the door. She thinks Faye might have wanted the two of them to meet at their ‘secret place.’”

  The words themselves appeared to deepen Eleanor’s interest. “Secret place,” she repeated.

  “Indian Rock, it’s called. But Miss Davies didn’t meet Faye there. She went back to this room. That’s where she’d been earlier, when she’d heard her brother and her father talking in the foyer.”

  Eleanor’s eyes drifted toward the door at the entrance to the room. “They must have been talking rather loudly, don’t you think? If Miss Davies had heard them all the way here.”

  Graves nodded. He hadn’t noticed the distance before then.

  “An argument, perhaps.” Eleanor thought a moment, then said, “Where did Faye go after that?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t traced her any farther than to the front door. I only know that about a half hour later she came around the side of the house and walked toward the woods. Miss Davies never saw her again. No one did, except for a local boy, a hiker, who saw her going down Mohonk Trail at the time.”

  “And so Miss Davies thinks that if she’d let Faye into the house that morning, she might have saved her life.”

  “Either that, or gone into the woods with her.”

  “Of course, if she’d done that, she might have been killed too,” Eleanor pointed out, exactly as Graves himself had. “That would have been more difficult, of course. Unless there were two killers.”

  Graves felt Sykes suddenly draw near him, hollow-eyed and cowering, Kessler’s obedient tool, fixed in his eternal cowardice. He could feel himself being sucked back into the world he had created for them, the nightbound city where they waited in the fog, or at the end of the alleyway, behind the oddly opened door.

  But these were not places Graves wanted to return to—at least not yet—and so he quickly acted to prevent it. “What about you?” he asked Eleanor Stern. “What are you working on?”

  “A play,” Eleanor replied. “More or less autobiographical.” She did not seem interested in pursuing the subject. “From what you’ve told me about your novels, I take it you don’t write autobiographically.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then I suppose your life has been as uneventful as mine. No trauma at all.”

  Graves smelled honeysuckle, felt once again the sense of safety that had briefly settled over him before; in an instant, the perfume had been overtaken by a blast of sweet, gummy breath, the warm touch of the night by the bony grasp of fingers on his shoulder, the rasp of crickets by a voice, low, threatening, What you looking at, boy?

  “What was your first novel about?” Eleanor asked.

  The bony fingers tightened around Graves’ shoulder; the nails bit into his flesh. “A kidnapping. Of a little boy.”

  “Was it the first of your series?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your hero, who is he?”

  In his mind Graves saw not Slovak, but Sheriff Sloane as he lumbered away from Mrs. Flexner’s house, weary, his broad shoulders slumped, resigned that the boy would never speak, and as a result, that he—Sloane—would never know the truth, never find and bring to justice whoever it was who’d slaughtered Gwendolyn Graves, hung her from a beam and mutilated her. For a moment Graves returned to that last afternoon, remembered how during the brief few seconds before he’d pulled away, the sheriff had stared at him from behind the dusty windshield. As if he were before him now, he heard again the old man’s futile questions. What did you see that night, Paul? Why won’t you tell me what you saw?

  “Slovak,” Graves said, now forcing himself to concentrate on Eleanor’s question.

  “And your villain?”

  Graves smelled the breath again, felt the man jerk the hoe from his trembling fingers. Gimme that. You won’t be needing it.

  “Kessler,” he rep
lied, then glimpsed a small, cringing figure in the darkness, his wet, slavish eyes fixed upon Kessler. “And he has a kind of personal servant.” The name fell from his mouth like a piece of torn flesh. “Sykes.”

  He could feel Eleanor’s eyes on him. “You hate them very much,” she said. “Kessler and Sykes.”

  Graves saw the black car grow small in the distance, finally vanish behind its tail of yellow dust. Revenge really was the only thing that could give him any peace, he thought. To take the life of the one who’d killed his sister. He saw the old sheriff facing him again, heard his insistent questions, remembered the silences that had followed them.

  Who was he, Paul?

  Silence.

  Who came to your house and killed your sister?

  Silence.

  There were two of them, weren’t there?

  Silence.

  You know who they were, don’t you? You saw them, I know you did. They tied you to a chair. They made you watch what they did to Gwen. I’ve seen the scratches on the chair, where you struggled to get free.

  Silence.

  But you couldn’t get free. You saw it all, didn’t you?

  Silence.

  If you don’t tell me, Paul, those two men will never pay for what they did to your sister.

  Silence.

  Who were they, son? Tell me who they were.

  He could still remember the image that had risen into his mind the moment Sheriff Sloane had asked his final question: two figures lurching through the front room of the old farmhouse, one tall, skinny, pointing here and there, hissing orders, Get this, get that, the other fixed in his eternal crouch, darting frantically on command, grabbing the tools that were required, a knife, a fork, a length of gray rope, a box of matches.

  You saw it all, didn’t you, Paul? Everything they did to Gwen. You were still here the next morning, weren’t you? You saw them.

  He’d replayed that final moment, saw the black car back out of the driveway, dawn now breaking over the fields. It had had a drooping front bumper and a choked, clattering engine, with worn tires and no hubcaps, an exhaust pipe hung so low it nearly dragged the ground. He had even remembered the license plate: Ohio 4273.