“Was there ‘something’ between Grossman and Mrs. Davies?” Graves asked.
Greta sniffed. “I do not know,” she answered. “I know only that Mr. Davies was good to Grossman. Took him in. Gave him a place to live. Work.”
She spoke of Warren Davies with great affection, a tone that reminded Graves of the photograph Saunders had mentioned days before, the picture of Mr. Davies he’d seen in Greta’s room. The picture now rested on a small table beside her bed. “You knew Mr. Davies before the war,” he said.
“Yes.” She glanced toward the window, the spacious grounds, the broad pond, all of it now hidden behind night’s black wall. “Mr. Davies brought me here.” A fierce wave of resentment swept over her. “From the camp.” She lowered her head, gazed at her knotted hands. “I could have been a doctor, like my mother.… A great doctor.” She remained silent for a time, then lifted her head slowly and stared out the window, at the nearly impenetrable darkness that blocked Riverwood from view. “That old detective didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe that Faye was a thief.”
“But someone was looking through Mr. Davies’ papers,” Graves said. “For what?”
Greta continued to stare out the window. “The truth about Riverwood. That is what the policeman said.”
“What truth?” Graves asked.
“He didn’t say,” Greta answered. “He didn’t know.”
She remained silent for a long time, then her eyes drifted back toward Graves. She seemed to have darkened almost physically, stricken by a terrible melancholy. It didn’t surprise him that her final words had nothing to do with Portman or Faye Harrison or some “truth about Riverwood” the old detective had spoken of but had never found.
“I should have died in the camp with my mother,” she said. “To see certain things, and then survive. This should not be.”
Graves felt the impulse to make a counterargument, sing the triumph of survival. But he saw his sister stagger across the floor, ragged, bloodied, dancing at Kessler’s command, her body jerking to the stomp of his dusty boot. And so a soft “I know” was all he said.
CHAPTER 19
As Graves headed back toward his cottage, the lights of the mansion shining brightly behind him, he thought again of the last thing Greta Klein had said to him. The truth about Riverwood, her tone had been dark and secretive, the same his characters used when they described the outrages that made up Malverna’s grisly history. For a moment Graves imagined Kessler standing on its shrouded gallery, wreathed in swamp gas and Spanish moss, waiting for the black carriage to arrive, for Sykes to haul out their latest victim, trussed and gagged, a young woman, as Graves envisioned her, with tangled chestnut hair.
The lights of Eleanor’s cottage returned Graves to Riverwood. He could see Eleanor through the screen door, her body caught in the soft yellow glow of the floor lamp beside her chair. She was reading, and although he was reluctant to disturb her, the thought of going directly to his cottage disturbed him even more, as if some part of his lifelong solitude had without warning begun to lose its cold appeal.
“Hello, Paul.” Eleanor did not seem surprised to see him coming up the stairs. She rose and swung open the screen to let him in. “I missed you at lunch. Dinner too.” Despite the lightness in tone, the question that followed was not altogether facetious. “Are you trying to starve yourself, Paul?”
Graves shook his head. “Busy. That’s all.”
Eleanor waved him inside the cottage, pointed to an empty chair, then chose one opposite. “Well, my work hasn’t been going very well.” She nodded toward the desk at the far end of the room. “I didn’t even turn it on.”
Graves glanced toward the desk. It was arrayed with what he assumed to be all the latest equipment. Computer. Monitor. Modem. Fax.
“Not exactly parchment and a quill pen anymore, is it?” she asked.
“I’m still pretty much at that stage,” Graves told her. “Just an old typewriter.”
“Did you get much work done today?”
“I learned a few things.” His mind returned to the last answer Greta Klein had given him. “But a lot is hidden. Family secrets.”
“That’s to be expected,” Eleanor said. “Remember that line from Tolstoy. ‘All families are unhappy. But each family is unhappy in its own way.’ In what way were the Davieses unhappy?”
Once again Graves found himself quite willing to reveal the few things he’d learned. “Well, there was trouble over Edward’s relationship with Mona Flagg.” He glanced toward the library, and in his mind saw a figure half hidden behind a bolt of canvas. “And it’s possible that Grossman—the man who found Faye’s body—had some sort of relationship with Mrs. Davies. Or, at least, that was the rumor.”
Eleanor laughed. “Well, in my experience, rumor is the single most reliable source of information on earth.”
Graves smiled suddenly, reflexively, a release that struck him as very nearly wanton. He imagined Gwen seeing it, this smile he had no right to, her eyes locked in fierce rebuke.
“So, Mrs. Davies and Grossman might have been an item,” Eleanor said. “Anything else?”
“Grossman knew Faye slightly. He took a photograph of her. Near Manitou Cave.”
Eleanor’s eyes took on the probing intensity of Sheriff Sloane’s. “There’s more, isn’t there? About Grossman, I mean.” She watched Graves closely, silently, her questions stored where Slovak stored his, in a small chamber just behind his eyes.
“Only a feeling,” Graves answered. “That he was hiding something.”
“That’s one of your themes, isn’t it? The buried life. What Slovak endured as a boy. The way Sykes was snatched from a childhood he never speaks about. Only Kessler seems to have no secret past.”
“Kessler lives in the moment,” Graves said dully, with no wish to discuss it.
“That’s a quote, you know,” Eleanor said. “From your second novel. The one I’m reading now. Half a quote, actually.” She gave the full one. “‘Kessler lives in the moment. And in each moment summons hell.’”
Graves recalled the line. It struck him as pretentious. Stilted and melodramatic. The line of a callow young writer. He remembered how it had come to him, the way he’d glanced out the window of his apartment and seen a spiral of red neon flashing in the darkness, beating off the seconds in a hellish glow.
Eleanor studied him intently. “Have you ever wondered why you write about murder?”
Graves saw Kessler untie his sister from the table, pull her backward by the hair, throw her to the floor. He felt his body struggle against the ropes that bound him to the chair, heard his voice cry out, Leave her alone! “No,” he answered now, a lie he’d repeated so often, it came to him as naturally as truth.
Eleanor continued to watch him closely. “‘Light only darkens things already dark.’ Slovak says that. Why does he feel that way?”
“Because he knows that life doesn’t care about the living.”
Something trembled in Eleanor’s face, and Graves realized that he’d touched a vulnerable aspect of her nature. For a moment she left it open to his gaze. Then she glanced away, returned to the safer subject of Faye Harrison’s death, the possibility that it might have been tied to the affair between Andre Grossman and Mrs. Davies.
“All right, let’s say that it’s true,” she began. “Let’s say that Mrs. Davies and this mysterious Mr. Grossman were having an affair, where would that leave you in terms of Faye?” She did not wait for Graves to answer. “Perhaps Faye found out about it. Threatened to tell Mr. Davies. Perhaps she was killed to shut her up. Of course, there are lots of reasons for a woman to have an affair. Love. Loneliness. Simple lust. But there’s also revenge. In this case, against Mr. Davies. To get even with him.”
Graves looked at her quizzically.
“For his having an affair,” Eleanor explained. “There’s a famous Russian short story. By Turgenev. ‘First Love.’ It deals with a teenage boy who’s desperately in love with a young woman. He
later discovers that the woman is having an affair. Still later he discovers that the man she is having the affair with is his own father. Suppose that in this case, it was the older man’s wife who made the discovery that her husband was having an affair with a young woman. That is, Faye Harrison.” She waited for Graves to respond. When he didn’t she went on. “Let’s see where we are, then. From what you’ve told me, I gather that no one saw Faye from approximately eight-thirty in the morning, when she was sitting alone in the gazebo, until a half hour later, when she came walking across the front lawn.”
Graves stopped her. “No. Someone did.” A face swept into his mind—dark, with burning eyes. “Greta Klein. The upstairs maid. I spoke to her just a few minutes ago. She still lives here. She told me that she saw Faye inside the house.”
“Inside the house?”
“In the basement,” Graves said. “She told Portman that she was coming down the stairs at around eight-twenty-five that morning when she saw Faye standing at the entrance to the corridor that leads from the basement to the boathouse. Edward and his girlfriend, Mona, were already in the boathouse, so Faye was alone when Greta saw her.”
“What was Faye doing in the basement?”
“Mr. Davies had a room down there. The door was open, and things had been scattered around inside it. Portman believed Faye—or someone else—might have been looking for something.” He thought again of the strained, curiously secretive look in Greta’s eyes as she’d told him what Portman had said. “The truth about Riverwood.”
“The truth about Riverwood …”
Graves could tell that Eleanor was already searching for some way to rethink all she’d learned so far.
“It’s a question of working out timetables, isn’t it?” she said after a moment. “For everyone at Riverwood? Where they were when Faye went into the woods that morning? What have you learned so far?”
“Well, Faye left her house and walked to the front door of the mansion at around eight o’clock.” Graves’ mind swept from the broad exterior world of Riverwood to its various enclosed rooms, the whole complex interior of the mansion suddenly exposed to his vision, so that looking down upon it, he saw it as a large wooden dollhouse, its roof removed, all its elegant rooms now visible, figures in those rooms. Mr. Davies and Edward in the foyer. Allison watching them from the entrance of the dining room. Mrs. Davies and Andre Grossman in the library. Mona on the stairs, headed for her room. The household servants at their morning chores.
“Everyone else was in the house,” Graves said. For a moment all was still, the players locked in the long-vanished sunlight of that distant summer morning. Then, as if at a signal, the denizens of Riverwood began to move as time inched forward, setting them in motion.
As if from a great height, Graves watched the scene as he narrated it. He saw Faye turn from the front door and head for the gazebo, where, minutes later, Warren Davies joined her. Andre Grossman dabbed at his palette, Mrs. Davies took her seat in the high leather chair by the sunlit window. Mona, now dressed for a morning sail, darted down the stairs to where Edward waited for her on the side porch.
“By approximately eight-fifteen, Mr. Davies had left Faye in the gazebo and gone back inside the house.”
He outlined each person’s subsequent movements as Portman had so meticulously traced them in his investigation. As he did so, he saw time move forward to 8:25 A.M. By then Faye had left the basement where Greta Klein had seen her staring down the corridor toward the boathouse, and was now crossing the lawn. Homer Garrett, Frank Saunders, and Jake Mosley watched intently from the unfinished cottage until she reached the forest edge, then vanished up the mountain trail.
“Faye went into the woods at just before eight-thirty. A few minutes later Preston saw her go around Indian Rock and down the opposite slope.” Graves glanced toward the ridge she’d moved up that morning. He imagined the great stone that rested at its crest, the steep trail that led away from it, Faye moving down it, her blond hair glistening in the dappled light.
“And no one saw her after that?” Eleanor asked. “Except her killer.” She rose, walked to the window, faced the pond for a moment, then turned back to Graves. “So, you’re in the same position you always put Slovak in. Maybe you should try to figure it out the same way he does.”
“How is that?”
“Don’t you read your own books, Paul?”
“Not after I’ve written them.”
“Well, Slovak has certain powers.” She ticked them off. “Imagination. Intuition. A feeling for the heart of things. They’re the key to his understanding. Slovak always looks at the person. Not where a victim was or what a victim was doing. But the victim … from the inside.”
Graves knew where she was headed, dreaded where she was urging him to go.
“You know where Faye was and where she went on the day she died, Paul. But you don’t know who she was. That’s the mystery Slovak would solve first. The mystery of Faye’s character. You haven’t looked into that yet.”
She was right. But Graves knew all too well why he had remained so aloof from Faye. It was simple. He could not discover Faye without revisiting her terror. Eleanor had clearly sensed his pulling back. Had she also begun to probe the reason for it?
“Would you mind if I went over the files Miss Davies gathered for you in the library?” Eleanor asked.
Graves hesitated. “Don’t you have your own work?”
“I think this is my work, Paul.” She regarded him with the same intensity he’d observed earlier. “When I was a little girl—eight years old, to be exact—my parents took me to the summer house we had in those days. It was in Maine. By a lake, surrounded by woods. Just like here.”
Graves could tell that she was assembling the tale in her mind, arranging each scene, building the set, writing the dialogue.
“One day, I went walking in the woods. Just like Faye Harrison did. It never occurred to me that there might be any danger. Then I saw him. A tall man with slick black hair. He was just standing in the woods, looking at me. I didn’t know what the look meant. Only that there was something about it that made me feel … afraid.”
Graves could see her small body motionless, her long, dark hair falling over her shoulders, her eyes, bright, evaluating, all her vast intelligence now focused on the grim figure who blocked her path, her mind working furiously to take in this new and strangely terrifying data.
“That’s when I experienced what all women at some point discover,” Eleanor went on. “That your body is distinct from yourself, that it can arouse—without you wishing it or even being aware of it—a terrible force. I looked at that man’s face, at the way he was looking at me, and I knew that just by being alive, living inside my body, that this in itself was an incitement.”
Graves saw Ammon Kessler lift his sister from the floor near the end of it, when he’d finally played enough games, finished with her, and dawn was breaking over the wide green fields. For a moment he’d cupped her face in his hands, caressed it almost tenderly, though with mocking words, Pretty, pretty. Once so pretty. At the time Graves had not been able to fathom the cruelty he’d glimpsed in Kessler’s face as he’d whispered such words to his sister. Now he realized to what dreadful degree Gwen’s beauty had stirred Kessler’s fury, driven him to give the brutal orders Sykes had so slavishly carried out, all the burning and scarring of a once-lovely face.
“He said, ‘Come here, sweetie,’ and started walking toward me,” Eleanor told Graves, trapped in her own memory. “I turned and ran out of the woods as fast as I could. My legs and arms were all scratched up by the time I got back to our house. My father asked me what had happened, but I didn’t have any way to tell him what I’d felt when I saw that man, how much the look in his eyes had frightened me. So I told him a lie. I said that I’d come across a big white dog and it had chased me through the woods. That was the first story. Later I embellished it. The dog was foaming at the mouth, I said, it had rabies. Ten or fifteen men searched thos
e woods for that dog. They carried rifles, shotguns. They must have terrified the chipmunks and the squirrels. Of course, they never found the dog. Or the man they should have been looking for instead. It was because of me that he got away.”
Graves saw the red dawn spread across the morning sky, Kessler standing on the porch beside him, his black car idling in the dusty drive. He’d grinned with a hideously confident glee as he spoke his final words: I could kill you, boy, but I don’t have to. You’ll never say anything. You’ll never say a word.
Eleanor shook her head regretfully. “If he isn’t dead, he’s probably in his sixties now. God knows, in all that time, how many little girls he may have hurt. That’s why I want to find the one who killed Faye Harrison. Because it’ll be like finding him. The one I helped to get away.”
Graves saw the battered black car rattle down the narrow dirt road, saw the red swirl of dust curling behind it, Kessler’s long, freckled arm waving its taunting good-bye. “It may be too late,” he said softly.
“It probably is,” Eleanor agreed. “But we can try. Let’s do it, Paul. Go at it the way your character does.”
Graves thought she meant Slovak, the relentless devotion that drove him onward, against all odds.
“Kessler, I mean,” she said, reading his mind. “Remember what he writes to Slovak, There is no difference between destiny and doom. Kessler doesn’t believe that his victims fall to him randomly. For no reason. Just chance. They become his victims because they fit the scheme of things in his mind.”
“Do you think Faye did that?” Graves asked. “Fit some scheme in her killer’s mind?” He looked at her doubtfully. “From all I’ve been able to gather everyone loved Faye.”
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