Instruments of Night

by Thomas H. Cook

  PORTMAN: Do you know if Faye had any close relationships with anybody at Riverwood? Anybody in the family or on the staff?

  GROSSMAN: Faye was often with Allison.

  PORTMAN: Anybody else?

  GROSSMAN: On most occasions, no.

  It was not an answer Portman accepted:

  PORTMAN: How long have you lived here at Riverwood?

  GROSSMAN: About four months.

  PORTMAN: And in all that time you never saw Faye with anyone but Allison?

  GROSSMAN: Occasionally I saw her with a young man. His name is Frank, I believe.

  PORTMAN: You mean Frank Saunders, the kid who works at Riverwood?

  GROSSMAN: Yes, that is the young man I mean. I have seen Frank with Faye from time to time. They are sometimes together.

  In his mind Graves now saw Portman scribble a note into the little green book Graves’ own imagination provided, the words written in it the same ones he now wrote on the pad beside his desk: FS & FH seen “sometimes together” (Grossman).

  PORTMAN: Did you get the idea that this was a romantic attachment—the one between Frank Saunders and Faye?

  GROSSMAN: It is not clear to me, the nature of it. Perhaps the two are friends. Perhaps more than friends. I do not know.

  PORTMAN: Well, can you think of anyone here at Riverwood who might have disliked Faye?

  GROSSMAN: No. No one.

  Portman had his doubts:

  PORTMAN: You know, Mr. Grossman, from the way people here talk, you’d think Riverwood was heaven. Everybody loves everyone else. Everybody gets along. To tell you the truth, it’s a little hard to believe everything could be that smooth.

  GROSSMAN: I do not know about everybody. I am soon to leave Riverwood. If there is trouble here, it is not my trouble.

  With that, the interview had ended. The remainder of the page was blank save for a single observation scrawled at the bottom in Portman’s pinched script—Grossman on run. To which he’d appended a lingering question: Why?

  Graves had just returned Portman’s notes to the envelope in which the old detective had placed them fifty years earlier when Saunders knocked and came into the room.

  “Miss Davies asked me to give you this,” he said.

  Graves took the small enamel box from Saunders’ hand. Its top and sides were adorned with brightly colored scenes of rural life. The women wore ornately designed dresses, their heads wrapped tightly in knotted scarves. The men wore baggy trousers, black vests, and billowy white shirts, and stood, swinging long scythes through yellow fields of grain.

  “Pretty, isn’t it? Miss Davies said that those letters you wanted to see are inside it.” Saunders turned to leave.

  “Did you know that Andre Grossman mentioned you?” Graves asked. “To Detective Portman.”

  “Mentioned me?” For the first time Saunders’ buoyancy deserted him. “What did he say?”

  “That he saw you and Faye together quite often. I hadn’t realized that you and she were close.”

  “We weren’t. But Grossman probably did see Faye and me together. We liked each other. We talked. But I wouldn’t say that we were close.”

  “You told me that everybody loved Faye. Other people have said the same thing. But no one has told me why.”

  “Faye didn’t think of herself first. Always others. What they needed. What would be good for them.” Saunders looked at Graves knowingly. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe that anyone can really put another person first.”

  Graves heard Kessler’s icy whisper, You knew she was here, but you took me to her anyway.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Graves,” Saunders continued. “It must be hard, living with so little confidence in other people. Anyway, Faye was just like I described her. Maybe that’s why she was taken, because God loved her too much to keep her here on this earth.”

  Graves said nothing. Such sentiments had no power to move or interest him. More important, Saunders’ comments seemed the product of a recent conversion, only a step away from some earlier darkness. “Did you always feel that way about Faye?”

  “No. For a long time I was jealous of her. Because of the way I was treated. I was just a boy here on the estate. Someone who’d been taken in. Out of pity. Because I had no place else to go. But Faye was a part of the family. Part of Riverwood. I resented that. For years. Then I got hurt. An accident. Here at Riverwood. When I was fourteen. They brought me to the house. Gave me a room. Faye came every day. With a flower. That’s the way Faye was. And that’s why everyone loved her. Not just Allison and Mr. Davies. But everyone. Even me.”

  “Someone didn’t love her,” Graves reminded him.

  “Maybe someone just loved himself more than Faye,” Saunders said. “Maybe he was willing to sacrifice her for some other reason.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like lust. Despite this job you have, to find a different story, I still believe that Jake Mosley killed Faye. I believed that almost from the moment she was found.”

  “Almost?”

  “Well, for just a little while I thought it might be some local boy. Someone I didn’t know about. A secret love, you might say.”

  “Why did you think Faye had a secret love?”

  “Because she seemed to get more and more upset during the last few weeks of that summer. Troubled. I thought she was probably lovesick. Maybe had a boyfriend who’d dropped her. I even thought it might be more serious than that. That she was pregnant, maybe. That was the sort of thing that would get a young girl in the dumps in those days. But later I heard the autopsy showed she wasn’t.

  “Who told you what the autopsy showed?”

  “Detective Portman. I’d told him what I just told you. How Faye had been acting that last week, sort of like a pregnant girl might act. He told me she wasn’t pregnant. That’s all he ever said.” He nodded toward the ornate box Graves still held in his hands and released a short, self-mocking laugh. “Of course, you shouldn’t put much stock in any of my theories, Mr. Graves. There was even a time when I figured it was Grossman who did it.”

  “Because he killed himself?”

  “No, not because of that,” Saunders answered. “Because of the way I heard him talking to Faye once. Asking her things. Intimate things. ‘Do you have a male friend? Do you think you’ll get married someday? Have children?’ Those kinds of questions.”

  “How did Faye react?”

  “She said, sure, she planned to marry, have kids. She just brushed it off. But I could see she was bothered by his questions. Like she knew Grossman was trying to get at something. Something he wasn’t saying outright. Something … about Faye.”

  But if Grossman’s suicide had had anything to do with Faye Harrison, the brief notes he’d written to Mrs. Davies only days before failed to reveal it. More than anything, they suggested that Grossman’s state of mind was exactly as Mrs. Davies had described it to her daughter—deeply, fatally depressed.

  The first letter was dated September 6, and was written on the light blue stationery of the Edison Hotel.

  My dear Madame:

  I am writing from my little room. Closed windows. Closed doors. Different from Riverwood. This is the only safety. To live as I once did. A prisoner. Life. Nothing else. Only life.

  Andre Grossman

  The second letter was no less disturbed.

  My dear Madame:

  I see things now. What must be done. To end this hatred of myself. What is done, is done. I see their faces. Young. So young. I would have told you of my crimes, but even in this, I was afraid.

  Andre Grossman

  Graves read the letter a second time, then a third, trying to apply Slovak’s powers to its oblique references. Imagination. Intuition. A feeling for the heart of things. But for all his effort, Graves could see nothing beyond the numbing despair of the words themselves, the anguish and self-loathing.

  In the third and final letter Grossman seemed even more distraught:

  M
y dear Mrs. Davies:

  No more. They must be avenged. So much I cannot tell you. So cruel to say it. I have done enough. Terrible. To live by their suffering. Buy life with their deaths. I spare you the rest. What I did. I wish only that you live in peace. It is not you who is tainted.

  Tainted.

  Graves imagined Grossman hunched over the stained writing desk in his room, staring at this final word, his eyes red-rimmed with sleeplessness. What had he meant by that? And if Mrs. Davies wasn’t tainted, then who was? Graves could find no way to answer the questions that rose from the last word of Grossman’s letter. He knew only that shortly after writing it, Grossman had walked to the window of his room at the Edison Hotel, climbed out upon its narrow ledge, paused a moment, then stepped off the ledge, a burst of air exploding beneath him, slapping at his collar and fluttering in his sleeves as he plunged at speeds he must have thought impossible toward the dark heart of something he had done.

  CHAPTER 22

  Graves had just returned Grossman’s letters to the box, when he heard a tap at the door. “Come in.”

  “Hi,” Eleanor said softly as she stepped inside the room. She was wearing khaki trousers and a white blouse. But despite the casual attire, Graves sensed a curious gravity building in her the way it built in Slovak, a slow, tortuous melding of the detective with the dreadful things he’d seen. He wondered if her nature was like Slovak’s too, her route through life always descending, joy never more than a flash of light in a steadily darkening chamber.

  Her eyes fell upon the enameled box. “I think that’s a Kaminsky box,” she said as she picked it up. “I learned about them in an art history class when I was in college.” She turned it over slowly, taking in the details. “Pierre Kaminsky made them for Czar Nicholas a few years before the revolution. Only twelve. The czar gave them to a few people in his inner circle.”

  “Mrs. Davies stored Andre Grossman’s letters in it. The ones he wrote after he left Riverwood.”

  “Why did he leave?”

  Graves saw Grossman make his way to the waiting car, lugging the battered brown traveling case he’d brought with him several months before, shoulders hunched, head bowed. “I think something drove him out,” he said. “Read the letters. Tell me what you think. Andre Grossman killed himself a few days after leaving Riverwood,” Graves added as she opened the first letter. “In New York City. He jumped from a window.”

  Once she’d finished, Eleanor returned the letters to the box and handed it to Graves. “Tainted,” she said. “What did he mean by that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think anything in the letters has to do with Faye?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Graves replied. “But Saunders once heard Grossman talking to Faye. He was asking her questions. About whether Faye intended to get married, to raise a family. It struck Saunders as a little strange. Of course, in the letters, there’s no mention of Faye at all. And certainly no suggestion that he murdered her.”

  “Just the opposite, in fact.” Eleanor shook her head. “Grossman talks about his ‘crimes’ and about ‘their deaths.’ Plural. He also says that it isn’t Mrs. Davies who’s tainted. If he were talking about his having murdered Faye, why would he need to assure Mrs. Davies that she isn’t tainted?” She thought a moment. “It seems pretty obvious that Grossman wants to confess to something, but I don’t think it’s Faye’s murder. In a way, whatever it is seems even more terrible than that. His ‘crimes,’ I mean. Worse than murder. Perhaps it was something so horrible, he preferred to kill himself rather than reveal it.”

  Suddenly Graves saw his sister’s eyes lift toward him, black and swollen, pleading silently, Kessler’s response a brutal yelp, Shut her up! He could still hear the sound of Sykes’ hand as it struck Gwen’s face.

  “We never know what people are capable of,” he said.

  Eleanor peered at him apprehensively, as if she’d seen a face beneath Graves’ face, the ghostly boy he’d once been. He could feel dark questions brimming in her mind, about to pour out. To stop the flood, he said, “I need your help, Eleanor.” Before she could give a deeper meaning to what he’d said, he added, “With the investigation.” He nodded toward the papers on his desk. “It wouldn’t take you long to look over what I’ve already read. You can stop when you get to the end of Portman’s talk with Grossman. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. We can read the rest of it together.”

  She took her seat behind the desk and began reading, flipping the pages at amazing speed, her eyes intent, searching.

  Within an hour she was done. Then they read together.

  They came first to Jake Mosley’s autopsy report. Eleanor was the one to voice the inescapable conclusion to which it led. “Jake Mosley didn’t kill Faye.” She pointed to the final line of the autopsy: Cause of death: Congestive heart failure.

  Graves recalled the description Saunders had given of Mosley that summer, the slack work habits he’d observed. “Mosley was always complaining about being tired.”

  “He would have been tired.” Eleanor’s eyes were still fixed on the report. “Almost all the time, I imagine. His heart was failing. He’d never have been able to walk to Manitou Cave, then back to Riverwood.” She turned the page, now moving on to the second series of interviews Portman had conducted at Riverwood. He’d begun with Allison Davies.

  Graves imagined the slanted light that must have filtered in through the porch screens as the old detective had questioned Allison Davies that afternoon. He saw Portman slumped in the chair opposite her, his thick fingers wrapped around the stubby yellow pencil Slovak used, Slovak’s tattered notebook laid fiat across Portman’s wide lap. Portman would have watched Allison with the same penetrating gaze that came into Slovak’s eyes when he suspected something hidden but did not know precisely what it was.

  But there were other sensations that went beyond those Graves now imagined, things added without his willing them—the pleasure he took in working with Eleanor, the desire he felt to extend his time with her, the way he seemed increasingly drawn toward an intimacy he had all his life denied himself.

  “He wants to trust her,” Eleanor said suddenly.

  For an instant Graves thought that Eleanor had read his mind.

  “Portman wants to trust Allison.” She turned to face him. “But he can’t.”

  Graves nodded, both relieved that she had been speaking of Portman and Allison and surprised that she’d been able to intuit so much from the notes, pick up the vague nuances that only a highly charged imagination could draw from the abbreviated formality of Portman’s report.

  “You can tell he doesn’t trust her. It’s right here, listen.” Eleanor turned back to the notes. “‘Asked AD about her friendship with FH. AD stated that they had known each other since childhood. Also stated that recently she had not had much “commerce” with FH.’ Portman puts ‘commerce’ in quotation marks.” She pointed to the word on the page. “Because he finds the word odd, don’t you think? Too formal. Inappropriate for describing a meeting between close friends.” She turned back to the notes and began to read again.

  “He senses something, Paul,” Eleanor said after a moment. “Something wrong or out of place. That’s why he’s so detailed in his questioning. That’s why he made Allison go through all the details—where she was and what she was doing that morning.”

  Graves could see Portman and Allison as they faced each other, the sweep of Riverwood, wide and grand, but closing in somehow, tightening life a noose.

  PORTMAN: You said after seeing Faye at the front door you went back to the dining room?

  ALLISON: Yes, I did. I’d left my book there. I went back to it.

  PORTMAN: And how long were you there?

  ALLISON: The rest of the morning, I guess. The afternoon too.

  PORTMAN: Just reading?

  ALLISON: Yes.

  PORTMAN: It must have been a long book.

  ALLISON: Yes, it was.

  From there Por
tman had gone on to more detailed questions, concentrating on exactly how Allison had spent the rest of the day. She had never left the grounds of Riverwood, she told him. She had spent some time on the side porch and lounged on the front steps. At around four she’d gone out to the gazebo, where she’d finally finished her book.

  “He seems to believe her,” Graves said as he neared the end of the notes.

  Eleanor turned to the last page. “But look at this. He’s constructed a complete timetable from the moment Allison saw Faye at the door until her death.”

  The outcome of Portman’s investigation, a complete chronology of Allison Davies’ whereabouts on August 27, 1946, had been neatly recorded in Portman’s characteristic shorthand:

  8:00—A sees F at front door

  8:05-12:30: Dining room (c/FT/GK/WD)

  12:30-4:30: Various locations in main house

  (12:35-3:00: side porch/FT/GK/PO/JW), (3:00: front steps/HG/FS), (4:00/gazebo/JW) (4:30: library/AG/MD)

  Eleanor’s eyes drifted down the list. “Allison was seen all over the place.” She turned to the next interview. Edward Davies and Mona Flagg. Portman’s notes failed to add to what he’d previously been told as to where the pair had been at the time of Faye’s death. However, Portman had subsequently conducted a wide-ranging investigation into Edward’s and Mona’s activities on August 27. Marcus Crowe of Britanny Falls told Portman that he’d seen “the Riverwood boat” on the Hudson at approximately 8:30 on the morning of Faye’s disappearance. The boat had cruised along the northern bank of the Hudson, two people inside, one a young man whom Crowe assumed to be Edward Davies, the other a woman he described only as “a girl with an umbrella.” They had been seated close together, Crowe told Portman, the man at the keel, the woman “nestled up” beside him.

  An hour later Doug Masterman had sailed past Granger Point and seen “a man and a woman picnicking onshore.” The man had waved casually to Masterman as he drifted by, then said something to the woman, who faced him from the opposite end of a plaid picnic blanket, her back pressed up against a tree at the edge of the riverbank. Masterman identified the man who’d waved to him as Edward Davies, but had been unable to identify the woman, since she’d been facing away from him. She’d worn a red polka-dot dress, however, the same clothing Mona Flagg had been wearing when she and Edward Davies had sailed from Riverwood that same morning.