Instruments of Night

by Thomas H. Cook

  To these two witnesses Portman added a third, a woman named Marge Kelly who lived on the northern bank of the Hudson. At approximately two in the afternoon she’d gone out to feed the few chickens she kept in a coop near the river. From there she’d seen a sailboat drift by, a young man standing up in back, a woman seated at his feet. The woman had turned and waved to her. She’d been dressed in a red polka-dot dress, Kelly told Portman. Later, when shown a photograph, she had identified the woman in the boat as Mona Flagg.

  Later Edward and Mona had helped a fisherman untangle his lines. The fisherman had positively identified both of them, and put the time of the encounter at 4:30 in the afternoon.

  “So Portman found confirmation for Edward and Mona’s story,” Eleanor said. “Which eliminates both of them. They were seen too often and at too many different places for them to have had anything to do with Faye’s murder.”

  With that, they turned to the next file, this one dealing with Mrs. Davies and Andre Grossman, and in which various members of the household staff readily corroborated in every detail exactly what they had previously told Portman.

  “So he eliminated Grossman and Mrs. Davies too,” Eleanor said when she’d finished reading Portman’s notes. “It’s becoming a locked-room mystery, Paul. Someone has been killed, but no one could have done it.” She sighed in exasperation.

  Graves saw a man moving out of the tangled underbrush, Faye turning in her blue dress to see him standing there, a figure draped in a black leather coat. “It had to have been a stranger,” he said. “Everything points to that conclusion.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “There’re still a few more notes.”

  They went through the last of them, stopping from time to time to discuss one aspect or another, but always arriving at the same conclusion, the inescapable fact that Portman had done a thorough job, all that could have been expected of him. The detective had meticulously checked out the stories of each of the household servants of Riverwood, each of its summer residents, every member of the Davies family.

  Save one.

  “Warren Davies,” Eleanor said quietly as she closed the Murder Book. “Portman never made any attempt to follow up on what Warren Davies told him.” She gazed at Graves intently. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Graves admitted. Nor did it seem to him that there was any way of finding out. There were no more answers in the Murder Book, he knew, nothing that could be gathered from it and turned into a story. He’d found a few facts. But not enough. And to those facts he’d added little. Slovak would have added more, of course. Slovak would have been able to imagine how and why Faye had been strangled. By sheer intuition he would have brought a world of disparate impressions into clear and terrible focus.

  But Slovak’s were only fictional powers, Graves knew. Faye, on the other hand, had died in a real world. And so, even as he’d continued to study the final phase of Portman’s investigation, Graves had begun to suspect that he was approaching two dead ends at once. With Slovak locked in an imaginary world, and Portman’s investigation getting nowhere in a real one, what place was there for Graves’ own work to go?

  Eleanor clearly saw his building anxiety. “Let’s get some air,” she said.

  They walked out of the cramped office and into the spaciousness of Warren Davies’ library.

  “I think it’s fine to do what Kessler does,” Eleanor said, returning to a point she’d made earlier. “After he’s murdered someone, he traces the route the person took to him. He assumes that a particular life always leads to a particular death.”

  “But that may not be true,” Graves argued.

  “But suppose in Faye’s case, it was true,” Eleanor replied emphatically. “If she wasn’t killed by a stranger, then there must have been a reason for her murder.”

  “But how would you begin to find it?”

  “The way Kessler does. He plots a life. For a time it moves in a straight line. Predictable. Then it makes an unexpected turn.” Her eyes darkened. “Toward him. Kessler. Toward death.”

  Graves suddenly imagined his sister as she’d made her way down the dusty road, turning suddenly as the black car drew in upon her, slowed, then swept by, speeding up until it vanished beyond a dusty curve. How certain she must have been that it was gone forever.

  “They always do something unexpected,” Eleanor said. “Kessler’s victims. Something happens. A horse crosses their path. A light blinds them for a moment. And because of it, they knock at the wrong door. Or glance in the wrong window. Or make a different turn.” She was staring at him intently. “What if Faye did that?”

  They had reached the front door.

  “Here, for example,” Eleanor said as she opened it. “On this little porch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Faye came to the front door that morning. She started to knock. That’s what we’d have expected her to do. But she didn’t. Why? What changed her mind?”

  “She saw Allison,” Graves said.

  “Yes, possibly,” Eleanor mused. “And if that’s true, it means that Faye hadn’t come to see Allison at all that morning. Seeing Allison changed things. Faye made a different turn because of it.”

  They headed down the stairs, turned to the right, and walked around the eastern corner of the house. They could see the gazebo quite clearly, thick vines of red roses hanging heavily from its white trellises, the flower garden only a few yards beyond it, a brilliant field of yellow primrose and purple iris.

  “Faye went from the door to the gazebo,” Eleanor said. “That was the turn she made. Then Warren Davies came out and talked to her.”

  “So it was Davies she’d come to see?” Graves asked tentatively.

  Eleanor seemed hardly to hear him. “They talked very briefly. Then Davies went back inside.” She thought a moment, her eyes fixed on the gazebo, the roses that hung from it, red petals and green leaves, like blood on grass.

  “Then she made another unexpected turn,” Eleanor said. “She glanced up toward the second floor. Why? According to Portman’s notes there was nothing to see there. No one could have been in any of the windows. Because everyone at Riverwood was downstairs. So if something drew Faye’s attention to the second floor, it had to have been something other than a person.”

  Graves looked at the line of windows that ran the entire length of the house. They were large, but in every other way ordinary. It was only the space between he noticed now. Identical wood carvings. Oval panels bordered by sprigs of laurel, its branches intertwined like strands of rope, the face of a lion carved deeply on the panel.

  “The crest of Riverwood,” Graves said.

  “Then Faye made yet another unexpected turn,” Eleanor said. “She went into the basement.”

  A cool wave of air swept over them when they stepped inside the basement, dry, but strangely musty, as if some small creature had died and been left to rot, leaving nothing but a peculiar sweetness in the air.

  Eleanor surveyed the area, moving slowly from the storage room in the far rear corner to the staircase at the center of the room, and finally to the corridor that led to the boathouse. “Why did Faye make that turn? Why did she come here? What was she looking for?” Her face grew highly concentrated, as if pondering some detail, trying to tease out its meaning or importance. After a moment she said, “I want to go to the cave now. To where Faye died.”

  The path narrowed steadily as they headed up the slope, the forest thickening on either side, squeezing them together so that their shoulders sometimes touched.

  They reached Indian Rock, then continued down the trail. The slope fell off at a steadily harsher angle until they finally reached the area around Manitou Cave. From there they could see the wide expanse of the river, boats drifting along its surface, white sails bright in the summer air.

  It was a brightness that seemed to fade from the air as they neared the cave, the trees and brush thickening, only bits of dappled light on the forest floor
. The cave’s mouth gaped before them like a stony, toothless mouth.

  “Not a very good place for a young woman to die,” Eleanor murmured.

  Graves saw the small living room where Gwen had been led for the final entertainment, the thick beams that stretched across it, a rope hanging from the one at the center, Gwen standing limply beneath it, her arms dangling at her sides as Kessler, whistling cheerily, handed Sykes the noose, then ordered him to string it around her neck.

  Graves turned toward the cave, trained his eyes on its dark interior. He did not turn from it until Eleanor spoke.

  “You know, Grossman would have been able to see Faye’s body from here,” she said. “Just as he said he did.”

  She was standing only ten yards from the mouth of the cave. The bare remnants of an old stump rose a few feet from the ground, stained with decades of rain, a cushion of deep green moss rising along its sodden, crumbling sides, but otherwise just as Grossman had long ago described it, with one side splintered and a thick canopy of limbs hanging above.

  “Which means Grossman told the truth,” Eleanor said. “In that one detail, at least. I mean, he would, in fact, have been able to see Faye’s body from where he said he was.”

  Graves knew that Eleanor had reached some sort of conclusion. He expected her to state it, but instead she offered a question.

  “Remember what Slovak does in The Unheard Melody? He examines all that he’s been told by various people during the investigation. It’s a huge conspiracy and he knows that Kessler’s at the heart of it. But the major elements of each conspirator’s story hold together. Slovak can’t find a crack anywhere. So he begins to look at the smaller aspects of each story, the tiniest, the most incidental details. That’s where he finds his answer. Someone who should have heard a melody, but didn’t. Paul, when we were in the basement, I kept thinking about Faye. Her unexpected turns. But I was focused on the wrong person. That’s why I didn’t catch it at once.”

  “Didn’t catch what?”

  She didn’t answer him directly. “It’s a question of positioning. In a play it’s called blocking. Characters have to be at certain places at certain times. If they’re off their marks, it throws everything off. Think about this, Paul. Allison claimed that when she walked to the dining room door that morning, she saw Faye at the entrance. We’ve both stood exactly where Allison stood. And so we know that she could, in fact, have seen Faye from that position. It would have been physically possible for her to do it. It’s just a little thing, a small part of her story, but it checks out.”

  “So what doesn’t check out?”

  “Nothing in what Allison told Portman. All the physical details, where she was, what she heard or saw that morning. All of it was physically possible. As far as I can tell, the same is true of everyone else Portman talked to. All their stories check out. You might say, following Slovak, that they all heard the melodies they should have heard. All but one.”

  Her expression was solemn yet highly charged, her eyes motionless yet deeply searching, a face Graves could easily imagine for a great detective.

  “Greta Klein,” she said. “That’s who I should have been thinking about when we were in the basement. Greta told Portman that she’d come halfway down the stairs, then stopped. She said that from that position she’d seen Faye standing at the entrance to the corridor that leads to the boathouse. That’s possible. She could have done that. But she also said that she saw Edward and Mona in the boathouse. That’s where the problem is. In the blocking, I mean. Because from halfway down the stairs, Greta couldn’t have looked down that corridor. She couldn’t have seen anyone in the boathouse.”

  “Maybe she got it wrong,” Graves said. “Maybe Greta got farther down the stairs than she thought she did.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered how far down them she got,” Eleanor said. “There’s only one place in the basement from which she could have seen Edward and Mona in the boathouse.” She stopped, as in a dramatic pause.

  Graves knew what was expected of him dramatically. A question.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “The room where Warren Davies kept his papers,” Eleanor answered. “Papers that were scattered around when Portman saw them there. Papers Portman thought Faye might have been going through, looking for something. Greta Klein told Portman that it was Faye who’d been in the room. She even suggested that Faye was a thief. But it was Greta who was in the room. Greta who was going through Warren Davies’ papers. Looking for something. But what?”

  Graves’ answer came as intuitively as he knew Slovak’s would have.

  “The truth about Riverwood,” he said.

  CHAPTER 23

  She was sitting in a blue chair just across from the bed when they entered the room. Magazines lay scattered on the table beside the chair. The television nickered in the far corner, daubing her with its drab light. At Graves’ knock she’d replied simply, “Come in,” leaned forward, and snapped off the television. It was only then, when she’d seen Eleanor standing beside him, that her manner had stiffened.

  “Who is this woman?”

  “A friend of mine,” Graves answered. He glanced toward Eleanor. He could see that she was taking in the odd mirthlessness that characterized Greta’s face. It was a sorrow Graves had noticed himself, the sense that something had gone to rot inside the woman, that her spirit could lift only so high, then descend again.

  “We’re working together on the project I talked to you about a few days ago,” he told her.

  Greta’s eyes drifted to Eleanor then back to Graves. “My room is too small for so many.”

  “We won’t be here long,” Graves assured her. “I have only a few questions.”

  Greta sat back, slowly. “What do you want then?”

  “We’ve been going over the statement you made to Detective Portman after Faye’s murder,” Graves began.

  “I already talked to you about that,” Greta said. She grabbed a single button of her dress and began to jerk it with quick, nervous motions, like someone awaiting a dreadful verdict.

  But a verdict for what crime, Graves wondered. Greta had provided a perfectly acceptable alibi in the case of Faye’s murder. Why was that alibi insufficient to protect her from a yet more threatening inquisition?

  “I don’t want to go over it all again,” Greta told him.

  “Yes, I know,” Graves said. “But we have a few more questions.” He chose his next words carefully. “About things you might have gotten wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Greta asked softly.

  “You mentioned that you saw Faye in the basement on the day she disappeared.” Eleanor said. “You said you’d come down the stairs, seen Faye, and stopped.” Eleanor edged forward, closing the space between herself and Greta Klein, but slowly, unthreateningly, in the manner, it seemed to Graves, of a daughter. “You said Faye was standing at the entrance to the corridor that leads from the basement to the boathouse.”

  “That is where I saw her,” Greta replied. “Looking down the corridor. Toward the boathouse. I told all of this to the detective.” She looked at Graves. “So, what is it that is ‘wrong’?”

  Eleanor reached the bed and lowered herself upon it without invitation. “You also told Portman that you saw Edward and Mona. That they were in the boathouse.”

  “Yes, I said this. It is true. Edward and the girl were already in the boathouse. Faye was at the other end of the corridor. Watching them. Her back was to me. I remember this.”

  Eleanor smiled slightly. “So you must have come all the way down the stairs.”

  Greta watched Eleanor suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “I was just trying to get an idea of where you were in the basement. I assume you came all the way down the stairs.”

  “No, I did not.” Greta’s hand released the button, settled motionless onto her lap. “I stopped halfway, like I told the detective.”

  “But from that position you wouldn’t have been able to see down the co
rridor to the boathouse.” Eleanor spoke gently, as if merely correcting an unintentional error. “You might have seen Faye at the entrance to the corridor from there, but you wouldn’t have been able to see Edward Davies and Mona Flagg in the boathouse.”

  Greta suddenly looked like a small animal captured in a trap, the hunter closing in, drawing back the rifle bolt. As if to conceal her fear, she lifted her chin and stared at Eleanor belligerently. “I do not have to say more.”

  “No, you don’t,” Eleanor told her. She clearly recognized that Greta had reached the end of her defenses, that her brief resistance was little more than a bluff. “But I’ve been to the basement. And it seems to me that you could have seen Faye and the others only from the storeroom on the opposite side of the basement. The room where the detective found Warren Davies’ papers scattered around. You couldn’t have seen them all from any other place.”

  “What does it matter what I saw? Who I saw? Where? It is all in the past.” Greta released a weary breath. “What does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t,” Eleanor answered. “Except to us.”

  Greta studied Eleanor’s face. “You are like him,” she said. “The old detective. He would come here. Talk to me. Many years after. He was still looking for the truth.”

  “Portman,” Graves said.

  The name appeared to calm Greta slightly. “I told him I was in the storeroom. I told him that I, too, was looking for the truth.”

  “Did you ever find it?” Eleanor asked.

  The melancholy that Graves had earlier observed descended upon Greta’s features again. “No,” she whispered.