Instruments of Night

by Thomas H. Cook

  Eleanor walked on a few paces, then stopped. “So you are going to let him get away with it?”

  Graves suddenly saw the black car pull away, Kessler’s freckled arm waving back to him. For an instant he feared that Eleanor might chase him all the way to the chamber where he kept such visions locked away, strike a match, then stagger back in horror at what her light revealed.

  “Warren Davies, I mean,” Eleanor continued. “You could tell Miss Davies what her father did to her best friend.” Before he could answer, she said, “But what would be the point? He’s dead. So is Faye. What good would it do to tell Miss Davies anything? So, we’ve reached the end of our investigation. What will you do now?”

  Graves’ constricted life had room for only one answer. “I’ll tell Miss Davies that I have no story for her. Then I’ll go back to New York.”

  “When do you plan to tell her?”

  “Tonight, I suppose. And leave tomorrow morning.” He’d said it without thinking, and now the fact that he would be leaving Eleanor within hours struck him as an irretrievable loss.

  Eleanor seemed to sense his descending mood. “Then we should have a farewell dinner, Paul,” she said with a quick smile. “But not here at Riverwood. I suddenly can’t abide the place. I noticed a little restaurant outside of town. We could go there tonight.” She didn’t give him time to refuse her. “Just come by my cottage at seven.” With that she turned away.

  Graves stayed in place, watching her go. He could feel himself releasing her, although reluctantly, as if she were a rope strung over the abyss, something to which he’d briefly clung, his fingers loosening now, readying the fall.

  There seemed no point in postponing it. So after Eleanor had returned to her cottage, Graves walked back to his office in the main house. Once there, he arranged all the files in their proper order. To the materials Miss Davies had previously collected, he added only the few notes he’d compiled during his own investigation. He took nothing having to do with Faye Harrison’s death from the room, except the letter Mrs. Harrison had written to Miss Davies, and which he thought should be returned to her personally.

  He found her in the gazebo, lost in thought, the darkness gathered around her like a scented cloak. “Good evening, Mr. Graves,” she said as he joined her. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

  “Miss Davies, I’ve come to tell you that I haven’t been able to find a story for you. At least not one that would satisfy the terms of our agreement. I’ve read all the notes regarding the investigation and interviewed everyone I could find who was living at Riverwood at the time, but I haven’t found anyone with both the motive and the opportunity to have murdered Faye.”

  Miss Davies smiled quietly. “You will, in time,” she said confidently.

  “No,” Graves replied evenly. “I won’t.”

  She looked puzzled. “So where does that leave us, Mr. Graves?”

  “With a conclusion you’re not going to like very much, I’m afraid.”

  “What conclusion is that?”

  “I think a stranger killed Faye,” Graves answered. “Someone who just came upon her in the woods. More or less by accident.” He saw Kessler’s car as it closed in behind a girl, one he’d never seen before, a lovely teenage girl with long chestnut hair. “This man, whoever he was, had never met Faye. He simply saw a girl. Alone. With no one to protect her.” The look in Kessler’s eyes was raw and savage, the delight of one animal as it prepares to pounce upon another. “This man had no motive but the pleasure he took in cruelty. That’s why he murdered Faye. For the pleasure of it.” He saw the blade slice the rope, saw Gwen’s bloodied body drop to the floor. He felt his soul tighten, almost physically, as if determined to close off his breath. “And when he was finished with her, he took the rope”—Kessler’s freckled arm swung in the morning air, the rope that had been used to hang his sister waving from his hand—“as a souvenir.”

  Miss Davies faced him sternly. “That’s the only story you’ve come up with?”

  “Yes.”

  Anger flashed in her eyes. “So, you’re leaving Riverwood without giving me a solution to Faye’s death?”

  “I have no solution.”

  “You intend to make no further effort?”

  “There’s no point in any further effort. There’s no point in my staying on at Riverwood either. You can have Saunders pick me up tomorrow morning.”

  Miss Davies stared at him as if he were some artifact she’d rashly purchased, and whose authenticity she now doubted.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Graves told her.

  “You should be sorry,” Miss Davies said sharply. “But for yourself rather than for me. Sorry that your imagination deserted you.”

  “Faye didn’t die an imaginary death,” Graved reminded her.

  “That wouldn’t have been a problem for Slovak.” Miss Davies’ tone was bitter and resentful, as if she were addressing a servant who’d given her false references. “I brought you here to imagine a solution. That’s what Slovak would have done. But you got bogged down in facts.” She seemed to spit the word out. “The facts were only supposed to inform your imagination. Clearly, you let them dominate it.”

  “I couldn’t accuse a person of murder without believing I was right,” Graves said. “Not even in a story.”

  “So what should I do now, Mr. Graves? Where can I go? To whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And so you’re not only abandoning the work, you have no suggestion as to how I might continue to pursue it?”

  “No, I don’t,” Graves replied. “All the material you gave me is still in the office.” He took Mrs. Harrison’s letter to her from his pocket. “Except for this,” he said as he held it out to her.

  But she did not take it from him. “Keep it.” Her voice was scalding. “As a souvenir. Of your failure.”

  Graves pocketed the letter.

  “And what should I say to Mrs. Harrison?” Miss Davies demanded.

  Graves faced her squarely. “That she has to accept that she’ll never know what happened to her daughter.”

  Miss Davies’ eyes took on a terrible ire. “Let it go, you mean?” she demanded shrilly. “Just leave Faye’s death unanswered? Is that what you’ve done, Mr. Graves?” Her contemptuous accusation fell upon him like a heavy weight. “Have you accepted that you’ll never know what happened to your sister?”

  Graves still felt the bite of Miss Davies’ departing words as he packed his clothes in the usual methodical style. He arranged each item in his suitcase, obeying the rigid sense of order he imposed on everything. He knew that this compulsion sprang from the hideous chaos that had once engulfed him, his sister’s agony carried out by sheer whimsy, tortures conceived then immediately implemented, trivial objects transformed by the moral vacuum that ruled the moment, matches and pliers turned toys in Kessler’s fearful game of “things to do.”

  A dreadful taunt sliced the air, You won’t tell nobody.

  Graves glanced toward the living room and saw Gwen standing beneath its broad beam, her dress hanging upon her like a bloody rag, arms dangling limply at her sides. Kessler stood behind her, his hand beneath her chin, lifting her battered face. Pretty, pretty, once so pretty.

  Graves’ eyes shot to the window, the black sweep of the pond, the dark wood that surrounded it. He was there too. Standing in the darkness, a gray rope dangling loosely in his hands.

  Graves fixed his gaze on the open suitcase. He stood, breathing slowly, rhythmically, waiting for it to pass. When it had, he glanced toward the window. The pond now lay motionless beyond it. The trees had resumed their earthly shapes. The grounds rested silent, vacant, with nothing to disturb them but Graves’ memory of a vanished man.

  “Right on time,” Eleanor said as she opened the door.

  Graves walked into the living room, noticed the desk in the far corner, his most recent novel open on a chair beside it.

  “I skipped ahead in the series,” Eleanor explained
as she closed the door. “To the last one.” She looked as if she expected some mild protest on his part. “I was eager to see how you’d developed as a writer.”

  Graves said nothing. His books seemed strangely distant to him now. He could feel himself retreating from them, leaving them behind as he was leaving Eleanor behind. He thought of the rope. The metal bar. The chair he could stand upon. In his mind they shone like lights, beckoning him home.

  Eleanor strode into her bedroom and emerged with a bright red shawl. “I saw you head up to the main house after I left you. Did you tell Miss Davies that you couldn’t find a story?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She was surprised. She said that I’d forgotten what I’d been asked to do in the first place.”

  Eleanor drew the bright shawl over her shoulders. “What did she mean by that?”

  “That I was supposed to imagine what happened to Faye the way Slovak does. She said that I’d let the facts get in the way of my imagination.

  “But facts are facts,” Eleanor said.

  “Yes, they are,” Graves said. “So I told her it was probably a stranger who killed Faye.” He felt Kessler step in out of the night, grasp his bare shoulder. “Someone who came out of the dark.”

  Eleanor looked at him oddly. “Except that Faye died in daylight.”

  She watched him for a moment, silently, as she had several times before, her gaze intent, concentrated, a searchlight aimed at his secret history, burning it away layer by layer, seeking its undiscovered core. “Well, shall we?” she said a little too brightly, motioning him toward the door.

  The restaurant was small and nearly empty. Their table was set off in a corner, a white tablecloth thrown over it, everything neatly arranged, a single red candle burning softly at the center.

  Eleanor ordered a scotch. When it came she lifted her glass. “I know you don’t drink, but we can make a toast anyway. To the rest of the summer.”

  Graves tapped his water glass to her drink. “To your play.”

  “And your books.” She took a sip, then said, “Will there be any more books, Paul?”

  He realized that he had no answer for her. He had often thought of his own death. Planned it. Gathered the necessary materials. He had even come to Riverwood in hope of determining if the hour had finally come. But it had never occurred to him that while he lived he would cease to write.

  “I mean, books in the series,” Eleanor explained. “After having read the last one, it seems to me that Slovak has gotten awfully tired of his life.”

  “It’s the only life he has.”

  “Then it’s a miserable one,” Eleanor told him. “So miserable, it’s hard for me to imagine him … continuing. I mean, he’s going down very fast. And there doesn’t appear to be anything that can stop it.”

  “Maybe there isn’t.”

  “So what are you going to do with him? You’re the writer. You give the orders. What are you planning for Slovak?”

  He saw his old companion poised at the brink of the ledge, Kessler staring at him coldly. So far he had kept Kessler silent. Now he gave him a single word, a command hissed to Slovak in the same sharp, commanding tone he used with Sykes, Jump!

  “I mean, Slovak has to have a way out of this … darkness,” Eleanor said. “Doesn’t he?” She waited for Graves to answer, but when he didn’t she added, “And Sykes too. There’s a problem with him. In the last book he’s become so deranged by all the things he’s helped Kessler do, he’s almost totally paranoid. Slovak sees that clearly. Remember what he says about him, ‘Sykes is the terror terror makes.’”

  Graves felt the impulse sweep over him in a wave of heat so fiery it seemed satanic, so hellish he all but trembled at the part of him from which it had boiled up. “Sometimes I want to kill them all,” he said before he could stop himself. “Kessler. Sykes. Even Slovak. Everyone. Everything. The whole world.”

  Her response stunned him with its desperate truth. “It’s loneliness, Paul. Only loneliness can make you feel like that.”

  She had said it quietly, as if she’d had a long familiarity with the terrible impulse he described. Watching her as she brought the glass to her lips, her eyes gazing at him questioningly from above its crystal rim, he wondered just how often she’d stood upon her balcony, stared out over the city, and suddenly seen it explode before her, become a ball of flame, the air a stink of smoldering flesh. Had she seen and smelled the final apocalypse in a visionary instant, the end of life, the end of man, and heard her mind pronounce its tragic judgment, Good.

  They finished dinner with no more talk either of Graves’ books, the fate he foresaw for the characters who populated them, or of Riverwood. They did not review what they’d learned about Faye Harrison’s death or revisit any aspect of the case. And yet, both Graves’ novels and Riverwood hung in the air around them, trivializing all other subjects, reducing them to the status of evasions.

  Nonetheless, the conspiracy held. It was a tacit agreement to keep things at a distance, so that they discussed research methods rather than the deeper objects of their research, the use of language rather than the ideas it conveyed, dramatic tension rather than the one Graves felt physically, the electric charge each time she looked at him or spoke to him, and which he felt as little more than a suggestion of the lightning bolt that would undoubtedly accompany her actual touch.

  It was just after nine when they left the restaurant and made their way back to Riverwood. Eleanor was behind the wheel, as usual. Graves sat on the passenger side, trying to hold his eyes on the road, almost wishing that he could simply disappear, not face the dismal moment when he would have to leave her, and in doing so return to that very loneliness she had already identified in him, and which now, for the first time in his life, seemed unbearable.

  She slowed as she neared his cottage, then sped forward again, passing it as well as her own, taking the long curve around the pond so that she finally brought the car to a halt in the driveway of the mansion. “It’s a pretty night,” she said. “I thought we might take a final stroll around the grounds.”

  They stood together in the darkness, facing the pond, Graves’ mind now suddenly returning to the day of Faye Harrison’s disappearance. Once again he tried to imagine what the workmen at the second cottage had seen that morning, a slim young girl making her way across the lawn. He knew that although Faye had lifted her hand to shield her eyes, it had not been against the sun. For the sun had been behind her. Instead, it now seemed to Graves that Faye had to have been shielding herself, hiding her face from those who might otherwise have seen it. For a brief time he’d considered the possibility that it might have been Mona Flagg behind the uplifted hand, Mona, Edward’s pawn, concealing her identity. But now he knew that it had never been Mona. It had been Faye and only Faye who’d crossed the lawn that morning, not Mona Flagg in Faye’s clothes. Still, she had undoubtedly lifted her hand against a morning light that hadn’t been there. Why had she done that? Why had she not wanted anyone to see her face?

  Suddenly Graves heard a voice in his mind. It was not one he’d ever actually heard, but he recognized it instantly. The voice his imagination had given Faye Harrison, small, trusting, betrayed, Remember me.

  An aching in the air swept toward Graves. He saw her step out of the deep summer night, glimmer eerily in her pale blue dress, then withdraw into the shadows once again, leaving nothing but her whisper in the air, Remember me.

  “Faye,” he said.

  “What is it?” Eleanor asked softly.

  Graves recalled the photograph Portman had studied so intently on that last day of his life. He could feel his imagination heating up, driving him beyond the plodding, investigative methods he’d previously relied upon, returning him to Slovak’s passionate and uncertain ways.

  “What are you thinking, Paul?” Eleanor demanded.

  He glanced toward the woods, and she was there again. At the edge of the trail, the nightbound forest like a
black wall behind her. She was staring at him imploringly, translucent and slowly undulating, as if mirrored by dark water. Graves could see the desolation in her face, hear her voice, scarcely audible above the whisper of the leaves, Oh, please, please, please …

  “Faye,” Graves said again. In the distance he saw her swiftly turn and head up the trail, her body dissolving into the green filament of the forest wall. “She was in such pain,” he said.

  Eleanor took his arm and urged him forward protectively, leading him away from a precipice she could not entirely see. “What about her pain?” she asked.

  As they walked toward the gazebo, Graves could feel all the things he’d learned in the past few days whirl wildly in his mind, a maelstrom of memories and images, real and imagined. He knew that they were gathering together as they did in Slovak’s mind, twisting and turning, a pattern emerging from the roiling mass. The white frame of the gazebo glowed softly in the hazy light, red roses drooping heavily in the summer air.

  “She was crying,” he said. “That’s why she hid her face when she crossed the lawn that morning.”

  Eleanor said nothing, but only continued to guide him forward, her arm still delicately encircling his. They reached the gazebo.

  “She knew what Warren Davies had done to her,” Graves said. He could feel his mind gathering bits of information, desperately working to arrange the images even as they flooded in. “She knew, but she hadn’t told anyone.” He stopped, now locked in a furious concentration, his mind like a steaming chamber, hot mists spewing everywhere. “So no one knew why.” As if it were a small animal trained by another, his hand entered his pocket, drew out the letter Mrs. Harrison had written to Allison Davies. “Why, Faye?” he asked as he handed it to Eleanor.

  She read it slowly, by the faded light that swept out from the gazebo, meticulously going over each word. When she’d finished it, she looked up and said, “Mrs. Harrison was an English teacher, you said. From the old school. A stickler for grammar, punctuation.” She pressed the letter toward Graves, her finger indicating the question Graves had just repeated: Why, Faye? “It’s the comma that doesn’t fit. A comma signals direct address. Airs. Harrison isn’t asking ‘Why Faye?’ That is, why, of all the girls on earth, it had to be Faye who was murdered. Her question isn’t directed to God or fate or anything like that. It’s directed to Faye herself. She isn’t asking who killed Faye. She’s not looking for a murderer.” Her eyes widened. “She’s looking for a … reason. A reason why Faye went into the woods.”