Instruments of Night (12 page)

Mrs. Harrison shrugged, and Graves saw her reluctance to return to that painful time. “There’s nothing much to tell. It was warm. There was a nice breeze blowing.”

As if he’d been standing beside the pond that morning, Graves saw the leaves rustle in the trees around her small home, ripple the otherwise tranquil waters of the nearby pond.

“I’d done a wash,” Mrs. Harrison added. “I was outside, pinning it to the line.”

Graves drew the notebook from his pocket, determined to take notes no less detailed than those Slovak took, then studied until dawn.

“That’s when my girl came out the back door.”

Graves envisioned Faye still sleepy as she came through the door, yawning, stretching, rubbing her eyes, her body draped in a white sleeping gown, the breeze of that long-ago morning gently riffling through her still unruly hair.

“I was surprised to see her up so early,” Mrs. Harrison said. “She didn’t work at the main house anymore.”

“Faye worked in the main house?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Harrison answered. “Aftar my husband died, Mr. Davies took a real interest in Faye.” Her eyes took on a sudden tenderness. “He noticed how Faye liked to walk in the flower garden. She was just eight years old. But she seemed curious. I guess Mr. Davies liked that. Anyway, he noticed her.”

In his mind Graves saw a little girl among the flowers, a man approaching her. Tall. Gray. The father she had lost.

“Mr. Davies kept part of the flower garden for himself, Mrs. Harrison continued. “For his studies.”

“Studies?”

“What Mr. Davies was doing. In the garden. Growing new flowers. That’s how Faye described it. Putting one flower with another one, she said. Making a different flower. She was real interested in it.” She seemed to see her daughter as she’d been at that time. A little girl with bright, inquisitive eyes. “And I guess Mr. Davies liked having her around. I don’t think Miss Allison ever took an interest in the work he did. With the flowers, I mean.” She sensed that she’d gotten off track. “Anyway, Mr. Davies asked if my Faye could work with him. He said he’d teach her what he was doing. He’d even pay her a little salary for helping him in the garden. She had a gift, he told me. For understanding things. Scientific things.” A gentle smile played on her lips. “Faye wanted to do it. She was real excited. So I brought her to Mr. Davies’ office. He gave her a piece of candy. He was a real kind man, always real thoughtful. Then they went to the garden. They worked together almost every day after that. Faye would go to his office after school. Then they’d go to the garden and work for an hour or so. She worked with Mr. Davies until she turned sixteen. Then she stopped.”

“A sudden stop?”

“Yes.”

Graves envisioned Warren Davies standing just behind a
teenage girl, his eyes fixed upon the delicate slope of her shoulder, the whiteness of her throat, his elegant fingers toying with the strands of her blond hair in a way that was no longer innocent. He saw Faye turn to face him, appalled by what she saw in his eyes, repulsed by his touch.

It was just a story, of course. Something he imagined. Still, Graves wondered if it might be true.

“Did Faye ever tell you why she stopped working for Mr. Davies?”

“She said he’d lost interest in the flowers,” Mrs. Harrison answered. “Just lost interest. One day he told her that he didn’t want to work in the garden anymore. So there was nothing for her to do. That was the end of it.” She was silent for a time. Then she returned to the last day of her daughter’s life. “So that’s why it seemed strange that Faye got up so early that morning. Since she wasn’t working. Had nothing to do.”

As Mrs. Harrison went on to describe her final conversation with her daughter, Graves found that he could hear their voices sounding in his head.

You look tired.

I couldn’t sleep.

How come?

I don’t know.

Graves felt he was watching the scene from a scant few yards away, a silent observer, scribbling notes, as mother and daughter hung the morning wash, talking companionably as they did so.

Got any plans this morning, honey?

No.

Well, there’s going to be a party when Mrs. Davies’ portrait is finished. You might want to go down to Britanny Falls and get yourself a new dress.

I have my blue dress. I don’t need a new one.

Well, you can be sure that Mona will have a new one.

“Mona?” Graves asked.

“Mona Flagg,” Mrs. Harrison replied. “Edward Davies’ girlfriend.”

Graves wrote the name in his notebook.

“Mona lived at Riverwood that summer,” Mrs. Harrison said. “Pretty girl. Her whole life ahead of her.” She stopped. Graves knew that she was comparing the open future of Mona Flagg with the tragically shortened one of her daughter. “Those two were together all the time. Edward and Mona.”

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.

O
nce 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 in 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.”