Instruments of Night (13 page)

Graves could see her mind working, little lights in her dark eyes, subtle, nearly invisible, but unmistakably flashing, the mark, he recognized, of a very great intelligence.

“Who was the murdered girl?”

The turn in the conversation surprised Graves. Eleanor Stern’s mind worked like a grappling hook—seizing subjects, impaling them. He felt that he was now dangling from that hook, would not be released until he’d told her everything.

“Her name was Faye,” he answered. “Faye Harrison. She was sixteen years old. She lived here on the estate with her mother. The mother taught at a local school. An old fashioned sort of teacher, I’ve been told. Heavy on grammar, punctuation, that sort of thing.”

Eleanor nodded. For a moment Graves imagined her as a child, seated at a long dining table, brilliant people all around her, a welter of dazzling talk, her young eyes darting from one person to the next, effortlessly following several conversations at once.

“When was she murdered?” Eleanor asked.

“In August 1946.”

“That’s a long time ago. Why is Miss Davies looking into it again?”

Suspicious, Graves thought, she is already suspicious,
already probing, poised to check the attic, then the cellar, draw open the forbidden door.

“I mean, it’s been more than fifty years, after all,” Eleanor persisted. “That’s a long time to dwell upon a single event, don’t you think? Even one as striking as a murder.”

The suspicion lingered in her voice. For that reason Graves sensed that Eleanor Stern’s suspiciousness was inherent in the way she saw things. For her, the human world was a landscape strewn with pits and snares, the mind her only means to maneuver through the bramble, avoid the iron traps.

“Not long ago, Faye’s mother wrote Miss Davies a letter,” Graves told her. “She said she’d never have any peace until she found out what happened to her daughter.”

“So the murderer was never found?” Eleanor’s eyes had narrowed slightly as she’d asked the question, a gesture of intensifying interest, as Graves recognized, a sense of drawing the subject inward, holding it in a subtle vise.

“No. There was a suspect. A man named Mosley. But he was never arrested. He died not long after the murder.”

Eleanor nodded. Graves saw something fire in her mind, a connection, two wires meeting in a sudden spark. “But if you found that the suspect had, in fact, done it, then you’d have to convince Mrs. Harrison of it?”

“Yes, I suppose I would.”

“But if the suspect didn’t do it, then you’d have to find the real killer?”

“Not exactly. I’m only supposed to ‘imagine’ who it was.”

“So it doesn’t have to be true,” Eleanor murmured. “Just believable. To give the girl’s mother closure.” She cast her eyes about the room, its stateliness and splendor.
“Murder in a place like this,” she added thoughtfully. “A perfect world.”

Graves was not sure what this woman might think of that world, the one he’d agreed to investigate while at Riverwood, and whose chief characteristic, according to Allison Davies, had been a tender innocence. He thought of the photographs he’d already studied, two girls in a boat, on a pier, lounging in a gazebo. What would Eleanor Stern think of such images? Would she see Faye and Allison as Miss Davies did? As two innocent, healthy, happy teenagers in a bright sunlight? Or would she see them already veiled in shadows?

“Life sometimes takes a cruel twist,” Eleanor Stern said.

Graves suddenly thought of the “cruel twist” that had destroyed his sister and devastated his life. To dull its building ache, he returned to the more distant murder of Faye Harrison. “Faye came to the house that morning.” In his mind he saw Faye at the entrance in her blue dress, her face wreathed in a curious dread. “Miss Davies saw her standing at the door. She thinks Faye might have wanted the two of them to meet at their ‘secret place.’”

The words themselves appeared to deepen Eleanor’s interest. “Secret place,” she repeated.

“Indian Rock, it’s called. But Miss Davies didn’t meet Faye there. She went back to this room. That’s where she’d been earlier, when she’d heard her brother and her father talking in the foyer.”

Eleanor’s eyes drifted toward the door at the entrance to the room. “They must have been talking rather loudly, don’t you think? If Miss Davies had heard them all the way here.”

Graves nodded. He hadn’t noticed the distance before then.

“An argument, perhaps.” Eleanor thought a moment, then said, “Where did Faye go after that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t traced her any farther than to the front door. I only know that about a half hour later she came around the side of the house and walked toward the woods. Miss Davies never saw her again. No one did, except for a local boy, a hiker, who saw her going down Mohonk Trail at the time.”

“And so Miss Davies thinks that if she’d let Faye into the house that morning, she might have saved her life.”

“Either that, or gone into the woods with her.”

“Of course, if she’d done that, she might have been killed too,” Eleanor pointed out, exactly as Graves himself had. “That would have been more difficult, of course. Unless there were two killers.”

Graves felt Sykes suddenly draw near him, hollow-eyed and cowering, Kessler’s obedient tool, fixed in his eternal cowardice. He could feel himself being sucked back into the world he had created for them, the nightbound city where they waited in the fog, or at the end of the alleyway, behind the oddly opened door.

But these were not places Graves wanted to return to—at least not yet—and so he quickly acted to prevent it. “What about you?” he asked Eleanor Stern. “What are you working on?”

“A play,” Eleanor replied. “More or less autobiographical.” She did not seem interested in pursuing the subject. “From what you’ve told me about your novels, I take it you don’t write autobiographically.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then I suppose your life has been as uneventful as mine. No trauma at all.”

Graves smelled honeysuckle, felt once again the sense of safety that had briefly settled over him before; in an instant, the perfume had been overtaken by a blast of
sweet, gummy breath, the warm touch of the night by the bony grasp of fingers on his shoulder, the rasp of crickets by a voice, low, threatening,
What you looking at, boy?

“What was your first novel about?” Eleanor asked.

The bony fingers tightened around Graves’ shoulder; the nails bit into his flesh. “A kidnapping. Of a little boy.”

“Was it the first of your series?”

“Yes.”

“And your hero, who is he?”

In his mind Graves saw not Slovak, but Sheriff Sloane as he lumbered away from Mrs. Flexner’s house, weary, his broad shoulders slumped, resigned that the boy would never speak, and as a result, that he—Sloane—would never know the truth, never find and bring to justice whoever it was who’d slaughtered Gwendolyn Graves, hung her from a beam and mutilated her. For a moment Graves returned to that last afternoon, remembered how during the brief few seconds before he’d pulled away, the sheriff had stared at him from behind the dusty windshield. As if he were before him now, he heard again the old man’s futile questions.
What did you see that night, Paul? Why won’t you tell me what you saw?

“Slovak,” Graves said, now forcing himself to concentrate on Eleanor’s question.

“And your villain?”

Graves smelled the breath again, felt the man jerk the hoe from his trembling fingers.
Gimme that. You won’t be needing it.

“Kessler,” he replied, then glimpsed a small, cringing figure in the darkness, his wet, slavish eyes fixed upon Kessler. “And he has a kind of personal servant.” The name fell from his mouth like a piece of torn flesh. “Sykes.”

He could feel Eleanor’s eyes on him. “You hate them very much,” she said. “Kessler and Sykes.”

Graves saw the black car grow small in the distance, finally vanish behind its tail of yellow dust. Revenge really was the only thing that could give him any peace, he thought. To take the life of the one who’d killed his sister. He saw the old sheriff facing him again, heard his insistent questions, remembered the silences that had followed them.

Who was he, Paul?

Silence.

Who came to your house and killed your sister?

Silence.

There were two of them, weren’t there?

Silence.

You know who they were, don’t you? You saw them, I know you did. They tied you to a chair. They made you watch what they did to Gwen. I’ve seen the scratches on the chair, where you struggled to get free.

Silence.

But you couldn’t get free. You saw it all, didn’t you?

Silence.

If you don’t tell me, Paul, those two men will never pay for what they did to your sister.

Silence.

Who were they, son? Tell me who they were.

He could still remember the image that had risen into his mind the moment Sheriff Sloane had asked his final question: two figures lurching through the front room of the old farmhouse, one tall, skinny, pointing here and there, hissing orders,
Get this, get that
, the other fixed in his eternal crouch, darting frantically on command, grabbing the tools that were required, a knife, a fork, a length of gray rope, a box of matches.

You saw it all, didn’t you, Paul? Everything they did to Gwen.
You were still here the next morning, weren’t you? You saw them.

He’d replayed that final moment, saw the black car back out of the driveway, dawn now breaking over the fields. It had had a drooping front bumper and a choked, clattering engine, with worn tires and no hubcaps, an exhaust pipe hung so low it nearly dragged the ground. He had even remembered the license plate:
Ohio 4273.

Graves suddenly saw Gwen on her shattered knees, staring upward, her hair wet and matted, glistening trails of blood pouring from her nose and the swollen corners of her mouth, pleading softly,
Kill me
, the response a vicious command,
Slap that bitch!
He could still hear the sound of the blow that struck his sister’s face.

And when he finally came back to himself, he saw that Eleanor watched him intently.

“Were you writing something just now?” There was a strange tension in her voice, something between curiosity and alarm, as if a faint siren had gone off in her mind, “In your head, I mean.”

“No,” Graves answered. “Just thinking.”

He could tell that she knew better.

“Where was she murdered?” she asked.

For a moment Graves thought she meant Gwen, then, just in time, realized that she knew nothing of that, knew only of Faye Harrison. “In the cave where they found her, I suppose. It’s in the woods around here. Manitou Cave.”

“You’ll probably have to go there at some point,” Eleanor said. “To get a feel for the place. A feeling for what happened there.” She smiled faintly. “Of course, you’re probably not one of those people who believes that spirits linger after death, are you?”

“No,” Graves answered. “I don’t believe that anything lingers after death.” He saw Gwen close her eyes, then the frantic movement beneath the lids as she waited, the
broken murmur that rose from her, a thin whimpering that tortured him like a prayer,
Oh, please, please, please ….

“Except our memories of the dead,” Graves said. He heard Kessler’s voice, speaking a line from
The Prey of Time: Terror is the deepest solitude we know.
An evil smell pierced the air around him, the greasy sweetness of French fries washed down with cheap bourbon.

It was an odor he wanted to rid himself of but knew he never could. For only revenge could bring him peace. And no matter what he did, Graves knew he could never entirely have it. For in all likelihood Ammon Vincent Kessler was still alive. He’d been young, after all, in his early twenties. He’d be a middle-aged man now, still young enough and strong enough to do to others what he’d done to Gwen. Each time Graves read about some young girl who’d been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, he knew it might be Kessler who’d done it, Kessler who was still roaming the remote country roads as night fell, searching for a lone light at the far end of a wide, deserted field.

It was at such a moment that Sheriff Sloane’s question most pierced him,
You can tell me who they were, can’t you, Paul? You can tell me what they did to your sister.
For it was true, he
could
have told him everything that happened in the farmhouse that night, how Ammon Kessler had made up games to while away the hours until dawn, “things to do,” as he’d laughingly called them, then sent Sykes to fetch the necessary tools. Again and again in his books, Graves had described their faces and their characters, Kessler’s marked by sadism, Sykes’, by cowardice, one pure evil, the other evil’s pathetic minion.

But he’d done it safely. He’d hidden everything back in time. He’d revealed nothing in the present. For Kessler had been right, and even now Graves could recall his final
words, the utterly confident smile on his lips as he’d said them to him,
You won’t say nothing, boy.

He’d been right. Down all the years, Ammon Kessler had been right. The boy had never said anything.

Nor the man.

W
alking past Eleanor’s unlighted cottage the next morning, Graves noticed that she’d left all her windows open, closed only the curtains of her bedroom. How could anyone feel so safe? Particularly a woman? It was women who were most often followed down deserted streets, stalked in empty parking lots, set upon when they were unaware.

Graves shook his head, drawing his eyes from Eleanor’s open windows, but still considering how extraordinary it was that women could put aside the murderousness that surrounded them, even stroll through empty woods as Gwen had when she brought his lunch that final day. He turned away abruptly and headed toward the main house.