Instruments of Night (15 page)

Warren Davies readily confirmed that he’d met Faye in the gazebo the morning of her disappearance. Their conversation
had been quite brief, Davies had told Sheriff Gerard, certainly no more than a few minutes. After that he’d returned to the house, though not before glancing back to find Faye still seated in the rich shadows of the gazebo. She was gazing up toward the second floor, Mr. Davies said, and appeared to be staring at one of its upper windows. As he turned to enter the house she “gave a little nod,” he added, “like someone had signaled to her.” Mr. Davies went on to say that the person to whom Faye had nodded was “probably my daughter, Allison.”

But it could not have been Allison to whom Faye nodded that morning. Graves discovered this once he turned to the statement Allison made to Sheriff Gerard only minutes after his interview with her father. It could not have been Allison because Allison had been in the dining room at the time, reading a book she’d started the night before. She had seen her friend only once that morning, she went on to say, the same glimpse she’d years later described to Graves, though in the earlier interview she’d added that “Faye gave me a little wave before she turned and walked away.”

Graves let his mind dwell upon that brief moment, as he knew Allison Davies must still dwell upon it, with that odd combination of irony and sorrow all people feel who have said a last good-bye without knowing it, watched a loved one wave, smile, offer a departing word as if it were merely one of thousands yet to come. He knew what Allison had done after that. She’d gone back to the dining room. Back to her book. Faye had returned to the gazebo, spoken briefly to Warren Davies, then glanced up and nodded to someone Mr. Davies assumed to be standing at one of the windows on the second floor.

In his mind Graves saw Faye’s eyes lift upward, saw the small, slight movement of her head. It seemed to him that
Mr. Davies might well have been right, that Faye had received a signal of some kind.

But from whom?

For the rest of the morning Graves tried to find out. He studied the notes Sheriff Gerard had compiled during the interviews he’d conducted on the morning after Faye’s disappearance. As he read, he often stopped to envision a scene, looking for hidden themes, motives, sinister connections. One by one the denizens of Riverwood came before him—not only the Davieses themselves, but maids and cooks, handymen and retainers. But despite all the work Sheriff Gerard had done in his initial interviews, Graves could find little to feed his imagination. For although several people at Riverwood had seen Faye that morning of her death, only Jake Mosley had followed her into the wood.

Two days after Gerard’s initial visit to Riverwood, Faye’s body had been found in Manitou Cave. At that point, with the “missing person” found, the focus of the investigation shifted from Sheriff Gerard to Dennis Portman, from a man searching for a girl to one searching for her killer.

A
nd so Graves knew it would be there. The Murder Book. The lead detective’s account of a homicide investigation. He found Dennis Portman’s Murder Book in the top drawer of the filing cabinet behind his desk.

The Murder Book consisted of a detailed record of Portman’s activities, everything that had been done in the course of the State Trooper’s investigation. There were usually photographs of the victim, of suspects, sometimes even witnesses, along with precise timetables of the detective’s movements, the collection of evidence, everything from lab reports to interviews with witnesses, the time and place such interviews had occurred, and summaries of what each witness had said.

It was all gathered in a plain blue folder, remarkably neat and orderly. Almost too neat, Graves thought. Too orderly, so that he wondered if perhaps Detective Portman had expected it to be reviewed at some point in the future, his work reconsidered and evaluated, his long
effort to discover what happened to Faye Harrison now passed to other hands.

A newspaper article had been taped just inside the front cover. Its headline read
DENNIS R. PORTMAN TO LEAD RIVERWOOD MURDER INVESTIGATION
. An accompanying photograph showed Portman as a big man, his bulky body draped in a transparent plastic rainslick almost identical to the one Graves had earlier imagined him wearing. Reality had added a gray felt hat, however, one Portman had tugged down over his brow, leaving his face in shadow.

For a moment Graves peered into that shadow. He tried to make something of the dark, unblinking eyes that peered back at him through the years, sunken, hooded, with puffy bags beneath and deep creases at the sides. The eyes seemed pressed into the great doughy mass of the face that surrounded them, a fat man’s face, dissolute, with flabby jowls and a second chin that hung in an indulgent crescent beneath the first.

As he continued to look at the photograph, Graves could feel his imagination heating up, filling in the blank spaces, creating an identity for Dennis Portman. He began to feel the man’s vast heaviness, hear his labored breathing as he’d mounted the stairs toward the main house at Riverwood or struggled up the steep forest trail that led to Indian Rock. How the heat of that long-ago summer must have afflicted him. How often he must have swabbed his neck and brow with the white handkerchief that protruded from the right front pocket of his rumpled flannel jacket. How longingly he must have stared out over the cool green water. Had he remembered the slenderness of his youth, the speed and grace that had once been his, the whole vanished world of his lost agility?

Graves drew his eyes from the photograph, making himself stop. He knew that he was perfectly capable of
losing his focus for hours, wasting a whole afternoon dreaming up a shattered life for Dermis Portman, and thus forgetting that other shattered life, Faye Harrison’s, that it had been the old detective’s job to investigate.

Portman had placed his first interview at the front of the book. The subject was Jim Preston, the hiker who’d spotted Faye Harrison on Mohonk Trail the afternoon of her murder. Since Graves’ reading had given him considerable experience with police argot, he found it easy to decipher the shorthand Portman used in his notes.

From these notes, Graves learned that James Preston was an eighteen-year-old white male. He was tall and rather thin. He had no criminal record, nor any outstanding warrants against him. That such a background check had been run on Preston at all indicated that he’d briefly been under suspicion, though probably for no more substantial reason than that he’d been the last person to see Faye Harrison alive.

On August 30, at 2:30
P.M
., Preston had arrived at police headquarters in Britanny Falls. Seven minutes later he’d been interviewed by New York State Police Detective
Dennis Portman in Sheriff Gerard’s office. That interview had lasted one hour and twelve minutes. It had been conducted by Portman alone, with no others present, and, in the absence of a stenographer, it had been recorded by means of audiotape.

The contents of that tape had later been transcribed, a copy of the transcription officially included in Portman’s Murder Book. The transcript was nearly twenty pages long, a rambling, repetitive conversation, with Portman applying the usual police method of revisiting the same area again and again, hoping to glean some additional fact the witness had either forgotten or chosen to conceal.

In the case of Jim Preston, the method had succeeded only in extending a brief sighting into an elaborate account of Preston’s own activities on the day of Faye Harrison’s disappearance:

For the next four pages of transcript, Preston traced his route through the mountains, meticulously indicating particular
trails. He’d walked for over an hour before finally penetrating the forest surrounding Riverwood, encountering no one else until he began to make his way up Mohonk Trail.

Up
the trail, as Graves noted particularly, just as it had been reported in the local paper the day after Preston had first been questioned by Sheriff Gerard.

The fact that Faye Harrison had been moving at such an accelerated pace had triggered a thought in Portman’s mind.

Graves saw Portman lean forward on the cluttered desk, his sunken eyes boring into Preston’s open, youthful face.

“Down
the trail,” Graves said aloud, glancing back over the transcript of Jim Preston’s interrogation, noting that Preston had referred to Faye Harrison as going “down” Mohonk Trail on four separate occasions. He felt something shift in his mind, a tiny, audible movement, the sound Slovak heard when something didn’t fit.

He walked to the map on the wall and peered at it closely. Mohonk Trail clearly ran “up” the ridge toward Indian Rock, then circled it and headed down the other side of the mountain at a steep angle until it reached the Hudson River. If Faye had been going down Mohonk Trail when Preston saw her, she had already gone past Indian Rock.

With his finger, Graves traced the path Faye had to have taken to have been seen going
down
Mohonk Trail. If Faye had intended to meet Allison Davies at Indian Rock, why had she not stopped there? Why had she not waited? And if, after realizing that Allison was not going to meet her at their “secret place,” why had Faye not returned to
Riverwood? Why had she gone down the opposite slope instead?

One answer presented itself instantly. Graves saw a dark figure moving swiftly along Mohonk Trail, Faye, now alert to its presence, rushing away, past Indian Rock and down the other side of the ridge, no longer precisely aware of where she was headed, only that she had to get out of the encircling woods. A man. Pursuing Faye from behind. Closing in swiftly. Reaching for her shoulder. Now Graves saw Faye twist round to face him, a figure his imagination had already draped in Kessler’s black leather coat. As if he were a boy again, he felt Kessler’s hand grasp his shoulder, heard the words that had sounded in the darkness behind him,
Start walking.
He knew Faye must have obeyed instantly, instinctively, already half-paralyzed, fear searing through her sharp as an electric shock. He recalled the words he’d heard that night, Kessler’s and his own.