Instruments of Night (16 page)

And he
had
walked on, moving meekly through the covering darkness, with no thought of escape, no notion of resistance, frightened only for himself, for what might happen to him if he did not obey, and knowing all the time exactly what he was doing, a little voice mercilessly reminding him that he was leading Ammon Kessler to his sister.

Graves peered at the map intently, as if something lay hidden along the trails and ridges it portrayed, the unfound rope that had been used to murder Faye Harrison. He saw her once again on the trail, shoved brutally from behind, and wondered if she’d made it far enough down
the slope to have seen the open area through the trees, cars parked there, people getting in and out. How near they must have seemed before she suddenly felt the hand grip her shoulder, heard the voice behind her. And after that, how far.

T
here were no pictures of the actual procedure in Faye Harrison’s autopsy report, but Graves could easily imagine her corpse on a stainless steel table, faceup and callously exposed under a fluorescent light. From the many books he’d read about forensic pathology, he knew that it had been flayed open in a Y incision, flaps of skin folded back from the trunk, then sewn together again in a crisscross of thick black thread. By the time the examination had run its course, Faye’s young body would have been fully explored, every cavity and orifice, the contents of her stomach emptied, her bowels uncoiled, a physical violation so extreme, Graves found it unspeakable in the living, barely endurable in the dead.

But as the report revealed, despite the dreadful thoroughness of his search, the coroner who’d conducted the autopsy on Faye Harrison had uncovered little of consequence. He’d found no sign of rape or torture. There were a few scratches on her arms and legs, probably the result of her body being dragged into the cave. Beyond
such superficial wounds, the coroner noted only that the girl’s fingers were red and raw, and that three of her fingernails had been broken. Some kind of rope had been wound around her throat. A few of its fibers were lodged beneath her fingernails. In the coroner’s opinion, the rope had been “yanked hard,” cutting into the flesh and leaving a collar of bruised tissue around her neck.

But for all the apparent force with which the rope had tightened around Faye’s throat, it had not broken her neck, as the report stated flatly, thereby avoiding what that specific lack of trauma actually meant: that Faye Harrison had not died instantly, but had felt every moment of her protracted strangulation, the bite of the cord, the constriction of her airways, the sense of slowly exploding from the inside that is the physical sensation of suffocation, its particular agony, and which would have thrown her into a violent seizure, a hideous flailing of arms and legs, the kicking and bucking that Graves knew to be the awful dance of this kind of death.

He found photographs of her body in a separate envelope, wedged in between the testimony of Jim Preston, and that of Andre Grossman, who’d actually stumbled upon her body. The envelope was marked simply SOC—no doubt Detective Portman’s police shorthand for “scene of the crime.”

Graves felt the old dread grip him as he laid the envelope on his desk. It was like thousands of tiny wires suddenly pulled taut inside him. He knew what he’d do if they began to break. He’d rise, bolt from this room, and never come back. By the time he reached his cottage, he’d be shivering uncontrollably, just as he had the night before Gwen’s burial, when Mrs. Flexner had escorted him to the funeral parlor where his sister had been taken, leading him gently down the dark corridor, his body shaking so violently by the time she’d opened the door and he’d
glimpsed the black coffin in which Gwen lay that she’d abruptly turned him around and hastily rushed him back down the musty hallway, the two of them nearly sprinting by the time they’d bolted through the entrance door and into the warm night air. He could still hear her voice trying desperately to calm him,
It’s all right, Paul. You don’t have to look at her if you don’t want to.

He was poised once again at the entrance to that room he’d fled so many years before. As if thrown back in time, a boy again, he felt himself reach for the brass knob, though in reality it was the flap of the SOC envelope he reached for; felt his hand push open that scarred wooden door, though it was really his fingers drawing out the three photographs that had been placed inside the plain brown envelope; felt his body move toward his sister’s coffin, its lid thrown open, a pale light rising from what lay inside, though when he reached it and looked down, it was the corpse of Faye Harrison he saw.

She lay on her left side, her legs drawn beneath her, but with her right shoulder pitched backward, so that her body appeared violently twisted, as if, near death, she’d assumed the fetal position, then, at the last moment, tried to pull herself out of it. Her right arm hung limply across her chest, the hand dangling, palm out, fingers nearly touching the dirt of the cave floor. Her left arm was positioned directly under her, entirely concealed save for the hand, which lay flat but oddly twisted, palm up, fingers curled inward, as if closed around an invisible ball. Her legs rested one upon the other, feet and ankles together. Her long blond hair fell over her face, obscuring it, all but the one place the strands had parted to reveal a single half-open eye.

Graves gazed at the photograph for a long time. Then
he closed his eyes, breathing deeply before he opened them again.

The next picture had been taken from a few feet beyond the mouth of the cave and showed its entrance, a rugged black recess surrounded by a thick, nearly impenetrable cloak of underbrush. Faye’s body rose like a mound of soiled clothes near the back of the cave. It was obvious that little effort had been made to hide it. Instead, it had merely been dragged to the rear of the cave and hastily covered with a litter of sticks and bramble, a kind of imitation burial that left the dead girl more or less exposed, a mound even the most casual forest rambler could easily have spotted.

The first two photographs had been the sort routinely taken by crime scene photographers. The last picture, however, was nothing of the kind. In fact, it was not a picture of the crime scene at all, but of Faye fully alive, standing on a riverbank, the Hudson flowing to her right, dense forest to her left. In every way it seemed like an ordinary picture, one of many that had no doubt been taken of Faye Harrison before her murder. It was not until Graves turned the photograph over and read the brief note scribbled on its back that he understood why Portman had included it.

Graves sat back in his chair and let his mind put it all together.

The resident artist at Riverwood that summer had taken a photograph of Faye Harrison almost three months before
her death, and at a location only thirty yards from where he’d later come upon her body.

In his mind Graves saw Faye and Grossman at their first encounter, Grossman standing on the bank of the pond as Faye strolled out of the water in a black bathing suit, shaking her head as she walked, flinging sparkling drops in all directions. From beneath the shadow of his floppy brown hat, Grossman stared at her emptily, feeling his weight, his ugliness, loathing the cruel joke nature had played by putting such a passionately yearning heart in so unattractive a body, laboring to overcome the agonizing debilitation his looks had inflicted upon him, and his accent heightened, combined afflictions so severe and paralyzing that he barely managed to speak.

Hello.

Hi.

You are Faye, yes? Allison’s friend. I have been seeing you with her. Playing tennis, I think. And on the lake. In the boat. How you say? Rowing?

Yes.

Allison told me about you. I am Grossman. Andre Grossman. Painter. I am painting portrait of Mrs. Davies. You are—I hope you don’t mind me to say it—but you are most pretty girl.

Thank you.

Most pretty, yes. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you perhaps something?

What?

You are so … when I saw you come out of water just now it was … I thought you might—how you say it?—sit for me?

Sit?

For painting. There are no models, you see. It is hard. With no models. But I hope you’re not … that you don’t think. My English. I am sorry for my asking. I do not want you to think that … I only. Please, if I gave the wrong … I am sorry.

It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize.

Graves saw Andre Grossman’s eyes soften, heard his voice grow less strained.

So. Do you think perhaps … perhaps that I could … that you would sit for me?

As Graves now imagined it, Faye’s answer could not have been sweeter … or more naive.

I’ve never done anything like that before. But I guess I could. I guess it would be okay.

She posed for him the very next day, as Graves conjured it, Faye lying in the grass beside the water, Grossman a few feet away, peeping out from behind the canvas, studying her long, bare legs, gleaming white in the summer sun, her shimmering blond hair, his body tensing each time he felt her eyes drift toward him.

At first they talked little, but as the days passed they began to exchange bits of information. Grossman spoke of his boyhood in Europe, Faye of the life she’d lived at Riverwood, growing fond of the painter as the days passed, coming to think of him almost as a father. So much so, that it seemed strange when he said:

Please. Call me Andre. Do not think me so old that I can’t … that I …

He had said nothing more, but had gone on to some other subject.

And so the days had passed, one falling upon another, Faye and Grossman increasingly drawn to each other. Faye toward the father who had died and abandoned her. Grossman toward a girl whose beauty made him want to do more than paint her, made him want to touch her.

Graves felt the story rush ahead, leaping over weeks and months, until the season neared its end. The artist’s time at Riverwood was almost over, the prospect of leaving it, of leaving Faye, became increasingly painful to him, his situation unbearable, his unexpressed desire desperate.

What do you think of it, the portrait?

Do I really look like that?

Yes, you do, Faye. You do not know this?

But I look so … beautiful.

But you are beautiful. Believe this. I have seen many girls. In Europe. In the great cities. I have seen many, many girls, but they are not so beautiful as you.

No, I’m just a—

No, please. Stop. Don’t say things against yourself.

Graves saw Andre Grossman’s eyes grow wild with longing, knowing that the moment had come, finally summoning the courage to seize it, his words bursting from him like small flames:

Go with me, Faye. When I leave, go with me. We could … be together … forever.

Graves now watched as Grossman lay his dreams before her, watched him tell Faye exactly what he felt, what he wanted, then stand in an agonized silence as the girl stared at him, shocked by the absurdity of his proposal, stammering her excuses as she swiftly gathered up her things, desperate to get away from him, this poor, pathetic little man.

With the story near its end, Graves looked at the photograph again, concentrating on Grossman now rather than on Faye. Shame and anguish and self-loathing must have swept over him at the moment of his supreme humiliation. Graves saw him in the days that followed her rejection, a stubby figure storming along the edge of the pond, bitter, fuming, his eyes fixed straight ahead, forcing himself not to look toward the radiant teenage girl who, on the morning of August 27th, moved across the lawn of Riverwood, her very beauty an incitement, reminding him that he was vile and disgusting, something to be yanked from a brackish water and hurled against a stone, a slimy, bloated toad.

Graves imagined the final scene as two figures grappling in a swirl of leaves, one pressed down like a heavy stone upon the other, the cord relentlessly tightening around a slender white throat. For a moment he heard the fury of that struggle, Faye’s muted cries, her fingers clawing the tightening cord, a final gasp, and after that only Grossman’s oddly sensual moan.

A
n evening shade had begun to fall over Riverwood by the time Graves headed back to his cottage. Eleanor Stern was sitting on the porch of her cottage. When she saw Graves, she stood and walked to the wooden railing of the porch. She lifted a glass toward him. “Care to join me?”

Graves never allowed himself a drink, nor even companionship very often, but the slowly falling night seemed to penetrate the wall he lived behind, to inexplicably urge him toward her.