Instruments of Night (20 page)

Graves saw them together, two old servants, sharing memories. Perhaps harboring secrets he had yet to unearth. “Would I be disturbing Miss Klein if I looked in on her now?”

Mrs. Powers shrugged. “I couldn’t say. She’s not real social.” A small crack seemed to open in the wall of her guardedness. “She just talks to Mr. Saunders. About the old days, like I said. When Riverwood was—” She stopped, clearly looking for the right word to describe what Riverwood had once been. “Happy.”

“Before the murder, you mean?”

Mrs. Powers hesitated. “No. I mean before Mr. and Mrs. Davies stopped getting along.” She glanced about, then lowered her voice. “I heard it was something to do with a man.” She stiffened suddenly. “You’d be better off talking to Miss Klein about things that went back that far, though,” she added hastily, now concerned that she’d overstepped her bounds. “Upstairs. Last door on the right. That’s where you’ll find her.”

Greta Klein sat upright in her bed, dressed in a checkered robe, her long white hair hanging over her shoulders. Her eyes peered at Graves intently. She’d said only “Come in” when he knocked at the door, but once he entered the room, she leaned forward slightly, reaching for her glasses.

“Frank?” she asked as she struggled to put them on. Her eyes drew together suspiciously, dark behind the thick lenses. “Who are you?”

“My name is Paul Graves. I’m spending the summer here at Riverwood.”

She watched him silently, offering no response. In the shadowy light her skin appeared unnaturally pale, like a creature who’d long been holed up in the darkness.

“It’s about Faye Harrison,” Graves added. “Do you remember her?”

Her head jerked to the left. “What do you want from
me?” she asked sharply, dryly, warning him away, her voice like the rattle of a snake.

“I’m trying to find out as much as I can about Faye,” Graves told her. “And about Riverwood at the time of her death.”

The old woman’s fingers tightened around the knot of her robe. “I was just a servant,” she said. Her German accent became suddenly more pronounced, so that she seemed to be using it to emphasize that she’d come to Riverwood a foreigner and had remained one ever since. “I told this to the other policeman.”

“Yes, I know,” Graves said. “I have his notes.”

“Notes?”

“Detective Portman made extensive notes on his investigation. But he made notes only on his first talk with you. The one in your room, on”—he took out his notebook, flipped to the appropriate page—“September second.” He looked up from the notebook. “Was that the first time you’d talked to the police?”

“Yes.”

“Why weren’t you interviewed by Sheriff Gerard?”

“Because I left Riverwood the next morning. The day after Faye disappeared, I mean.” She anticipated Graves’ next question so quickly, he sensed that she’d long expected such a visit, the nature of its inquiry. “I had a … nervous condition. Mr. Davies said I should take a few days off.” She looked about the room, as if trying to determine in which direction she should go now, how much to tell him, how much to hold back. “He sent me to a clinic. A place upstate. When I got back, everybody was upset. The policeman came to ask me questions.”

Graves glanced at his notes. “In that first interview you told Detective Portman that you went to the basement at around eight twenty-five and that you saw Faye Harrison standing at the entrance to the corridor that leads from
the basement to the boathouse. You said that you could see Edward Davies and Mona Flagg at the end of the corridor. Mona was already sitting in the boat. Edward was on the landing.”

Greta nodded slightly, grudgingly, clearly reluctant to give him even so slight a confirmation.

“Portman kept asking you if you had any idea why Faye Harrison was in the Davies house that day,” Graves continued. “You told him you didn’t, but he didn’t seem to accept that.”

“He kept asking about why she was there, all alone in the basement.” She remained silent for a moment, then blurted out, “He was suspicious of Faye. Because of her being in the basement. Because of the way it looked.” Something seemed to give inside her, so that she appeared suddenly unmoored and helplessly drifting back to that distant morning. “The way the door was open. The door to the little room in the basement where Mr. Davies kept his papers. Things were scattered around. Papers and things. Pictures. He thought Faye had done that. That she had gone through Mr. Davies’ things.”

“Why would she have done that?”

“Looking for money, maybe. That’s what I told the detective. That Faye was a poor girl. Maybe she thought she could find money in Mr. Davies’ room.”

“Detective Portman didn’t include that statement in his notes,” Graves pointed out.

Greta appeared indifferent to what Portman had or had not recorded in his notes. “He maybe didn’t think it was possible. He maybe thought Faye was a good girl.”

“What did you think of Faye?”

“I thought she was pretending to be something she wasn’t.

“What was she pretending to be?”

“One of the Davieses,” Greta answered promptly.
“Like she was a daughter. A sister. She worked for Mr. Davies just like I did, but he treated her like a daughter. It made her act like she was one of the family.”

“Did you ever see Faye in Mr. Davies’ room?”

She stared at him. “No,” she admitted. “Even that last time, when the papers were scattered around, even then I did not see her in the room.”

“Where was she when you saw her that morning?”

“Standing in the corridor. Looking toward the boat-house. I could see Edward there. Leaning over the boat. The girl was already sitting down in the boat.”

“Did you speak to Faye at all that morning?”

“No. The painter was calling me. Grossman. He needed cloth.”

“Grossman found Faye’s body,” Graves said. “Did he know her?”

“He was sometimes with her,” Greta answered. “In the woods with her. But mostly, he was with Mrs. Davies.” There was a clear insinuation in her voice. “Mr. Davies finally made him leave. He suspected something between Grossman and Mrs. Davies.”

The grotesque figure Graves had previously imagined for Andre Grossman suddenly transformed itself into a tall, robust man, wild, passionate, a curl of dark hair dangling raffishly over his forehead. A story instantly materialized in his mind, Faye Harrison at the dreadful center of it, a young girl who’d accidentally stumbled upon an indiscreet moment between Mrs. Davies and her foreign lover, and who, for that reason, had to be eliminated. It was followed by a second story, this time with Faye less the innocent victim than a clever though foolhardy schemer, bent on blackmail, unaware of the terrible peril in which such a demand might place her.

“Was there ‘something’ between Grossman and Mrs. Davies?” Graves asked.

Greta sniffed. “I do not know,” she answered. “I know only that Mr. Davies was good to Grossman. Took him in. Gave him a place to live. Work.”

She spoke of Warren Davies with great affection, a tone that reminded Graves of the photograph Saunders had mentioned days before, the picture of Mr. Davies he’d seen in Greta’s room. The picture now rested on a small table beside her bed. “You knew Mr. Davies before the war,” he said.

“Yes.” She glanced toward the window, the spacious grounds, the broad pond, all of it now hidden behind night’s black wall. “Mr. Davies brought me here.” A fierce wave of resentment swept over her. “From the camp.” She lowered her head, gazed at her knotted hands. “I could have been a doctor, like my mother.… A great doctor.” She remained silent for a time, then lifted her head slowly and stared out the window, at the nearly impenetrable darkness that blocked Riverwood from view. “That old detective didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe that Faye was a thief.”

“But someone was looking through Mr. Davies’ papers,” Graves said. “For what?”

Greta continued to stare out the window. “The truth about Riverwood. That is what the policeman said.”

“What truth?” Graves asked.

“He didn’t say,” Greta answered. “He didn’t know.”

She remained silent for a long time, then her eyes drifted back toward Graves. She seemed to have darkened almost physically, stricken by a terrible melancholy. It didn’t surprise him that her final words had nothing to do with Portman or Faye Harrison or some “truth about Riverwood” the old detective had spoken of but had never found.

“I should have died in the camp with my mother,” she
said. “To see certain things, and then survive. This should not be.”

Graves felt the impulse to make a counterargument, sing the triumph of survival. But he saw his sister stagger across the floor, ragged, bloodied, dancing at Kessler’s command, her body jerking to the stomp of his dusty boot. And so a soft “I know” was all he said.

A
s Graves headed back toward his cottage, the lights of the mansion shining brightly behind him, he thought again of the last thing Greta Klein had said to him.
The truth about Riverwood
, her tone had been dark and secretive, the same his characters used when they described the outrages that made up Malverna’s grisly history. For a moment Graves imagined Kessler standing on its shrouded gallery, wreathed in swamp gas and Spanish moss, waiting for the black carriage to arrive, for Sykes to haul out their latest victim, trussed and gagged, a young woman, as Graves envisioned her, with tangled chestnut hair.

The lights of Eleanor’s cottage returned Graves to Riverwood. He could see Eleanor through the screen door, her body caught in the soft yellow glow of the floor lamp beside her chair. She was reading, and although he was reluctant to disturb her, the thought of going directly to his cottage disturbed him even more, as if some part of
his lifelong solitude had without warning begun to lose its cold appeal.

“Hello, Paul.” Eleanor did not seem surprised to see him coming up the stairs. She rose and swung open the screen to let him in. “I missed you at lunch. Dinner too.” Despite the lightness in tone, the question that followed was not altogether facetious. “Are you trying to starve yourself, Paul?”

Graves shook his head. “Busy. That’s all.”

Eleanor waved him inside the cottage, pointed to an empty chair, then chose one opposite. “Well, my work hasn’t been going very well.” She nodded toward the desk at the far end of the room. “I didn’t even turn it on.”

Graves glanced toward the desk. It was arrayed with what he assumed to be all the latest equipment. Computer. Monitor. Modem. Fax.

“Not exactly parchment and a quill pen anymore, is it?” she asked.

“I’m still pretty much at that stage,” Graves told her. “Just an old typewriter.”

“Did you get much work done today?”

“I learned a few things.” His mind returned to the last answer Greta Klein had given him. “But a lot is hidden. Family secrets.”

“That’s to be expected,” Eleanor said. “Remember that line from Tolstoy. ‘All families are unhappy. But each family is unhappy in its own way.’ In what way were the Davieses unhappy?”

Once again Graves found himself quite willing to reveal the few things he’d learned. “Well, there was trouble over Edward’s relationship with Mona Flagg.” He glanced toward the library, and in his mind saw a figure half hidden behind a bolt of canvas. “And it’s possible that Grossman—the man who found Faye’s body—had some sort of
relationship with Mrs. Davies. Or, at least, that was the rumor.”

Eleanor laughed. “Well, in my experience, rumor is the single most reliable source of information on earth.”

Graves smiled suddenly, reflexively, a release that struck him as very nearly wanton. He imagined Gwen seeing it, this smile he had no right to, her eyes locked in fierce rebuke.

“So, Mrs. Davies and Grossman might have been an item,” Eleanor said. “Anything else?”

“Grossman knew Faye slightly. He took a photograph of her. Near Manitou Cave.”

Eleanor’s eyes took on the probing intensity of Sheriff Sloane’s. “There’s more, isn’t there? About Grossman, I mean.” She watched Graves closely, silently, her questions stored where Slovak stored his, in a small chamber just behind his eyes.

“Only a feeling,” Graves answered. “That he was hiding something.”

“That’s one of your themes, isn’t it? The buried life. What Slovak endured as a boy. The way Sykes was snatched from a childhood he never speaks about. Only Kessler seems to have no secret past.”

“Kessler lives in the moment,” Graves said dully, with no wish to discuss it.

“That’s a quote, you know,” Eleanor said. “From your second novel. The one I’m reading now. Half a quote, actually.” She gave the full one. “
‘Kessler lives in the moment. And in each moment summons hell.’”

Graves recalled the line. It struck him as pretentious. Stilted and melodramatic. The line of a callow young writer. He remembered how it had come to him, the way he’d glanced out the window of his apartment and seen a spiral of red neon flashing in the darkness, beating off the seconds in a hellish glow.

Eleanor studied him intently. “Have you ever wondered why you write about murder?”

Graves saw Kessler untie his sister from the table, pull her backward by the hair, throw her to the floor. He felt his body struggle against the ropes that bound him to the chair, heard his voice cry out,
Leave her alone!
“No,” he answered now, a lie he’d repeated so often, it came to him as naturally as truth.