Instruments of Night (23 page)

As to his whereabouts on the day of the murder, Grossman was emphatic:

Portman had already spoken to Mrs. Davies, of course. Knew well that she’d confirmed Grossman’s story. Graves felt it probable that Portman might also have suspected that the two were in league somehow, providing mutual alibis. But if that were true, the old detective’s notes did not suggest it. Instead, he seemed now to question the alibis of other people who’d been at Riverwood on the day of Faye’s death, abruptly shifting his inquiry toward them and away from Grossman, probing not whether Grossman himself had murdered Faye but whether he knew of someone else who had.

It was not an answer Portman accepted:

In his mind Graves now saw Portman scribble a note into the little green book Graves’ own imagination provided, the words written in it the same ones he now wrote on the pad beside his desk:
FS & FH seen “sometimes together” (Grossman).

Portman had his doubts:

With that, the interview had ended. The remainder of the page was blank save for a single observation scrawled at the bottom in Portman’s pinched script—
Grossman on run.
To which he’d appended a lingering question:
Why?

Graves had just returned Portman’s notes to the envelope in which the old detective had placed them fifty years earlier when Saunders knocked and came into the room.

“Miss Davies asked me to give you this,” he said.

Graves took the small enamel box from Saunders’ hand. Its top and sides were adorned with brightly colored scenes of rural life. The women wore ornately designed dresses, their heads wrapped tightly in knotted scarves. The men wore baggy trousers, black vests, and billowy white shirts, and stood, swinging long scythes through yellow fields of grain.

“Pretty, isn’t it? Miss Davies said that those letters you wanted to see are inside it.” Saunders turned to leave.

“Did you know that Andre Grossman mentioned you?” Graves asked. “To Detective Portman.”

“Mentioned me?” For the first time Saunders’ buoyancy deserted him. “What did he say?”

“That he saw you and Faye together quite often. I hadn’t realized that you and she were close.”

“We weren’t. But Grossman probably did see Faye and me together. We liked each other. We talked. But I wouldn’t say that we were close.”

“You told me that everybody loved Faye. Other people have said the same thing. But no one has told me why.”

“Faye didn’t think of herself first. Always others. What they needed. What would be good for them.” Saunders looked at Graves knowingly. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe that anyone can really put another person first.”

Graves heard Kessler’s icy whisper,
You knew she was here, but you took me to her anyway.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Graves,” Saunders continued. “It must be hard, living with so little confidence in other people. Anyway, Faye was just like I described her. Maybe that’s why she was taken, because God loved her too much to keep her here on this earth.”

Graves said nothing. Such sentiments had no power to move or interest him. More important, Saunders’ comments
seemed the product of a recent conversion, only a step away from some earlier darkness. “Did you always feel that way about Faye?”

“No. For a long time I was jealous of her. Because of the way I was treated. I was just a boy here on the estate. Someone who’d been taken in. Out of pity. Because I had no place else to go. But Faye was a part of the family. Part of Riverwood. I resented that. For years. Then I got hurt. An accident. Here at Riverwood. When I was fourteen. They brought me to the house. Gave me a room. Faye came every day. With a flower. That’s the way Faye was. And that’s why everyone loved her. Not just Allison and Mr. Davies. But everyone. Even me.”

“Someone didn’t love her,” Graves reminded him.

“Maybe someone just loved himself more than Faye,” Saunders said. “Maybe he was willing to sacrifice her for some other reason.”

“Like what?”

“Like lust. Despite this job you have, to find a different story, I still believe that Jake Mosley killed Faye. I believed that almost from the moment she was found.”

“Almost?”

“Well, for just a little while I thought it might be some local boy. Someone I didn’t know about. A secret love, you might say.”

“Why did you think Faye had a secret love?”

“Because she seemed to get more and more upset during the last few weeks of that summer. Troubled. I thought she was probably lovesick. Maybe had a boyfriend who’d dropped her. I even thought it might be more serious than that. That she was pregnant, maybe. That was the sort of thing that would get a young girl in the dumps in those days. But later I heard the autopsy showed she wasn’t.

“Who told you what the autopsy showed?”

“Detective Portman. I’d told him what I just told you. How Faye had been acting that last week, sort of like a pregnant girl might act. He told me she wasn’t pregnant. That’s all he ever said.” He nodded toward the ornate box Graves still held in his hands and released a short, self-mocking laugh. “Of course, you shouldn’t put much stock in any of my theories, Mr. Graves. There was even a time when I figured it was Grossman who did it.”

“Because he killed himself?”

“No, not because of that,” Saunders answered. “Because of the way I heard him talking to Faye once. Asking her things. Intimate things. ‘Do you have a male friend? Do you think you’ll get married someday? Have children?’ Those kinds of questions.”

“How did Faye react?”

“She said, sure, she planned to marry, have kids. She just brushed it off. But I could see she was bothered by his questions. Like she knew Grossman was trying to get at something. Something he wasn’t saying outright. Something … about Faye.”

But if Grossman’s suicide had had anything to do with Faye Harrison, the brief notes he’d written to Mrs. Davies only days before failed to reveal it. More than anything, they suggested that Grossman’s state of mind was exactly as Mrs. Davies had described it to her daughter—deeply, fatally depressed.

The first letter was dated September 6, and was written on the light blue stationery of the Edison Hotel.

The second letter was no less disturbed.

Graves read the letter a second time, then a third, trying to apply Slovak’s powers to its oblique references. Imagination. Intuition. A feeling for the heart of things. But for all his effort, Graves could see nothing beyond the numbing despair of the words themselves, the anguish and self-loathing.

In the third and final letter Grossman seemed even more distraught:

Tainted.

Graves imagined Grossman hunched over the stained writing desk in his room, staring at this final word, his eyes red-rimmed with sleeplessness. What had he meant by that? And if Mrs. Davies wasn’t tainted, then who was? Graves could find no way to answer the questions that rose
from the last word of Grossman’s letter. He knew only that shortly after writing it, Grossman had walked to the window of his room at the Edison Hotel, climbed out upon its narrow ledge, paused a moment, then stepped off the ledge, a burst of air exploding beneath him, slapping at his collar and fluttering in his sleeves as he plunged at speeds he must have thought impossible toward the dark heart of something he had done.

G
raves had just returned Grossman’s letters to the box, when he heard a tap at the door. “Come in.”

“Hi,” Eleanor said softly as she stepped inside the room. She was wearing khaki trousers and a white blouse. But despite the casual attire, Graves sensed a curious gravity building in her the way it built in Slovak, a slow, tortuous melding of the detective with the dreadful things he’d seen. He wondered if her nature was like Slovak’s too, her route through life always descending, joy never more than a flash of light in a steadily darkening chamber.

Her eyes fell upon the enameled box. “I think that’s a Kaminsky box,” she said as she picked it up. “I learned about them in an art history class when I was in college.” She turned it over slowly, taking in the details. “Pierre Kaminsky made them for Czar Nicholas a few years before the revolution. Only twelve. The czar gave them to a few people in his inner circle.”

“Mrs. Davies stored Andre Grossman’s letters in it. The ones he wrote after he left Riverwood.”

“Why did he leave?”

Graves saw Grossman make his way to the waiting car, lugging the battered brown traveling case he’d brought with him several months before, shoulders hunched, head bowed. “I think something drove him out,” he said. “Read the letters. Tell me what you think. Andre Grossman killed himself a few days after leaving Riverwood,” Graves added as she opened the first letter. “In New York City. He jumped from a window.”

Once she’d finished, Eleanor returned the letters to the box and handed it to Graves. “Tainted,” she said. “What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think anything in the letters has to do with Faye?”

“I don’t know that either,” Graves replied. “But Saunders once heard Grossman talking to Faye. He was asking her questions. About whether Faye intended to get married, to raise a family. It struck Saunders as a little strange. Of course, in the letters, there’s no mention of Faye at all. And certainly no suggestion that he murdered her.”