Instruments of Night (9 page)

The next morning Saunders arrived at Graves’ apartment right on time. He was dressed more formally than before, white shirt, dark blue jacket, gray tie, but his manner remained no less casual.

“You look beat,” he commented as he placed Graves’ suitcase and typewriter in the trunk of the Volvo.

“I didn’t sleep much,” Graves told him.

Saunders opened the rear door and waited for Graves to get in. “Well, you can take a nap on the way to Riverwood if you want. I’ll turn on the air-conditioning, a little music. You’ll sleep like a baby, believe me.”

But Graves had not been able to nap, and so, after they’d been on the road awhile, Saunders glanced back toward him and laughed. “We made bets, you know. The staff, I mean. On whether you’d come back. Most of us figured you wouldn’t.”

Mention of the staff at Riverwood gave Graves a way of beginning his work.

“The people who work at Riverwood now,” he said. “Were any of them there the summer Faye Harrison was murdered?”

“Only Greta Klein,” Saunders answered. “She was one of the housekeepers then.”

Graves took the small notebook he’d purchased in a drugstore the day before, flipped back its cover, and wrote her name.

“Greta came to Riverwood right after the war,” Saunders added. “From Germany. Just sixteen and pretty as a picture.”

Graves saw a young girl with bright blue eyes and blond hair she’d painstakingly braided, two thick braids hanging neatly down the back of her carefully pressed blouse. She held a bulky suitcase in her hand, and in his mind Graves envisioned her standing on the steps of the main house, ringing the bell, waiting apprehensively for the door to open.

“She’d been through a lot, Greta had,” Saunders went on. “She was a refugee.” His eyes swept over to Graves. “She’d been in one of the camps, you know.”

Graves’ imagination immediately revised the story. Now Greta was dark, her hair straight and raven black. The white blouse was gone, along with the shiny black shoes. Instead, she was dressed in the tattered makeshift clothes of a Jewish refugee.

“I remember the day she arrived.” Saunders spoke so freely, with so little need of prompting, Graves felt sure he’d been instructed to do just that. “The whole family met her at the door. I took her upstairs and showed her the room we’d gotten ready for her.”

Graves saw a youthful Frank Saunders take Greta’s suitcase and guide the girl up the long flight of stairs that led to her tiny room, Warren Davies watching them from the foyer, the rest of his family gathered around him, all staring silently at the strange young creature who’d just come into their midst.

“Do you know how she happened to come to Riverwood?” Graves asked.

The question appeared to derail the progress of Saunders narrative, add a curve to the road. “No, not really,” he replied. “I guess she had some sort of connection to Mr. Davies. She had a picture of him. I remember that. She kept it in her room. On a little table by her bed.”

Graves instantly envisioned the photograph, Mr. Davies in an elegantly tailored suit.

“It was the only picture she had,” Saunders went on. “All her other pictures were destroyed, Greta told me. Gone up in smoke, she said. Like her mother, I guess. In the camp.”

In his mind Graves saw Greta’s mother huddled before a brick wall, naked, shivering. A Polish snow fell all around her, blanketing the burial pits. A river ran sluggishly in the background, its surface coated with a film of gray ash.

“Anyway, Greta was all alone in the world. I felt sorry for her. We all did. She tried hard to be accepted. She wanted to be the family favorite, you might say. But it never worked. That place was already taken.”

“By whom?”

“Faye Harrison,” Saunders replied. “Everybody loved Faye.”

The unexpected mention of Faye Harrison in connection with Greta Klein instantly generated a story in Graves’ mind. He envisioned Greta as she began to fashion a new life for herself at Riverwood. Alone, her family dead, he saw Greta as she made her first halting efforts to be accepted at Riverwood, cautiously approaching each member of the Davies family, but particularly Allison, a girl her own age and in whom she hoped to find not just a friend, but perhaps a sister. For a while it had seemed possible, and as he continued to imagine it, Graves saw the
two girls together, Greta speaking haltingly in her heavily accented English, Allison listening quietly, the vastly privileged life of the one embracing the unspeakably tragic life of the other, their friendship steadily growing deeper and more intimate as the weeks passed, Allison now moving toward the idea that Greta should not live at Riverwood as a servant, but as a full-fledged member of the Davies family, the sister she had always wanted and never had.

And so it might have happened, Graves thought, had another girl not suddenly emerged from the shadows. Not a servant, but the daughter of a servant, a beautiful girl with shimmering blond hair, who spoke without an accent, an all-American girl who had never felt history roll over her like a cold black wave. Given her own terrible background, the depth of her need, how could Greta Klein not have hated Faye Harrison? How could she not have wanted her dead?

To these questions regarding Greta Klein, Graves now added a third. Where had Greta been on the afternoon of August 27, 1946, when Faye Harrison was murdered? The very question threw up the single, chilling image of a dark, lonely teenager lurking in the forest’s depths, waiting silently as a girl came toward her, blue-eyed, with long blond hair and skin so luminous, it seemed almost to brighten the shadowy interior of the cave where Greta Klein crouched.

“You’ll be the first one at Riverwood,” Saunders said as the two of them sped along the New York State Thruway a few minutes later. “The other guest for the summer won’t arrive until this evening.”

Graves recalled the many empty cottages he’d noticed on his first visit to Riverwood. “There’s only one other guest?”

“There’re usually more. But Miss Davies wanted to keep things kinda quiet at Riverwood this summer. So it’ll only be you and the other guest. Eleanor Stern. Ever heard of her?”

Graves shook his head.

“Well, there’ll be a dinner in the main house tonight,” Saunders said. “You can meet her then.”

Saunders said little else during the rest of the trip, and so Graves took the time to think silently about the task before him. He glanced down at his notebook, at the single name he’d written there.
Greta Klein.
He knew that before the summer ended a great many more names would be added to it, a gallery of suspects, and that if he were successful, one of them would finally emerge from the rest, have both the motive and the means to kill a teenage girl.

“Miss Davies asked me to bring you directly to the main house.” Saunders brought the car to a halt before the long flight of stairs that led to the main house. “I’ll take your things to the cottage.”

“Thank you,” Graves told him, then headed up the stairs. A woman in a black dress with a wide white collar opened the door when he rang the bell.

“Ah, you must be Mr. Graves.” She spoke in a friendly, welcoming tone. “Miss Davies said for me to tell you that she’d be down shortly.” With that, she escorted him to a set of double doors and opened them. “You can wait in here.”

Graves stepped into a wood-paneled room with high windows through which shafts of sunlight fell over a parquet floor dotted here and there with Oriental carpets. Rows of bookshelves stood along the wall to his right, a vast array of books arranged behind tall glass doors. There
were leather-bound editions of Dickens and Trollope, but as he strolled down the line of shelves, Graves saw no books dated further back than the nineteenth century. Instead, there was a large collection of more modern works. First editions, Graves assumed, of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, all in their original dust jackets, protected by plastic covers.

“My father’s passion.”

Allison Davies stood at the entrance of the room. She wore a loose-fitting white dress; her silver hair was tucked neatly beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat. In that pose she looked like an old movie star, composed, impeccable. An unmistakable elegance clung to her.

“American first editions mostly,” she added, closing the door behind her. “He was a businessman, as you may know. My father. Too busy to read as much as he wished. But he loved to collect books.” She came forward gracefully. “I wanted to show you the room where I’ve kept everything that pertains to Faye’s murder. You’ll have a key to it. No one else will. You can use the room as your private study. Our other guest will use the library.” She added nothing else, but turned abruptly and led Graves to a door at the back of the room, where he waited until she’d unlocked it.

“I think you’ll find it a good place to work,” she said as she waved him into the adjoining room. “Very private. A good place to think.”

The room was adequate but not at all grand, the sort of space a powerful person might assign to a private secretary. It was furnished with a desk, reading lamp, bookshelves, mostly empty, and a small file cabinet, which, as Miss Davies quickly demonstrated by pulling out its top drawer, was nearly full of neatly arranged files and folders.

“Everything having to do with Faye’s murder is in this drawer,” she told him. “All the original reports are here,
the police investigation, everything that could be located, even the newspaper clippings from the time. I’ve also instructed Saunders to be available for interviews. Saunders can tell you a great deal about Riverwood. He’s sort of our unofficial historian.”

Graves decided to mention the only name he’d come upon so far, look for a response as he knew Slovak would. “Saunders mentioned a young girl who came to Riverwood just after the war. Greta Klein. She was here the summer of the murder.”

“She’s still here,” Miss Davies said. “Unfortunately, Greta hasn’t been in good health for the last several years. She stays in her room most of the time. I think Saunders is probably a considerably better source. He remembers everything. And as you’ve probably garnered, he doesn’t mind talking.”

A second name occurred to him. “What about Mrs. Harrison? Faye’s mother. Would she talk to me?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Miss Davies said. “But I suppose Mrs. Harrison might be helpful to you. She lives at a place called The Waves. It’s a home for elderly people just outside Britanny Falls. I can arrange for you to meet her, of course. As early as this afternoon, if you like.”

Graves nodded, his eyes drifting over the top of the desk, where a green blotter had been placed, along with a stack of notepads and a tray of fine-point pens. But it was something other than these that drew his attention—a small silver frame that held a photograph of Faye Harrison.

“Faye was only thirteen when I took this,” Miss Davies said as she picked up the photograph and handed it to him. “I thought you might glance up from your desk from time to time and see how lovely she was.” She smiled slightly. “It’s something Slovak does, isn’t it? He studies pictures of the victims, imagines the lives they might have had.”

This was true enough, but Graves knew that there was a
rather serious problem with the way Slovak imagined the abruptly shortened lives of Kessler’s victims. In Slovak’s mind, the unjustly dead would always have had good lives, happy, fulfilled, brimming with achievement. Unlike real life, murder never saved them from something even worse.