Instruments of Night (24 page)

“Just the opposite, in fact.” Eleanor shook her head. “Grossman talks about his ‘crimes’ and about ‘their deaths.’ Plural. He also says that it isn’t Mrs. Davies who’s tainted. If he were talking about his having murdered Faye, why would he need to assure Mrs. Davies that she isn’t tainted?” She thought a moment. “It seems pretty obvious that Grossman wants to confess to something, but I don’t think it’s Faye’s murder. In a way, whatever it is seems even more terrible than that. His ‘crimes,’ I mean. Worse than murder. Perhaps it was something so horrible, he preferred to kill himself rather than reveal it.”

Suddenly Graves saw his sister’s eyes lift toward him, black and swollen, pleading silently, Kessler’s response a brutal yelp,
Shut her up!
He could still hear the sound of Sykes’ hand as it struck Gwen’s face.

“We never know what people are capable of,” he said.

Eleanor peered at him apprehensively, as if she’d seen a face beneath Graves’ face, the ghostly boy he’d once been. He could feel dark questions brimming in her mind, about to pour out. To stop the flood, he said, “I need your help, Eleanor.” Before she could give a deeper meaning to what he’d said, he added, “With the investigation.” He nodded toward the papers on his desk. “It wouldn’t take you long to look over what I’ve already read. You can stop when you get to the end of Portman’s talk with Grossman. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. We can read the rest of it together.”

She took her seat behind the desk and began reading, flipping the pages at amazing speed, her eyes intent, searching.

Within an hour she was done. Then they read together.

They came first to Jake Mosley’s autopsy report. Eleanor was the one to voice the inescapable conclusion to which it led. “Jake Mosley didn’t kill Faye.” She pointed to the final line of the autopsy:
Cause of death: Congestive heart failure.

Graves recalled the description Saunders had given of Mosley that summer, the slack work habits he’d observed. “Mosley was always complaining about being tired.”

“He would have been tired.” Eleanor’s eyes were still fixed on the report. “Almost all the time, I imagine. His heart was failing. He’d never have been able to walk to Manitou Cave, then back to Riverwood.” She turned the page, now moving on to the second series of interviews Portman had conducted at Riverwood. He’d begun with Allison Davies.

Graves imagined the slanted light that must have filtered in through the porch screens as the old detective had questioned Allison Davies that afternoon. He saw Portman slumped in the chair opposite her, his thick fingers wrapped around the stubby yellow pencil Slovak used, Slovak’s tattered notebook laid fiat across Portman’s wide lap. Portman would have watched Allison with the same penetrating gaze that came into Slovak’s eyes when he suspected something hidden but did not know precisely what it was.

But there were other sensations that went beyond those Graves now imagined, things added without his willing them—the pleasure he took in working with Eleanor, the desire he felt to extend his time with her, the way he seemed increasingly drawn toward an intimacy he had all his life denied himself.

“He wants to trust her,” Eleanor said suddenly.

For an instant Graves thought that Eleanor had read his mind.

“Portman wants to trust Allison.” She turned to face him. “But he can’t.”

Graves nodded, both relieved that she had been speaking of Portman and Allison and surprised that she’d been able to intuit so much from the notes, pick up the vague nuances that only a highly charged imagination could draw from the abbreviated formality of Portman’s report.

“You can tell he doesn’t trust her. It’s right here, listen.” Eleanor turned back to the notes. “
‘Asked AD about her friendship with FH. AD stated that they had known each other since childhood. Also stated that recently she had not had much “commerce” with FH.’
Portman puts ‘commerce’ in quotation marks.” She pointed to the word on the page. “Because he finds the word odd, don’t you think? Too formal. Inappropriate for describing a meeting between
close friends.” She turned back to the notes and began to read again.

“He senses something, Paul,” Eleanor said after a moment. “Something wrong or out of place. That’s why he’s so detailed in his questioning. That’s why he made Allison go through all the details—where she was and what she was doing that morning.”

Graves could see Portman and Allison as they faced each other, the sweep of Riverwood, wide and grand, but closing in somehow, tightening life a noose.

From there Portman had gone on to more detailed questions, concentrating on exactly how Allison had spent the rest of the day. She had never left the grounds of Riverwood, she told him. She had spent some time on the side porch and lounged on the front steps. At around four she’d gone out to the gazebo, where she’d finally finished her book.

“He seems to believe her,” Graves said as he neared the end of the notes.

Eleanor turned to the last page. “But look at this. He’s constructed a complete timetable from the moment Allison saw Faye at the door until her death.”

The outcome of Portman’s investigation, a complete chronology of Allison Davies’ whereabouts on August 27, 1946, had been neatly recorded in Portman’s characteristic shorthand:

Eleanor’s eyes drifted down the list. “Allison was seen all over the place.” She turned to the next interview. Edward Davies and Mona Flagg. Portman’s notes failed to add to what he’d previously been told as to where the pair had been at the time of Faye’s death. However, Portman had subsequently conducted a wide-ranging investigation into Edward’s and Mona’s activities on August 27. Marcus Crowe of Britanny Falls told Portman that he’d seen “the Riverwood boat” on the Hudson at approximately 8:30 on the morning of Faye’s disappearance. The boat had cruised along the northern bank of the Hudson, two people inside, one a young man whom Crowe assumed to be Edward Davies, the other a woman he described only as “a girl with an umbrella.” They had been seated close together, Crowe told Portman, the man at the keel, the woman “nestled up” beside him.

An hour later Doug Masterman had sailed past Granger Point and seen “a man and a woman picnicking onshore.” The man had waved casually to Masterman as he drifted by, then said something to the woman, who faced him from the opposite end of a plaid picnic blanket, her back pressed up against a tree at the edge of the riverbank. Masterman identified the man who’d waved to him as Edward
Davies, but had been unable to identify the woman, since she’d been facing away from him. She’d worn a red polka-dot dress, however, the same clothing Mona Flagg had been wearing when she and Edward Davies had sailed from Riverwood that same morning.

To these two witnesses Portman added a third, a woman named Marge Kelly who lived on the northern bank of the Hudson. At approximately two in the afternoon she’d gone out to feed the few chickens she kept in a coop near the river. From there she’d seen a sailboat drift by, a young man standing up in back, a woman seated at his feet. The woman had turned and waved to her. She’d been dressed in a red polka-dot dress, Kelly told Portman. Later, when shown a photograph, she had identified the woman in the boat as Mona Flagg.

Later Edward and Mona had helped a fisherman untangle his lines. The fisherman had positively identified both of them, and put the time of the encounter at 4:30 in the afternoon.

“So Portman found confirmation for Edward and Mona’s story,” Eleanor said. “Which eliminates both of them. They were seen too often and at too many different places for them to have had anything to do with Faye’s murder.”

With that, they turned to the next file, this one dealing with Mrs. Davies and Andre Grossman, and in which various members of the household staff readily corroborated in every detail exactly what they had previously told Portman.

“So he eliminated Grossman and Mrs. Davies too,” Eleanor said when she’d finished reading Portman’s notes. “It’s becoming a locked-room mystery, Paul. Someone has been killed, but no one could have done it.” She sighed in exasperation.

Graves saw a man moving out of the tangled underbrush,
Faye turning in her blue dress to see him standing there, a figure draped in a black leather coat. “It had to have been a stranger,” he said. “Everything points to that conclusion.”

Eleanor shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “There’re still a few more notes.”

They went through the last of them, stopping from time to time to discuss one aspect or another, but always arriving at the same conclusion, the inescapable fact that Portman had done a thorough job, all that could have been expected of him. The detective had meticulously checked out the stories of each of the household servants of Riverwood, each of its summer residents, every member of the Davies family.

Save one.

“Warren Davies,” Eleanor said quietly as she closed the Murder Book. “Portman never made any attempt to follow up on what Warren Davies told him.” She gazed at Graves intently. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Graves admitted. Nor did it seem to him that there was any way of finding out. There were no more answers in the Murder Book, he knew, nothing that could be gathered from it and turned into a story. He’d found a few facts. But not enough. And to those facts he’d added little. Slovak would have added more, of course. Slovak would have been able to imagine how and why Faye had been strangled. By sheer intuition he would have brought a world of disparate impressions into clear and terrible focus.

But Slovak’s were only fictional powers, Graves knew. Faye, on the other hand, had died in a real world. And so, even as he’d continued to study the final phase of Portman’s investigation, Graves had begun to suspect that he was approaching two dead ends at once. With Slovak locked in an imaginary world, and Portman’s investigation
getting nowhere in a real one, what place was there for Graves’ own work to go?

Eleanor clearly saw his building anxiety. “Let’s get some air,” she said.

They walked out of the cramped office and into the spaciousness of Warren Davies’ library.

“I think it’s fine to do what Kessler does,” Eleanor said, returning to a point she’d made earlier. “After he’s murdered someone, he traces the route the person took to him. He assumes that a particular life always leads to a particular death.”

“But that may not be true,” Graves argued.

“But suppose in Faye’s case, it was true,” Eleanor replied emphatically. “If she wasn’t killed by a stranger, then there must have been a reason for her murder.”

“But how would you begin to find it?”

“The way Kessler does. He plots a life. For a time it moves in a straight line. Predictable. Then it makes an unexpected turn.” Her eyes darkened. “Toward him. Kessler. Toward death.”

Graves suddenly imagined his sister as she’d made her way down the dusty road, turning suddenly as the black car drew in upon her, slowed, then swept by, speeding up until it vanished beyond a dusty curve. How certain she must have been that it was gone forever.

“They always do something unexpected,” Eleanor said. “Kessler’s victims. Something happens. A horse crosses their path. A light blinds them for a moment. And because of it, they knock at the wrong door. Or glance in the wrong window. Or make a different turn.” She was staring at him intently. “What if Faye did that?”

They had reached the front door.

“Here, for example,” Eleanor said as she opened it. “On this little porch.”

“What do you mean?”

“Faye came to the front door that morning. She started to knock. That’s what we’d have expected her to do. But she didn’t. Why? What changed her mind?”

“She saw Allison,” Graves said.

“Yes, possibly,” Eleanor mused. “And if that’s true, it means that Faye hadn’t come to see Allison at all that morning. Seeing Allison changed things. Faye made a different turn because of it.”

They headed down the stairs, turned to the right, and walked around the eastern corner of the house. They could see the gazebo quite clearly, thick vines of red roses hanging heavily from its white trellises, the flower garden only a few yards beyond it, a brilliant field of yellow primrose and purple iris.

“Faye went from the door to the gazebo,” Eleanor said. “That was the turn she made. Then Warren Davies came out and talked to her.”

“So it was Davies she’d come to see?” Graves asked tentatively.

Eleanor seemed hardly to hear him. “They talked very briefly. Then Davies went back inside.” She thought a moment, her eyes fixed on the gazebo, the roses that hung from it, red petals and green leaves, like blood on grass.

“Then she made another unexpected turn,” Eleanor said. “She glanced up toward the second floor. Why? According to Portman’s notes there was nothing to see there. No one could have been in any of the windows. Because everyone at Riverwood was downstairs. So if something drew Faye’s attention to the second floor, it had to have been something other than a person.”

Graves looked at the line of windows that ran the entire length of the house. They were large, but in every other way ordinary. It was only the space between he noticed now. Identical wood carvings. Oval panels bordered by
sprigs of laurel, its branches intertwined like strands of rope, the face of a lion carved deeply on the panel.

“The crest of Riverwood,” Graves said.