Instruments of Night Part 6

Silence.

You know who they were, don't you? You saw them, I know you did. They tied you to a chair. They made you watch what they did to Gwen. I've seen the scratches on the chair, where you struggled to get free.

Silence.

But you couldn't get free. You saw it all, didn't you?

Silence.

If you don't tell me, Paul, those two men will never pay for what they did to your sister.

Silence.

Who were they, son? Tell me who they were.

He could still remember the image that had risen into his mind the moment Sheriff Sloane had asked his final question: two figures lurching through the front room of the old farmhouse, one tall, skinny, pointing here and there, hissing orders, Get this, get that Get this, get that, the other fixed in his eternal crouch, darting frantically on command, grabbing the tools that were required, a knife, a fork, a length of gray rope, a box of matches.

You saw it all, didn't you, Paul? Everything they did to Gwen. You were still here the next morning, weren't you? You saw them. You were still here the next morning, weren't you? You saw them.

He'd replayed that final moment, saw the black car back out of the driveway, dawn now breaking over the fields. It had had a drooping front b.u.mper and a choked, clattering engine, with worn tires and no hubcaps, an exhaust pipe hung so low it nearly dragged the ground. He had even remembered the license plate: Ohio 4273. Ohio 4273.

Graves suddenly saw Gwen on her shattered knees, staring upward, her hair wet and matted, glistening trails of blood pouring from her nose and the swollen corners of her mouth, pleading softly, Kill me Kill me, the response a vicious command, Slap that b.i.t.c.h! Slap that b.i.t.c.h! He could still hear the sound of the blow that struck his sister's face. He could still hear the sound of the blow that struck his sister's face.

And when he finally came back to himself, he saw that Eleanor watched him intently.

"Were you writing something just now?" There was a strange tension in her voice, something between curiosity and alarm, as if a faint siren had gone off in her mind, "In your head, I mean."

"No," Graves answered. "Just thinking."

He could tell that she knew better.

"Where was she murdered?" she asked.

For a moment Graves thought she meant Gwen, then, just in time, realized that she knew nothing of that, knew only of Faye Harrison. "In the cave where they found her, I suppose. It's in the woods around here. Manitou Cave."

"You'll probably have to go there at some point," Eleanor said. "To get a feel for the place. A feeling for what happened there." She smiled faintly. "Of course, you're probably not one of those people who believes that spirits linger after death, are you?"

"No," Graves answered. "I don't believe that anything lingers after death." He saw Gwen close her eyes, then the frantic movement beneath the lids as she waited, the broken murmur that rose from her, a thin whimpering that tortured him like a prayer, Oh, please, please, please .... Oh, please, please, please ....

"Except our memories of the dead," Graves said. He heard Kessler's voice, speaking a line from The Prey of Time: Terror is the deepest solitude we know. The Prey of Time: Terror is the deepest solitude we know. An evil smell pierced the air around him, the greasy sweetness of French fries washed down with cheap bourbon. An evil smell pierced the air around him, the greasy sweetness of French fries washed down with cheap bourbon.

It was an odor he wanted to rid himself of but knew he never could. For only revenge could bring him peace. And no matter what he did, Graves knew he could never entirely have it. For in all likelihood Ammon Vincent Kessler was still alive. He'd been young, after all, in his early twenties. He'd be a middle-aged man now, still young enough and strong enough to do to others what he'd done to Gwen. Each time Graves read about some young girl who'd been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, he knew it might be Kessler who'd done it, Kessler who was still roaming the remote country roads as night fell, searching for a lone light at the far end of a wide, deserted field.

It was at such a moment that Sheriff Sloane's question most pierced him, You can tell me who they were, can't you, Paul? You can tell me what they did to your sister. You can tell me who they were, can't you, Paul? You can tell me what they did to your sister. For it was true, he For it was true, he could could have told him everything that happened in the farmhouse that night, how Ammon Kessler had made up games to while away the hours until dawn, "things to do," as he'd laughingly called them, then sent Sykes to fetch the necessary tools. Again and again in his books, Graves had described their faces and their characters, Kessler's marked by sadism, Sykes', by cowardice, one pure evil, the other evil's pathetic minion. have told him everything that happened in the farmhouse that night, how Ammon Kessler had made up games to while away the hours until dawn, "things to do," as he'd laughingly called them, then sent Sykes to fetch the necessary tools. Again and again in his books, Graves had described their faces and their characters, Kessler's marked by sadism, Sykes', by cowardice, one pure evil, the other evil's pathetic minion.

But he'd done it safely. He'd hidden everything back in time. He'd revealed nothing in the present. For Kessler had been right, and even now Graves could recall his final words, the utterly confident smile on his lips as he'd said them to him, You won't say nothing, boy. You won't say nothing, boy.

He'd been right. Down all the years, Ammon Kessler had been right. The boy had never said anything.

Nor the man.

PART THREE

To see Nature truly, think of air as a spider's web.-Paul Graves, Forests of Night

CHAPTER 11.

Walking past Eleanor's unlighted cottage the next morning, Graves noticed that she'd left all her windows open, closed only the curtains of her bedroom. How could anyone feel so safe? Particularly a woman? It was women who were most often followed down deserted streets, stalked in empty parking lots, set upon when they were unaware.

Graves shook his head, drawing his eyes from Eleanor's open windows, but still considering how extraordinary it was that women could put aside the murderousness that surrounded them, even stroll through empty woods as Gwen had when she brought his lunch that final day. He turned away abruptly and headed toward the main house.

A glittering layer of dew lay upon the gra.s.s. A thin mist drifted over the water. Riverwood looked peaceful and serene, an earthly paradise. But it was a secluded heaven, Graves thought, exclusive and set apart, a world of members only. Had the men who'd worked on the second cottage, overwhelmed by Riverwood's wealth and power, felt themselves little more than serfs? Had they resented the grandeur that dwarfed them? A story took shape in his mind.

He saw a workman, shirtless, with tangled hair, braced on the unfinished roof of the cottage. It was not Jake Mosley, but Homer Garrett, the foreman who'd first implicated Mosley in Faye's murder, and whom Graves now imagined as a thin, wiry man with rodent eyes. Perhaps as Garrett had labored through that sweltering summer, his anger had continually built against the very people who'd hired him, the idle rich who played tennis or strolled the manicured paths. Graves imagined the steamy room to which Garrett returned each night, heard the squeaky springs on the iron bed upon which he lay, glaring resentfully at the cheap drapes, thinking of the golden-haired girl who sometimes crossed the broad lawn of the Davies mansion or dawdled near the boathouse, haughty, dismissive, hardly giving him a glance, one of "them" now, chosen to be a friend of the rich man's daughter, and thus suddenly lifted beyond the reach of a man like him.

As if it were a movie playing in his head, Graves now saw Faye Harrison halt abruptly on the forest trail, saw her eyes widen as Garrett stepped out of the surrounding brush to block her path.

A girl like you shouldn't be out in the woods all alone.Why not?Because you might run into something too big for you to handle.

It was at that moment Faye Harrison would have felt the first bite of fear, Graves knew. She would have glanced around or begun to back away just as he had shrunk away as Kessler drew in upon him. He could hear Garrett's question and Faye's reply, just as he'd heard Kessler's and his own.

Where you going?I was just ...Just what?

Graves could feel the utter isolation that had settled upon Faye as the seconds pa.s.sed, the sense that the world had suddenly emptied, that there was nothing and no one to stand between herself and the man who faced her. He heard the heightened fear creep into her voice even as she tried the one tactic she thought might warn him away: I was just going to meet Allison. At Indian Rock.She's right behind me.No, she's not. She's still back at Riverwood. It's just you and me out here.

At that point, as Graves knew all too well, Faye's aloneness would have suddenly deepened, her fear mushrooming into panic: What are you doing?You just do what I tell you.Get away from me.Up the lull.Get your hands off me.Up the hill, I said.

Graves could see them moving through the brush, Faye pushed roughly from behind, driven deeper and deeper into the surrounding trees until the cave finally loomed before her, a black maw gaping out of the surrounding green. By then she would have been fully aware of what was about to happen to her. Did she still hope that he might simply rise and walk away when he was done, leave her naked, soiled, unspeakably violated ... but alive?

Lay down.All right. Just please ... please.Hurry up.

She'd be frantic now, her body trembling. But at the same time a sense of unreality would have begun to settle in, the feeling that this was all a terrible dream, that Garrett was not really drawing the gray cord from his back pocket, coiling it around her throat, not really tightening it slowly, his eyes filling with the same obscene delight Kessler's had as he'd watched Gwen pull desperately at the rope, trying to tear it from her neck, her hands raw and blistered by the time she'd finally surrendered.

"Good morning, sir."

The voice had seemed to come from out of the thick, musty air inside the small farmhouse to which Graves' mind had unexpectedly swept him, but when he glanced around, he saw that it was Saunders standing in the doorway of the Davies mansion.

"Early to work, I see, Mr. Graves."

"Yes, early," Graves said. He started to move past him, then stopped and glanced back toward the second cottage. "How many people were at work on the cottage the day Faye Harrison disappeared?"

"Well, I worked on it most of that day," Saunders answered after a moment. "And there was Jake, of course, and Mr. Garrett. Homer Garrett. He was in charge of things."

"How old was Garrett?"

"I was just a boy, so he looked pretty old to me at the time. But looking back, I'd say he was probably in his fifties." He looked at Graves warily. "Is Mr. Garrett a suspect now?"

Graves gave the only possible answer. "Everybody is."

"Well, Mr. Garrett wasn't a murderer, I can tell you that." Saunders said it firmly. "He was a normal guy. A hard worker. That's why he disliked Jake so much. Because Jake was always slacking off. He was doing it the morning Faye disappeared. Eight-thirty, and he's already slumped down on one of the sawhorses, mooning off toward the woods." A thought struck him. "Well, not toward the woods. It was Faye he was staring at."

"Where was she when Jake was looking at her?"

"At the edge of the woods."

"Did you see Jake follow her into them?"

"No, not exactly. That morning Jake was claiming he was sick again, acting tired, out of breath, using any excuse he could find to slack off. Anyway, he just sat there on the sawhorse for a few seconds, then got up and headed toward the woods."

"Did Garrett ever go into the woods that day?"

"No, he didn't. Mr. Garrett and I worked the rest of the morning together. Jake came back around noon. Claimed he'd fainted or something. Then he started working too. We were still at it a few hours later when Mrs. Harrison came around looking for Faye. We told her that we'd seen her go into the woods." He turned and pointed out across the grounds to a narrow break in the forest. "That's where we saw Faye Harrison for the last time. Right there, at the woods' edge."

In his mind Graves saw a girl poised at the mouth of the trail, her blue dress glowing eerily out of the green, her face frozen in a ghostly desolation. But her hair was not blond and wavy as he knew Faye Harrison's had been, but a silky chestnut, her skin not flushed with pink like Faye's, but deeply tanned by a hot southern sun, so that he realized with a sudden chilling clarity that the girl he'd just imagined at the brink of the forest, the one who now turned slowly from him, yet beckoned him to follow, was not Faye Harrison at all, but his murdered sister, Gwen.

As Graves made his way to the library, he could still feel his nerves jerking like sharp hooks inside him. The sense of having seen his sister's ghost jarred him, shaking the mental balance he struggled to maintain. He needed to focus on something solid, concentrate on a single task. And so, once inside the office, he quickly took the newspaper file from the cabinet to which he had returned it the day before. He lay the file on top of his desk, but before opening it he glanced at the picture of Faye Harrison that Miss Davies had left for him, hoping, by some imaginative process, that it would do for him what similar photographs did for Slovak, urge him onward relentlessly, call up a vast devotion.

But the photograph yielded nothing. He could feel only how remote Faye Harrison remained, how little he'd learned about her. What, after all, had he gathered so far? Only the barest details. A few sc.r.a.ps of personality, along with a sketchy outline of her activities on August 27, 1946, the last day of her life.

And so, with no other direction open, he decided to concentrate on that day.

He'd learned that Faye had risen earlier than she'd needed to that morning, then set off for the main house. She'd gone to the front entrance, paused, then headed quickly back down the stairs and around to the back of the house. Thirty minutes later she'd strolled around the eastern side of the house, crossed the lawn, and gone into the woods. She'd gone up Mohonk Trail, crested the ridge at Indian Rock, and headed down the trail. At some point along the route to wherever she was headed, Faye had met her death.

By whose hand?

Graves leaned forward and peered more closely at the photograph, trying to view it as Slovak would. He needed to "read" it in the way an archaeologist might read a cave painting, working to unearth the buried life it portrayed.

In the picture Faye Harrison is standing before the towering granite boulder known as Indian Rock, her long blond hair falling over her shoulders. She is young and very beautiful, and Graves could only a.s.sume that her death might well have resulted from nothing more than the fact that some stranger had met her in the woods, then, in Sheriff Gerard's phrase, "botched" a rape; that is, turned it into a murder.

But what if Faye Harrison had died for some other reason? One generated by forces so distant and obscure that she had been unaware of them? He imagined her in the dirt, her murderer straddling her, the rope drawing in relentlessly around her throat. He saw her legs kick fiercely, throwing up bursts of moist soil and forest debris, her head jerking left and right as she struggled frantically to free herself. Even then, he thought, even in that instant of concentrated terror, had her mind posed the last question it would ever pose, fixed upon it desperately as if, by finding the answer, she might yet save her life: Why are you killing me? Why are you killing me?

Suddenly Graves saw Faye's life more fully. In a whirl of images, he imagined her a toddler, following her father as he went about his ch.o.r.es, then as a girl of eight, living alone with her widowed mother, doing small ch.o.r.es for Mr. Davies, and finally as a teenager, now approaching adulthood, no longer just a shadow on the estate, but a steadily more intimate partic.i.p.ant in its family life, "the favorite" not only of Allison, but all the Davies clan.

All? Was it really true that Faye had been cherished by each member of the Davies household? Could it be that at least one member of the Davies family did not welcome Faye's steadily deepening involvement with Riverwood? Was it possible that while Allison might have seen Faye as a friend, some other member of the family might have viewed her as an intruder? Perhaps even a threat? As she'd moved toward the door of the big house on that final morning of her life, could Faye have been considered both a welcome presence and a dreaded one, depending upon whose eyes watched her from behind parted curtains?

A stream of stories flowed from these conjectures, each member of the Davies family now lurking in the woods or crouched in the dank recesses of Manitou Cave. But complicated and fully detailed as these stories were, Graves recognized that they remained the glittering light show of his imagination. They were perfectly acceptable in a fictional world, but wholly useless in a real one.

The real world lay outside his mind, and to draw himself back into it, Graves opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and took out an envelope he'd noticed the day before, one marked simply HARRISON, MARY FAYE_____MISSING PERSON_____ CASE HARRISON, MARY FAYE_____MISSING PERSON_____ CASE # 24732. # 24732.

The original Missing Persons Report had been filled out by Sheriff Gerard on the evening of August 27, when Mrs. Harrison had called his office from Riverwood to report that her daughter had not returned home. The report dutifully detailed Faye's height and weight, the color of her eyes and hair, what she'd been wearing the morning of her disappearance. To such usual information Gerard had added a terse note, "When daughter did not return home, Mrs. Harrison looked for her at R., then searched surrounding woods. Saw no sign. Fears foul play." "When daughter did not return home, Mrs. Harrison looked for her at R., then searched surrounding woods. Saw no sign. Fears foul play."

The next morning Sheriff Gerard had made his way along the winding road that led to Riverwood. He'd spoken first with Homer Garrett. According to the sheriff's notes, Garrett told him that he'd seen Faye emerge from the eastern corner of the house at approximately 8:30. The girl had paused and stared out over the pond, he said, her hand lifted to her forehead and angled down, "like she was shielding her eyes from the sun."

But that was not all Homer Garrett had noticed that morning. The foreman had also seen Jake Mosley take the same trail into the woods minutes later. When Mosley returned three hours later, he'd appeared "out of breath," Garrett said, a detail Sheriff Gerard had recorded in his notes, and beside which he'd set a large black question mark.

Mosley did not deny that he had also gone into the woods a few minutes after Faye. He'd felt sick, he told the sheriff. He needed to sit for a time in the shade. He'd walked only a short distance up the trail, then grown so tired that he'd slumped down beside a tree and "pa.s.sed out." Three hours later he'd awakened and walked back to Riverwood. As for his being breathless upon his return, Jake replied only that there was "something wrong with me."

Frank Saunders, then a teenage boy, confirmed the time at which Faye had entered the woods, but added the detail that he'd also seen her earlier that morning. At 8:05 he'd been on his way to water the flower garden behind the main house, when he'd noticed Faye in the gazebo. He'd finished the job a few minutes later, then headed back toward the house. Faye had still been seated in the gazebo, Saunders said, but she'd no longer been alone. Warren Davies now sat next to her, the two all but hidden by the thick vines of red roses that clung to the white trellises of the gazebo.

Warren Davies readily confirmed that he'd met Faye in the gazebo the morning of her disappearance. Their conversation had been quite brief, Davies had told Sheriff Gerard, certainly no more than a few minutes. After that he'd returned to the house, though not before glancing back to find Faye still seated in the rich shadows of the gazebo. She was gazing up toward the second floor, Mr. Davies said, and appeared to be staring at one of its upper windows. As he turned to enter the house she "gave a little nod," he added, "like someone had signaled to her." Mr. Davies went on to say that the person to whom Faye had nodded was "probably my daughter, Allison."

But it could not have been Allison to whom Faye nodded that morning. Graves discovered this once he turned to the statement Allison made to Sheriff Gerard only minutes after his interview with her father. It could not have been Allison because Allison had been in the dining room at the time, reading a book she'd started the night before. She had seen her friend only once that morning, she went on to say, the same glimpse she'd years later described to Graves, though in the earlier interview she'd added that "Faye gave me a little wave before she turned and walked away."

Graves let his mind dwell upon that brief moment, as he knew Allison Davies must still dwell upon it, with that odd combination of irony and sorrow all people feel who have said a last good-bye without knowing it, watched a loved one wave, smile, offer a departing word as if it were merely one of thousands yet to come. He knew what Allison had done after that. She'd gone back to the dining room. Back to her book. Faye had returned to the gazebo, spoken briefly to Warren Davies, then glanced up and nodded to someone Mr. Davies a.s.sumed to be standing at one of the windows on the second floor.

In his mind Graves saw Faye's eyes lift upward, saw the small, slight movement of her head. It seemed to him that Mr. Davies might well have been right, that Faye had received a signal of some kind.

But from whom?

For the rest of the morning Graves tried to find out. He studied the notes Sheriff Gerard had compiled during the interviews he'd conducted on the morning after Faye's disappearance. As he read, he often stopped to envision a scene, looking for hidden themes, motives, sinister connections. One by one the denizens of Riverwood came before him-not only the Davieses themselves, but maids and cooks, handymen and retainers. But despite all the work Sheriff Gerard had done in his initial interviews, Graves could find little to feed his imagination. For although several people at Riverwood had seen Faye that morning of her death, only Jake Mosley had followed her into the wood.

Two days after Gerard's initial visit to Riverwood, Faye's body had been found in Manitou Cave. At that point, with the "missing person" found, the focus of the investigation shifted from Sheriff Gerard to Dennis Portman, from a man searching for a girl to one searching for her killer.

CHAPTER 12.

And so Graves knew it would be there. The Murder Book. The lead detective's account of a homicide investigation. He found Dennis Portman's Murder Book in the top drawer of the filing cabinet behind his desk.

The Murder Book consisted of a detailed record of Portman's activities, everything that had been done in the course of the State Trooper's investigation. There were usually photographs of the victim, of suspects, sometimes even witnesses, along with precise timetables of the detective's movements, the collection of evidence, everything from lab reports to interviews with witnesses, the time and place such interviews had occurred, and summaries of what each witness had said.

It was all gathered in a plain blue folder, remarkably neat and orderly. Almost too neat, Graves thought. Too orderly, so that he wondered if perhaps Detective Portman had expected it to be reviewed at some point in the future, his work reconsidered and evaluated, his long effort to discover what happened to Faye Harrison now pa.s.sed to other hands.

A newspaper article had been taped just inside the front cover. Its headline read DENNIS R. PORTMAN TO LEAD RIVERWOOD MURDER INVESTIGATION DENNIS R. PORTMAN TO LEAD RIVERWOOD MURDER INVESTIGATION. An accompanying photograph showed Portman as a big man, his bulky body draped in a transparent plastic rainslick almost identical to the one Graves had earlier imagined him wearing. Reality had added a gray felt hat, however, one Portman had tugged down over his brow, leaving his face in shadow.

For a moment Graves peered into that shadow. He tried to make something of the dark, unblinking eyes that peered back at him through the years, sunken, hooded, with puffy bags beneath and deep creases at the sides. The eyes seemed pressed into the great doughy ma.s.s of the face that surrounded them, a fat man's face, dissolute, with flabby jowls and a second chin that hung in an indulgent crescent beneath the first.

As he continued to look at the photograph, Graves could feel his imagination heating up, filling in the blank s.p.a.ces, creating an ident.i.ty for Dennis Portman. He began to feel the man's vast heaviness, hear his labored breathing as he'd mounted the stairs toward the main house at Riverwood or struggled up the steep forest trail that led to Indian Rock. How the heat of that long-ago summer must have afflicted him. How often he must have swabbed his neck and brow with the white handkerchief that protruded from the right front pocket of his rumpled flannel jacket. How longingly he must have stared out over the cool green water. Had he remembered the slenderness of his youth, the speed and grace that had once been his, the whole vanished world of his lost agility?

Graves drew his eyes from the photograph, making himself stop. He knew that he was perfectly capable of losing his focus for hours, wasting a whole afternoon dreaming up a shattered life for Dermis Portman, and thus forgetting that other shattered life, Faye Harrison's, that it had been the old detective's job to investigate.

Portman had placed his first interview at the front of the book. The subject was Jim Preston, the hiker who'd spotted Faye Harrison on Mohonk Trail the afternoon of her murder. Since Graves' reading had given him considerable experience with police argot, he found it easy to decipher the shorthand Portman used in his notes.