Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

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.

“I sometimes think of what she lost,” Miss Davies added. “The future she would have had. I suppose one always does that. It’s part of the curse, don’t you think? This sense of what might have been.”

Graves glanced back down to the photograph. “In the pictures you sent me in New York, one of them is of Faye in front of a big rock. Was that Indian Rock, the place you thought of as a secret place?”

“Yes, it was,” Miss Davies answered. “We’d gone for a walk in the woods that day.” She drew the picture from Graves’ hand and stared at it. “Faye was quite wise. Beyond her years. She understood life better than anyone I’ve met since.” She returned the photograph to the desk, then looked at Graves pointedly. “There was nothing naive about Faye.”

Graves’ question came spontaneously, something thrown up by his own experience. “Then why would she have gone into the woods alone?”