Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

“No. She didn’t say much of anything. When the clothes were all pinned, she just walked back into the house.”

Graves saw Faye walk away from the clothesline, toward the little house, her blond hair lifted by a scented breeze. She halted suddenly, then turned to ask a question she had not really asked, Why do I have to die?

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Faye?” Graves asked.

A single hand rose shakily to Mrs. Harrison’s throat, replaying, as Graves imagined it, the strangulation of her only child. “No one would want to hurt my girl. I see her all the time. The way she was that morning. Just before she went into the house.”

Graves saw Faye as he thought Mrs. Harrison must see her, a young girl with a haunted face, caught in some dark web. He heard the screen door slap against its frame as she went into the house, a final glimmer of blond hair as she disappeared into its shadows.

“She left about an hour later,” Mrs. Harrison said. “I saw her walking toward the big house. Wearing that blue dress. The one Allison gave her for her fifteenth birthday. All dressed up, like she was going to a party. She looked like she was going to knock at the door. But she didn’t. She just turned and walked back down the stairs.” She turned toward the window, staring out in the slowly falling twilight. “Everyone loved my Faye.” She stiffened slightly, as if struck by an icy wave. “Why?” she blurted out angrily, a buried rage boiling up suddenly, as it sometimes did with Graves when he thought of Gwen, saw the rope snap taut, her feet lift from the floor, bare and bloody as they dangled over the wooden slats.

“I don’t want it all dragged up again,” Mrs. Harrison repeated savagely. “I told that to Portman too. Leave my girl in peace, I told him. But he wouldn’t do it.”

Graves saw the detective trudging wearily down the corridor toward Mrs. Harrison’s shadowed room, his shoulders slumped beneath the plastic raincoat, fat and wheezing, a wrinkled fist rapping softly at her closed door.

“He said Jake didn’t do it,” Mrs. Harrison said exhaustedly.

Graves leaned forward. “Why did he think that?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Harrison answered. “He never said.” She slumped back into her chair. “I see him sometimes. Standing at the end of my bed. Looking down at me. The one who killed Faye.”

Graves realized that Mrs. Harrison wasn’t speaking of any particular person, but of that form of evil that lies forever in wait, eternal and all-powerful, as malignantly skilled in small things as in great ones, the hand that expertly wields the blade and precisely guides the storm. Silently, he pronounced the name he had given it years before: Kessler.

“You imagine him,” Graves told the old woman softly.

Mrs. Harrison closed her eyes. They were still closed when Graves left the room.

Once back at his cottage, Graves took a shower, dressed, then walked out onto the screened porch just as a black Mazda swept by. He watched as the car moved along the edge of the pond, then came to a halt in front of the cottage Jake Mosley had been working on the summer of Faye Harrison’s murder.

A woman stepped out almost instantly. She wore a long navy blue dress with a burgundy shawl over her shoulders. She drew the shawl more tightly around her as she made her way toward the steps of the cottage. At the top she stopped and looked back. A breeze riffled her hair and lifted the edges of the shawl. She peered intently at the water, as if seeking to divine what lay just beneath its surface.

Watching her as she now turned back toward the cottage, Graves knew that years before, the sight of such a woman might have urged him from his isolation, kindled the normal fires of physical desire. But such yearning seemed well past him now. His own flesh felt as dead as the carcasses that hung in the chambers of Malverna, motionless and void, gutted by the same ripping blade.

Graves did not see the woman again until she arrived for dinner. She was dressed in a white linen skirt and short-sleeved khaki blouse, her feet in simple leather sandals. It was the fashionably casual attire suited for a remote artists’ colony, Graves supposed, quite different from his own style of dress, so uncompromisingly urban, the dark pants and shirt that tended to dissolve into any backdrop of brick or tinted glass, clothes that vaguely served as camouflage. There were gray wisps in her otherwise dark hair. Her eyes were dark too, and deeply sunken, the first hint of wrinkles in their corners allowing him to calculate her age at between thirty-five and forty.

But it was the way she moved toward him that Graves noticed most, a masculine, curiously athletic stride, as if she expected to find obstacles in her path and had already determined to surmount them.

He rose from his chair as she approached him. He could tell by the way she looked at him that she’d expected to recognize him but hadn’t.

“Eleanor Stern” was all she said.

“Paul Graves.”

Eleanor glanced at the table. The center leaf had been removed so that it was just large enough for the two of them. “From the way the table has been arranged, I suppose we’re expected to talk during dinner,” she said as she pulled out her chair.

She’d said it cheerfully, but with a hint of irritation, as if it were a trick someone had tried to play on her, a transparent attempt to make her more sociable than she was, to force her into a conversation she would have otherwise avoided.

From her tone, Graves guessed that she’d been subject to a great many such ruses, had seen through them all, perhaps even come to despise them. It was his first insight into her, that she was a social director’s nightmare.

She drew the napkin from the table and spread it across her lap. “I’m told it’ll be just the two of us. All summer.” She looked down at her plate, concentrating on the idyllic country scene that had been painted upon it, an English country house, men in scarlet sporting jackets, mounted on horses, the fox hunt about to commence. “We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to, of course,” she said, lifting her eyes toward him.

Graves realized that he was still standing, hastily pulled out his chair, and sat down. “I’m not here for the same reason you are,” he replied, suddenly determined to clear the air. “I’m not really a guest here.”

She stared at him without comment. He could make nothing of her gaze, nor in the least discern what she was thinking. All he noticed was that everything she looked at, she peeled back a little.

“I’m more of an employee.” He heard the diffidence in his voice. It was a tone he didn’t like and hadn’t intended. He worked to find another way to express the distinction he recognized between them. Nothing came, however, so that he simply unfolded his napkin.

“An employee.” Eleanor circled her fingers around the stem of a crystal water goblet to her right. “What’s the job?”

Since no other answer appeared possible, Graves replied, “I’ve been hired to solve a murder. Of a young girl. Or at least imagine what might have happened to her.”

Eleanor took a sip from the glass. “So, are you a policeman? Or a private detective, something like that?”

“No, I’m a writer. Mysteries. A series. Set back in time.”

She nodded and started to ask another question, but the same woman who’d directed Graves to the library earlier in the day suddenly entered the room. “Well now, I suppose you’d probably like a drink before dinner,” she said cheerily.

Graves shook his head.

Eleanor said, “A scotch, please,” then waited for the woman to leave before returning her attention to Graves. “I’ve never heard of a writer being hired to do something like that.”