Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

He could feel Eleanor’s eyes on him. “You hate them very much,” she said. “Kessler and Sykes.”

Graves saw the black car grow small in the distance, finally vanish behind its tail of yellow dust. Revenge really was the only thing that could give him any peace, he thought. To take the life of the one who’d killed his sister. He saw the old sheriff facing him again, heard his insistent questions, remembered the silences that had followed them.

Who was he, Paul?

Silence.

Who came to your house and killed your sister?

Silence.

There were two of them, weren’t there?

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, 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.

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 bumper 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.

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, the response a vicious command, Slap that bitch! 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…

“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. 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. For it was true, he 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.

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.

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

Nor the man.

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 grass. 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.