Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

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 passed, 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 scraps 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 assume 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?