Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

Eleanor shook her head regretfully. “If he isn’t dead, he’s probably in his sixties now. God knows, in all that time, how many little girls he may have hurt. That’s why I want to find the one who killed Faye Harrison. Because it’ll be like finding him. The one I helped to get away.”

Graves saw the battered black car rattle down the narrow dirt road, saw the red swirl of dust curling behind it, Kessler’s long, freckled arm waving its taunting good-bye. “It may be too late,” he said softly.

“It probably is,” Eleanor agreed. “But we can try. Let’s do it, Paul. Go at it the way your character does.”

Graves thought she meant Slovak, the relentless devotion that drove him onward, against all odds.

“Kessler, I mean,” she said, reading his mind. “Remember what he writes to Slovak, There is no difference between destiny and doom. Kessler doesn’t believe that his victims fall to him randomly. For no reason. Just chance. They become his victims because they fit the scheme of things in his mind.”

“Do you think Faye did that?” Graves asked. “Fit some scheme in her killer’s mind?” He looked at her doubtfully. “From all I’ve been able to gather everyone loved Faye.”

“Perhaps what made her lovable also made her a victim,” Eleanor said.

“Is that where Slovak would begin?” Graves asked.

“No,” Eleanor answered firmly. “But it’s where Kessler would.”

Thomas H. Cook

Instruments of Night

The light was already on in his office as Graves made his way up to the main house the next morning. The previous evening Eleanor had seemed so determined to pursue Faye Harrison’s murderer that he’d half expected to find her sitting at his desk, files and photographs spread before her. An unmistakable sense of anticipation stirred as he opened the door. Followed immediately by a curious disappointment when he found Allison Davies there instead, seated imperiously behind his desk.

“Good morning, Mr. Graves,” she said as he stepped into the room. “I thought I’d check in to see how your work is going.” She rose and walked to the window, one hand fingering the sash that held the thick burgundy drapes in place. An odd gesture, Graves thought. Like someone toying with a key. Uncertain whether to open the door or lock it more securely.

“Have you found the material helpful?” she asked.

“I’ve only read the newspaper accounts and gone over the original missing person report,” Graves answered. He nodded toward the Murder Book that rested on top of his desk. “Now I’m looking through the lead detective’s notes. A man named Dennis Portman.”

“Mr. Portman, yes,” Miss Davies said thoughtfully. She seemed to have no interest in the Murder Book. “A large man, as I recall.”

“You told Portman that you’d seen Faye only once on the day she died.”

“Which is what I also told you,” Miss Davies said.

Her voice had suddenly grown tense, a change of tone Slovak often noticed in the sinister characters he interrogated. Graves wondered if Allison Davies had something in common with the denizens of that lost underworld, used physical alibis as they did, merely as a means of hiding crimes yet darker man the ones about which they were being questioned.

“Do you have some reason to doubt any of what I told Detective Portman?” she asked.

“No,” Graves answered, though he knew that his answer was not entirely true, his doubts deepened by what Eleanor had said the night before. “Everyone seems to have loved Faye,” he said now, hoping to glimpse something peculiar in Miss Davies’ response.

“Do you know of any reason why they wouldn’t have?”

Again Miss Davies’ response struck Graves as needlessly defensive, like someone dodging nonexistent blows.

“I just don’t know very much about her,” Graves answered.

“Faye was an angel.” Miss Davies’ tone remained curiously combative, as if she were now defending Faye. Despite the fact that no one had attacked her. “As you know, Faye worked for my father from the time she was eight until she was sixteen. He gave her treats each time she came to his office. But he also gave her a weekly salary.” She spoke rapidly, like someone rushing into the brink. “On one occasion Faye gave every dime of it away. To a boy in her school. Because he needed shoes.”

Graves said nothing. A response Miss Davies seemed to take as a challenge, or an expression of doubt. She leaped into the breach again. “When Frank Saunders broke his leg, she brought him a flower every day until he was on his feet again. That’s what Faye was like, Mr. Graves. That’s why everybody loved her.”

“Well, not everybody,” Graves reminded her.

“Precisely,” Miss Davies snapped. “Which brings me to the reason I came here this morning.” Her voice took on a sense of command. She the general in charge of the assault, Graves but the foot soldier brought up to take the hill. “Do you have a suspect yet?”

Graves offered the only one he had. “Andre Grossman.”

The name clearly struck an unpleasant chord in Miss Davies’ mind. “He was a very… unattractive person,” she said. “Not the sort we generally invited to Riverwood. Of course, he was more of an employee. Someone recommended him as a portraitist. He arrived, as you might imagine, sight unseen.”

“When did he arrive?”

“Around the middle of April, as I recall. And as you’ve probably learned, he left right after Faye’s murder.”

“Do you remember much about him?”

Miss Davies appeared to realize that the tables had been turned slightly, Graves now asking questions, she compelled to answer them. “Well, not really, no,” she said with some reluctance. “He claimed to be an artist, the curator of a museum. In Vienna, I believe. He spent most of his time with my mother. They were always in the library together.” She looked at Graves with a strange cautiousness. Like someone testing water in a pot, trying to determine how near it was to boiling. “So much so that a rumor began to circulate,” she added hesitantly. “About the two of them.”

“What kind of rumor?”

“That they were lovers. Or, at least, that they had some sort of special relationship. Not a word of it was true, but rumors have a life of their own. It was even suggested that I was the source of the rumor. That I’d seen the proof myself.”

Graves saw a young girl open the oak door of the library, expecting to find her mother seated by the window, Grossman behind an easel, but finding something else instead.

“Seen my mother and Mr. Grossman in what we used to call a ‘compromising position,’” Miss Davies continued. She scoffed at the absurdity of such a thought. “Well, I never came upon any such display. My mother would never have had anything of that nature to do with a person like Grossman. But the rumor persisted. They always do. No matter how baseless they might be. And so, in the end, my father was forced to confront the issue.”

“When was this?”

“A few weeks before Grossman left Riverwood. I know it was then because I’d just come back from a sail with Edward and Mona. They’d lingered in the boathouse, but I’d gone down the corridor toward the basement. That’s how I happened to hear my father and Grossman talking. They were in the storage room where my father kept his papers.”

Graves saw the two men facing each other in a yellow light, Allison inching toward them from the shadowy depths of the corridor, hearing their voices, faint at first, then growing louder as she drew closer.