Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

“No. For a long time I was jealous of her. Because of the way I was treated. I was just a boy here on the estate. Someone who’d been taken in. Out of pity. Because I had no place else to go. But Faye was a part of the family. Part of Riverwood. I resented that. For years. Then I got hurt. An accident. Here at Riverwood. When I was fourteen. They brought me to the house. Gave me a room. Faye came every day. With a flower. That’s the way Faye was. And that’s why everyone loved her. Not just Allison and Mr. Davies. But everyone. Even me.”

“Someone didn’t love her,” Graves reminded him.

“Maybe someone just loved himself more than Faye,” Saunders said. “Maybe he was willing to sacrifice her for some other reason.”

“Like what?”

“Like lust. Despite this job you have, to find a different story, I still believe that Jake Mosley killed Faye. I believed that almost from the moment she was found.”

“Almost?”

“Well, for just a little while I thought it might be some local boy. Someone I didn’t know about. A secret love, you might say.”

“Why did you think Faye had a secret love?”

“Because she seemed to get more and more upset during the last few weeks of that summer. Troubled. I thought she was probably lovesick. Maybe had a boyfriend who’d dropped her. I even thought it might be more serious than that. That she was pregnant, maybe. That was the sort of thing that would get a young girl in the dumps in those days. But later I heard the autopsy showed she wasn’t.

“Who told you what the autopsy showed?”

“Detective Portman. I’d told him what I just told you. How Faye had been acting that last week, sort of like a pregnant girl might act. He told me she wasn’t pregnant. That’s all he ever said.” He nodded toward the ornate box Graves still held in his hands and released a short, self-mocking laugh. “Of course, you shouldn’t put much stock in any of my theories, Mr. Graves. There was even a time when I figured it was Grossman who did it.”

“Because he killed himself?”

“No, not because of that,” Saunders answered. “Because of the way I heard him talking to Faye once. Asking her things. Intimate things. ‘Do you have a male friend? Do you think you’ll get married someday? Have children?’ Those kinds of questions.”

“How did Faye react?”

“She said, sure, she planned to marry, have kids. She just brushed it off. But I could see she was bothered by his questions. Like she knew Grossman was trying to get at something. Something he wasn’t saying outright. Something… about Faye.”

But if Grossman’s suicide had had anything to do with Faye Harrison, the brief notes he’d written to Mrs. Davies only days before failed to reveal it. More than anything, they suggested that Grossman’s state of mind was exactly as Mrs. Davies had described it to her daughter-deeply, fatally depressed.

The first letter was dated September 6, and was written on the light blue stationery of the Edison Hotel.

My dear Madame:

I am writing from my little room. Closed windows. Closed doors. Different from Riverwood. This is the only safety. To live as I once did. A prisoner. Life. Nothing else. Only life.

Andre Grossman

The second letter was no less disturbed.

My dear Madame:

I see things now. What must be done. To end this hatred of myself. What is done, is done. I see their faces. Young. So young. I would have told you of my crimes, but even in this, I was afraid.

Andre Grossman

Graves read the letter a second time, then a third, trying to apply Slovak’s powers to its oblique references. Imagination. Intuition. A feeling for the heart of things. But for all his effort, Graves could see nothing beyond the numbing despair of the words themselves, the anguish and self-loathing.

In the third and final letter Grossman seemed even more distraught:

My dear Mrs. Davies:

No more. They must be avenged. So much I cannot tell you. So cruel to say it. I have done enough. Terrible. To live by their suffering. Buy life with their deaths. I spare you the rest. What I did. I wish only that you live in peace. It is not you who is tainted.

Tainted.

Graves imagined Grossman hunched over the stained writing desk in his room, staring at this final word, his eyes red-rimmed with sleeplessness. What had he meant by that? And if Mrs. Davies wasn’t tainted, then who was? Graves could find no way to answer the questions that rose from the last word of Grossman’s letter. He knew only that shortly after writing it, Grossman had walked to the window of his room at the Edison Hotel, climbed out upon its narrow ledge, paused a moment, then stepped off the ledge, a burst of air exploding beneath him, slapping at his collar and fluttering in his sleeves as he plunged at speeds he must have thought impossible toward the dark heart of something he had done.

Graves had just returned Grossman’s letters to the box, when he heard a tap at the door. “Come in.”

“Hi,” Eleanor said softly as she stepped inside the room. She was wearing khaki trousers and a white blouse. But despite the casual attire, Graves sensed a curious gravity building in her the way it built in Slovak, a slow, tortuous melding of the detective with the dreadful things he’d seen. He wondered if her nature was like Slovak’s too, her route through life always descending, joy never more than a flash of light in a steadily darkening chamber.

Her eyes fell upon the enameled box. “I think that’s a Kaminsky box,” she said as she picked it up. “I learned about them in an art history class when I was in college.” She turned it over slowly, taking in the details. “Pierre Kaminsky made them for Czar Nicholas a few years before the revolution. Only twelve. The czar gave them to a few people in his inner circle.”

“Mrs. Davies stored Andre Grossman’s letters in it. The ones he wrote after he left Riverwood.”

“Why did he leave?”

Graves saw Grossman make his way to the waiting car, lugging the battered brown traveling case he’d brought with him several months before, shoulders hunched, head bowed. “I think something drove him out,” he said. “Read the letters. Tell me what you think. Andre Grossman killed himself a few days after leaving Riverwood,” Graves added as she opened the first letter. “In New York City. He jumped from a window.”

Once she’d finished, Eleanor returned the letters to the box and handed it to Graves. “Tainted,” she said. “What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think anything in the letters has to do with Faye?”

“I don’t know that either,” Graves replied. “But Saunders once heard Grossman talking to Faye. He was asking her questions. About whether Faye intended to get married, to raise a family. It struck Saunders as a little strange. Of course, in the letters, there’s no mention of Faye at all. And certainly no suggestion that he murdered her.”

“Just the opposite, in fact.” Eleanor shook her head. “Grossman talks about his ‘crimes’ and about ‘their deaths.’ Plural. He also says that it isn’t Mrs. Davies who’s tainted. If he were talking about his having murdered Faye, why would he need to assure Mrs. Davies that she isn’t tainted?” She thought a moment. “It seems pretty obvious that Grossman wants to confess to something, but I don’t think it’s Faye’s murder. In a way, whatever it is seems even more terrible than that. His ‘crimes,’ I mean. Worse than murder. Perhaps it was something so horrible, he preferred to kill himself rather than reveal it.”

Suddenly Graves saw his sister’s eyes lift toward him, black and swollen, pleading silently, Kessler’s response a brutal yelp, Shut her up! He could still hear the sound of Sykes’ hand as it struck Gwen’s face.