Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

“So he eliminated Grossman and Mrs. Davies too,” Eleanor said when she’d finished reading Portman’s notes. “It’s becoming a locked-room mystery, Paul. Someone has been killed, but no one could have done it.” She sighed in exasperation.

Graves saw a man moving out of the tangled underbrush, Faye turning in her blue dress to see him standing there, a figure draped in a black leather coat. “It had to have been a stranger,” he said. “Everything points to that conclusion.”

Eleanor shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “There’re still a few more notes.”

They went through the last of them, stopping from time to time to discuss one aspect or another, but always arriving at the same conclusion, the inescapable fact that Portman had done a thorough job, all that could have been expected of him. The detective had meticulously checked out the stories of each of the household servants of Riverwood, each of its summer residents, every member of the Davies family.

Save one.

“Warren Davies,” Eleanor said quietly as she closed the Murder Book. “Portman never made any attempt to follow up on what Warren Davies told him.” She gazed at Graves intently. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Graves admitted. Nor did it seem to him that there was any way of finding out. There were no more answers in the Murder Book, he knew, nothing that could be gathered from it and turned into a story. He’d found a few facts. But not enough. And to those facts he’d added little. Slovak would have added more, of course. Slovak would have been able to imagine how and why Faye had been strangled. By sheer intuition he would have brought a world of disparate impressions into clear and terrible focus.

But Slovak’s were only fictional powers, Graves knew. Faye, on the other hand, had died in a real world. And so, even as he’d continued to study the final phase of Portman’s investigation, Graves had begun to suspect that he was approaching two dead ends at once. With Slovak locked in an imaginary world, and Portman’s investigation getting nowhere in a real one, what place was there for Graves’ own work to go?

Eleanor clearly saw his building anxiety. “Let’s get some air,” she said.

They walked out of the cramped office and into the spaciousness of Warren Davies’ library.

“I think it’s fine to do what Kessler does,” Eleanor said, returning to a point she’d made earlier. “After he’s murdered someone, he traces the route the person took to him. He assumes that a particular life always leads to a particular death.”

“But that may not be true,” Graves argued.

“But suppose in Faye’s case, it was true,” Eleanor replied emphatically. “If she wasn’t killed by a stranger, then there must have been a reason for her murder.”

“But how would you begin to find it?”

“The way Kessler does. He plots a life. For a time it moves in a straight line. Predictable. Then it makes an unexpected turn.” Her eyes darkened. “Toward him. Kessler. Toward death.”

Graves suddenly imagined his sister as she’d made her way down the dusty road, turning suddenly as the black car drew in upon her, slowed, then swept by, speeding up until it vanished beyond a dusty curve. How certain she must have been that it was gone forever.

“They always do something unexpected,” Eleanor said. “Kessler’s victims. Something happens. A horse crosses their path. A light blinds them for a moment. And because of it, they knock at the wrong door. Or glance in the wrong window. Or make a different turn.” She was staring at him intently. “What if Faye did that?”

They had reached the front door.

“Here, for example,” Eleanor said as she opened it. “On this little porch.”

“What do you mean?”

“Faye came to the front door that morning. She started to knock. That’s what we’d have expected her to do. But she didn’t. Why? What changed her mind?”

“She saw Allison,” Graves said.

“Yes, possibly,” Eleanor mused. “And if that’s true, it means that Faye hadn’t come to see Allison at all that morning. Seeing Allison changed things. Faye made a different turn because of it.”

They headed down the stairs, turned to the right, and walked around the eastern corner of the house. They could see the gazebo quite clearly, thick vines of red roses hanging heavily from its white trellises, the flower garden only a few yards beyond it, a brilliant field of yellow primrose and purple iris.

“Faye went from the door to the gazebo,” Eleanor said. “That was the turn she made. Then Warren Davies came out and talked to her.”

“So it was Davies she’d come to see?” Graves asked tentatively.

Eleanor seemed hardly to hear him. “They talked very briefly. Then Davies went back inside.” She thought a moment, her eyes fixed on the gazebo, the roses that hung from it, red petals and green leaves, like blood on grass.

“Then she made another unexpected turn,” Eleanor said. “She glanced up toward the second floor. Why? According to Portman’s notes there was nothing to see there. No one could have been in any of the windows. Because everyone at Riverwood was downstairs. So if something drew Faye’s attention to the second floor, it had to have been something other than a person.”

Graves looked at the line of windows that ran the entire length of the house. They were large, but in every other way ordinary. It was only the space between he noticed now. Identical wood carvings. Oval panels bordered by sprigs of laurel, its branches intertwined like strands of rope, the face of a lion carved deeply on the panel.

“The crest of Riverwood,” Graves said.

“Then Faye made yet another unexpected turn,” Eleanor said. “She went into the basement.”

A cool wave of air swept over them when they stepped inside the basement, dry, but strangely musty, as if some small creature had died and been left to rot, leaving nothing but a peculiar sweetness in the air.

Eleanor surveyed the area, moving slowly from the storage room in the far rear corner to the staircase at the center of the room, and finally to the corridor that led to the boathouse. “Why did Faye make that turn? Why did she come here? What was she looking for?” Her face grew highly concentrated, as if pondering some detail, trying to tease out its meaning or importance. After a moment she said, “I want to go to the cave now. To where Faye died.”

The path narrowed steadily as they headed up the slope, the forest thickening on either side, squeezing them together so that their shoulders sometimes touched.

They reached Indian Rock, then continued down the trail. The slope fell off at a steadily harsher angle until they finally reached the area around Manitou Cave. From there they could see the wide expanse of the river, boats drifting along its surface, white sails bright in the summer air.

It was a brightness that seemed to fade from the air as they neared the cave, the trees and brush thickening, only bits of dappled light on the forest floor. The cave’s mouth gaped before them like a stony, toothless mouth.

“Not a very good place for a young woman to die,” Eleanor murmured.

Graves saw the small living room where Gwen had been led for the final entertainment, the thick beams that stretched across it, a rope hanging from the one at the center, Gwen standing limply beneath it, her arms dangling at her sides as Kessler, whistling cheerily, handed Sykes the noose, then ordered him to string it around her neck.

Graves turned toward the cave, trained his eyes on its dark interior. He did not turn from it until Eleanor spoke.

“You know, Grossman would have been able to see Faye’s body from here,” she said. “Just as he said he did.”