Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

“Eleanor has a great mind for detail,” Graves explained. “She came up with an idea about Faye’s death. How someone from Riverwood might have had the opportunity to murder her.”

The blades closed slowly. “Someone from Riverwood? Opportunity? Is that why you want to see my brother?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Are you telling me that you think that there was an opportunity for Edward to have murdered Faye?”

“Edward and Mona,” Eleanor replied. “Together.”

Such a possibility seemed never to have occurred to Miss Davies, but at the same time, she did not appear inclined to dismiss it. She touched one of the drooping irises, toyed with its limp petals. “So now you’re looking for a reason for them to have done it? That’s why you want to talk with Edward?”

“Yes.”

“But do you seriously believe he’s just going to blurt it out? ‘I murdered Faye Harrison. And here’s the reason why.’” She stared at Graves.

“No, but I might find out enough to come up with a story.”

Miss Davies suddenly became more accommodating. “A story, yes. I keep forgetting that we’re only talking about a story. You’re right. You should talk to him.” She began pruning the irises again, cupping their dying spines in quick, oddly brutal strokes. “Edward lives in a little town called Winthrop. It’s on Route Twelve. About an hour’s drive from here. His address is 1400 Carson Lane.”

Graves turned to leave, but Eleanor remained in place. “You hate Edward, don’t you?” she asked.

Miss Davies continued to snip at the flowers, reducing them to headless brown sticks, a carpet of severed blooms gathering at her feet. “He killed my father. By what he did.” The shears came to a halt. Her eyes shot over to them. “My brother was a thief.”

“It’s strange how different Riverwood is from the way it appears,” Eleanor said a few minutes later. They were in Eleanor’s car, she at the wheel as they drove through a gentle landscape of farms, the deep green of the rural countryside. “Corrupt, like Malverna in your books, where Kessler was born. The way it looks when Slovak finally visits it.” She seemed to envision Malverna in its eternal ruin. “So rotted. With vines coiling up the central banister and Spanish moss hanging from the chandeliers. All of it so…”

Graves recalled Grossman’s word. “Tainted.”

“Yes,” Eleanor agreed. “But not just by one act. Something one person did. But overall. Generally. A tainted atmosphere. Only alive. The way Malverna seems alive. So that you can feel it. You know, tingling. Fibrous. Like something woven into the scheme of things.”

“You sound like Slovak,” Graves said.

She glanced toward him. “Yes, I suppose I do a little.” She smiled. “His language is a bit… florid, Paul,” she added cautiously, clearly reluctant to offer any more trenchant criticism of his work.

“Yes, I know,” Graves said. “I’d like to pare it down. I don’t know why I can’t.”

Her answer struck him as achingly on target. “Because writing is your only passion. So you can’t help pouring everything into it.”

Watching her, Graves considered how much he’d given up in his isolation, the fuller and more passionate life he’d turned from in his guilt. No wife. No children. Nothing to look forward to. Save the rope and the metal bar. But even now he felt it the only life he deserved, the one way he could continue to live, and yet be dead, buried with the sister he’d knowingly led Kessler to, all that had been done to her after that.

“Is he based on anyone?” Eleanor asked, her eyes now fixed on the road. “Slovak, I mean.”

“No,” Graves lied, remembering how Sheriff Sloane had made the long, dusty drive to Mrs. Flexner’s house, trudging wearily up the creaky wooden stairs, always bent upon talking to “the boy” just one more time.

“What about Kessler?” Eleanor asked. “Is he based on anybody you ever knew or heard of?”

“No.”

“And Sykes?”

Graves shook his head. “Imagined” was all he said.

The house on Carson Lane was decidedly a far cry from the grandeur of Riverwood. Here there was no broad circular drive, no great columns or towering windows. Instead, a cement driveway led to a single-car garage. The house was modest and without charm, covered in beige aluminum siding, the roof of asbestos shingles. A rusting wheelbarrow rested beside the narrow walkway; the remains of a vegetable garden withered behind a sagging wire fence.

Eleanor grasped the small brass knocker on the front door and tapped twice. When there was no answer, she tapped again.

The door opened slowly to reveal a short, stocky woman in a nurse’s uniform.

“We’re looking for Edward Davies,” Graves said. He introduced himself and Eleanor, then added, “We’re working on a story. About Riverwood.”

The woman seemed not to recognize the name. “Well, come in,” she said in a thin, dry voice, indicating they should go into the adjoining room. “I’ll get Mr. Davies.”

They stepped into a tiny room whose drawn curtains cast everything in a murky light. The walls were bare except for a scattering of photographs. All were of Edward Davies, but only in his later years, none of his youth or early adulthood. It was a time in his life, it seemed to Graves, that Edward had either failed to record or wished to forget.

“No pictures of Riverwood,” he murmured as he moved along the wall, glancing at the photographs. “None of Allison or his parents.”

“Or of Mona Flagg,” Eleanor said.

“Mona was nothing to him,” Graves said assuredly. “A summer fling. Someone he used, then threw away.”

Eleanor looked at him oddly. “Why do you say that? You don’t know what he felt for Mona Flagg. So why do you assume she was just someone he ‘used and threw away’? Why is the woman always the victim in your mind, Paul?” She raised her hand to stop him from replying. “What if Edward were the victim? Led on by Mona. Forced to do things he wouldn’t have done if she hadn’t made him do them.”

Her version of the story was no less likely than his own, but still, he could hardly imagine it that way. Mona as the diabolical one, Edward her simpering tool. He knew where this distortion came from, the fact that it had been seared into his brain during the longest night of his life. Kessler and Sykes at their horrid work. Gwen the thing they worked upon.

“You always think of women as abused,” Eleanor said. “Mistreated. Led to their destruction by a man. It’s the same in your books. Kessler’s victims are always women. Like Maura in The Lost Child. The little boy’s sister.”

Graves saw Gwen’s hands drop from the rope, raw and bleeding, heard her final, desperate breath. Dead now. Dead at last. The man Graves had knowingly led to her standing beside the dangling body, bored now with the long night’s savagery, but searching still for one last outrage for Sykes to carry out, seizing it in a fiendish instant, barking his command, Gut her!

He felt it surge up, the vast, bloody gorge of his hidden past rise so powerfully, he felt sure he would release it. “Eleanor… I…”

She lifted her hand, again silencing him. “He’s coming.”

He glanced toward the corridor and saw a man emerge from its shadows, tall but bowed, his lustrous black hair now white and unruly. Edward Davies was large and unkempt, dressed in baggy brown pants and a white shirt that bore a faint yellow stain beneath the pocket. He eyed them suspiciously as he neared them.

“You wanted to see me,” he said gruffly, walking to a chair and easing himself into it. “Something about Riverwood. I don’t have anything to do with Riverwood.”

“It’s about Faye Harrison,” Graves began cautiously.