Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

“Crying?”

“Yes. Mona started to go over to her, but when Faye saw her, she turned away, like she was embarrassed to be seen like that. Broken up. So Mona left her alone. That’s the way Mona was. She always knew the right thing to do.” The love he’d felt for Mona Flagg sprang into his eyes. Enriched by loss, as it seemed to Graves, but also edged in anger. “Mona was the best person I ever knew. That’s why it so enraged me. What my father did.” An old trouble rose in him, flooding the banks of his long reserve. He needed no further coaxing in order to reveal it. “The morning Faye disappeared, my father came up to me. He had some papers in his hand. He shoved them at me. ‘Read this,’ he told me. It was a report. On Mona. Her whole family. A general rundown of what they’d done. It wasn’t pretty, I can tell you that.”

In his mind Graves saw Edward Davies as he must have appeared at that moment, young and very rich and hopelessly in love with Mona Flagg, but now convinced that his father would never permit him to marry a girl from the “lower orders.”

“‘They’re nothing but criminals,’ my father told me. ‘Every one of them. The whole family. Low-life. Do you think I’d ever let such people get near Riverwood?’ He jerked the papers out of my hand. ‘You have a week, Edward.’ That’s what he told me. A week to decide between Mona and Riverwood.” The burden of his dilemma seemed to fall upon him once again. “I told Mona all about it. She said she wasn’t like her family. She told me she’d broken off with them several years before. We were both pretty upset. I nearly tipped the boat a couple of times. When we got back, I couldn’t find the rope to tie the boat. Mona had trouble getting out. It was a terrible day.” He waited for a question, continued when none came. “But I’d made my decision. I was going to stay with Mona. If she hadn’t… Mona would have lived her whole life and never hurt a soul. That’s why it was so unfair. What my father did. Hiring that cop to check up on Mona and her family. Put what he found out in those papers my father shoved at me.” Again, his anger flared. “But even worse, the way that same cop showed up at Riverwood after Faye’s death. Asking Mona questions like he’d never heard of her before. Had never sneaked around gathering filth on her family.” His mouth jerked into a sneer. “That fat bastard.”

“Are you talking about Dennis Portman?” Graves asked.

“That fat cop, yes.” Davies’ eyes flashed with rage. “He was nothing but a flunky who did my father’s dirty work. I’d seen his name on the report he’d done about Mona and her family. So when he came to Riverwood after Faye died, I knew why he was there. It made me sick, the way he acted. Pretending to be so dedicated. Like he was just trying to find out what happened to Faye. Looking for the truth.” He gave a dry, derisive laugh. “Whatever Dennis Portman was doing he was doing for my father. So he could protect Riverwood. Bury anything that needed burying. Portman was no more than a servant. He was big and fat. But he was little. A little man. One of my father’s little men.”

“What if he’s right?” Eleanor asked as they headed back to Riverwood. Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “What if Portman’s whole investigation were a sham? What if he never intended to find out who killed Faye? What if his real job was to make sure no one ever did?” She glanced toward Graves, then returned her eyes to the road. “Is that what we’ve left out, Paul? The fact that Portman was Warren Davies’ private henchman?”

“We don’t have any reason to believe that. All we know is that he did some work for Mr. Davies.”

“We know more than that.”

“What?”

“Remember all the follow-up interviews Portman did? The way he checked out everyone’s story? Always trying to find out exactly where everyone was at the time of Faye’s murder. Everyone except Warren Davies, remember? As far as we can tell from his notes, Portman never even bothered to find out if Davies actually went to Britanny Falls that morning, actually met with that man, Brinker, the new mayor.”

Graves remembered the single reference Portman had made to Warren Davies’ having left Riverwood at noon on the day of Faye’s disappearance. Eleanor was right: there had been no follow-up.

“We’ve always assumed that Portman was trying to find the truth,” she continued. “But suppose he wasn’t doing that at all? Suppose he was afraid of Riverwood? Of its power to destroy him?”

Portman rose into Graves’ imagination, fat and stinking in the summer heat, venal, corrupt, the putrid and repellent creature his cowardice had made him.

“We’ve imagined him as Slovak,” Eleanor added, softly now, in a tone of dark concentration. “Suppose he was like Sykes instead?”

The sound came without warning, a hard rap. Graves twisted in bed, his imagination now hooked into the echo, altering it, so that it became a hammer, driving nails into wood, a lid slamming over him. He sat up, tangled in the sheets. The sound became a soft, insistent tapping.

He rose and glanced outside. Eleanor was standing on the porch.

He threw on his clothes and went to the door.

“Brinker is alive,” Eleanor said without preamble. “The man Mr. Davies went to meet in Britanny Falls the day Faye disappeared. I’ve talked to him.” A genuine excitement bubbled in her voice, like Slovak’s when he felt that he was closing in, Kessler just within his reach. “I found Brinker on the Internet,” she explained. “You can access something called the National Directory. I just typed in Brinker’s name. And there it was. Matt Brinker. There were several, of course, but only one of them had a phone number with the same area code as Britanny Falls. When I called it, an old man answered. I asked him if he was the Matt Brinker who’d once been mayor of Britanny Falls. He said he was. So I mentioned Faye Harrison. The murder. I asked him if he recalled meeting with Warren Davies the day Faye disappeared. He said he did.”

“Did he tell you anything about the meeting?”

“I didn’t ask. I didn’t want him to go into it over the phone. I wanted you to hear whatever he had to say. That’s why I’m here, Paul. Brinker agreed to talk to us at eight-thirty this morning.”

Minutes later they were on their way, Eleanor at the wheel of her black Mazda. She’d opened the sunroof, and Graves felt an unaccustomed pleasure in the play of light upon her face, the way the wind tossed her hair. Then an invisible hand yanked him from this brief delight, and he saw Gwen before him, her eyes open but cold and colorless. Her lips moved mechanically, in a surreal whisper, repeating the words Eleanor had heard years before in the Maine woods, Come here, sweetie.

Graves felt the bite of the rope that bound him to the chair, heard his voice cry out, Leave her alone. He saw Kessler let go of Gwen’s blood-soaked hair, turn to face him. You want me to leave her alone, boy? Kessler was coming toward him now, a knife in his hand. The old certainty swept over Graves again, that he was going to die. Then astonishment when he didn’t. He heard the knife slice the rope, felt Kessler’s lips at his ear, whispering softly, What’s your name, boy?

When he returned to himself, the landscape had changed. Hills had become valleys, the broad estates that bordered Riverwood now broken into small, neat farms.

“Where do you go, Paul?” Eleanor asked. She was watching him intently. “In your mind?”

“Into the past,” Graves said. Which was true. “Old New York,” he added quickly. Which was a lie.