Graves suddenly saw Gwen on her shattered knees, staring upward, her hair wet and matted, glistening trails of blood pouring from her nose and the swollen corners of her mouth, pleading softly, Kill me, the response a vicious command, Slap that bitch! He could still hear the sound of the blow that struck his sister’s face.
And when he finally came back to himself, he saw that Eleanor watched him intently.
“Were you writing something just now?” There was a strange tension in her voice, something between curiosity and alarm, as if a faint siren had gone off in her mind, “In your head, I mean.”
“No,” Graves answered. “Just thinking.”
He could tell that she knew better.
“Where was she murdered?” she asked.
For a moment Graves thought she meant Gwen, then, just in time, realized that she knew nothing of that, knew only of Faye Harrison. “In the cave where they found her, I suppose. It’s in the woods around here. Manitou Cave.”
“You’ll probably have to go there at some point,” Eleanor said. “To get a feel for the place. A feeling for what happened there.” She smiled faintly. “Of course, you’re probably not one of those people who believes that spirits linger after death, are you?”
“No,” Graves answered. “I don’t believe that anything lingers after death.” He saw Gwen close her eyes, then the frantic movement beneath the lids as she waited, the broken murmur that rose from her, a thin whimpering that tortured him like a prayer, Oh, please, please, please ….
“Except our memories of the dead,” Graves said. He heard Kessler’s voice, speaking a line from The Prey of Time: Terror is the deepest solitude we know. An evil smell pierced the air around him, the greasy sweetness of French fries washed down with cheap bourbon.
It was an odor he wanted to rid himself of but knew he never could. For only revenge could bring him peace. And no matter what he did, Graves knew he could never entirely have it. For in all likelihood Ammon Vincent Kessler was still alive. He’d been young, after all, in his early twenties. He’d be a middle-aged man now, still young enough and strong enough to do to others what he’d done to Gwen. Each time Graves read about some young girl who’d been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, he knew it might be Kessler who’d done it, Kessler who was still roaming the remote country roads as night fell, searching for a lone light at the far end of a wide, deserted field.
It was at such a moment that Sheriff Sloane’s question most pierced him, You can tell me who they were, can’t you, Paul? You can tell me what they did to your sister. For it was true, he could have told him everything that happened in the farmhouse that night, how Ammon Kessler had made up games to while away the hours until dawn, “things to do,” as he’d laughingly called them, then sent Sykes to fetch the necessary tools. Again and again in his books, Graves had described their faces and their characters, Kessler’s marked by sadism, Sykes’, by cowardice, one pure evil, the other evil’s pathetic minion.
But he’d done it safely. He’d hidden everything back in time. He’d revealed nothing in the present. For Kessler had been right, and even now Graves could recall his final words, the utterly confident smile on his lips as he’d said them to him, You won’t say nothing, boy.
He’d been right. Down all the years, Ammon Kessler had been right. The boy had never said anything.
Nor the man.
PART THREE
To see Nature truly, think of air as a spider’s web.
—Paul Graves,
Forests of Night
CHAPTER 11
Walking past Eleanor’s unlighted cottage the next morning, Graves noticed that she’d left all her windows open, closed only the curtains of her bedroom. How could anyone feel so safe? Particularly a woman? It was women who were most often followed down deserted streets, stalked in empty parking lots, set upon when they were unaware.
Graves shook his head, drawing his eyes from Eleanor’s open windows, but still considering how extraordinary it was that women could put aside the murderousness that surrounded them, even stroll through empty woods as Gwen had when she brought his lunch that final day. He turned away abruptly and headed toward the main house.
A glittering layer of dew lay upon the grass. A thin mist drifted over the water. Riverwood looked peaceful and serene, an earthly paradise. But it was a secluded heaven, Graves thought, exclusive and set apart, a world of members only. Had the men who’d worked on the second cottage, overwhelmed by Riverwood’s wealth and power, felt themselves little more than serfs? Had they resented the grandeur that dwarfed them? A story took shape in his mind.
He saw a workman, shirtless, with tangled hair, braced on the unfinished roof of the cottage. It was not Jake Mosley, but Homer Garrett, the foreman who’d first implicated Mosley in Faye’s murder, and whom Graves now imagined as a thin, wiry man with rodent eyes. Perhaps as Garrett had labored through that sweltering summer, his anger had continually built against the very people who’d hired him, the idle rich who played tennis or strolled the manicured paths. Graves imagined the steamy room to which Garrett returned each night, heard the squeaky springs on the iron bed upon which he lay, glaring resentfully at the cheap drapes, thinking of the golden-haired girl who sometimes crossed the broad lawn of the Davies mansion or dawdled near the boathouse, haughty, dismissive, hardly giving him a glance, one of “them” now, chosen to be a friend of the rich man’s daughter, and thus suddenly lifted beyond the reach of a man like him.
As if it were a movie playing in his head, Graves now saw Faye Harrison halt abruptly on the forest trail, saw her eyes widen as Garrett stepped out of the surrounding brush to block her path.
A girl like you shouldn’t be out in the woods all alone.
Why not?
Because you might run into something too big for you to handle.
It was at that moment Faye Harrison would have felt the first bite of fear, Graves knew. She would have glanced around or begun to back away just as he had shrunk away as Kessler drew in upon him. He could hear Garrett’s question and Faye’s reply, just as he’d heard Kessler’s and his own.
Where you going?
I was just …
Just what?
Graves could feel the utter isolation that had settled upon Faye as the seconds passed, the sense that the world had suddenly emptied, that there was nothing and no one to stand between herself and the man who faced her. He heard the heightened fear creep into her voice even as she tried the one tactic she thought might warn him away:
I was just going to meet Allison. At Indian Rock.
She’s right behind me.
No, she’s not. She’s still back at Riverwood. It’s just you and me out here.
At that point, as Graves knew all too well, Faye’s aloneness would have suddenly deepened, her fear mushrooming into panic:
What are you doing?
You just do what I tell you.
Get away from me.
Up the lull.
Get your hands off me.
Up the hill, I said.
Graves could see them moving through the brush, Faye pushed roughly from behind, driven deeper and deeper into the surrounding trees until the cave finally loomed before her, a black maw gaping out of the surrounding green. By then she would have been fully aware of what was about to happen to her. Did she still hope that he might simply rise and walk away when he was done, leave her naked, soiled, unspeakably violated … but alive?
Lay down.
All right. Just please … please.
Hurry up.
She’d be frantic now, her body trembling. But at the same time a sense of unreality would have begun to settle in, the feeling that this was all a terrible dream, that Garrett was not really drawing the gray cord from his back pocket, coiling it around her throat, not really tightening it slowly, his eyes filling with the same obscene delight Kessler’s had as he’d watched Gwen pull desperately at the rope, trying to tear it from her neck, her hands raw and blistered by the time
she’d finally surrendered.
“Good morning, sir.”
The voice had seemed to come from out of the thick, musty air inside the small farmhouse to which Graves’ mind had unexpectedly swept him, but when he glanced around, he saw that it was Saunders standing in the doorway of the Davies mansion.
“Early to work, I see, Mr. Graves.”
“Yes, early,” Graves said. He started to move past him, then stopped and glanced back toward the second cottage. “How many people were at work on the cottage the day Faye Harrison disappeared?”
“Well, I worked on it most of that day,” Saunders answered after a moment. “And there was Jake, of course, and Mr. Garrett. Homer Garrett. He was in charge of things.”
“How old was Garrett?”
“I was just a boy, so he looked pretty old to me at the time. But looking back, I’d say he was probably in his fifties.” He looked at Graves warily. “Is Mr. Garrett a suspect now?”
Graves gave the only possible answer. “Everybody is.”
“Well, Mr. Garrett wasn’t a murderer, I can tell you that.” Saunders said it firmly. “He was a normal guy. A hard worker. That’s why he disliked Jake so much. Because Jake was always slacking off. He was doing it the morning Faye disappeared. Eight-thirty, and he’s already slumped down on one of the sawhorses, mooning off toward the woods.” A thought struck him. “Well, not toward the woods. It was Faye he was staring at.”
“Where was she when Jake was looking at her?”
“At the edge of the woods.”
“Did you see Jake follow her into them?”
“No, not exactly. That morning Jake was claiming he was sick again, acting tired, out of breath, using any excuse he could find to slack off. Anyway, he just sat there on the sawhorse for a few seconds, then got up and headed toward the woods.”
“Did Garrett ever go into the woods that day?”
“No, he didn’t. Mr. Garrett and I worked the rest of the morning together. Jake came back around noon. Claimed he’d fainted or something. Then he started working too. We were still at it a few hours later when Mrs. Harrison came around looking for Faye. We told her that we’d seen her go into the woods.” He turned and pointed out across the grounds to a narrow break in the forest. “That’s where we saw Faye Harrison for the last time. Right there, at the woods’ edge.”
In his mind Graves saw a girl poised at the mouth of the trail, her blue dress glowing eerily out of the green, her face frozen in a ghostly desolation. But her hair was not blond and wavy as he knew Faye Harrison’s had been, but a silky chestnut, her skin not flushed with pink like Faye’s, but deeply tanned by a hot southern sun, so that he realized with a sudden chilling clarity that the girl he’d just imagined at the brink of the forest, the one who now turned slowly from him, yet beckoned him to follow, was not Faye Harrison at all, but his murdered sister, Gwen.
As Graves made his way to the library, he could still feel his nerves jerking like sharp hooks inside him. The sense of having seen his sister’s ghost jarred him, shaking the mental balance he struggled to maintain. He needed to focus on something solid, concentrate on a single task. And so, once inside the office, he quickly took the newspaper file from the cabinet to which he had returned it the day before. He lay the file on top of his desk, but before opening it he glanced at the picture of Faye Harrison that Miss Davies had left for him, hoping, by some imaginative process, that it would do for him what similar photographs did for Slovak, urge him onward relentlessly, call up a vast devotion.
But the photograph yielded nothing. He could feel only how remote Faye Harrison remained, how little he’d learned about her. What, after all, had he gathered so far? Only the barest details. A few scraps of personality, along with a sketchy outline of her activities on August 27, 1946, the last day of her life.
And so, with no other direction open, he decided to concentrate on that day.
He’d learned that Faye had risen earlier than she’d needed to that morning, then set off for the main house. She’d gone to the front entrance, paused, then headed quickly back down the stairs and around to the back of the house. Thirty minutes later she’d strolled around the eastern side of the house, crossed the lawn, and gone into the woods. She’d gone up Mohonk Trail, crested the ridge at Indian Rock, and headed down the trail. At some point along the route to wherever she was headed, Faye had met her death.
By whose hand?
Graves leaned forward and peered more closely at the photograph, trying to view it as Slovak would. He needed to “read” it in the way an archaeologist might read a cave painting, working to unearth the buried life it portrayed.
In the picture Faye Harrison is standing before the towering granite boulder known as Indian Rock, her long blond hair falling over her shoulders. She is young and very beautiful, and Graves could only assume that her death might well have resulted from nothing more than the fact that some stranger had met her in the woods, then, in Sheriff Gerard’s phrase, “botched” a rape; that is, turned it into a murder.
But what if Faye Harrison had died for some other reason? One generated by forces so distant and obscure that she had been unaware of them? He imagined her in the dirt, her murderer straddling her, the rope drawing in relentlessly around her throat. He saw her legs kick fiercely, throwing up bursts of moist soil and forest debris, her head jerking left and right as she struggled frantically to free herself. Even then, he thought, even in that instant of concentrated terror, had her mind posed the last question it would ever pose, fixed upon it desperately as if, by finding the answer, she might yet save her life: Why are you killing me?
Suddenly Graves saw Faye’s life more fully. In a whirl of images, he imagined her a toddler, following her father as he went about his chores, then as a girl of eight, living alone with her widowed mother, doing small chores for Mr. Davies, and finally as a teenager, now approaching adulthood, no longer just a shadow on the estate, but a steadily more intimate participant in its family life, “the favorite” not only of Allison, but all the Davies clan.
All? Was it really true that Faye had been cherished by each member of the Davies household? Could it be that at least one member of the Davies family did not welcome Faye’s steadily deepening involvement with Riverwood? Was it possible that while Allison might have seen Faye as a friend, some other member of the family might have viewed her as an intruder? Perhaps even a threat? As she’d moved toward the door of the big house on that final morning of her life, could Faye have been considered both a welcome presence and a dreaded one, depending upon whose eyes watched her from behind parted curtains?
A stream of stories flowed from these conjectures, each member of the Davies family now lurking in the woods or crouched in the dank recesses of Manitou Cave. But complicated and fully detailed as these stories were, Graves recognized that they remained the glittering light show of his imagination. They were perfectly acceptable in a fictional world, but wholly useless in a real one.
The real world lay outside his mind, and to draw himself back into it, Graves opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and took out an envelope he’d noticed the day before, one marked simply HARRISON, MARY FAYE_____MISSING PERSON_____ CASE # 24732.
The original Missing Persons Report had been filled out by Sheriff Gerard on the evening of August 27, when Mrs. Harrison had called his office from Riverwood to report that her daughter had not returned home. The report dutifully detailed Faye’s height and weight, the color of her eyes and hair, what she’d been wearing the morning of her disappearance. To such usual information Gerard had added a terse note, “When daughter did not return home, Mrs. Harrison looked for her at R., then searched surrounding woods. Saw no sign. Fears foul play.”
The next morning Sheriff Gerard had made his way along the winding road that led to Riverwood. He’d spoken first with Homer Garrett. According to the sheriff’s notes, Garrett told him that he’d seen Faye emerge from the eastern corner of the house at approximately 8:30. The girl h
ad paused and stared out over the pond, he said, her hand lifted to her forehead and angled down, “like she was shielding her eyes from the sun.”
But that was not all Homer Garrett had noticed that morning. The foreman had also seen Jake Mosley take the same trail into the woods minutes later. When Mosley returned three hours later, he’d appeared “out of breath,” Garrett said, a detail Sheriff Gerard had recorded in his notes, and beside which he’d set a large black question mark.
Mosley did not deny that he had also gone into the woods a few minutes after Faye. He’d felt sick, he told the sheriff. He needed to sit for a time in the shade. He’d walked only a short distance up the trail, then grown so tired that he’d slumped down beside a tree and “passed out.” Three hours later he’d awakened and walked back to Riverwood. As for his being breathless upon his return, Jake replied only that there was “something wrong with me.”
Frank Saunders, then a teenage boy, confirmed the time at which Faye had entered the woods, but added the detail that he’d also seen her earlier that morning. At 8:05 he’d been on his way to water the flower garden behind the main house, when he’d noticed Faye in the gazebo. He’d finished the job a few minutes later, then headed back toward the house. Faye had still been seated in the gazebo, Saunders said, but she’d no longer been alone. Warren Davies now sat next to her, the two all but hidden by the thick vines of red roses that clung to the white trellises of the gazebo.
Warren Davies readily confirmed that he’d met Faye in the gazebo the morning of her disappearance. Their conversation had been quite brief, Davies had told Sheriff Gerard, certainly no more than a few minutes. After that he’d returned to the house, though not before glancing back to find Faye still seated in the rich shadows of the gazebo. She was gazing up toward the second floor, Mr. Davies said, and appeared to be staring at one of its upper windows. As he turned to enter the house she “gave a little nod,” he added, “like someone had signaled to her.” Mr. Davies went on to say that the person to whom Faye had nodded was “probably my daughter, Allison.”
Instruments of Night Page 10
