As Graves opened the cottage door he recognized that it was not a servant who’d brought breakfast to him. The woman was tall and slender, her silver hair pulled tightly back and secured by a small jeweled clasp. Her eyes were large, gray, perfectly round, and set in a face that seemed sculpted from pale stone. Only the fullness of her lips gave it a touch of sensuousness. A daub of rouge had been applied to her cheeks, but only enough to give them the faintest sense of color, hardly more noticeable than the studiedly modest white pearls in her earlobes.
“Good morning, Mr. Graves,” she said. “I’m Allison Davies.”
She was dressed in a style that struck Graves as elegantly informal, a loose-fitting white blouse and khaki trousers. Even so, she gave off an aura of command. Graves could hear it in her voice and see it in her manner. He was sure the confidence of wealth and power also lay like a fine varnish on the desk in her office and floated invisibly beneath the Tiffany lamp in her sitting room. He saw delicate lace curtains in a large dining room, heard the tinkle of French chandeliers, sniffed the faint musty odor of leather-bound books, and instantly imagined a whole family history to go with such luxurious things, a kind of Hudson Valley version of The Magnificent Ambersons, but tinged with that dread and sense of imminent horror that darkened Graves’ every creative thought, turned every place into some more subtle version of Malverna, every person into Kessler, Sykes, or one of the hapless strangers they’d worked their worst upon.
“I’ve brought your breakfast,” Miss Davies added. She offered a smile, but it was a quick, tentative one, and Graves immediately suspected that despite her wealth she’d known considerable distress, borne the weight of grave responsibilities. There were certain forms of anxiety she would never know, of course, but there were others she would in no way be able to escape. One of Kessler’s idle meditations occurred to him: Money rids the rich of none but vulgar care. He opened the screen door.
But she did not step inside. “I thought you might take it in the open air,” she said. “The table by the pond. I’d like to talk with you, Mr. Graves.”
“All right,” Graves said with some relief. He’d not slept well. The rural look of the cottage too easily recalled the Carolina farmhouse he’d lived in as a boy, the final scenes he’d witnessed there. He was happy to escape it.
They walked to a wooden picnic table beside the lake and sat down opposite each other. Graves placed his hands on its rough wooden surface, suddenly heard straps of rope slapping against its legs, and quickly drew his hands into his lap.
“Well, I guess you’ve been wondering why I asked you here to Riverwood,” Miss Davies said as she pressed the breakfast tray toward Graves.
Graves glanced at the food without appetite.
“To begin with, I’ve followed your work for quite some time,” Miss Davies told him. “A young college student who once spent the summer here first recommended your novels to me. Evidently you’re somewhat popular with college students.”
Graves did not dispute such “popularity,” though he knew that it had been severely limited, little more than a brief flirtation. At first he’d suspected that his student admirers had been drawn to his books by the icy nihilism they found in them. Kessler was their spokesman, rather than Slovak. Later he’d entertained the darker possibility that youthful readers had been attracted to his writing by Kessler’s sadism. The way he ordered Sykes to commit vicious injuries, then sat back and watched the whole terrible ordeal as if it were really Sykes who was the subject of the experiment. When he allowed himself to ponder it, Graves feared that it was precisely this aspect of his books to which his “fans” were drawn, Kessler’s relendess effort to invent a cruelty so hideous, Sykes would finally refuse to enact it, take the pain himself radier than inflict it.
“I must admit that I was rather skeptical,” Miss Davies went on. “After all, different generations don’t usually have the same literary tastes.” She smiled. “But on the whole, I was quite impressed. Particularly by the way you come up with strange dynamics. For your characters, I mean. Their reasons for doing things are sometimes quite unexpected, and yet, once revealed, their motivations seem entirely believable.”
Graves could tell by the somber look in her eyes that this last remark had not been meant to flatter him. Allison Davies was not a fan. She had invited him to Riverwood for one particular facet of his writing, the part that bored into life’s secret festering. It was the darker impulses that interested her, Graves thought. The serpents in the grass. Once again he heard Kessler’s arctic whisper: It is life itself that smiles and smiles… and is a villain.
“I’ve done a little research on you, Mr. Graves. I know that you’re forty-five. The same age as Slovak. You’ve never married or had children.”
Nor ever would, Graves thought. Since to live alone meant you had no one to protect, no way to fail in the awesome duty of protection.
“You were raised in North Carolina,” Miss Davies continued. “After your parents were killed in a car accident, you and your older sister continued to live on the family farm.” She regarded him solemnly. “But that was only for a year or so, the time you lived alone with your sister.”
Graves nodded silently, hoping it might be enough to prevent her from going on.
“You were only twelve years old when…”
She stopped abruptly, clearly trying to determine how she should continue, by what means she should approach the darkest moment of his life.
“I’ve read the newspaper accounts,” Miss Davies began again. “So I know what happened to your sister.” She gave Graves a strangely anguished look, as if her sympathy alone could make him talk about it, release a floodgate, penetrate a wall of silence that Sheriff Sloane, for all his tenacious effort, had been unable to breach years earlier.
“I’m simply saying, Mr. Graves, that I know what you’ve been through,” she said finally.
He felt his throat begin to close. He managed to get out, “Why does what I’ve been through concern you?”
“Because your life was marked by crime,” Miss Davies answered. “So was mine. So was all of Riverwood.”
He saw the first tiny fissure in the otherwise solid wall of her composure. It was no more than a small movement in her eyes, but in it he detected an inner disarray he knew too well, the aftershock that reverberates through time, moving in endless, undulating waves from the murderous scene of the explosion.
“I don’t know if what I have in mind will work, Mr. Graves. I know only that I have to try it, and that you’re the best person for the job. And, of course, it’s not just because of what happened when you were a boy. It also comes from my having read your books. You have something I require. Imagination.”
For the first time, Graves felt a stir of interest in what Allison Davies might say next. Long ago he’d recognized that imagination was his only gift. The way the world came to him in stories was a way of seeing that had emerged almost immediately with that first story Gwen had read to him, then more powerfully with the first he’d written. Almost unconsciously he had begun to tell stories to his classmates, amazed at how intently he could hold their attention. Often, he’d listened to his own stories in the same way his audience listened to them, without knowing where the tale was going or what the ending would be, as surprised as they were when it all came together. It was a gift that had never deserted him, the one constant in his life, as natural to him as breath. Even during the long year when he’d been mute, sitting silently in the dingy wooden swing that hung in Mrs. Flexner’s front yard as Sheriff Sloane came and went, determined to find out what he’d seen and heard that night, even then, especially then, it had been his imagination that had sustained him, drawn him protectively into the far less dangerous world of his own mind.
Allison Davies leaned forward. “But now, after having met you, I’ve come to think that you also have something beyond that. Beyond imagination. A certain restlessness. I can see it, Mr. Graves. This agitation.”
How had she seen it, Graves wondered, the restlessness she’d spoken of? After all, he could sit still and concentrate for long hours on a single task. He didn’t fidget or have tics. And yet he knew what she was talking about. The jittery undercurrent of anxiety that never left him, and which he felt like a frantic pulse incessantly beating. It had begun the night he’d stopped in his tracks as the light blinked off on the back porch of his home. Since then, he’d never lost the sense of a creature stalking him through a tangled wood, a predator he could hear and smell and even glimpse occasionally as it darted through the undergrowth. In the end he’d even given his stalker a human form, wrapped it in a black leather coat, named it: Kessler.
“Your character. Detective Slovak,” Miss Davies said. “He’s very intuitive. Very observant too. He seems to know a great many things about people.”
As far as Graves was concerned, Slovak knew-or thought he knew-only one thing, that people sought love but rarely found it. It was Kessler who really knew things about people. Particularly the mad drive of even the dullest and most worthless life to sustain itself, to go on seeing and hearing regardless of what it saw and heard. Kessler ceaselessly depended upon this simple, primordial urge to get his way in the world. Of course, Kessler knew other things as well. The drive for power. The ecstasy of conquest. The rapture of cruelty. The delight in hearing someone beg to live, and how the writhing anguish of one person could enter another like a warming sip of rich red wine. Most important of all, because of his long experiment with Sykes, Kessler knew that there was no bottom to the human pit, no act to which terror could not drive a man. Graves wondered if Allison Davies had noticed any of these things in his books as well.
“But Slovak never actually wins, does he?” she asked. “Never actually captures Kessler. Slovak’s goodness is his fatal flaw.”
Graves had never actually thought of it in the same way, but he knew she was right. Slovak’s mighty effort to track Kessler down was made futile by the fact that something forever stayed his hand. The rules of the game. The constraints of conscience.
“But even so, your detective puts things together quite well,” Miss Davies added. “I’ve always been impressed by the way Slovak sees connections-extremely subtle connections-that other people miss.” She stared at him intently, and Graves could see that she was approaching the actual reason she’d asked him here to Riverwood, brought his breakfast, escorted him down to the table beside the lake for this early morning conversation. “Of course, I realize that Slovak isn’t a real person,” she said. “But you are a real person, Mr. Graves. And you created Slovak. You’ve gone with him through fourteen books. So you’ve lived with him for a long time. More than twenty years, to be exact. You must have something in common with him.”
Graves considered the long comradeship he’d forged with Slovak, aging him book by book, adding bulk to his frame, aches to his joints, wrinkling his face, blurring his vision. In book six he was still recovering from a head wound suffered in book five, and he’d never lost the limp he’d gotten in a fall in volume nine. Worst of all, two decades of pursuing Kessler through fog and rain, searching for him in dank cellars and through the teeming wards of charity hospitals and workhouses, had at last produced a harsh, racking cough. But time had inflicted a greater injury still. In book twelve Slovak’s wife had died after an illness that had spanned the two previous volumes. Her death left him with an aching grief as well as a strange, inchoate need for revenge. In the thirteenth volume a spiritual malaise had begun to settle in, slowly draining away the raw vitality that had sustained him for so long. By book fourteen, the latest one to have been published, this dispiritedness had deepened, leaving Slovak glum and sleepless, a spectral figure who spent his evenings slouched in the dimly lighted corners of after-hours bars. By volume fifteen, the one to which Graves had finally come to the end just the previous day, and which had taken him the longest to write, Slovak’s inner life had begun to spiral downward at an ever-accelerating rate. Plagued by hideous visions of past crimes, his mind echoing with the screams of Kessler’s long-dead victims, Slovak’s view of life had turned so intensely grim that his character seemed poised on the brink of an absolute despair.
“You’re like Slovak in many ways, I think.” Miss Davies watched him silently, and Graves wondered if some aspect of Slovak’s decline, the deep loneliness that gnawed at him continually, had suddenly swum into his own face. “I’ve asked you here to solve a mystery, Mr. Graves,” she said finally. “A murder mystery. You see, years ago a young girl was murdered here at Riverwood. Her name was Faye. Faye Harrison. She was my best friend.” She smiled the sort of fleeting, rueful smile Graves put on the lips of the burned-out, melancholy women he wrote about now, the ones Slovak met in smoky bars and drew beneath his arm, though with no other motive than to ease and comfort them, all desire extinguished, departed with his wife.
“She was murdered here during an otherwise perfect summer.” Some element of that happier time appeared briefly in Miss Davies’ face, then no less quickly vanished. “Riverwood was wonderful in those days. We all lived together. My whole family. Faye’s father worked as a groundskeeper. She was eight years old when he died. After that, Mrs. Harrison and Faye stayed on here at Riverwood. Mrs. Harrison continued to work as a teacher in a local school.” Miss Davies glanced over Graves’ shoulder, fixed her attention briefly on something in the distance, then returned to him. “Faye was the closest friend I ever had, Mr. Graves. She was part of our family. Beloved. And that summer, the last one we spent together, was the best one of my life.”
For an instant, Graves thought of his own favorite summer. He could remember how beautiful Gwen had looked when she brushed her hair in the evening and the way she’d always checked in on him before going to bed each night. Are you all right, Paul? He had never felt more safe, more loved, more at home on earth than when he’d answered her. Yes, I’m fine.
“Faye had just turned sixteen when she was murdered,” Miss Davies went on. “That was on August 27, 1946. The summer after the war.”
The scene spontaneously materialized in Graves’ mind, a stage set of brilliant summer days, placid lakes, bright flags flying in the small villages of upstate New York, a few young men still in uniform, all America buoyant and full of celebration, relishing the last lingering pleasure of its recent military triumph. He heard the lilting refrain of “Sentimental Journey,” saw crowded troop ships returning from Europe and the Pacific, soldiers running down wide gangplanks into the arms of relatives, friends, lovers.
“Things were so relaxed that summer,” Miss Davies said. “My brother Edward was home from college. He often went sailing. I remember my father sitting quietly, at the end of the pier. So peaceful. My mother had nothing to do but sit for her portrait.” Something caught in her mind. “Actually, it was the portrait artist who found Faye’s body. Andre Grossman. He found it about two miles from here. A place called Manitou Cave.”
Graves instantly envisioned it as a dank and murky place, with dripping walls and a soggy earthen floor. Bats hung from the ceiling in ceaselessly agitated clusters, their leathery wings flapping in the dark air. In one of its cold, unlighted hollows he saw a slender girl lying facedown, naked. Leaves and dirt were flung over her, crusted in her mouth and open eyes. The dried-out bones of long-devoured animals lay scattered in the soil around her, all that was left of some much earlier prey.
Miss Davies’ pale face tightened. “It was terrible, what Mr. Grossman saw. I don’t think he ever quite got over it.” She shuddered, as if touched by a sudden chill. “There are pictures, of course. You can get the… details. I’d rather not go into them.”
Graves recognized that the moment of truth had arrived. “I suppose it’s time for me to ask what you actually do want me to go into, Miss Davies.”
“The past,” she answered without hesitation. “That summer fifty years ago.” She drew a piece of paper from the pocket of her trousers, white with blue lines, clearly torn from a spiral notebook. “A few weeks ago I received a letter from Faye’s mother. It was quite nostalgic. She recalled how Faye and I had been so close, how wonderful that last summer had been. The way we used to sneak off to Indian Rock. That was our secret place. Faye’s and mine. We went there to be alone. Anyway, Mrs. Harrison’s letter brought back memories. It was good to hear from her again. Nothing really disturbed me until I got to the end of the letter, the last few lines.” She lifted the paper toward Graves. “You can read them for yourself.”
Graves took it, went directly to its last paragraph, and read it silently:
I’ve never understood it, Allison. What happened to Faye? I think and think, but I can’t find an answer. I see her face the way she was. I ask the same question over and over. Why, Faye? I’ve prayed for an answer, but no answer has come. That’s my punishment. I know it is. To be tormented by the mystery of my daughter’s death.
Graves offered the letter to Miss Davies; she didn’t take it.
“I’d like you to hold on to it awhile, Mr. Graves. As a reminder of how tormented Mrs. Harrison is. As you’ve no doubt guessed, Faye’s murder was never solved. At least not formally.”
Graves folded the letter and put it in his pocket. “What do you mean, not formally?”
“Well, a man was accused of the murder. A local man. His name was Jake Mosley. It’s always been quite obvious that Mosley killed Faye. But clearly, Mrs. Harrison doesn’t believe Jake did it. Because of that-what she wrote, particularly in that last line-about not knowing who killed Faye, I decided to contact you.”
Graves said nothing.
“Mrs. Harrison is quite old now, as you might imagine, Mr. Graves. And I don’t want her to die still wondering what happened to her daughter. It’s all I can do for her now. To give her the peace she needs. And only an answer can do that. A solution to Faye’s murder.” She looked at him piercingly. “It would be cruel for her to die without that, don’t you think?”
In his mind, Graves heard Sheriff Sloane’s soft, imploring voice: Please, son, don’t make me die without knowing who killed your sister.
“That’s why I’ve asked you here to Riverwood,” Miss Davies continued when he did not speak. “To find an answer to Faye’s death.” Before Graves could respond, she added, “I know you’re not a detective, Mr. Graves. At least, not a real one. But it’s not a real detective I need. Just the opposite, in fact. I need someone who can go beyond the facts of the case. I need someone who can imagine what happened to Faye, and why.”
The flaw in such reasoning was instantly obvious, and Graves dutifully exposed it. “To imagine things, that’s not the same as finding the truth,” he told her.
“No, of course not,” Miss Davies admitted. “But I already know the truth. Jake Mosley murdered Faye. As you’ll learn quite quickly once you’ve looked into the facts of the case. Unfortunately, Mrs. Harrison isn’t satisfied with that solution.” Her eyes softened. “She needs a different story, Mr. Graves. That’s why I’ve asked you here to Riverwood. To write a story that will give Mrs. Harrison the peace she deserves.”
“A story?” Graves asked.
“Yes, a story,” Miss Davies answered firmly. “It doesn’t have to be true. As a matter of fact, it can’t be true. But it does have to meet two conditions. The first is that the ‘killer’ has to be someone from Riverwood, someone Mrs. Harrison knew. Not a stranger, someone who just happened to come upon Faye in the woods, killed her, and then disappeared forever.”
Graves saw the old car rumble away in the bright morning light, a single arm waving good-bye from an open window, leaving a farmhouse that had been stumbled upon by accident, then left in unspeakable ruin. “But that sometimes happens,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” Miss Davies replied. “But it can’t have happened in this case. Not in your story, I mean. Because if you were to write that a stranger murdered Faye, there would be no resolution in Mrs. Harrison’s mind. So it must be someone from Riverwood who did it. Someone who had what the police call ‘opportunity.’”
Graves waited for the second condition.
“Motive,” Miss Davies said. “Your story has to provide a motive for Faye’s murder that Mrs. Harrison will believe. That’s the job I’m offering you, Mr. Graves.” Before Graves could either accept or refuse it, she added, “Please don’t give me your answer right away. There are some photographs I’d like you to look at first. They might help you in your decision. I’ve had them sent to your apartment in New York. They’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”
“Pictures of what?” Graves asked.
“Of innocence,” Miss Davies answered baldly. “Of an ideal summer in an ideal place.” A wave of long-submerged pain and anger suddenly swept into her face. “It wasn’t just Faye who was killed, you see. Riverwood was murdered too. Its beauty and its innocence. That’s what died with Faye that summer. Her murder darkened everything at Riverwood. Particularly my father. He’d worked hard to make life perfect here. He believed in that, you see. Perfection. That life could be made perfect. Even mankind. But Faye’s murder destroyed all that. It broke my father’s zeal for perfection. He died only a year later. All I ask is that you look at the pictures I’ve sent you. If you want the job, you can come back here and work. I’ve already gathered the relevant police reports. You’ll have complete access to everything.” She rose. “Of course, if you decide against it, I’d like the photographs returned.” She glanced about the placid landscape that surrounded them, the deep green forest, the dark green pond. Her eyes finally settled on a narrow trail that coiled like a dark vein up the far slope. “That’s where Faye was seen for the last time at Riverwood,” she told Graves. “She was standing just at the mouth of that trail.” A smile briefly shadowed her lips, then vanished. “She was wearing a light blue summer dress. One of her favorites. ‘My piece of sky,’ she always called that dress.”
Graves looked toward where Allison Davies had indicated and saw, without in the least willing it, a young girl Standing at the edge of the forest. The girl stared at him mutely, her face blank and unsmiling. Then she turned away gracefully, her eyes quiet, mournful, as if she’d already glimpsed a fate she had no choice but to accept, a slender figure disappearing into the deep, enfolding woods like a piece of sky into an open grave.