Graves thought Kingston a drab little town of squat brick buildings, old but without the charm of age, dreary, in decline, like an elderly relative whom no one wants to visit anymore. Charlie Portman’s office was on the second floor of a dingy building on Sycamore Street. A Be Back Soon sign was posted on the door. Its cardboard clock said 10:30.
It was only a short wait, but rather than linger on the street, they walked to a small cafe a few blocks from Portman’s office and took a booth at the front.
“Just coffee,” Eleanor said when the waitress stepped up.
Graves ordered the same, then peered out the smudged window of the diner onto a nearly deserted main street. “They say southern towns look like this now. Left behind.” It was only an idle comment, something he’d tossed in because he could think of nothing else to say. He was not used to small talk, had little idea of how it was accomplished. It was one of the deficiencies his isolation had imposed, the sense that even with others he was alone, with no obligation to engage them, inquire into even their most superficial aspects, or to in any way reveal his own.
“You’ve never gone back for a visit?” Eleanor asked.
“No.”
“There was no one you wanted to see again?”
Mrs. Flexner’s face swam into Graves’ mind. Kind. Watching him with a patience he still could not fathom. “Only one person,” he said before he could stop himself.
Something in Eleanor’s dark eyes quickened. “Who?”
Graves felt his silence draw in around him, but not before he said, “The woman who took me in.”
“Took you in?”
Graves knew that he had no choice but to answer. “After what happened.” He decided on a course of action, then told her as much as he could. “After my sister died. We’d lived together. My parents had been killed the year before. A car accident. After that I lived with my sister. When she died, a woman took me in. Mrs. Flexner. She’s the one I mean. The one I’d like to have seen again.”
“And yet you never went back to see her?”
“I couldn’t. It would have been too difficult, I suppose.”
He could tell that Eleanor doubted him, suspected that everything he revealed left other things hidden. “You’re like a set of Chinese boxes, Paul,” she said at last. “One inside another, inside another.”
Graves tried to make a joke of it. “I wish I were that mysterious.”
She stared at him without smiling. “You don’t let anyone get close, do you? When someone tries to touch you, you pull away.”
Graves suddenly imagined her reaching out, touching him. He felt a delicate tremor run through him, a subtle quickening that urged him to escape the enforced solitude he’d lived in for so long. It was a life that now struck him painfully as little more than a blur of eating, sleeping, writing, a noose of featureless days, each scarcely different from the one before or after. He knew it was the life Gwen’s death had fashioned, a choice he’d made to be dead as she was dead, the truth of her murder, of his appalling silence in the face of Sheriff Sloane’s relentless probing, of everything that had happened on Powder Road still hanging from him like the tatters of her bloody dress.
“Paul?”
“What?”
She nodded toward his hands.
He glanced down, saw that his fingers were trembling, and swiftly drew them into his lap, where she could not see them. “Portman may be back at his office by now,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’d better go.”
They paid at the register, then headed down the street toward Portman’s office, past pawnshops and used-furniture stores, the neighborhood Charlie Portman had chosen, or been forced to accept, as the location for his profession.
There was a bail bondsman on the bottom floor of the building. A small blinking neon light promised “personal service.” As he glanced toward the window, Graves saw an elderly man in baggy pants and suspenders sweeping bits of paper across a plain cement floor. There was a red plastic radio on the front desk. Gwen had kept one like that in her room. Kessler had turned it on during that last hour, made her dance and sway around while he clapped and stomped his foot. He’d finally partnered her with Sykes, made him spin her wildly, dip her hard, slam her head against the floor.
Graves could feel his body tightening at the thought of it. He sank his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers and turned away, toward the door that led up the stairs to Portman’s office.
As he opened it, Eleanor took his arm firmly. “I can do this if you’re not…”
“No, I’m fine,” he interrupted curtly, then wheeled away from her and began to make his way up the stairs.
But he was not fine. He could feel the panic building, the terror that it had never really ended, that Gwen was still stumbling right and left, struggling blearily to keep time with the frantic rhythm of Kessler’s pounding feet, leaving bloody tracks across the floor as Sykes, with both hands wrapped around her wrist, flung her brutally from wall to crushing wall.
At the top of the stairs he looked back. Eleanor had made it only halfway up by then, so he knew he’d bounded up them furiously, taken them two at a time, the way Slovak always did when Kessler seemed almost within his grasp.
Even so, what she said when she reached him at the top of the stairs surprised him.
“I don’t know what’s chasing you, Paul.” Her tone was more tender than any she had ever used with him, a voice more gentle than any he had heard since his sister’s death. “But I think you should face it very soon. Because it’s gaining fast.”
With that she stepped past him, opened the door to Charlie Portman’s office, and walked inside.
“May I help you?” a man asked, blinking rapidly, so that Graves suspected he’d been snoozing at his desk as Eleanor burst in. He got to his feet ponderously. “Charlie Portman,” he said.
Watching as he offered Eleanor his hand, Graves was struck by how closely the younger Portman resembled his dead father. He had the same slack jaws and woeful, hangdog look, the same shrunken, melancholy eyes. There was even a clear plastic rainslick on a rack behind his desk.
“Belonged to my dad,” Portman said when he noticed Graves staring at it. He smiled and waved his hand, indicating the general disarray of the room, pages from the local newspaper scattered here and there, along with empty soda cans, one or two tin ashtrays, and a few back issues of a police equipment magazine. “Sorry about the mess. I’ve never quite gotten into the habit of picking up after myself.”
He looked to be in his early sixties, and Graves instantly conjured up the story of a young man who’d wanted desperately to be like his father, a noted figure in the State Police, but who’d possessed none of his father’s gifts, and so had ended up with a dull career of petty cases, a life like the furniture in his office, second-rate and badly used.
“Now, what can I do for you?” Portman eased himself back into the chair behind his desk. “That is, assuming it’s me you’re looking for.”
“I’m Paul Graves. This is Eleanor Stern. We’re working on a murder case your father investigated years ago.”
Portman looked at them knowingly. “I’ll bet you mean the one at Riverwood. That girl they found in the woods. Faye Harrison.”
“That’s right,” Graves said.
Eleanor went directly to the issue. “Your father met with Warren Davies the day Faye disappeared. They spent several hours together. Do you know why?”
It was obvious that nothing in what Eleanor had just said was news to Charlie Portman. “Yeah, Dad mentioned that meeting. He said Mr. Davies suspected that someone at Riverwood had been going through his papers. Looking for something. They went over all the possibilities, the people who might be doing it. Finally, Mr. Davies decided it was most likely his son. Eddie. They’d been having a lot of trouble lately. Mr. Davies asked Dad to look into it. To keep tabs on the kid. Find out where he went when he wasn’t at Riverwood. Who his friends were. Stuff like that. Basically, he wanted to know if the boy was up to something.”
“Is that the sort of job your father would have taken?” Eleanor asked.
“If he’d had the time, he’d probably have done a little work on it. But a few days later that girl turned up dead in the woods. After that Dad had his hands full with that case. It looks to me like you two have had your hands full with it too.” Portman smiled cheerfully, the pose of a village storyteller. “Well, the way it went was this. At first Dad thought it was a guy who’d worked on the estate. Then he thought it was probably somebody the girl knew. Somebody from town or from her school. A boyfriend. Something like that. When that didn’t go anywhere, he figured it was a random thing. The girl went for a walk in the woods and somebody just swept in out of nowhere and killed her. You know, for no reason… except meanness.”
In his mind Graves saw Kessler circle his sister, the rope dangling loosely in his hands, Gwen’s eyes lost in an eerie acceptance as he knotted one end in a hangman’s noose, then tossed the other over the beam. She had been staring at Kessler with a kind of distant confusion by the time he’d finished. In those final moments, had she been working to understand how a perfect stranger could hate her so?
“That’s what Dad figured until almost the very end,” Portman added.
Eleanor’s mind seized on the operative word. “Almost?”
“Almost, yes,” Portman said. “He was going through his files. Reviewing his old cases. Sort of getting things in order before he died. When he got to the file on the Riverwood murder, he said, ‘It had to have been a stranger, because everyone at Riverwood was-’ And that’s where he stopped. Right there. Without finishing the sentence. I could tell something had hit him. He started looking through all the stuff he’d put together during the investigation. He said, ‘The rope. Who took the damn rope?’ I could tell he was digging for something, but I didn’t know what it was. He finally found it, though. A picture. Just one picture. He grabbed it from a pile of pictures and started looking at it real close. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just kept staring at the picture. Finally, he said, ‘She went into the woods.’ It was a photograph of the Harrison girl, Faye. She was lying on the ground. In the cave, where they found her. Dad kept staring at it. Like he spotted something in it. Like he was turning it over in his mind.” Charlie Portman seemed to see his father in that strange pose, feeble, dying, his hands clutching a faded photograph. “‘She went into the woods, Charlie,’ he told me. ‘Alone.’”
“What did he mean by that?” Graves asked.
“Damned if I know. I asked him, but he didn’t answer me. He just kept plowing through the stuff on the case. I could tell he wanted to be alone. So I just left him to his work.
“So you have no idea what your father meant?” Eleanor asked.
“No. But I got the feeling he figured that girl had gone into the woods for some specific reason. Like maybe she was looking for something. Or was planning to meet somebody there. Dad never said anything else. Just ‘She went into the woods.’ It was the last thing he said before I left him to his work. He just said, ‘She went into the woods. Alone.’”
“But everyone knew Faye went into the woods alone.” Eleanor’s face was troubled. “People saw her go. Lots of people. There was never any mystery about that.”
“No, there wasn’t,” Portman agreed easily. “That’s why it seemed so odd to me. The way Dad looked when I found him the next morning.” Graves could tell that a vision had surfaced in Portman’s mind. “He was sitting up in bed. He had that picture in his hand. The one I told you about. The dead girl. But he didn’t look the way he’d looked the last time I’d seen him. So baffled by everything. He looked at peace. Like he’d found his answer at last. Figured it out. Knew who’d taken the rope. Knew who’d killed Faye.” A mournful expression settled upon the aging man’s features. “And I would have asked him who he thought it was. But he was dead.”