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 had 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.”
But it could not have been Allison to whom Faye nodded that morning. Graves discovered this once he turned to the statement Allison made to Sheriff Gerard only minutes after his interview with her father. It could not have been Allison because Allison had been in the dining room at the time, reading a book she’d started the night before. She had seen her friend only once that morning, she went on to say, the same glimpse she’d years later described to Graves, though in the earlier interview she’d added that “Faye gave me a little wave before she turned and walked away.”
Graves let his mind dwell upon that brief moment, as he knew Allison Davies must still dwell upon it, with that odd combination of irony and sorrow all people feel who have said a last good-bye without knowing it, watched a loved one wave, smile, offer a departing word as if it were merely one of thousands yet to come. He knew what Allison had done after that. She’d gone back to the dining room. Back to her book. Faye had returned to the gazebo, spoken briefly to Warren Davies, then glanced up and nodded to someone Mr. Davies assumed to be standing at one of the windows on the second floor.
In his mind Graves saw Faye’s eyes lift upward, saw the small, slight movement of her head. It seemed to him that Mr. Davies might well have been right, that Faye had received a signal of some kind.
But from whom?
For the rest of the morning Graves tried to find out. He studied the notes Sheriff Gerard had compiled during the interviews he’d conducted on the morning after Faye’s disappearance. As he read, he often stopped to envision a scene, looking for hidden themes, motives, sinister connections. One by one the denizens of Riverwood came before him-not only the Davieses themselves, but maids and cooks, handymen and retainers. But despite all the work Sheriff Gerard had done in his initial interviews, Graves could find little to feed his imagination. For although several people at Riverwood had seen Faye that morning of her death, only Jake Mosley had followed her into the wood.
Two days after Gerard’s initial visit to Riverwood, Faye’s body had been found in Manitou Cave. At that point, with the “missing person” found, the focus of the investigation shifted from Sheriff Gerard to Dennis Portman, from a man searching for a girl to one searching for her killer.