An evening shade had begun to fall over Riverwood by the time Graves headed back to his cottage. Eleanor Stern was sitting on the porch of her cottage. When she saw Graves, she stood and walked to the wooden railing of the porch. She lifted a glass toward him. “Care to join me?”
Graves never allowed himself a drink, nor even companionship very often, but the slowly falling night seemed to penetrate the wall he lived behind, to inexplicably urge him toward her.
“All right,” he said quietly.
He mounted the stairs, sat down in one of the chairs opposite her, took the glass of wine she offered, but did not sip it.
“You didn’t come to lunch,” Eleanor said.
“No, I didn’t.”
When Graves added nothing else, Eleanor let the matter drop. “Last night I thought I noticed a southern accent. What part of the South are you from?”
“North Carolina.”
“Did your whole family move north?”
“No. They stayed in the South.” His mind spontaneously envisioned the trio of gray stones that marked the place where they had stayed.
Eleanor watched him distantly, like someone studying a liquid in a test tube, something squirming in a vial. “Well, how’s your work going?” she asked, forcing a certain lightness into her voice. “Found anything interesting?”
Graves revealed the only thing of interest he’d found. “Faye Harrison was going down Mohonk Trail when she was seen for the last time. Away from Riverwood instead of back toward it.”
Eleanor immediately grasped the point. “So she wasn’t planning to meet Allison Davies at Indian Rock?” She leaned forward slightly. “All day I couldn’t write,” she said. “I kept getting distracted. Thinking about Faye Harrison. Riverwood too. The mood it must have had that summer. I kept thinking about how Faye’s death destroyed all that. And I suddenly remembered a painting I’d seen in Germany. It was of a lovely little German village, and it reminded me of the way Cezanne painted French villages. Very peaceful. Idyllic. I didn’t think anything of it particularly until I noticed the title. It was called Dachau. And I thought: No one will ever be able to look at that painting in the same way, or think of Dachau as anything but a death camp. That’s how it must have been with Riverwood.” She took a sip from her glass. “Innocence is a fragile thing. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”
Hurled back in time, Graves saw the old car pull away, a black stain against a bloodred dawn, a freckled hand waving good-bye in the early morning air. That same malicious hand had taken his innocence from him during the preceding night, snatched it prematurely and abruptly, like his sister’s life.
“In every life there’s a period of moral virginity, don’t you think?” Eleanor mused. “A time before you’ve done anything truly evil. And when it’s gone, you realize that you’re exactly like everyone else. A place can experience the same thing. Lose its innocence. I’d never thought of that before.” She took a deep breath. “You know, Paul, the way I see it, you’re going to have to do what I do, make a play out of it. Out of what happened to Faye Harrison. With Riverwood as the stage and all the people who were here that summer as the characters. You’re going to have to mix them all together, shake the mixture, and see what boils up. Dramatically, I mean.”
It struck Graves that she had already thought this out, predetermined the course he should take. Her next question did not surprise him.
“How many characters are we talking about anyway?”
Graves ticked them off. “Well, besides the Davies family, there were the two men who were at work on the second cottage and the usual members of the household staff. Mona Flagg too. She was the girlfriend of Allison’s brother Edward. And there was one other guest. The man who actually found Faye’s body. An artist. Andre Grossman.
Eleanor appeared to be logging the names into her mind, storing them for later reference. “That’s the cast of characters, then. Somewhere in that list is the person who strangled Faye Harrison.”
Graves knew all too well that that was not necessarily so. “Unless it was a stranger,” he said. He heard the voice behind him, What you doing out here, boy? He said, “Someone who just came out of the woods, then vanished back into them.” You lost in the dark? You a lost child? He could hear the old horror enter his voice and knew that Eleanor had heard it too.
“You actually believe in evil, don’t you, Paul? You believe that it exists.”
“No. At least not as something separate from what people do.”
He felt himself move silently toward the darkened house, heard the sound of his footsteps as he mounted its creaky wooden stairs, Kessler’s breath like a stinking wind across his bare shoulders.
“But there are people who…”
He saw the door swing open, the light flash on, Gwen bent over the kitchen table, hands and feet tied to its wooden legs, her white skirt thrown up over her back, panties yanked down to her ankles, a trickle of blood snaking down her thigh. Kessler’s voice sounded behind him, You didn’t know I’d already been here, did you, boy? Next came laughter and the dreadful truth, but you brought me to her anyway, didn’t you?
“People who…”
He felt Kessler’s hand shove him toward a chair, lash him to its wooden back, heard him ask his appalling question. Want to hear her squeal?
“People who… ”
“Who savor pain,” Eleanor said, completing the thought. “That’s what you say about Kessler, the villain in your book, that he savors pain.” She smiled softly. “I read one of your books this afternoon,” she explained, anticipating his question. “My play wasn’t going anywhere, so I went up to the library in the main house. I started looking through the collection, and there they were. Your books all in a row. From your first novel to the latest one. I took the whole series, but I’ve had time to read only the first one. About the kidnapped little boy. The Lost Child.”
Graves said nothing, partly pleased that she’d read one of his books, but also apprehensive that she’d done so, fearing both her judgment and that she might have learned too much.
“I have to say it was much better than I’d expected,” Eleanor continued. “Rather haunting, in a way. That opening scene, with Slovak standing in the rain, at night, looking up at the ‘yellow-eyed windows’ of a child’s brothel.”
Graves could easily recall the scene, even the opening line he’d put in Slovak’s mind: Innocence is not a shield.
“The child,” Eleanor added now. “The little boy of the title. The one Kessler kidnaps. He’s still lost at the end of the book.” She looked at him pointedly. “Is he ever found?”
“Not yet.”
“He’d be a man now, wouldn’t he?” Eleanor gazed at him intently. “With those terrible memories-the ones from his childhood-with them still in his mind.” Her eyes took on a sudden comprehension, and Graves saw it, the pure white wave of her intuition, how in a single instant she’d read a cryptic sign, glimpsed some portion of his secret history.
“The lost child,” she said quietly, as if merely repeating the title of his book. She said nothing else, but he knew what she was thinking, It’s you.