As Portman’s notes made clear, he’d confronted Andre Grossman not in the library, as Graves had imagined it, but in his room on the second floor. The artist had been packing his bags when Portman entered, his clothes strewn across the bed or hung over chairs, books and papers stacked willy-nilly throughout the room. The chaos had heightened the detective’s suspicion, so that in his notes he’d described the scene as having the look of a “speedy getaway.”
As Graves began to reconstruct Portman’s interrogation of Grossman, he found that his imagination had subtly changed things, particularly Grossman’s voice, so that now the painter sounded strained and frightened, a man on the run.
PORTMAN: When you left Riverwood that morning-the day you found Faye’s body, I mean-had you planned to go to Manitou Cave?
GROSSMAN: No. It is just that I was walking. Thinking. I am leaving Riverwood, you see. For this reason, I must make many plans.
PORTMAN: Why are you leaving?
GROSSMAN: Because my work is done. The portrait. Of Mrs. Davies. Finished. There is nothing more for me here. So I go. This is what I was thinking that day. While I walked. The day I found the-Faye.
PORTMAN: And you walked all the way from Riverwood to Manitou Cave?
GROSSMAN: I did, yes.
PORTMAN: You didn’t come by way of the river?
GROSSMAN: No. Not by the river. The trail. It is a long walk.
He had been in the woods for several hours, he told Portman, and as Graves read the detective’s notes, he could sense Grossman’s extreme edginess as he labored to detail his exact movements on the day he’d come upon the corpse of Faye Harrison.
GROSSMAN: I went into the woods just where Faye did. I took the same path. There were many people around. Everywhere people looking for her. Because of this, I went in the other direction. Away from the crowds.
He had not joined the search Warren Davies had organized, Grossman told Portman, because he believed that Faye had run away. That she did not want to be found by anyone.
PORTMAN: Why did you think she’d run away?
GROSSMAN: Because she was… young. The young do strange things, no?
PORTMAN: Do you know of any reason why Faye would have wanted to run away?
GROSSMAN: No. No reason. Perhaps just to-Nothing. I do not know a reason.
PORTMAN: Do you know of any personal problems she might have had?
GROSSMAN: No. We talked sometimes. When I took photographs of her. But we did not speak of-what is the word?-of close things. Close to the heart. I did not know Faye. Only that she was… nice.
Now, having reached a dead end, Portman shifted the conversation in a different direction:
PORTMAN: Had you ever taken Faye to Manitou Cave before you took the photograph of her there?
GROSSMAN: No.
PORTMAN: Did you ever take her there again?
GROSSMAN: No. Never again. But perhaps she went there herself. She thought it was a beautiful place. That was her comment.
PORTMAN: Had she been there before?
GROSSMAN: I think so, yes. She seemed to… know it.
PORTMAN: Had she ever gone there alone?
Why had Portman asked if Faye had gone to Manitou Cave alone, Graves wondered. Had he suspected that on the day of her death she’d planned to meet someone at Manitou Cave?
But Portman did not pursue the matter further. Instead, he directed the interview away from Faye and back to Grossman’s life at Riverwood, how long he’d been there, when he planned to leave, but always circling back to his presence at Manitou Cave, his discovery there.
PORTMAN: You said you were planning to leave Riverwood soon?
GROSSMAN: Yes. I have no more work here. I must make other plans. It is not easy. That is why I was walking. To think about my plans.
PORTMAN: Well, exactly how did you happen to come across the body?
GROSSMAN: I stopped to rest. This is how I saw. I sat down on the ground. That is when I saw her. At first I saw only a girl in the leaves. I thought she was maybe sleeping. I started to leave. I did not wish to disturb her. But when I rose from the ground, I saw that she was… put there. It did not look like a person sleeping. It looked
… twisted.
PORTMAN: Where exactly were you sitting when you saw Faye?
To this question Grossman had given a highly detailed answer. He’d sat by a tree, he said, a large old tree with many exposed roots, perhaps a hundred yards from the river. There’d been a stump nearby. The stump had rested under a panoply of low-slung limbs, and he’d first thought of sitting on it. Then he’d noticed that it was old and decayed, one of its sides caved in slightly, bits of rotting wood scattered around it. And so, fearing it might not support him, he’d settled down next to it instead.
As to his whereabouts on the day of the murder, Grossman was emphatic:
GROSSMAN: I was here at Riverwood, as I have said many times. I was completing my portrait of Mrs. Davies. We were in the library.
PORTMAN: All day?
GROSSMAN: All day. Except for lunch. For lunch we went to the dining room, of course. After that we returned to the library. You may speak to Mrs. Davies. She will tell you the same.
Portman had already spoken to Mrs. Davies, of course. Knew well that she’d confirmed Grossman’s story. Graves felt it probable that Portman might also have suspected that the two were in league somehow, providing mutual alibis. But if that were true, the old detective’s notes did not suggest it. Instead, he seemed now to question the alibis of other people who’d been at Riverwood on the day of Faye’s death, abruptly shifting his inquiry toward them and away from Grossman, probing not whether Grossman himself had murdered Faye but whether he knew of someone else who had.
PORTMAN: Do you know if Faye had any close relationships with anybody at Riverwood? Anybody in the family or on the staff?
GROSSMAN: Faye was often with Allison.
PORTMAN: Anybody else?
GROSSMAN: On most occasions, no.
It was not an answer Portman accepted:
PORTMAN: How long have you lived here at Riverwood?
GROSSMAN: About four months.
PORTMAN: And in all that time you never saw Faye with anyone but Allison?
GROSSMAN: Occasionally I saw her with a young man. His name is Frank, I believe.
PORTMAN: You mean Frank Saunders, the kid who works at Riverwood?
GROSSMAN: Yes, that is the young man I mean. I have seen Frank with Faye from time to time. They are sometimes together.
In his mind Graves now saw Portman scribble a note into the little green book Graves’ own imagination provided, the words written in it the same ones he now wrote on the pad beside his desk: FS amp; FH seen “sometimes together” (Grossman).
PORTMAN: Did you get the idea that this was a romantic attachment-the one between Frank Saunders and Faye?
GROSSMAN: It is not clear to me, the nature of it. Perhaps the two are friends. Perhaps more than friends. I do not know.
PORTMAN: Well, can you think of anyone here at Riverwood who might have disliked Faye?
GROSSMAN: No. No one.
Portman had his doubts:
PORTMAN: You know, Mr. Grossman, from the way people here talk, you’d think Riverwood was heaven. Everybody loves everyone else. Everybody gets along. To tell you the truth, it’s a little hard to believe everything could be that smooth.
GROSSMAN: I do not know about everybody. I am soon to leave Riverwood. If there is trouble here, it is not my trouble.
With that, the interview had ended. The remainder of the page was blank save for a single observation scrawled at the bottom in Portman’s pinched script- Grossman on run. To which he’d appended a lingering question: Why?
Graves had just returned Portman’s notes to the envelope in which the old detective had placed them fifty years earlier when Saunders knocked and came into the room.
“Miss Davies asked me to give you this,” he said.
Graves took the small enamel box from Saunders’ hand. Its top and sides were adorned with brightly colored scenes of rural life. The women wore ornately designed dresses, their heads wrapped tightly in knotted scarves. The men wore baggy trousers, black vests, and billowy white shirts, and stood, swinging long scythes through yellow fields of grain.
“Pretty, isn’t it? Miss Davies said that those letters you wanted to see are inside it.” Saunders turned to leave.
“Did you know that Andre Grossman mentioned you?” Graves asked. “To Detective Portman.”
“Mentioned me?” For the first time Saunders’ buoyancy deserted him. “What did he say?”
“That he saw you and Faye together quite often. I hadn’t realized that you and she were close.”
“We weren’t. But Grossman probably did see Faye and me together. We liked each other. We talked. But I wouldn’t say that we were close.”
“You told me that everybody loved Faye. Other people have said the same thing. But no one has told me why.”
“Faye didn’t think of herself first. Always others. What they needed. What would be good for them.” Saunders looked at Graves knowingly. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe that anyone can really put another person first.”
Graves heard Kessler’s icy whisper, You knew she was here, but you took me to her anyway.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Graves,” Saunders continued. “It must be hard, living with so little confidence in other people. Anyway, Faye was just like I described her. Maybe that’s why she was taken, because God loved her too much to keep her here on this earth.”
Graves said nothing. Such sentiments had no power to move or interest him. More important, Saunders’ comments seemed the product of a recent conversion, only a step away from some earlier darkness. “Did you always feel that way about Faye?”
“No. For a long time I was jealous of her. Because of the way I was treated. I was just a boy here on the estate. Someone who’d been taken in. Out of pity. Because I had no place else to go. But Faye was a part of the family. Part of Riverwood. I resented that. For years. Then I got hurt. An accident. Here at Riverwood. When I was fourteen. They brought me to the house. Gave me a room. Faye came every day. With a flower. That’s the way Faye was. And that’s why everyone loved her. Not just Allison and Mr. Davies. But everyone. Even me.”
“Someone didn’t love her,” Graves reminded him.
“Maybe someone just loved himself more than Faye,” Saunders said. “Maybe he was willing to sacrifice her for some other reason.”
“Like what?”
“Like lust. Despite this job you have, to find a different story, I still believe that Jake Mosley killed Faye. I believed that almost from the moment she was found.”
“Almost?”
“Well, for just a little while I thought it might be some local boy. Someone I didn’t know about. A secret love, you might say.”
“Why did you think Faye had a secret love?”
“Because she seemed to get more and more upset during the last few weeks of that summer. Troubled. I thought she was probably lovesick. Maybe had a boyfriend who’d dropped her. I even thought it might be more serious than that. That she was pregnant, maybe. That was the sort of thing that would get a young girl in the dumps in those days. But later I heard the autopsy showed she wasn’t.
“Who told you what the autopsy showed?”
“Detective Portman. I’d told him what I just told you. How Faye had been acting that last week, sort of like a pregnant girl might act. He told me she wasn’t pregnant. That’s all he ever said.” He nodded toward the ornate box Graves still held in his hands and released a short, self-mocking laugh. “Of course, you shouldn’t put much stock in any of my theories, Mr. Graves. There was even a time when I figured it was Grossman who did it.”
“Because he killed himself?”
“No, not because of that,” Saunders answered. “Because of the way I heard him talking to Faye once. Asking her things. Intimate things. ‘Do you have a male friend? Do you think you’ll get married someday? Have children?’ Those kinds of questions.”
“How did Faye react?”
“She said, sure, she planned to marry, have kids. She just brushed it off. But I could see she was bothered by his questions. Like she knew Grossman was trying to get at something. Something he wasn’t saying outright. Something… about Faye.”
But if Grossman’s suicide had had anything to do with Faye Harrison, the brief notes he’d written to Mrs. Davies only days before failed to reveal it. More than anything, they suggested that Grossman’s state of mind was exactly as Mrs. Davies had described it to her daughter-deeply, fatally depressed.
The first letter was dated September 6, and was written on the light blue stationery of the Edison Hotel.
My dear Madame:
I am writing from my little room. Closed windows. Closed doors. Different from Riverwood. This is the only safety. To live as I once did. A prisoner. Life. Nothing else. Only life.
Andre Grossman
The second letter was no less disturbed.
My dear Madame:
I see things now. What must be done. To end this hatred of myself. What is done, is done. I see their faces. Young. So young. I would have told you of my crimes, but even in this, I was afraid.
Andre Grossman
Graves read the letter a second time, then a third, trying to apply Slovak’s powers to its oblique references. Imagination. Intuition. A feeling for the heart of things. But for all his effort, Graves could see nothing beyond the numbing despair of the words themselves, the anguish and self-loathing.
In the third and final letter Grossman seemed even more distraught:
My dear Mrs. Davies:
No more. They must be avenged. So much I cannot tell you. So cruel to say it. I have done enough. Terrible. To live by their suffering. Buy life with their deaths. I spare you the rest. What I did. I wish only that you live in peace. It is not you who is tainted.
Tainted.
Graves imagined Grossman hunched over the stained writing desk in his room, staring at this final word, his eyes red-rimmed with sleeplessness. What had he meant by that? And if Mrs. Davies wasn’t tainted, then who was? Graves could find no way to answer the questions that rose from the last word of Grossman’s letter. He knew only that shortly after writing it, Grossman had walked to the window of his room at the Edison Hotel, climbed out upon its narrow ledge, paused a moment, then stepped off the ledge, a burst of air exploding beneath him, slapping at his collar and fluttering in his sleeves as he plunged at speeds he must have thought impossible toward the dark heart of something he had done.