Free Instruments of Night by Thomas H. Cook Page A

nothing to protect. No one to whom anything of value should be entrusted. He’d given Wendy the key to his mailbox and the key to his apartment so that she could leave his mail on the kitchen table. He knew that when he returned, the usual accumulation of bills and third-class flyers would be waiting for him. There’d be no personal letters, however, no notes from relatives or friends. It was the path he’d chosen—a conscious choice—to live so stripped of human connection that when he died there would be no grief.
    He read for the rest of the day, shifting from the sofa to the chair, from his desk to the small table by the window. At around six he made dinner, ate it quickly, then walked out onto the terrace and watched night fall over the city. In recent books Slovak had taken up the same twilight vigil, a lonely figure perched on a rusting fire escape, staring out over the jagged field of spires and chimneys. This merging of Slovak’s habits with his own did not trouble Graves, however. It seemed the inevitable consequence of the life they’d lived together. But while Slovak brooded about Kessler as he peered out over the city, working to unearth the force that drove the latter to such awesome acts of harm, Graves worked only to empty his mind of thought.
    Once the darkness had settled over the city, Graves returned inside, stretched out on the sofa, and began to read again. The book was a huge nineteenth-century novel peopled with scores of characters, plots and subplots, a work whose vast sweep made his own novels appear puny, repetitive, limited in theme. And yet he could not write anything other than what he wrote, could not portray a single aspect of the human experience beyond Kessler’sevil, Sykes’ cowardice, and Slovak’s futile effort to bring them down.
    He read for nearly two hours, then rose from the sofa, walked into the bedroom, and crawled into bed. He had just reached for the light, when he heard a hard thump on the other side of the wall. He knew that it came from Wendy’s bedroom, and for a time he listened anxiously for some other sound, a low moan, a cry of pain. Or something worse. A sound he recalled from the depths of his past, the soft, rhythmic pleading of a young woman, begging, however hopelessly, to live.

    The next morning Saunders arrived at Graves’ apartment right on time. He was dressed more formally than before, white shirt, dark blue jacket, gray tie, but his manner remained no less casual.
    “You look beat,” he commented as he placed Graves’ suitcase and typewriter in the trunk of the Volvo.
    “I didn’t sleep much,” Graves told him.
    Saunders opened the rear door and waited for Graves to get in. “Well, you can take a nap on the way to Riverwood if you want. I’ll turn on the air-conditioning, a little music. You’ll sleep like a baby, believe me.”
    But Graves had not been able to nap, and so, after they’d been on the road awhile, Saunders glanced back toward him and laughed. “We made bets, you know. The staff, I mean. On whether you’d come back. Most of us figured you wouldn’t.”
    Mention of the staff at Riverwood gave Graves a way of beginning his work.
    “The people who work at Riverwood now,” he said. “Were any of them there the summer Faye Harrison was murdered?”
    “Only Greta Klein,” Saunders answered. “She was one of the housekeepers then.”
    Graves took the small notebook he’d purchased in a drugstore the day before, flipped back its cover, and wrote her name.
    “Greta came to Riverwood right after the war,” Saunders added. “From Germany. Just sixteen and pretty as a picture.”
    Graves saw a young girl with bright blue eyes and blond hair she’d painstakingly braided, two thick braids hanging neatly down the back of her carefully pressed blouse. She held a bulky suitcase in her hand, and in his mind Graves envisioned her standing on the steps of the main house, ringing the bell, waiting apprehensively for the door to