Free Instruments of Night by Thomas H. Cook Page B

open.
    “She’d been through a lot, Greta had,” Saunders went on. “She was a refugee.” His eyes swept over to Graves. “She’d been in one of the camps, you know.”
    Graves’ imagination immediately revised the story. Now Greta was dark, her hair straight and raven black. The white blouse was gone, along with the shiny black shoes. Instead, she was dressed in the tattered makeshift clothes of a Jewish refugee.
    “I remember the day she arrived.” Saunders spoke so freely, with so little need of prompting, Graves felt sure he’d been instructed to do just that. “The whole family met her at the door. I took her upstairs and showed her the room we’d gotten ready for her.”
    Graves saw a youthful Frank Saunders take Greta’s suitcase and guide the girl up the long flight of stairs that led to her tiny room, Warren Davies watching them from the foyer, the rest of his family gathered around him, all staring silently at the strange young creature who’d just come into their midst.
    “Do you know how she happened to come to Riverwood?” Graves asked.
    The question appeared to derail the progress of Saunders narrative, add a curve to the road. “No, not really,” he replied. “I guess she had some sort of connection to Mr. Davies. She had a picture of him. I remember that. She kept it in her room. On a little table by her bed.”
    Graves instantly envisioned the photograph, Mr. Davies in an elegantly tailored suit.
    “It was the only picture she had,” Saunders went on. “All her other pictures were destroyed, Greta told me. Gone up in smoke, she said. Like her mother, I guess. In the camp.”
    In his mind Graves saw Greta’s mother huddled before a brick wall, naked, shivering. A Polish snow fell all around her, blanketing the burial pits. A river ran sluggishly in the background, its surface coated with a film of gray ash.
    “Anyway, Greta was all alone in the world. I felt sorry for her. We all did. She tried hard to be accepted. She wanted to be the family favorite, you might say. But it never worked. That place was already taken.”
    “By whom?”
    “Faye Harrison,” Saunders replied. “Everybody loved Faye.”
    The unexpected mention of Faye Harrison in connection with Greta Klein instantly generated a story in Graves’ mind. He envisioned Greta as she began to fashion a new life for herself at Riverwood. Alone, her family dead, he saw Greta as she made her first halting efforts to be accepted at Riverwood, cautiously approaching each member of the Davies family, but particularly Allison, a girl her own age and in whom she hoped to find not just a friend, but perhaps a sister. For a while it had seemed possible, and as he continued to imagine it, Graves saw thetwo girls together, Greta speaking haltingly in her heavily accented English, Allison listening quietly, the vastly privileged life of the one embracing the unspeakably tragic life of the other, their friendship steadily growing deeper and more intimate as the weeks passed, Allison now moving toward the idea that Greta should not live at Riverwood as a servant, but as a full-fledged member of the Davies family, the sister she had always wanted and never had.
    And so it might have happened, Graves thought, had another girl not suddenly emerged from the shadows. Not a servant, but the daughter of a servant, a beautiful girl with shimmering blond hair, who spoke without an accent, an all-American girl who had never felt history roll over her like a cold black wave. Given her own terrible background, the depth of her need, how could Greta Klein not have hated Faye Harrison? How could she not have wanted her dead?
    To these questions regarding Greta Klein, Graves now added a third. Where had Greta been on the afternoon of August 27, 1946, when Faye Harrison was murdered? The very question threw up the single, chilling image of a dark, lonely teenager lurking in the forest’s depths, waiting silently as a girl came toward her, blue-eyed, with