"Well, since Portman was in charge of the investigation of Faye Harrison"s murder, and since that investigation involved Mr. Davies, we were wondering if we should trust him."

"Trust him how?"

"Trust him to have conducted a true investigation."

"Instead of what?" Blinker"s tone had sharpened.

"Working for Mr. Davies."

"You think Portman might have covered something up about that girl"s murder? Because he worked for Mr. Davies?" Blinker"s gaze shifted from Eleanor to Graves, then back to Eleanor. "Let me tell you something about Dennis Portman, miss. He worked his a.s.s off on that case. He worked day and night on it." Like Graves, he appeared to recall Portman in his mind, see his great hulk moving down the small streets of Britanny Falls, ma.s.sive and ungainly, a giant in their placid midst. "He slept on a cot right in Sheriff Gerard"s office. For weeks. Going over everything he could find. There"s no telling how many people Dennis talked to. Walking Mohonk Trail. Floating up and down the river in that old aluminum boat of his. Talking to everybody he could find that might have seen some stranger in the woods or on the river. Somebody who might have had something to do with the murder, or seen something that had to do with it." He stopped, and for the first time seemed to weigh his words. "To tell you the truth, Dennis went a little nuts over it."

"Nuts?" Graves asked.

"A little nutty, yes." Brinker nodded. "Because he started thinking that it had to have been someone at Riverwood who killed that girl. Not a stranger. Or someone from the area. But somebody from Riverwood. Someone who lived there. He was absolutely convinced of it. That"s why he never stopped looking. Until his dying day, I mean. His son told me that. Said that to the very end, Dennis just couldn"t let it go."

Graves pulled out his notebook. "Portman had a son?"

"Oh, yeah. Charlie lives in Kingston. Got his own little private eye business. He wanted to be like his father. A big-time crime investigator. But it"s mostly divorce work, I hear. Anyway, it was Charlie who told me Dennis was still working that case up to the minute he pa.s.sed on." The old man shook his head in wonder at Portman"s legendary doggedness. "He"d gotten a little crazy by then, Charlie said. Kept going on about the rope. The one the killer used to strangle Faye."

As Graves knew, nothing in Portman"s notes had ever suggested such a focus. "Why the rope?" he asked.

Brinker shrugged, clearly at a loss to fathom the twists in Dennis Portman"s mind. "Because it was missing, I guess. That"s what Dennis always looked for in the end. Something that was missing."

CHAPTER 27.

Graves thought Kingston a drab little town of squat brick buildings, old but without the charm of age, dreary, in decline, like an elderly relative whom no one wants to visit anymore. Charlie Portman"s office was on the second floor of a dingy building on Sycamore Street. A Be Back Soon sign was posted on the door. Its cardboard clock said 10:30.

It was only a short wait, but rather than linger on the street, they walked to a small cafe a few blocks from Portman"s office and took a booth at the front.

"Just coffee," Eleanor said when the waitress stepped up.

Graves ordered the same, then peered out the smudged window of the diner onto a nearly deserted main street. "They say southern towns look like this now. Left behind." It was only an idle comment, something he"d tossed in because he could think of nothing else to say. He was not used to small talk, had little idea of how it was accomplished. It was one of the deficiencies his isolation had imposed, the sense that even with others he was alone, with no obligation to engage them, inquire into even their most superficial aspects, or to in any way reveal his own.

"You"ve never gone back for a visit?" Eleanor asked.

"No."

"There was no one you wanted to see again?"

Mrs. Flexner"s face swam into Graves" mind. Kind. Watching him with a patience he still could not fathom. "Only one person," he said before he could stop himself.

Something in Eleanor"s dark eyes quickened. "Who?"

Graves felt his silence draw in around him, but not before he said, "The woman who took me in."

"Took you in?"

Graves knew that he had no choice but to answer. "After what happened." He decided on a course of action, then told her as much as he could. "After my sister died. We"d lived together. My parents had been killed the year before. A car accident. After that I lived with my sister. When she died, a woman took me in. Mrs. Flexner. She"s the one I mean. The one I"d like to have seen again."

"And yet you never went back to see her?"

"I couldn"t. It would have been too difficult, I suppose."

He could tell that Eleanor doubted him, suspected that everything he revealed left other things hidden. "You"re like a set of Chinese boxes, Paul," she said at last. "One inside another, inside another."

Graves tried to make a joke of it. "I wish I were that mysterious."

She stared at him without smiling. "You don"t let anyone get close, do you? When someone tries to touch you, you pull away."

Graves suddenly imagined her reaching out, touching him. He felt a delicate tremor run through him, a subtle quickening that urged him to escape the enforced solitude he"d lived in for so long. It was a life that now struck him painfully as little more than a blur of eating, sleeping, writing, a noose of featureless days, each scarcely different from the one before or after. He knew it was the life Gwen"s death had fashioned, a choice he"d made to be dead as she was dead, the truth of her murder, of his appalling silence in the face of Sheriff Sloane"s relentless probing, of everything that had happened on Powder Road still hanging from him like the tatters of her b.l.o.o.d.y dress.

"Paul?"

"What?"

She nodded toward his hands.

He glanced down, saw that his fingers were trembling, and swiftly drew them into his lap, where she could not see them. "Portman may be back at his office by now," he said, getting to his feet. "We"d better go."

They paid at the register, then headed down the street toward Portman"s office, past p.a.w.nshops and used-furniture stores, the neighborhood Charlie Portman had chosen, or been forced to accept, as the location for his profession.

There was a bail bondsman on the bottom floor of the building. A small blinking neon light promised "personal service." As he glanced toward the window, Graves saw an elderly man in baggy pants and suspenders sweeping bits of paper across a plain cement floor. There was a red plastic radio on the front desk. Gwen had kept one like that in her room. Kessler had turned it on during that last hour, made her dance and sway around while he clapped and stomped his foot. He"d finally partnered her with Sykes, made him spin her wildly, dip her hard, slam her head against the floor.

Graves could feel his body tightening at the thought of it. He sank his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers and turned away, toward the door that led up the stairs to Portman"s office.

As he opened it, Eleanor took his arm firmly. "I can do this if you"re not ..."

"No, I"m fine," he interrupted curtly, then wheeled away from her and began to make his way up the stairs.

But he was not fine. He could feel the panic building, the terror that it had never really ended, that Gwen was still stumbling right and left, struggling blearily to keep time with the frantic rhythm of Kessler"s pounding feet, leaving b.l.o.o.d.y tracks across the floor as Sykes, with both hands wrapped around her wrist, flung her brutally from wall to crushing wall.

At the top of the stairs he looked back. Eleanor had made it only halfway up by then, so he knew he"d bounded up them furiously, taken them two at a time, the way Slovak always did when Kessler seemed almost within his grasp.

Even so, what she said when she reached him at the top of the stairs surprised him.

"I don"t know what"s chasing you, Paul." Her tone was more tender than any she had ever used with him, a voice more gentle than any he had heard since his sister"s death. "But I think you should face it very soon. Because it"s gaining fast."

With that she stepped past him, opened the door to Charlie Portman"s office, and walked inside.

"May I help you?" a man asked, blinking rapidly, so that Graves suspected he"d been snoozing at his desk as Eleanor burst in. He got to his feet ponderously. "Charlie Portman," he said.

Watching as he offered Eleanor his hand, Graves was struck by how closely the younger Portman resembled his dead father. He had the same slack jaws and woeful, hangdog look, the same shrunken, melancholy eyes. There was even a clear plastic rainslick on a rack behind his desk.

"Belonged to my dad," Portman said when he noticed Graves staring at it. He smiled and waved his hand, indicating the general disarray of the room, pages from the local newspaper scattered here and there, along with empty soda cans, one or two tin ashtrays, and a few back issues of a police equipment magazine. "Sorry about the mess. I"ve never quite gotten into the habit of picking up after myself."

He looked to be in his early sixties, and Graves instantly conjured up the story of a young man who"d wanted desperately to be like his father, a noted figure in the State Police, but who"d possessed none of his father"s gifts, and so had ended up with a dull career of petty cases, a life like the furniture in his office, second-rate and badly used.

"Now, what can I do for you?" Portman eased himself back into the chair behind his desk. "That is, a.s.suming it"s me you"re looking for."

"I"m Paul Graves. This is Eleanor Stern. We"re working on a murder case your father investigated years ago."

Portman looked at them knowingly. "I"ll bet you mean the one at Riverwood. That girl they found in the woods. Faye Harrison."

"That"s right," Graves said.

Eleanor went directly to the issue. "Your father met with Warren Davies the day Faye disappeared. They spent several hours together. Do you know why?"

It was obvious that nothing in what Eleanor had just said was news to Charlie Portman. "Yeah, Dad mentioned that meeting. He said Mr. Davies suspected that someone at Riverwood had been going through his papers. Looking for something. They went over all the possibilities, the people who might be doing it. Finally, Mr. Davies decided it was most likely his son. Eddie. They"d been having a lot of trouble lately. Mr. Davies asked Dad to look into it. To keep tabs on the kid. Find out where he went when he wasn"t at Riverwood. Who his friends were. Stuff like that. Basically, he wanted to know if the boy was up to something."

"Is that the sort of job your father would have taken?" Eleanor asked.

"If he"d had the time, he"d probably have done a little work on it. But a few days later that girl turned up dead in the woods. After that Dad had his hands full with that case. It looks to me like you two have had your hands full with it too." Portman smiled cheerfully, the pose of a village storyteller. "Well, the way it went was this. At first Dad thought it was a guy who"d worked on the estate. Then he thought it was probably somebody the girl knew. Somebody from town or from her school. A boyfriend. Something like that. When that didn"t go anywhere, he figured it was a random thing. The girl went for a walk in the woods and somebody just swept in out of nowhere and killed her. You know, for no reason ... except meanness."

In his mind Graves saw Kessler circle his sister, the rope dangling loosely in his hands, Gwen"s eyes lost in an eerie acceptance as he knotted one end in a hangman"s noose, then tossed the other over the beam. She had been staring at Kessler with a kind of distant confusion by the time he"d finished. In those final moments, had she been working to understand how a perfect stranger could hate her so?

"That"s what Dad figured until almost the very end," Portman added.

Eleanor"s mind seized on the operative word. "Almost?"

"Almost, yes," Portman said. "He was going through his files. Reviewing his old cases. Sort of getting things in order before he died. When he got to the file on the Riverwood murder, he said, "It had to have been a stranger, because everyone at Riverwood was-" And that"s where he stopped. Right there. Without finishing the sentence. I could tell something had hit him. He started looking through all the stuff he"d put together during the investigation. He said, "The rope. Who took the d.a.m.n rope?" I could tell he was digging for something, but I didn"t know what it was. He finally found it, though. A picture. Just one picture. He grabbed it from a pile of pictures and started looking at it real close. He didn"t say anything for a long time. He just kept staring at the picture. Finally, he said, "She went into the woods." It was a photograph of the Harrison girl, Faye. She was lying on the ground. In the cave, where they found her. Dad kept staring at it. Like he spotted something in it. Like he was turning it over in his mind." Charlie Portman seemed to see his father in that strange pose, feeble, dying, his hands clutching a faded photograph. ""She went into the woods, Charlie," he told me. "Alone.""

"What did he mean by that?" Graves asked.

"d.a.m.ned if I know. I asked him, but he didn"t answer me. He just kept plowing through the stuff on the case. I could tell he wanted to be alone. So I just left him to his work.

"So you have no idea what your father meant?" Eleanor asked.

"No. But I got the feeling he figured that girl had gone into the woods for some specific reason. Like maybe she was looking for something. Or was planning to meet somebody there. Dad never said anything else. Just "She went into the woods." It was the last thing he said before I left him to his work. He just said, "She went into the woods. Alone.""

"But everyone knew Faye went into the woods alone." Eleanor"s face was troubled. "People saw her go. Lots of people. There was never any mystery about that."

"No, there wasn"t," Portman agreed easily. "That"s why it seemed so odd to me. The way Dad looked when I found him the next morning." Graves could tell that a vision had surfaced in Portman"s mind. "He was sitting up in bed. He had that picture in his hand. The one I told you about. The dead girl. But he didn"t look the way he"d looked the last time I"d seen him. So baffled by everything. He looked at peace. Like he"d found his answer at last. Figured it out. Knew who"d taken the rope. Knew who"d killed Faye." A mournful expression settled upon the aging man"s features. "And I would have asked him who he thought it was. But he was dead."

CHAPTER 28.

It was a ten-minute drive from Charlie Portman"s office to his home outside Kingston. Portman had agreed to take them there so that they could look at the files and pictures his father had been studying the night he died.

The house was modest, but Portman seemed pleased with it. He stood proudly in the unpaved driveway. "Well, this is it," he said, gesturing toward the house. "Dad lived here with me during his last few weeks. I fixed up one of the bedrooms, put in a ceiling fan, that sort of thing. I think he liked it okay."

Once inside the house, Portman led Graves and Eleanor up a staircase and into the tiny room where Dennis Portman had died.

"Dad pa.s.sed away almost thirty years ago." Portman pointed to the narrow wooden bed at the end of the room. "I found him right there, still sitting up. Pictures and papers scattered all around him. The place is pretty much the way it was when he died. An old bachelor like me, I never had any reason to fix it up. No kids or anything." He indicated two gray metal cabinets that stood on either side of the window on the other side of the room. "I piled all Dad"s old files in those cabinets. There"s no order to it, though, so you"ll just have to plow through everything. You can stay as long as you like. I"ll be downstairs, making lunch. After that I"ll take a snooze in the hammock. Either way, I"ll be around if you need anything."

They went to work immediately after Portman left them, Graves at one cabinet, Eleanor at the other, both carefully sifting through what turned out to be the macabre residue of Dennis Portman"s professional life. Photographs of bodies sprawled across floors, streets, beds, floating languidly in ponds, streams, rivers. Bodies that had been shot, stabbed, beaten, then left in their awesome disarray.

At one photograph, Graves suddenly stopped. The picture showed a teenage girl, naked, strapped in a wooden chair, a wide piece of black tape slapped across her mouth. Her hands were roped together at the wrists, but she"d lifted her arms upward pleadingly, her fingers spread, as if begging that her killer spare her this last indignity, the captured image of her agony Graves now held in his hand.

"The things Portman saw," Eleanor said softly as she moved up beside him.

Graves made no response. He felt his eyes lock on the picture, his body tighten, then grow limp, then tighten again, as if he were caught in a seizure. He turned the picture over, read the note Portman had written in his cramped script. Mary Louise Hagan, murdered January 7, "61-Unsolved. Mary Louise Hagan, murdered January 7, "61-Unsolved. Even without turning back to the picture, he knew the unspeakable suffering it portrayed. Now the details emerged, and he could see all that had been done to Mary Hagan, the scratches on her face, the burns on her inner arms and thighs, the small nest of dark hair that had been torn from her head and now lay curled around one leg of the chair. He heard her tormentor"s voice, imagined what he"d said at the moment he"d taken this picture, the delight with which he"d said it, Even without turning back to the picture, he knew the unspeakable suffering it portrayed. Now the details emerged, and he could see all that had been done to Mary Hagan, the scratches on her face, the burns on her inner arms and thighs, the small nest of dark hair that had been torn from her head and now lay curled around one leg of the chair. He heard her tormentor"s voice, imagined what he"d said at the moment he"d taken this picture, the delight with which he"d said it, Pretty, pretty. Once so pretty. Pretty, pretty. Once so pretty.

The name came from his mouth in a broken whisper: "Kessler."

"What?" Eleanor said.

She watched him with a fierce insistence, and he knew that he had to give her some part of his story. "The girl in this picture. It reminds me of my sister," he said quietly. He could see a hundred questions in Eleanor"s eyes. "She didn"t just die. Not like I said before. She was murdered. Tortured ... When I was thirteen. The man who did it was never caught." He let his eyes settle once again on the photograph. "For a moment I wondered if perhaps he"d done this too."

Eleanor glanced at the photograph, then back at Graves. "You said, "Kessler.""

"Yes."

"You use that name for the villain in your books?"

"That"s right."

"Is that actually the name of the man who killed your sister?"

"Yes," Graves said, knowing that had he uttered the same name many years before, he"d have sent Sheriff Sloane in pursuit of the old black car with the Ohio plates he"d watched disappear into a bright summer dawn.

"I"m sorry," Eleanor said. "About your sister."

She seemed to sense that she should not pursue the matter further, that if she did, Graves would retreat into silence. And so she said nothing else, but only stepped away, returned to the cabinet, and began looking through the papers inside it. Almost half an hour had pa.s.sed before she spoke again.

"Here it is," she said. From the bottom drawer she lifted a thick manila file. Graves could see the single word Portman had written in tight black letters across the front of the envelope: Riverwood. Riverwood.

Unlike the carefully arranged material inside Portman"s official Murder Book, the papers and photographs he"d collected for his own use were in no specific order.

The report he"d written on Mona Flagg in 1946 lay amid a scattering of pictures that in themselves seemed to bear no relation to the murder of Faye Harrison. It consisted of nine single-s.p.a.ced typewritten pages, and it was packed with details. Portman had gathered what amounted to a full criminal history of the Flagg family, beginning with Angus Flagg, a rumrunner who"d ferried illegal liquor down the Hudson to a thirsty Manhattan during Prohibition. Angus" son, Lemuel, had continued the family business after Angus" death in 1931, but with the end of Prohibition a year later he"d turned to more sophisticated crimes. He"d sold bogus stocks and real estate, carried out various forms of insurance fraud, and had even been implicated in a foiled plot to kidnap the teenage son of a wealthy industrialist whose summer home was only fifty miles from Riverwood.

Elmira Flagg, Lemuel"s wife, had kept herself busy as well. According to Portman"s report, she"d set up illegal card games, fenced stolen goods, and run a string of flophouses that were little more than low-rent brothels. The two had met in 1924 and married four years later. Elmira had given birth to her first child, a son named Roy, seven months before the wedding. Her daughter, Mona, had arrived four months after it.

Roy had followed in his parents" footsteps. Though not for long. At twenty-three he"d been killed in a bank heist in Providence, Rhode Island. A third child, another boy, had drowned under what Portman described as "mysterious circ.u.mstances" at the age of ten. A second daughter, named Augusta, had apparently run away from home at fourteen, and after that simply vanished.

As for Mona, she had remained with the family, though from all Portman could find out, she"d managed to stay clear of most of its illegal activities. She"d been arrested for shoplifting at eight, dragged before a juvenile court judge, read a stern warning, and set free. As far as Portman had been able to determine, she had never been arrested again, though the old detective bluntly declared that it was "unlikely that she had never been recruited to work in one or another of her family"s many illegal schemes."

But if, as a teenage girl, Mona had partic.i.p.ated in various criminal conspiracies, such partic.i.p.ation had ended abruptly when, as a young woman, she"d suddenly packed up and moved to Boston. Once there, she"d taken a room in a "female residence hall" and enrolled in a nursing school. Two months later, in June 1946, she met Edward Davies.