He"d been asleep for nearly an hour when the phone rang. He rolled over and plucked the receiver from its cradle.

"h.e.l.lo."

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Graves? Allison Davies. I hope I"m not disturbing you, but I wanted to know if you"d looked at the photographs I sent you."

"Yes, I did."

"And have you reached a decision about coming to Riverwood?"

Graves realized that, in fact, he had had made his decision, that while he"d slept, his imagination had played a scene for him, one that existed in none of his books. In the scene, Slovak crawls through a dank, dripping tunnel to find the decomposed body of a little girl. Even as he crawls, he knows that her body has been decaying for days, that nothing is left but slime and maggots. And yet Slovak goes on, dragging himself through the stinking muck because he knows that this pile of rotten flesh was once a blue-eyed child, one whose mother still waits for him to bring her murdered daughter home. made his decision, that while he"d slept, his imagination had played a scene for him, one that existed in none of his books. In the scene, Slovak crawls through a dank, dripping tunnel to find the decomposed body of a little girl. Even as he crawls, he knows that her body has been decaying for days, that nothing is left but slime and maggots. And yet Slovak goes on, dragging himself through the stinking muck because he knows that this pile of rotten flesh was once a blue-eyed child, one whose mother still waits for him to bring her murdered daughter home.

"Mr. Graves?"

"Yes, I"m here," Graves answered. In his mind"s eye he could see the photographs Miss Davies had sent him. They were still spread across the table in the adjoining room, Mrs. Harrison"s letter resting forlornly in their midst.

"Well, will you do it, then?"

He heard Slovak whisper in his ear. Sometimes you must do a thing because your own darkness will overwhelm you if you don"t. Sometimes you must do a thing because your own darkness will overwhelm you if you don"t.

It was a line he"d written years before, written in his first book. But now it seemed like nothing less than the old detective"s solemn admonition, the dying wish of someone Graves had long ago created and now come to revere, his weary, wasted questioner of Cain.

"Will you come to Riverwood?" Miss Davies asked.

He gave his answer achingly, like someone beaten into submission, the word dropping from his mouth like a broken tooth.

"Yes."

PART TWO

Oh, please, please, please. .-Paul Graves, Uncommon Prayer

CHAPTER 7.

The next morning Graves did his laundry, threw away the few perishables that had acc.u.mulated in his refrigerator, then arranged for Wendy, the young woman who lived next door, to pick up any mail he might receive while at Riverwood. She hadn"t bothered to look through the peephole before she"d opened it, and for a long time after he returned to his own apartment, Graves found himself considering the things that might have been done to her had some other man been at the door, pressed his dusty boot against it, then pushed it open. He"d even briefly envisioned Sykes at work while Kessler sat nearby, barking orders-Use that. Stick it there-delighted by the horrors he could instruct another to perform.

To escape the mood such visions called up, Graves busied himself with the last of his ch.o.r.es, then packed a single suitcase-the same one he"d brought from North Carolina over twenty years before-and placed it beside the door. He put his typewriter in its carrying case and placed it beside the suitcase. That was it. There was nothing more to do. No plants to water. No animals to care for. No friends to notify of his move to Riverwood. He had nothing to nurture, 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 acc.u.mulation of bills and third-cla.s.s 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, repet.i.tive, 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"s evil, 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 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 the two 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 pa.s.sed, 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 long blond hair and skin so luminous, it seemed almost to brighten the shadowy interior of the cave where Greta Klein crouched.

"You"ll be the first one at Riverwood," Saunders said as the two of them sped along the New York State Thruway a few minutes later. "The other guest for the summer won"t arrive until this evening."

Graves recalled the many empty cottages he"d noticed on his first visit to Riverwood. "There"s only one other guest?"

"There"re usually more. But Miss Davies wanted to keep things kinda quiet at Riverwood this summer. So it"ll only be you and the other guest. Eleanor Stern. Ever heard of her?"

Graves shook his head.

"Well, there"ll be a dinner in the main house tonight," Saunders said. "You can meet her then."

Saunders said little else during the rest of the trip, and so Graves took the time to think silently about the task before him. He glanced down at his notebook, at the single name he"d written there. Greta Klein. Greta Klein. He knew that before the summer ended a great many more names would be added to it, a gallery of suspects, and that if he were successful, one of them would finally emerge from the rest, have both the motive and the means to kill a teenage girl. He knew that before the summer ended a great many more names would be added to it, a gallery of suspects, and that if he were successful, one of them would finally emerge from the rest, have both the motive and the means to kill a teenage girl.

"Miss Davies asked me to bring you directly to the main house." Saunders brought the car to a halt before the long flight of stairs that led to the main house. "I"ll take your things to the cottage."

"Thank you," Graves told him, then headed up the stairs. A woman in a black dress with a wide white collar opened the door when he rang the bell.

"Ah, you must be Mr. Graves." She spoke in a friendly, welcoming tone. "Miss Davies said for me to tell you that she"d be down shortly." With that, she escorted him to a set of double doors and opened them. "You can wait in here."

Graves stepped into a wood-paneled room with high windows through which shafts of sunlight fell over a parquet floor dotted here and there with Oriental carpets. Rows of bookshelves stood along the wall to his right, a vast array of books arranged behind tall gla.s.s doors. There were leather-bound editions of d.i.c.kens and Trollope, but as he strolled down the line of shelves, Graves saw no books dated further back than the nineteenth century. Instead, there was a large collection of more modern works. First editions, Graves a.s.sumed, of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, all in their original dust jackets, protected by plastic covers.

"My father"s pa.s.sion."

Allison Davies stood at the entrance of the room. She wore a loose-fitting white dress; her silver hair was tucked neatly beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat. In that pose she looked like an old movie star, composed, impeccable. An unmistakable elegance clung to her.

"American first editions mostly," she added, closing the door behind her. "He was a businessman, as you may know. My father. Too busy to read as much as he wished. But he loved to collect books." She came forward gracefully. "I wanted to show you the room where I"ve kept everything that pertains to Faye"s murder. You"ll have a key to it. No one else will. You can use the room as your private study. Our other guest will use the library." She added nothing else, but turned abruptly and led Graves to a door at the back of the room, where he waited until she"d unlocked it.

"I think you"ll find it a good place to work," she said as she waved him into the adjoining room. "Very private. A good place to think."

The room was adequate but not at all grand, the sort of s.p.a.ce a powerful person might a.s.sign to a private secretary. It was furnished with a desk, reading lamp, bookshelves, mostly empty, and a small file cabinet, which, as Miss Davies quickly demonstrated by pulling out its top drawer, was nearly full of neatly arranged files and folders.

"Everything having to do with Faye"s murder is in this drawer," she told him. "All the original reports are here, the police investigation, everything that could be located, even the newspaper clippings from the time. I"ve also instructed Saunders to be available for interviews. Saunders can tell you a great deal about Riverwood. He"s sort of our unofficial historian."

Graves decided to mention the only name he"d come upon so far, look for a response as he knew Slovak would. "Saunders mentioned a young girl who came to Riverwood just after the war. Greta Klein. She was here the summer of the murder."

"She"s still here," Miss Davies said. "Unfortunately, Greta hasn"t been in good health for the last several years. She stays in her room most of the time. I think Saunders is probably a considerably better source. He remembers everything. And as you"ve probably garnered, he doesn"t mind talking."

A second name occurred to him. "What about Mrs. Harrison? Faye"s mother. Would she talk to me?"

"I hadn"t thought of that," Miss Davies said. "But I suppose Mrs. Harrison might be helpful to you. She lives at a place called The Waves. It"s a home for elderly people just outside Britanny Falls. I can arrange for you to meet her, of course. As early as this afternoon, if you like."

Graves nodded, his eyes drifting over the top of the desk, where a green blotter had been placed, along with a stack of notepads and a tray of fine-point pens. But it was something other than these that drew his attention-a small silver frame that held a photograph of Faye Harrison.

"Faye was only thirteen when I took this," Miss Davies said as she picked up the photograph and handed it to him. "I thought you might glance up from your desk from time to time and see how lovely she was." She smiled slightly. "It"s something Slovak does, isn"t it? He studies pictures of the victims, imagines the lives they might have had."

This was true enough, but Graves knew that there was a rather serious problem with the way Slovak imagined the abruptly shortened lives of Kessler"s victims. In Slovak"s mind, the unjustly dead would always have had good lives, happy, fulfilled, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with achievement. Unlike real life, murder never saved them from something even worse.

"I sometimes think of what she lost," Miss Davies added. "The future she would have had. I suppose one always does that. It"s part of the curse, don"t you think? This sense of what might have been."

Graves glanced back down to the photograph. "In the pictures you sent me in New York, one of them is of Faye in front of a big rock. Was that Indian Rock, the place you thought of as a secret place?"

"Yes, it was," Miss Davies answered. "We"d gone for a walk in the woods that day." She drew the picture from Graves" hand and stared at it. "Faye was quite wise. Beyond her years. She understood life better than anyone I"ve met since." She returned the photograph to the desk, then looked at Graves pointedly. "There was nothing naive about Faye."

Graves" question came spontaneously, something thrown up by his own experience. "Then why would she have gone into the woods alone?"

"I wish she hadn"t done that," Miss Davies said brusquely. She seemed reluctant to go on, but forced herself to do so. "Faye came to the house that morning. The last one. She came to the front door. I"d been sitting in the dining room, when I heard my father and my brother talking in the foyer. I walked to the entrance of the dining room. You can see the front door from there. That"s when I saw Faye. Through that window by the door. She was wearing her blue dress. The one I"d given her for her birthday the year before. She saw me too. I know she did, because she gave a little nod. I think perhaps she wanted me to meet her at Indian Rock." She shook her head. "I"ve often wondered what might have happened if I"d gone to the door. Or stepped outside to meet her. We might have gone into the woods together. Up to Indian Rock. The two of us. I might have saved her life."

"Or been murdered with her," Graves said. He felt the bony hand on his shoulder, heard the voice, hard, raspy, What you doing here, boy? What you doing here, boy? "It"s as easy for two people to be at the wrong place as it is for one." "It"s as easy for two people to be at the wrong place as it is for one."

She studied him intently. "You"re a true Manichean, Mr. Graves. You believe that the world is divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil, and that in the end, it"s the evil forces that always win."

Graves said nothing. It was not a charge he could deny.

"But the fact is, evil men are not always as strong and clever as the villain in your books," Miss Davies told him. "I can a.s.sure you that Jake Mosley was neither strong nor clever. He was just a workman. Ordinary."

"Did Faye know him?"

"Only by sight. The second cottage was being built that summer. Mosley was one of the workmen my father hired for the job. Faye didn"t know him, but he alarmed her."

"Alarmed her?"

"She said she didn"t like the way he stared at her. She thought he was creepy, and when he stared at her she said she felt like he was ... touching her with his eyes."

Graves glanced toward the window, the mouth of the trail Faye had taken to her death. He saw a hand reach out, jerk her around. The fear was in her eyes, stark and terrible, as it had been in Gwen"s, the horror of her fate already fixed within them, that she was now the stuff of sport, would live only as long as her agony delighted.

When he turned back toward Miss Davies, he saw that she was peering at him darkly.

"You"re always imagining things, aren"t you?" she asked. "Terrible things." She glanced away suddenly, avoiding Graves" eyes, as if through them she"d glimpsed some hidden chamber of his mind. "Well, I"ll leave you to your work," she said. She started to leave, reached the door, then turned back. The look on her face was one Graves had seen before. In movies. In life. The moment when the victim presses herself against the door, listens for the footsteps of the intruder.

CHAPTER 8.

Graves spent the next minutes trying to adapt himself to his new surroundings, moving around the room slowly, like a cat in an unfamiliar dwelling, wary and uncertain. He"d done the same thing the first night he"d spent at Mrs. Flexner"s house. He"d been taken there after Gwen"s murder, Mrs. Flexner arranging the small bedroom just across the hall from her own. He"d tried to sleep, huddled beneath the covers despite the sweltering summer air, but the dread had finally urged him out of bed and into the house, where he"d stalked from room to room, wondering if he was still there somewhere, watching him behind the window or the drawn curtain, crouching inside a closet, waiting to leap out. He"d made it to the kitchen by the time Mrs. Flexner heard him, turned on the light, and found him standing by the sink, his body draped in one of her husband"s white nightshirts, the knife in his hand, something he"d seized for his own protection and intended to take into his bed. She"d taken the knife from him gently, placed it on the old wooden cutting board, and escorted him back to his room. "Keep the light on in here if you want to, Paul," she told him.

And he had.

For fourteen months.