Instruments of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

and cheese sandwich, iced tea in a Mason jar. They’d talked companionably while he ate, sitting together under the old elm, a sultry summer breeze playing through Gwen’s chestnut hair. She’d left an hour later, pausing where the woods rose up at the far end of the field, waving to him before she’d turned and entered them. After that he’d gone back to his work, carefully weeding the rows of corn and beans and green pepper until the end of day.
    By seven, with the sun lowering, he’d finished the last row, slung his hoe over his aching shoulder, and begun the long walk home. He was tired, but it was a good tiredness,one that made him feel older than his years, the “man of the house” his father had instructed him to be.
    Night had already fallen by the time he’d closed in upon the spare, isolated farmhouse he’d lived in all his life. That’s why it had struck him as so strange, the fact that as he’d drawn in upon the house, the light Gwen always kept burning for him on the back porch, a shining beacon to guide him home, had suddenly winked out.

CHAPTER 3
    A s Graves opened the cottage door he recognized that it was not a servant who’d brought breakfast to him. The woman was tall and slender, her silver hair pulled tightly back and secured by a small jeweled clasp. Her eyes were large, gray, perfectly round, and set in a face that seemed sculpted from pale stone. Only the fullness of her lips gave it a touch of sensuousness. A daub of rouge had been applied to her cheeks, but only enough to give them the faintest sense of color, hardly more noticeable than the studiedly modest white pearls in her earlobes.
    “Good morning, Mr. Graves,” she said. “I’m Allison Davies.”
    She was dressed in a style that struck Graves as elegantly informal, a loose-fitting white blouse and khaki trousers. Even so, she gave off an aura of command. Graves could hear it in her voice and see it in her manner. He was sure the confidence of wealth and power also lay like a fine varnish on the desk in her office and floatedinvisibly beneath the Tiffany lamp in her sitting room. He saw delicate lace curtains in a large dining room, heard the tinkle of French chandeliers, sniffed the faint musty odor of leather-bound books, and instantly imagined a whole family history to go with such luxurious things, a kind of Hudson Valley version of
The Magnificent Ambersons
, but tinged with that dread and sense of imminent horror that darkened Graves’ every creative thought, turned every place into some more subtle version of Malverna, every person into Kessler, Sykes, or one of the hapless strangers they’d worked their worst upon.
    “I’ve brought your breakfast,” Miss Davies added. She offered a smile, but it was a quick, tentative one, and Graves immediately suspected that despite her wealth she’d known considerable distress, borne the weight of grave responsibilities. There were certain forms of anxiety she would never know, of course, but there were others she would in no way be able to escape. One of Kessler’s idle meditations occurred to him:
Money rids the rich of none but vulgar care.
He opened the screen door.
    But she did not step inside. “I thought you might take it in the open air,” she said. “The table by the pond. I’d like to talk with you, Mr. Graves.”
    “All right,” Graves said with some relief. He’d not slept well. The rural look of the cottage too easily recalled the Carolina farmhouse he’d lived in as a boy, the final scenes he’d witnessed there. He was happy to escape it.
    They walked to a wooden picnic table beside the lake and sat down opposite each other. Graves placed his hands on its rough wooden surface, suddenly heard straps of rope slapping against its legs, and quickly drew his hands into his lap.
    “Well, I guess you’ve been wondering why I asked you here to Riverwood,” Miss Davies said as she pressed the breakfast tray toward Graves.
    Graves glanced at the food without