Instruments of Night by Thomas H. Cook

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.
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 glass doors. Therewere leather-bound editions of Dickens 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 assumed, of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, all in their original dust jackets, protected by plastic covers.
    “My father’s passion.”
    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 space a powerful person might assign 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