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subtle connections—that other people miss.” She stared at him intently, and Graves could see that she was approaching the actual reason she’d asked him here to Riverwood, brought his breakfast, escorted him down to the table beside the lake for this early morning conversation. “Of course, I realize that Slovak isn’t a real person,” she said. “But
you
are a real person, Mr. Graves. And you created Slovak. You’ve gone with him through fourteen books. So you’ve lived with him for a long time. More than twenty years, to be exact. You must have something in common with him.”
    Graves considered the long comradeship he’d forged with Slovak, aging him book by book, adding bulk to his frame, aches to his joints, wrinkling his face, blurring his vision. In book six he was still recovering from a head wound suffered in book five, and he’d never lost the limp he’d gotten in a fall in volume nine. Worst of all, two decades of pursuing Kessler through fog and rain, searching for him in dank cellars and through the teeming wards of charity hospitals and workhouses, had at last produced a harsh, racking cough. But time had inflicted a greater injury still. In book twelve Slovak’s wife had died after an illness that had spanned the two previous volumes. Her death left him with an aching grief as well as a strange, inchoate need for revenge. In the thirteenth volume aspiritual malaise had begun to settle in, slowly draining away the raw vitality that had sustained him for so long. By book fourteen, the latest one to have been published, this dispiritedness had deepened, leaving Slovak glum and sleepless, a spectral figure who spent his evenings slouched in the dimly lighted corners of after-hours bars. By volume fifteen, the one to which Graves had finally come to the end just the previous day, and which had taken him the longest to write, Slovak’s inner life had begun to spiral downward at an ever-accelerating rate. Plagued by hideous visions of past crimes, his mind echoing with the screams of Kessler’s long-dead victims, Slovak’s view of life had turned so intensely grim that his character seemed poised on the brink of an absolute despair.
    “You’re like Slovak in many ways, I think.” Miss Davies watched him silently, and Graves wondered if some aspect of Slovak’s decline, the deep loneliness that gnawed at him continually, had suddenly swum into his own face. “I’ve asked you here to solve a mystery, Mr. Graves,” she said finally. “A murder mystery. You see, years ago a young girl was murdered here at Riverwood. Her name was Faye. Faye Harrison. She was my best friend.” She smiled the sort of fleeting, rueful smile Graves put on the lips of the burned-out, melancholy women he wrote about now, the ones Slovak met in smoky bars and drew beneath his arm, though with no other motive than to ease and comfort them, all desire extinguished, departed with his wife.
    “She was murdered here during an otherwise perfect summer.” Some element of that happier time appeared briefly in Miss Davies’ face, then no less quickly vanished. “Riverwood was wonderful in those days. We all lived together. My whole family. Faye’s father worked as a groundskeeper. She was eight years old when he died. After that, Mrs. Harrison and Faye stayed on here atRiverwood. Mrs. Harrison continued to work as a teacher in a local school.” Miss Davies glanced over Graves’ shoulder, fixed her attention briefly on something in the distance, then returned to him. “Faye was the closest friend I ever had, Mr. Graves. She was part of our family. Beloved. And that summer, the last one we spent together, was the best one of my life.”
    For an instant, Graves thought of his own favorite summer. He could remember how beautiful Gwen had looked when she brushed her hair in the evening and the way she’d always checked in on him before going to bed each night.
Are you all right, Paul?
He had never felt more safe, more loved,