Page 13 of Murder Will Out
He rounded the corner and out of sight.
Audra limped back and shook her head. “Bloody heels. Turned my ankle. He’s gone to the mansion. God knows why.” She looked helplessly at Naomi. “He… still didn’t look good. But he swore if we sent anyone after him, he’ll—let’s see—” She thought a minute and nodded. “Fire me, divorce you, and sue whoever sets foot on ‘his’ property.”
Oh, for God’s sake, Willow thought. She turned to Naomi, who looked ready to burst into tears, and said, “I’ll go. The mansion is on my way back to the cabin, and he asked me to come by after the reception, anyway. I can text you and let you know—hang on, my phone battery is dead.” She frowned and shook it.
The dark-haired assistant nodded. “Happens to all of us, especially when we are moving around; battery drain is terrible around here. Turn off your Wi-Fi when you’re not someplace you’ll be using it, or it constantly pings back and forth and runs you down.” She jotted down a pair of numbers on a card and handed it to Willow. “Here, you can reach out once you’re charged again.”
“Great, thank you.” Willow reached out and squeezed Naomi’s hand. “I’m sure he’s fine. And”—she gave a small, sad smile—“thank you for the wine.”
Naomi nodded and smiled back, understanding. “Thank you too.” She shifted to include Audra in the circle. “We cast-out women need to stick together, I guess.”
“We do.” Willow looked back into the restaurant, where Rina sat in the corner booth with Diana, Mac, and the red-haired woman gathered around her in solidarity and sympathy. And love—the love was obvious.
Willow remembered that kind of love. But it had been a long time.
CHAPTER NINE
Willow hurried away from the restaurant to the shore path, automatically picking up Geralt’s discarded bottle from the grass and shoving it into her pack with her organ shoes and Bach scores. She scanned the path and the seashore along the way, praying she would not see the golf cart on its side in a ditch or a set of tracks veering off into the ocean. She rounded the bend and turned onto the Cameron House front walk, past the pair of stone lions that had stood guard there as long as she could remember.
She was first relieved to see Geralt’s cart parked—in a loose definition of the term—beside the front steps. But her heart lurched when she realized he was still seated, unmoving, in the front seat of the cart.
“Mr. Talbot?” she called anxiously, breaking into a run. “Mr. Talbot, please, are you all right?”
After an agonizing moment, his head turned; her heart sighed with relief at the sight of his sharp profile and hawklike nose silhouetted in the late-afternoon light. “For God’s sake, Sue’s girl, don’t tell me you’ve bought into the ‘poor, aging, decrepit old man at death’s door’ garbage my wife is pushing. I’m fine.”
Regaining her calm, at least outwardly, Willow raised an eyebrow. “Your parking job would suggest otherwise.”
He scowled. “It’ll be my lawn soon enough; I’ll drive all over it if I want to.” His gaze narrowed. “Are you here because my wife and her slow-moving assistant suckered you into it, or did you come for the tour I promised?”
Willow regarded him carefully. His eyes were as sharp as ever, but the knuckles clutching the steering wheel were white, and his breathing seemed fast and labored. She replied, “I’m here for the tour, of course. If you’re up for it.” At the very least, she thought, maybe she could get him out of the cart and into the house.
He nodded. “You’re lying, but I’ll let it pass.” He carefully released his fingers from the wheel, climbed out of the cart, and walked with as much steadiness as he could muster to the deeply sunken post at the base of the stairs, from which two weathered wooden signs hung, one above the other. The first, in an old-fashioned flowery font, proclaimed the house to be:
The Cameron Seaside Cottage Historical Site
Beneath the sign was another, smaller:
Home of the North Islands Historical Society
Geralt glared back at Willow. “If you’re satisfied that I am not at death’s door, perhaps you would help an old man up the stairs?”
Without comment, Willow walked up beside him and offered her arm, which he grudgingly took, and the two stepped into Cameron House.
Geralt hated thatthe short walk into the entry hall had exhausted him this much, hated the indignity of getting old. Mustering whatremained of his strength and composure, he made his way to one of the high-backed foyer chairs and sat. Sunlight from the stained glass scattered fragments of color all around, illuminating his translucent pallor and refracting jittery shards of light from the glass knob of the cane in his trembling hand.
He looked up, irritated, at the solemn young woman watching him. “I presume my wife and her boring little assistant will be waiting for your update that I’m not dead. Satisfied?” he rasped; as hard as he tried to summon his usual curmudgeonly sharpness, his voice came out sounding petulant and weak. And elderly. And sick.
He refused to be elderly. And curse it all, he was not sick.
Willow managed a smile that did not quite hide her worry. He hated the worry too; it told him he did indeed look as bad as he felt, and he felt horrible.
“They were worried, that’s all. And they knew you didn’t want them coming after you, so I volunteered.”
“I’m eighty-three years old; I’m not going to run to the doctor every time I have some little twinge.”
“You know what people who live to eighty-five and ninety have in common?” she retorted. “When something’s wrong at eighty-three, they go to the doctor. And they get to live longer.”
“The young woman makes a sound case, you know,” came a mild voice from the top of the stairs.
