Page 22 of Murder Will Out
Willow’s mother would never have approved of letting a dog on the bed, but then Willow’s mother would never have let a dog in the house to begin with. And frankly, after what she had learned today, emulating anything about her parents was the last thing Willow was interested in. She changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants and joined Finn.
Willow was wrung out. Her brain wanted to keep niggling away at the little pieces of information she’d picked up through the day, looking for connections and patterns, but she found her thoughts unable to move faster than a foggy crawl. She needed to sleep. If her brain would let her.
The loft at least was still familiar, still warm and welcoming and hers. The Tiffany-style bedside lamp Sue had made back when she decided to learn how to work with stained glass, the simple nightstand holding a clock, a CD player, and a beat-up paperback book—Sue loved reading and always made sure Willow never lacked for reading material. The cover of the old novel featured the stereotypical shadowy heroine reaching out across storm-swept seas, like so many of the pulpy thrillers Sue had enjoyed.
There was a padded mailer–type envelope on the bed, with Willow’s name written on it in black marker; Rina must have come upstairs at some point and left it for her. Willow opened it and, curious, pulled out a CD and an old hardbound book.
She recognized the CD immediately. Grief and love squeezed her heart; for now, she gently set it aside.
Tucked into the inside cover of the book was another of Rina’s notes:
Willow—
I found these with Sue’s things the other day; they survived all her Marie Kondo-like purges through the years. I think she held on to them and set them aside for you in the hopes of seeing you again someday soon. I’m sorry she did not get to pass them on to you herself… but, again, I know she would want you to have them.
—Rina
Rina, Willow was learning, preferred to express herself not in words but in homemade brownies and pasta, company on lonely evenings, and tokens of the past that connected them in their love of someone they had both lost.
No, Willow thought.No, Rina wouldn’t, couldn’t, have poisoned Geralt. I don’t believe it.
She examined the hardcover book, its dusty jacket showing an image of a tall house—like Cameron House, and yet not like—above storm-tossed seas;Widow’s Walk, it read in large, slanted letters across the top,by Abel R. Douglas. At the highest point of the house, the silhouette of a woman stood on the eponymous rooftop walk, gazing out at the sea with a shawl around her shoulders and wind blowing the hair back from her bowed head. She opened the book and read on the inside of the dust jacket, “When her husband perished in the early days of the Second World War, Marie thought her life’s journey was over… but in truth, it was only beginning.”
Willow knew why Sue had saved the CD, but the book was unfamiliar. Why would Sue have saved this for her? She pulled out her computer. A quick internet search showed that Abel R. Douglas had written about a dozen books;Widow’s Walk, published in 1946, seemed to be the first. All his novels were by nowout of print, though some were available from used booksellers or on eBay. She could find nothing else about the author online.
“Hmm,” she murmured to Finn. “Maybe I’ll stop by the library tomorrow and ask Catherine if she knows anything. What do you think?”
The dog’s tail gave a sleepy thump.
Willow nodded. “Agreed. I’m tired too.” She scratched his ears, grateful for his company, and together, they curled up on her old bed.
Willow reached for the CD Rina had left her; her hands shook a little as she gently removed it from its case, slipped it into the old player on the nightstand, and pressed Play.
Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor exhaled its gentle grounding theme into the loft of the cabin. It was the piece Willow had played at the end of the memorial service—Willow’s favorite piece of music in all the world, the one she always kept under her fingers, the one she turned to when she needed steadiness. It had also been Sue’s favorite, she suddenly remembered. As often as Willow had played it, how had she forgotten that her love for it probably had grown from Sue’s?
She curled up in the bed and let the gentle repetition and variation of the music wash over her, each phrase built on the same foundational footprint, ranging further and further abroad while staying rooted in its home place.
Though she never admitted it consciously even to herself, some part of Willow had always dreamed that one day Sue would wander into a church where she was practicing; she would hear her goddaughter playing Bach, they would recognize each other and reunite, and whatever had driven the yearslong abyss between them could at last be forgotten.
The overlapping phrases curled softly around Willow as she released her hold on the dream that would now never be. The tears finally came, soaking her pillow and racking her body with hardsobs. The corgi crawled up next to her, his solid warmth comforting in the chilly Maine night. She curled her arm around him and held him close. And slept.
Willow didn’t knowwhat time she woke in the night or what had awakened her. Nor could she pinpoint the source of the impulse to get out of bed and move to the loft window.
She had forgotten how dark the nights were here. There were no streetlights on Little North Island; the aura of illuminated civilization she hardly noticed in Chicago had no grip here. Even so, the nearly invisible silhouette of the Cameron mansion rose out of the swaying pines and granite shoreline. Its darkness was more than a mere absence of light; it gave weight and mass to the night, wrapping shadow around itself like a cloak.
In a quick flicker, a bright shard broke the darkness, a brief flash of light behind one of the mansion’s first-floor windows. It grew and faded, then moved to another room, as though someone was walking around the house with a flashlight. Then it disappeared, and the heavy dark fell again. Willow frowned. Who would be skulking around Cameron House with a flashlight in the middle of the night? Surely no one with any business there.
Willow watched for several minutes, but the light beams did not return. She stepped away from the window, ready to return to bed, then turned back, her eye drawn to a small dormer window on one of the upper floors. There, a golden bloom of light, gentle as a will-o’-the-wisp, ignited and seeped out into the night. This was no flashlight—it looked, if such were possible, like the glow from an old-fashioned gas lamp, filtering through the delicate lace curtain that covered the window. As Willow stared in fascination, a hand reached out and pulled the curtain aside, and a face peeked out. A woman’s face, she was sure, despite the distance.
Looking, across the darkness, directly at Willow.
Willow took several impulsive steps back, her heart pounding. When she stepped forward and dared to look again, the little dormer window was dark. But somehow this was worse. Was the face still there? Could it see her?
Had it even been there to begin with, or was she imagining things?
Willow had heard the stories, of course, of the ghosts that supposedly haunted Cameron House, scary tales children told at slumber parties or on campouts, but she had never believed them. Certainly she had never seen a ghost herself. And the intruder with the flashlight had been, she was certain, all too real. Why, then, was she so certain the face in the upper window had been someone else entirely?
She crawled back into bed; Finn writhed irritably at having to make room for her but was snoring again within seconds.
