Page 24 of Murder Will Out
Willow climbed to the second-floor landing and looked both ways down the shadowed hallways. To her right, an unbroken length of corridor led to a pair of double doors inlaid with stained glass; there, the passage angled off to the left toward the rear of the house. The hall to her left was lined with doors—bedrooms, probably, she surmised, imagining the sumptuous decorations and heavy antique furniture that would lie behind them. Willowhesitantly stepped up to one and turned the knob; this wasn’t what she was here for, but she couldn’t resist a peek. Gently, she pushed the door inward to open it.
With an abrupt jerk, the door wrenched itself out of her grip and slammed shut in her face. She gasped and jumped back, almost losing her balance and falling back down the stairs; she clutched the smooth wood of the newel post, gasping. The jeweled lights of the foyer had dimmed as if a cloud had moved over the sun outside (But there were no clouds, she thought desperately), and the spring warmth had been replaced by a bone-chilling cold.Don’t, the house seemed to be saying.Just don’t.
Adrenaline still surging, Willow thought in a panic,Oh my God what is this place I should leave I will leave right now.
Forcing her hands to release their grip, Willow began her descent to the first floor and back out of the house. She half expected some specter to explode in her face or push her down the grand staircase; instead, she heard a gentle rustling from the landing above; a single sheet of paper floated from the third floor and settled halfway down the staircase, half a flight above her. Willow craned her neck in an unsuccessful attempt to see where it had come from, then cautiously climbed the steps to where it lay.
She picked up the ordinary sheet of white paper, with a single line of type, faintly uneven, as though from a manual typewriter. Willow examined it, squinting at the words on the page.
Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall
The line of poetry was vaguely familiar, but she could not place it. Willow’s eyebrows knitted together in puzzlement.Coincidence?she thought.A little too on the nose for that.She turned the paper over to look at the back. At the bottom was one more line of text:
If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all
“All right then,” she murmured to herself or anyone else who might be listening. “Challenge accepted. Upward it is.”
Taking a deep breath, Willow started back up the staircase.
Whoever or whateverhad objected to her opening doors on the second floor seemed to have no problem with Willow opening the third-floor doors, a row of modest bedrooms with white cloths draped over what was probably fine antique furniture. But the views of Sue’s cabin were not quite right; this was not the part of the house she was looking for.
At the end of the third-floor hallway, in the largest of the house’s turrets, she found a small open parlor, its curved walls lined with bookcases all around, one of which had swung open to reveal a narrow hallway.
Willow had read that hidden corridors were often built into houses like this, ostensibly so servants could move around in seeming invisibility to those they served, but she had never seen one herself.
I wonder who moves around Cameron House without being seen these days?Willow thought, and a chill zinged up her spine.
She stepped through the concealed doorway into a dim passage, paneled in the same rich wood as the rest of the house; up ahead, a high window let in light. A small stairway, a sharp turn, and a short stretch along a brick-paved wall; she realized the shadowy journey was taking her around one of the house’s massive chimneys. Another turn, another stairway, twisting ever upward.
If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all…Willow suddenly wanted to go back, to retrieve Finn from the bright, unthreatening sitting room and head to the safety of the village, where there was sunlight and humanity and no mysterious hands slamming doors or enigmatic typed notes—she did not want to see where this passage went. But before she could turn to head back, shebecame aware of a rustling behind her, the brush of fabric against walls, near-silent footsteps. The sound of light breathing.
It was her imagination, of course. And all she had to do to prove it was turn around and confront the empty passage behind her. That would settle the question, wouldn’t it?
Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall…
She did not turn around.
Soon whatever sounds she might have heard in the passageway were overtaken by the hollow whistling of wind in the eaves; she was certainly up too high by now for the dormer window she sought. The journey was steep now. Willow could feel the stairs swaying slightly beneath her, and she tightened her grip on the handrail, forcing herself to continue.
The staircase at last emptied her onto a small, bright landing and a tiny room. A glass-paned door opened to a broad rooftop deck at the very top of the house.
She hadn’t located her lamp-lit dormer window, but she had found the widow’s walk.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The rooftop deck at the top of Cameron House was larger than she had realized, maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. Its wooden safety railing was battered and pocked, but it looked fairly solid—except for one spot where the railing had split and was awaiting repair.
Out here, the sun was shining again, as though she had stepped out of whatever peculiar microclimate Cameron House held inside itself, back into the normal world. And yet, the rooftop deck filled her with unease. It wasn’t a fear of heights—no, it was the distinct sense that she was not alone. And that the house itself had driven her up here for some purpose.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that purpose was.
Uneasiness aside, Willow couldn’t deny that the view from the roof walk of Cameron House was magical. She felt like she could see forever—the soft pink granite mountains of Acadia National Park to the northeast, the rocky shoals on the mainland, the twin lighthouses on either side of Little North, marking the passage to the ocean vastness beyond. Nearby in Little North Village, the white belfry of the Congregational church rose above the bluffoverlooking the ocean; across the island on St. Andrew’s Hill, the steeple of the smaller Catholic church rose out of the sea of evergreens. Closer still, a little boy in an old-fashioned newsboy cap ran happily through the broad lupine field beside Cameron House, a crow circling his head and cawing happily. Beyond the field, a pine-needle-covered footpath led away from Cameron House and disappeared into the edge of the forest. Willow remembered her friends’ whispers about the haunted Cameron family graveyard at the end of the path; everyone seemed to have a story about it, but no one would admit to actually seeing the graveyard or its ghosts themselves.They thought the graveyard was haunted? They should have tried the house, Willow thought wryly.As Shakespeare said, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
Not devils, though, she realized. There was no sense of evil or malice in the presences she felt here.
That didn’t make the experience any less unnerving.
Willow turned to the side of the roof facing Sue’s cabin and gazed down the shingled drop, scanning gables and turrets for the dormer room where she had seen the curious lamplight last night. She found it quickly, a little down and over, sitting just below the ridge jutting off the main wing. The little room had two windows, Willow realized—the dormer facing Sue’s cabin, and another that opened onto the roof across from the widow’s walk, almost close enough to crawl to from here. The room should have looked awkward, planted there in the asymmetrical roofline, but Willow found it charming and wanted more than ever to find it herself.
