Page 44 of Murder Will Out
Finn, his eyes not leaving hers, was inching backward down the stairs.What are you waiting for?he seemed to be asking.Let’s move!Okay, she concluded. Slightly better terrible odds than the alternatives.Two seconds…
Her heart nearly stopped when she saw the shadowy figure—had it been there all along, or had it just appeared?—standing in the hallway on the other side of the bedchamber door, not four feet from Willow, exhaling an icy chill across the space between them. One dark hand, a wraithlike grasp of negative space, reached out to the section of wall and pressed one of the wainscoted squares; a small section of wall shifted, opening inward to reveal a narrow passageway, a pitch-black opening, offering no clue what might be beyond it. Then the figure was gone.
Three seconds…She’d waited too long; now it was a choice between certain capture, or a featureless black tunnel to God knew where?Not much of a choice, she thought.But what are the alternatives?Willow ducked quickly across the doorway into the black hole of the secret passage; she bit back a scream when the same icy hand reached over her shoulder from behind, so cold she could feel the chill emanating off it, to press a spot on the wall to the right of the door.
The panel began its silent slide shut.
Three and a half seconds…
In a burst of panic, Willow realized Finn had not followed her—but it was too late to do anything to get to him. As the intruder flung the bedroom door open and burst into the hallway, Finn uttered a single sharp bark and ran down the stairs for the door. With a muttered curse, the black-clad figure followed, just as the wall panel slid shut with a softclick.
Finn!Willow thought in panic, listening to the blend of canine and human footsteps descending the stairway; then she remembered to pause.Keep still, she told herself again.Breathe. Breathe until your mind starts working again.
The corgi knew more about this house than any human, and Diana had mentioned his escape-artist tendencies before; Finn would be fine. She hoped.Please, Finn, be as smart as I hope you are, she begged silently.
Willow turned on her flashlight. She was alone again, at least as far as she could tell; in Cameron House, one could never be sure. Another passageway lay before her, narrow and low, warm wood and plastered walls, the flashlight creating more shadows than it dispelled. She haltingly started forward, then paused when she heard the pad of a shoeless footstep behind her, felt a burst of icy air on the back of her neck.
Not alone, after all; Willow might have left the living intruder behind, but someone or something else was in this passageway with her. Her heart thudded violently in her chest; she moved as quickly as she could along the twisting passage, as though by doing so she could escape the unseen presence behind her. Gradually, light seeped into the little corridor from up ahead; the pitch-black dark softened to shadows until Willow found she no longer needed the flashlight. A final turn, a short staircase…
She stood inside a bedroom, the smallest she had yet found in the grand old house. Its shape was irregular, tucked into the higher levels of the mansion; it stood neither on the third floor nor in the attic proper, as though someone had decided one dayto carve a piece out of the roof of Cameron House and drop this cozy chamber into the space left behind. And itwascozy—the chill had left the air, and whatever terrifying presence had prickled the hair on Willow’s neck and made her heart beat faster seemed to have left her for now.
A small dormer with a lace-curtained window faced southeast; another, at a ninety-degree angle from the first, faced up the roof to the widow’s walk. Together, the two windows formed a nook with a bench-like window seat. Willow walked across to it and saw Sue’s cabin framed in the wavy glass. She had found it at last, the room with the glowing gas lamp and the indistinct face behind the curtain. A secret room; a hidden room. A room whose owner had shown Willow the way in and saved her from almost certain catastrophe.
Willow gently drew back the lacy draperies and fastened them on the hooks to either side of the window. She let herself sink onto the window seat, the exhaustion and tension of the past hour—could it have been so short a time?—finally catching up to her. Willow watched as the first brilliant rays of sunrise shot up from forest and sea and the soft quilt of clouds on the horizon.
She took a proper look around the little room, now illuminated by the morning sun. The asymmetrical slant of the ceiling made one feel like a poet in a garret, though perhaps a finer one than the average Victorian starving artist might have managed; the furniture, though spare, was of the same high quality found in the more formal bedrooms on the lower floors. An ornately carved wardrobe stood in one corner; a pair of chairs and a secretary desk, the kind whose writing surface could be folded up and latched to conceal what lay behind it, sat across from one of the dormer windows. The walls, though faded by sunlight and time, had once been painted a soft coral; an antique colonial spool bed was tucked neatly into the larger west gable, covered in a bright patchwork counterpane made of dozens of little circles of cloth sewn together.
Willow sat down cautiously on the heavy walnut chair by the secretary desk, finding the latch that allowed her to carefully lower the lid to its horizontal position. The space it revealed was neatly organized, if smaller than she had expected: a thick stack of slightly yellowed paper to the left, a pile of books to the right. Tilting her head sideways, Willow could see that all six of them were by Abel R. Douglas, author of the novel she’d fallen asleep over the previous night;Widow’s Walkwas not among them, thoughWeather the Stormwas. A sheet of paper, the same size and weight as the notes with which Willow was familiar by now, sat neatly in the center of the writing surface:
nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream --WBY
and, on the reverse side:
a gift of memory, the mother of the Muses… --Pl
WBY… that’s probably Yeats?Willow thought curiously, taking out her phone to search. Yes, the first quote was Yeats. The second… Plato.
Curious, Willow thought. After folding the page and tucking it into her pocket, she closed the desk and continued her exploration of the small room.
A little cedar chest sat next to the bed, a small box clearly intended for a child’s treasures. One of the hinges had worked most of the way loose and was held precariously in place by a mismatched screw. Willow gently lifted the lid.
A small photo album, exquisitely made and leather-bound, lay just inside; Willow sat on the bed, opened it, and paged through quickly. The first photos were black-and-white, sepia-toned antiques from the early twentieth century; the images movedthrough time to the drugstore snapshots of later years. Resisting the urge to examine it more closely, Willow gently set it aside. Next, she found an ancient doll wrapped in a baby blanket. The doll’s body was sewn from leather so old it threatened to crack or dissolve at the slightest movement, sewn to the smooth bisque head; a few decaying threads attached the fragile porcelain hands and feet to the stiff leather of the limbs. The doll was clothed in a simple white shift, perhaps sewn by the little girl it had belonged to; the blanket, too, had been crocheted by inexpert hands, the labored effort of a young girl wanting to keep her beloved doll warm in winter.
Willow suddenly wondered what the doll’s name was.
She gently set it down on the bed beside the photo album, then bent over the chest again. Beneath the doll, she found a small stack of books—old, battered, and much read.Little Womensat on the top, withWuthering HeightsandJane Eyrebeneath it, andMiddlemarch. At the very bottom, turned 180 degrees so one had to remove all the books to see it, sat a lurid-looking title calledA Phantom Loverby Vernon Lee.
Willow grinned, recognizing the trick immediately—when she was younger, she, too, had put a row of “appropriate” books in an obvious spot on her bookcase, spines out, while tucked behind them were the Stephen King and V. C. Andrews novels her mother would never have permitted at Willow’s age.
In one corner at the very bottom of the chest was a small cardboard box; Willow took it out and carefully lifted the lid. Nestled against faded red velvet sat a gold locket, about an inch high, on a length of pink ribbon. It was engraved with a set of initials, three letters so elaborately interlocked that it was impossible to read them in the still-new morning light. Willow’s hand hovered over the locket, as though waiting for some unseen being to object; none did. She cupped it gently in her hands, sliding a careful fingernail into the crack between the two halves of the lock and feeling the littlesnickas it opened.
From one side of the open locket, a young man in uniform looked out at her; on the other, a sad-faced woman held a baby. Willow quietly closed it and laid it back into its box.
Someone had wanted Willow to find this room, to find the locket. Someone shy, someone who loved shadows but disliked shoes. She took a deep breath and spoke hesitantly.
“Annabel?”
The room was silent; nothing moved.
