Page 64 of Murder Will Out
Peter said, gently but urgently, “Willow, there’s not much time. You have to get out of this. Don’t let her beat you.”
“But… she’s his daughter, isn’t she? Your niece? Doesn’t she have as much right—”
“Willow, listen,” he interrupted; he was seated beside her again, his face close to hers. “Understand. Joel explained to you, didn’t he, how the house needs a living Cameron heir to sustain the ongoing life of the family?”
She nodded.
“Here’s what Joel didn’t say,” he continued. “In fact, I’m not sure he even knows himself; it’s not only about genetics and lineage. It’s more than blood. It has to do with responsibility and understanding and acceptance.” He looked at her sadly. “Susan didn’t know, you see,” he said sadly. “Who she was, that she belonged here.”
“Effie never told her?” Willow asked.
Peter glanced to the front of the room, to the rocking chair by the bay window. From it, a woman’s voice, quavery with age and self-recrimination, quietly spoke a single syllable: “No.”
Willow turned her head in surprise. There was Effie Cameron at last, sitting in her chair, rocking gently; the embroidered pillow was somehow back on the floor beside her. “I meant to tell her; Iwanted her to know everything, but there wasn’t time. I ran out of time,” the old woman said forlornly.
Willow looked at the dented pillow and understood at last.No, Willow thought fiercely,someone took away your time.
Peter said, “Susan didn’t know she was my child, my blood, so she never saw herself as anything more than a placeholder, someone whose job it was to look for the next, ‘real’ Cameron heir. She never—” His voice choked a little; he cleared his throat and went on. “She never let herself truly believe she belonged anywhere. We all hoped getting married would help her settle in and find her place, but…” Peter sighed again. He looked back at Willow, his gaze reaching deep inside her. “I wanted to be a proper father to her, but I wasn’t there. Just as—”
He broke off as, from the library, the sound of pacing feet and books being hurled to the floor grew closer. “There’s no more time,” Effie said sharply. She pulled herself to her feet and faced Willow. “We can’t help you much, not yet. But remember: You’re stronger than she is. You have to fight.”
Willow’s face clouded. “But I don’t know where—”
“Don’t you, though?” Effie interrupted. “I imagine you do; you just don’t realize it yet. But first, you have to stay alive.”
Peter nodded. Taking Willow’s shoulders in his strong hands, he said intently, “Aunt Effie is right. Fight for what’s yours. Claim it. Claim it, and no one can ever take it away.”
A sad smile, a quick nod, and he was gone.
Effie opened her mouth to speak but stopped when she saw the embroidered pillow on the floor, with its face-shaped depression in one side. She shook her head and picked it up, placing it almost absentmindedly back on the sofa where Willow had placed it only days ago.
She doesn’t remember, Willow realized.She doesn’t remember how she died.
Then Effie was gone as well. In the same instant, the pillow was back in its spot on the floor beside the rocking chair.
Effie might not remember, Willow realized, but the house did. She wasn’t sure whether that was comforting or not.
But Effie and Peter had been right—the time for thought was past; she needed to act. Willow’s eyes darted around the room frantically, looking for anything she could use to break the zip ties; heavy-duty as they were, they were still plastic. “Too bad they couldn’t have sent me a ghost whose talisman is a Swiss Army knife,” she muttered under her breath.
Her eye caught on the granite hearthstone, its sharp corner showing rough fragments of quartz and feldspar. Not a knife, but it had potential. She shifted as quietly as she could, rubbing the plastic tie back and forth across the stone like a saw, scraping her hands several times in the process. After what seemed like forever, Willow felt the edge of the plastic begin to shred; she continued until it broke, and her hands were freed. She managed the same maneuver on her ankle ties, praying Audra was busy enough wherever she was to leave her a few more minutes.
Willow pulled herself woozily to her feet, bracing herself on the couch as the room spun around her; whatever drug Audra had injected her with—probably the same one she had used to subdue Sue—was still in her system. She managed to make her silent way around to the foyer archway; she looked rapidly into the hall and up the steps, but there was no one there. She tiptoed her way across the foyer to the library door itself. She didn’t dare peek around the doorjamb, but she at least could hear better now.
Audra was at the other end of the library, far enough away that Willow could only catch a few words at a time: “What she’s doing here? I have no idea, but…” followed by several seconds of obscurity. The pattern continued: “—in the library now, but earlier… the desk. Yeah, Sue’s, and she left it a mess… looking for the same thing we… I don’t know, love, the body count is starting to concern me… wait, you think?” The footsteps were coming back in her direction, closer to the door. “On her? How? She’s only been here four days.”
Who was Audra talking to?
Audra was moving away again, her remaining words even more muffled. “—think she knows… Hank… revenge for… maybe…” Then a low laugh, warm and seductive, completely at odds with the mild-mannered persona that was all Willow had ever seen.
But whoever Audra’s partner was, he wasn’t here. Yet. This might be Willow’s only chance to escape. Audra had moved away from the doorway, and Willow took the opportunity to swiftly make her way down the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door. The wind gusted violently around her; she held up her hand against the nearly horizontal swirls of rain pelting the porch and threatening to blind her, and hurried down the back steps.
Where she ran headlong into a shadowy figure in a hooded raincoat, going the other way.
CHAPTER FORTY
Willow stood in the rain, wind whipping around her, and gaped in shock at Mrs. Patricia MacFarlane Ramsey.
Patricia looked shocked too at first, then irritated, and at last confused, to see Willow standing by the back porch of a house where neither of them belonged, in the middle of the night. “Willow Stone?” Patricia asked. “What are you doing here?”
