Page 34 of Murder Will Out
She turned and left the restaurant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Willow sat for a few more minutes, poking at the sludgy mix of melted ice cream and disintegrating brownie in the bowl in front of her, numb at Naomi’s revelation. By the time she left the booth and stepped out into the main restaurant, the jazz group had finished their set and were packing up; she saw no sign of Patricia. In a daze, she walked out of the restaurant, Naomi’s words jumbling around her brain as though in some vain hope that rearranging them somehow could change their meaning.
Invited your family to the wedding and written you a letter… Found it in Rina’s desk. Unmailed… You had a right to know.
Willow thought of the previous night—of Rina’s homemade pasta sauce, of the kindness behind the book and CD and the feeling of inclusion by the little group of people who had loved Sue so much—and felt sick to her stomach. She pushed the restaurant door open and hurried out, wanting nothing more than to be anywhere else.
She did not notice the woman standing, talking on her phone, on the shadowed sidewalk outside. With a jolt, Willow bumped into her; the woman whirled around, phone slipping out of herhand and clattering to the pavement. The collision jerked Willow’s awareness back to her surroundings; she automatically apologized, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry, I—” She trailed off in shock when she realized whom she had unceremoniously crashed into.
Patricia MacFarlane Ramsey stood in front of her, red-faced and shaking—with rage, Willow at first assumed, and prepared herself to be verbally skewered or worse for the second time in as many days.
But when she looked again, she saw the streaks of wet on the older woman’s cheeks, the red eyes, the jaw set in repressed sobs. After a timeless frozen instant, a woman’s tinny voice spoke from the phone on the sidewalk, barely audible: “Patty? Patty, are you there?”
Patricia let out an almost feral growl and turned away from Willow, bending to snatch up the phone. “I’ll call you back,” she said shortly, clicking off the phone and slipping it into her purse. She surreptitiously swiped a hand across her cheek to wipe away the streaks of tears, running a quick finger beneath each eye to catch any telltale smudges of mascara. When she turned back to Willow, Patricia had regained her composure, again radiating her aura of the self-possessed village matriarch, the queen looking down her nose (never mind that Willow was at least five inches taller) at the noxious peasant in her path.
“For God’s sake, young woman, why can’t you watch where you’re going?” She turned to walk back to her car, then whirled back and advanced on Willow again. “In fact,” she spat, “what are you doing here at all? You came, you paid your respects to a woman you hadn’t seen in more than a decade, the service is over. Why don’t you go back home to your big city and leave us in peace?” Her voice was growing higher and thinner with every word, and the red spots high on her cheekbones deepened. “You don’t belong here. Just… go.”
Patricia waited long enough to see Willow’s face crumble, then turned and stalked back to her car.
Willow did not move; she felt like one of the rabbits in her parents’ front yard, the ones who naively believed utter stillness would make them invisible to predators. In Willow’s case, of course, the predator had come and gone, and the rabbit had been well and truly eviscerated—the one acceptable consequence for catching Patricia in a moment of weakness. She waited as Patricia climbed into the dark red vintage sports car parked next to Willow’s battered Prius, got in, slammed the door, and pulled out of the lot.
Once she was gone, Willow hurried to her own car. Something had dripped onto the asphalt in the next parking space; she almost slipped but managed to lurch ungracefully into the driver’s seat without face-planting on the pavement. She took several deep breaths, turned on the Fauré Requiem—Lord, have mercy, indeed, she thought—and forced herself to calmly back out of her own spot and pull out of the lot.
Willow hated this stretch of road; from here to the coast, it was all twists and hills, with too many trucks and not enough streetlights. The drive from the Raven to the sea was downhill all the way; the incline was slight at first but increased steadily, and she never felt like she was fully in control.
Willow shifted her car into low gear. What had upset Patricia so much? Those hadn’t looked like ordinary tears of sadness—more like a mixture of shock, fear, and fury. Willow wondered who Patricia had been talking with and what awful news might have been relayed in the seconds before Willow bumped into her. Was it about Hank, their least favorite hotel developer? Or something else entirely?
Willow was so deep in thought, gently nursing her car around the scariest of the curves at the bottom of the hill, that she almost missed it.
But her heart gave a sickening lurch when her headlights flashed over the wine-red hulk of metal buried in the pine trees and undergrowth to the side of the road. Steam poured from under thehood; the one remaining headlight illuminated the pine tree that had stopped its forward motion.
Patricia’s car.
Willow pulled ontothe shoulder, grabbed the flashlight she always kept in her glove box, and ran back to the place the car had veered off the road; she tried to dial 911, but there was no signal. Her childhood memories recalled the little crosses and flowers so often found at this exact spot in years past, where other motorists had lost control of the curve and crashed into a granite boulder, and she prayed Patricia had not met the same fate.
But Patricia had been unbelievably lucky. The car, about ten feet off the road into the woods, had narrowly missed the huge boulder and plowed into a small tree, crumpling the front of the car and shattering the safety glass of the windshield. The old-model automobile had no airbags, Willow realized; she could see Patricia moving unsteadily inside the car, turning her head from side to side in a terrified haze, cringing away from the bright beam of Willow’s flashlight. Blood poured from a gash in her forehead, but she was conscious and moving.
A voice called from behind her, “My God, what happened? Are you all right?” The man got out of his landscaper’s truck and ran toward them; he had seen the damaged car and pulled over as well.
“There’s no cell service here,” Willow called out to him. “I’ll see if she’s okay. Can you drive up the hill a little and call 911?”
“You got it,” he said, hurrying back to his truck and speeding off.
Willow shoved her way through the underbrush to the mangled car. The door was locked; she shouted through the window to a terrified and confused Patricia, “Mrs. Ramsey? I need you to unlock the door.” She gestured to the little knob by the window. “Unlock the door, and we’ll get you out.”
Patricia gaped up at Willow, words finally piercing her panic,and managed to release the lock. As soon as the door opened, Patricia launched herself out of the car, her whole body shuddering; Willow put an arm around the small woman and helped her walk the few yards back to the side of the road.
Patricia’s eyes were wide and full of terror; Willow couldn’t tell if she even knew whose hands she was clutching so tightly. But she was mumbling something, the same few words over and over again. Willow bent close, listening.
When she realized what Patricia was muttering, a chill came over her.
“The brakes. The brakes were gone.”
The man in the landscaping truck came back; soon after, whirling red and blue lights appeared at the top of the hill, and the medics and police took over. Willow stayed as close to Patricia as she could, only stepping aside when the EMTs put her into the ambulance. There were more questions from the police—what had she seen, what did Patricia say, what happened?
It was probably forty-five minutes later when one more police officer pulled up, out of uniform, on a motorcycle.
