Page 46 of Murder Will Out
“Nope. Just black.” He took a swallow. “Quit stalling. I want the truth.”
Oh, piss off, she said mentally, but managed to keep the words from escaping her lips as she got the carton of half-and-half from the fridge and splashed a little into her own cup. She turned back to him.
“Okay. Truth. One, I learned she died literally through a well-timed internet search, and I came as quickly as I could so I could attend the service. Two, I never wanted the estrangement; I thought it had been Sue’s choice, so I didn’t know about the wedding. Three, I don’t know what to say about your homicide investigation except to point out you’ve miscounted by a couple—Effie Cameron’s and Sue Davis’s deaths ought to be investigated as homicides too, especially now. That’sthreebodies on one little island, and I wasn’t here for the first two. You can’t blame any of this on me. And frankly, trying to pin it all on Rina of all people is ridiculous.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, great; now you’re trying to do my job for me.” He took a swig of coffee. “Look, Rina is being held onsuspicionof the murder of Geralt Talbot. She has not yet been formally charged. Within forty-eight hours of taking her in, she will either be charged or released. Which means I have about twenty-eight hours left to gather what I need and make a recommendation. Okay?”
“Nick,” she persisted, “don’t you see? This is about way more than some ongoing feud between Rina and Geralt. It’s about Cameron House; it’s about every single heir to the property dying within months of each other.” Nick shook his head, but she went on. “Naomi told me Geralt had been sick for weeks, with tremors and stomach upset and all of it. Have the doctors been able to pin down whether he died from acute poisoning from one big dose, or could it have been ongoing?”
Nick looked at her sideways. “Someone’s been doing their research.”
She tilted her head at him. “Diana’s a lawyer, Catherine’s a librarian, and I’m literally a research scholar. What did you expect?” She paused. “Well?”
His eyes met hers levelly as though he were deciding how to respond. Finally, he said, “I’m afraid I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Willow threw up her hands. “It’s a valid question. If he was being poisoned gradually, it couldn’t have been Rina, so—”
“Willow, I’ll say it again, even though you completely ignored me yesterday: Let us do our jobs. Do you think we sit around eating doughnuts and issuing golf-cart-driving citations all day? Breaking up fights at the bars on Saturday nights?”
Willow set down her mug and faced him. “Nick, Sue died the night before her wedding, literally less than a day before the line of succession to the Cameron fortune would irrevocably pass to Rina and take away anyone else’s maneuvers to get hold of it. Doesn’t that sound suspicious to you? And then the only other known heir dies weeks later? Is thatlessbelievable than Rina Montalto crafting some elaborate plan to poison him with pottery supplies? Come on, Nick,” she pleaded, “you know Rina. Do you believe she could have done this?”
He shook his head in frustration. “Willow, I’m a cop. It’s not my job to follow my beliefs about what someone would orwouldn’t do; I need to follow evidence. And the fact that I do know her—that everyone on the force here knows her—makes it twice as important. If we dismiss or overlook evidence, if we fail to follow a lead because the suspect is our neighbor, it will make it almost impossible to prosecute anyone for this or any related crime, ever. So kindly back off.”
He set down his cup and took a step closer to her, close enough that she had to crane her neck to look up at him. “That was, by the way, an excellent attempt at distraction. Now you can tell me the part you aren’t telling me. About what you’re doing here.”
She couldn’t breathe; he was too close, and she could smell the laundry detergent he’d used to wash his shirt and count the few reddish strands in his mostly blond beard. “I want the truth,” he said softly. “No BS. What are you up to?”
Exhale, she thought.Take a step back.She forced her lungs and feet into action so she could get a little distance and begin to think again. Mercifully, he did not follow but gave her space.
She took a sip of coffee and then a deep breath, hoping both might steady her. “I can’t tell you all of it, Nick. But Sue wrote me a letter. I didn’t get it until after she died, but she needs me to take care of something, and I owe her that. After disappearing from her life—no, I know it wasn’t technically my fault,” she said, waving her hands in front of her face to stop Nick’s automatic protest, “but I did go, and I had plenty of time to try to reconnect, and I never did. So I need to do this. For her.”
His eyes narrowed. “Is it illegal? Or dangerous?”
She thought of her visits to Cameron House—did it count as trespassing if it had been Sue’s home? Sue had invited her, after all—and about her near miss with the nighttime intruder. “It shouldn’t be.” Far from fully truthful, but what could she do? “But I promise I’ll be careful.”
He gritted his teeth. “Listen to me, Stone. I’d put you under house arrest if I had the slightest legal excuse, but I can’t, and you’re going to do what you’re going to do, anyway. But the secondyou give me a reason, be assured I’ll take it.” She wasn’t listening; she had processed his comment from earlier, and—“Wait… you said a poisoningandan attempted murder. So Patricia Ramsey’s brake lineswerecut, weren’t they?”
Nick cursed under his breath, then grimaced and said blandly, “I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.” Then he relented. “Look. I don’t know what’s going on around here. But if someone is playing a long game, they won’t welcome your interference; trust me, I’m not the only one wondering what you’re up to. For God’s sake, if you find yourself in over your head, call me. Deal?”
She nodded. “Deal.”
“Good,” he said decisively, draining his cup and heading for the door. “You’re enough of a pain in my tail alive; if you wind up dead, you’ll still be a pain in my tail because of the crap ton of paperwork you’d cause me.”
“God forbid,” she said dryly as the door slammed shut behind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Catherine’s text came less than an hour later.We need to talk; emergency crime-solvers meeting. Can you come back to the café?
Be there in fifteen, was Willow’s response.
God, she was tired. The predawn visit to Cameron House, the intruder, the discovery of Annabel’s bedroom, and then having to fence with Nick Bloody Tyler—she didn’t know how much she had left in her.
The village looked different today; the anachronistically out-of-place people she had gotten used to seeing were conspicuous in their absence, and the green looked bereft without them. As she walked, she almost thought she caught an occasional flash in her peripheral vision—a white apron, a newsboy cap, a leather boot, a black bonnet—but when she turned her head to see, the elusive flickers were gone.
It was true, then, what Joel had said—the ghosts were fading. Or gone.
She was so intent on searching the green for long-lost Camerons that she didn’t notice the lumbering figure of Hank Ramsey until it was too late to escape him. “Miss Stone! Miss Stone,” hecalled out. His comb-over flapped up and down in the breeze in a single sheet as though he had applied hair spray to it.
