Page 62 of Murder Will Out
Then casket and feather were gone too, and the organ was silent.
Willow slipped out of the chapel and gently closed the doors.
The house, and the ghosts, were still here, at least a little. Joel might have given up on her, but someone—or several someones—had not.
The broad corridor curved around and led her beneath an archway trimmed in vine-carved wood. Willow felt her face break into a smile as she stepped into a high-ceilinged open space with broad windows and gleaming floors. Here was the other side of the sea swirl of stained glass that presided over the foyer, dominating the grandeur of what could only be a ballroom. Eyesshining, Willow slowly moved around the room, admiring the ornate curls of woodwork that drew the eye up from the walls to the starry-painted ceiling. Her imagination filled with images of finely dressed men and women dining or dancing in this room, engaging in sparkling conversation over slim champagne flutes, or slipping out through the row of glass doors to walk arm in arm in the moonlight on the balcony outside. Through the windows Willow could see the balcony opening onto a terrace extending outward. For a moment, she heard fragments of music, the swish of fabric as couples danced and laughed… There was the handsome young man from the chapel, in a tuxedo instead of the suit and fedora in which she was used to seeing him, dancing with a young woman in a white gown—Peter and Marisa, gazing at each other with eyes full of love and hope for a long and happy future together…
The room was empty again.
Willow went back to the second-floor landing and the stretch of wall where the hidden door to Annabel’s garret had been and pressed the subtle switch she had seen Annabel’s ghost touch two nights ago.
Nothing happened.
She frowned. Had she missed the spot? No, she was sure she had it right; the lever simply wasn’t working.
Evidently, Annabel didn’t want company today. Dejected, Willow returned to the grand staircase.
On the floor at the bottom of the stairs—to no great surprise—she found another typed missive, this time Shakespeare:
not one now to mock your own grinning? quite chapfallen? now get you to my lady’s chamber… --WS
Willow had to give her literary note-leaver points for knowing more than the first line of the “Alas, poor Yorick” scene fromHamlet. But this was less than helpful. Willow glowered and said to the air, “Well, I tried, but she won’t let me in—”
She stopped. Something was niggling at the back of her brain, something she had missed. She turned in a slow circle in the grand foyer, trying to pick up what was different from the last time she had stood there. She scanned the smooth wainscoting, the heavy sideboard, the small table with its chess pieces polished to a bright glow… and she had it. Willow grinned and mentally face-palmed; her quote-loving ghost was right to be a little salty—Willow had blown right past the obvious. It wasn’t Annabel’s chamber the note was sending Willow to—it was Sue’s.
Willow hurried back to Sue’s bedroom, with its weeks-old layer of dust, and she knew she had been right.
Every room Willow had visited in the whole of Cameron House had been clean, polished, practically gleaming, and it had not occurred to her till now to question why or how. But the memory clicked into place in a brief flash: a glimpse of a young woman in a long black dress with starched white cap and apron.
“A self-cleaning haunted house,” Willow murmured to herself. “That’s… convenient.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about the ethics of a ghostly cleaning staff condemned to spend the afterlife in service, but she would wrestle with that later. The more immediate follow-up question: Why was Sue’s room the only one with a layer of dust?
Willow surveyed Sue’s room with new eyes. Joel had said the ghosts could only interact with material things that had existed while they lived, which made the antique-filled rooms of Cameron House perfectly accommodating for even the oldest Cameron spirits. Sue’s room, on the other hand, was full of “new” things—abstract area rugs, contemporary furniture, modern window treatments, a coat of paint in a cool shade of cream that Willow knew would not have been original to a Victorian home—even the elaborately carved desk was clearly a newer custom piece, rather than an antique.
Neither deigned to share their reasoning with us, Joel had said acerbically of Sue and Effie when Willow had asked what the pair had been planning for the house.
Effie, and Sue after her, had shared their home with generations of the family’s ghosts. To keep certain things private, they would have needed to carve out a place in the house where the rest of the mansion’s inhabitants could not enter. That’s why they had needed this room, remodeled and decorated for its twenty-first-century inhabitants.
My lady’s chamber, the note had said—not Annabel’s but Sue’s.
Willow turned to her godmother’s desk, stacking its piles of books and papers on the floor and carefully moving the computer monitor onto the bed.
Now she could fully see the ornately carved desk. This was no mere piece of furniture, it was a work of art, and it took her breath away. The curved back of the desk had been carved in the shape of a tree, with songbirds peeking from between its limbs; its long vine-like branches twisted and curled sinuously around drawers and shelves all the way down to the elegantly curved legs. Several drawers sat half-open, as though someone had searched them recently. Willow examined the desk, but she found nothing of interest in the papers and books on or around it; whoever had been sneaking into Cameron House was human, not a ghost, and had surely long since removed anything remotely relevant.
But her mysterious typist had sent her here, to this room, today; what was she missing? In the chaos of last night and this morning, Willow had let herself put the question of Sue’s and Effie’s murders, and Geralt’s as well, aside. But now, especially with their only two real suspects dead—themselves also murdered…
Naomi could, in theory, have gradually poisoned Geralt. But could Naomi really have lured Sue up to the widow’s walk and pushed her over the edge? Sue had always been strong; surely there would have been a struggle if Hank, Naomi, or frankly anyone had come upon her to push her off the roof, and the policewould have investigated it as a potential homicide. And as for Effie—Naomi had told Willow that she and Geralt didn’t come to the island full-time till after Effie died. Effie’s murder couldn’t be attributed to Naomi; but Hank, as a full-time islander, might have been here in March.
But if Hank and Naomi had killed all three Cameron House heirs, then who had killed them? And why?
She closed her eyes, forcing herself to relax, to let her mind shift back into a mental free-association-playback mode, a state that made interesting connections possible and sleeping incredibly difficult… Sue and Effie. Hank. Naomi.
Geralt.
Geralt in the hospital. Naomi leaving him there to have a few drinks at the Raven. Hank waiting in the Jacuzzi.
The text from Naomi the day Geralt died:We thought he was improving, but…
And Diana, that night:They tried dialysis to filter it out, but they couldn’t get ahead of it.
