She fit her key into the university chapel’s back entry and wrestled the door open, shoving her backpack into the doorway so the door wouldn’t fall closed again. Retrieving her coffee from its precarious spot on the step, she ducked inside and made her way through the sacristy, along the nave, and to the choir loft stairs. Another key, another stairway. By the time she moved through the last door into the organ loft itself, the sunlight was sifting through the stained glass windows down the nave; it scattered colored flecks of light through the rose window above her, framed by the facade of the chapel’s grand pipe organ.
Willow dropped her backpack and cardigan next to the organ console, slid off her sneakers, and pulled on her battered and unfashionable black organ shoes. Their smooth soles were nearly worn through to her socks from years of treading the organ pedals, and the squared-off heels had gone lopsided, but they got the job done. She eased into her usual morning routine: scales and études, then a couple of intense hours on a new Duruflé fugue—attacking the same four bars twenty times, twenty different ways, before moving on to the next four. It was tedious work, granular work, but it gave her mind something to focus on, something that was not the envelope in her sweater pocket. Finally, she shiftedinto her last hour, when she gave herself permission to open up her scores and play the music she loved—Bach, Messiaen, Price—enjoying the instrument and the acoustic.
By now, people wandered the chapel below; Willow could see them moving in and out of the rearview mirror one could find on every organ loft console, put there so the musician could see the progress of the service. Students stopping in to pray that they would do well on their finals (Willow, in her on-again, off-again relationship with God, had a feeling studying might go further in that regard than prayer, but who was she to say?) shared the space with visitors and neighborhood locals. An older woman walked through, holding the hand of the little girl by her side. Willow watched them all in her peripheral vision as she played, feeling a little like the Lady of Shalott, as though her existence, too, depended on viewing the world from a little aside, a little above, and through a mirror. A witness. A watcher. Not quite a participant.
Willow reached into the backpack for one more score. Her hand hovered for a moment; she dropped the pack and picked up her sweater, retrieving the envelope with the Maine postmark. Her hands shook as she carefully slit it open with the nail file on her key chain and pulled out the sheet of stiff cream stationery inside. She immediately recognized the neat handwriting, though she had not seen it in fifteen years. She shifted position so the organ console’s light shined on the letter, and started to read.
Dear Willow,
I have begun this note several times, but I find it impossible to say the things I need to; I have so much to tell you and so much I wish to know about you. You are an adult now; your choices are your own, and I hope you can choose forgiveness for the wrongs done to you. If not, perhaps curiosity—or a desire to tell me to my face what you think of me—will bring you back into my life.
But whether you forgive me or not, please come back to LittleNorth, if not for the wedding, then whenever you can. But please—and this is important—come soon. I know it has been a long time, but you are still part of this place, and it needs you.
The Willow I remember could never resist mystery or adventure. I hope life has not crushed that quality out of your spirit.
There is much more to say, but it will have to wait.
I miss you. Please come.
With love,
—Susan
With love. Sue had signed the letter, “With love.” That in itself was enough to make the tears well up.Sue still loved her. Sue wanted to see her. Sue wantedherforgiveness.A weight Willow had carried for fifteen years lifted off her heart, one so old and familiar she could—sometimes—almost forget it was there.
Willow turned back to the letter, realizing some of its details didn’t make sense. For one thing, it was dated March 8, more than two months ago, but the postmark on the envelope confirmed that it had been mailed from Little North just last week. Even more puzzling was the ornate letterhead at the top proclaiming the letter to be from “Dr. Susan Davis, Cameron House, Little North Island, Maine.”
Aunt Sue was living in Cameron House? What, Willow wondered, had happened to the cabin, the little log home on the edge of the Cameron acreage, where Willow had stayed with her aunt—honorary aunt, she corrected herself mentally, though Sue had felt more like family than most of Willow’s blood relatives—for most of her childhood summers?
Willow’s godmother, Susan Davis, had been a close friend of her parents and one of the few adults who didn’t find the peculiar little girl to be terribly peculiar. The arrangements had been perfect for everyone: Willow’s adventurous mother and father could spend summers climbing Machu Picchu or kayaking the Alaskanfjords, while Willow got to wander the paths and hills of the sleepy Maine island or quietly rock on the porch swing with Sue on cool summer evenings.
Then it had ended—no more summers on the island, no more Aunt Sue in her life. Her parents refused to tell Willow what had happened or why, only announcing one day that she would no longer be spending summers on Little North. Willow never heard from Sue again, until today.
Willow retrieved her phone and typed “Cameron House, Little North Island, Maine” into the search bar. The list of results was flooded with sponsored posts from Gilded Age websites and “Haunted Houses of New England” travel pages, but they were all years old and listed Effie Cameron, whom Willow vaguely remembered from childhood, as the property owner. She next plugged Effie’s name into the search engine—more information, but not the answers she was looking for: Effie Cameron had passed quietly in her home in March, of natural causes, at ninety-nine years of age. Survived by one nephew, Geralt Talbot, aged eighty-three. Active in the life of the village. Member of the North Islands Historical Society. No mention of Sue.
A little down the list of search results, Willow came upon a more recent Reddit post with screenshots from an article in the Island’s tiny local newspaper:ECCENTRIC CAMERON HOUSE HEIR LEAVES ESTATE TO CARETAKER.
“Here we go,” she murmured as she enlarged the images and skimmed the text.
A few minutes later, she sat back, her eyes wide. According to the news article, Sue and Effie had become close friends over the past decade, and Sue had cared for the property and helped Effie in her last years. When the old woman died, islanders were shocked to discover that the childless Effie had left Susan Davis her entire estate—a move that threw a shock wave across the community. Most had expected the elderly nephew would inherit the house and its land, but there was also talk of developers who had beenpressing Effie to sell the property for decades. Then there were the preservationists who had been working with Effie to get the house onto the National Register of Historic Places. Overall, the islanders quoted in the article expressed their shock that a member of the oldest family on the island would leave her estate to a retired history professor fromMichiganof all places. Between lines of text, Willow could all but hear the disapproving murmurs.
Willow next navigated to the home page of the little newspaper the Reddit post had come from, hoping for more recent information, but the site was behind a paywall; without a subscription, she could do nothing but scroll through recent headlines, one after another.
Until the one that made her heart lurch, tucked innocuously on the screen between a report about lobster fishing disputes and commentary on the new cell tower recently raised across the bay:
SUSAN DAVIS OF CAMERON HOUSE FALLS TO DEATH ON EVE OF WEDDING
Willow sat frozen on the organ bench, as though some part of her believed that if she remained immobile enough, she could make the world stop, could go back to a time before she had read the headline. As though she could wish it out of existence.
Glancing at the organ console mirror, blood pounding in her ears, Willow saw again the gray-haired woman and little girl, like a time-out-of-time vision of a younger Willow and her beloved Aunt Sue, moving through its hazy frame once again. On impulse, she turned away from the instrument to see them more clearly. The older woman grinned and swept the child up in her arms, holding her high and turning in a slow circle to take in the whole of the space. As she eased the girl back down into an enthusiastically returned hug, Willow caught a glimpse of both of their faces, radiant and full of love.
She turned back to the organ console. Silently, she began to sob.
CHAPTER TWO
The old man careened across the village green in his state-of-the-art luxury golf cart, taking a perverse pleasure in watching pedestrians scatter in panic before him. Stubbornly maintaining his speed, he thrust a bony arm out of the side of the cart and shook his glass-topped cane at them.
“Watch where you’re going, you idiots! What in the hell is wrong with you?” he shouted as he slalomed around the large white pine in the center of the green and onto the bumpy gravel road heading out of town. For good measure, he let out two resounding blasts on the cart’s air horn, though his potential victims were, by now, far behind.
