CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Willow stood alone in the now-vacant house. She wandered out to the foyer and sat on the stairs, miserable and wrung out.
A few minutes later, her phone dinged with an incoming text message. It was from Naomi.
Geralt’s gone, the message read.A few minutes ago. We thought he was improving, but then…
A moment passed, then another text:I thought you’d want to know. Thank you for being kind, to him and to me.
Now she understood.Our time has run out, Joel had said. Geralt was dead. Murdered. The last of the Cameron heirs. Even if Sue had been onto something, she had died before she could share it, and now there were no Camerons left.Good job, Rina, Willow thought.Your spiteful little gesture really screwed everything up.
Not long after Naomi’s message, Willow’s phone dinged again. This time, the text was from Diana, sent to Willow, Mac, and Catherine.
Come to the dock; Geralt has died, and now the police are arresting Rina for his murder. She needs us. Hurry.
Then another text.
You too, Willow. Please come.
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Willow considered ignoring the texts, turning off her phone, and going back to the cabin. But only a fraction.
As she swung the heavy front door open, a whoosh of wind swept the foyer. Willow heard the almost soundless sound of something floating down to the floor behind her.
Another sheet of paper, dusty and a little rough around the edges like the first. A new set of words, in the same irregular typeface:
follow up the quest
despite of day and night
and death
and hell
--AT
And at the bottom:
Mordre wol out
--GC
Willow stared at the page, then looked up, scanning the hall from the foyer up to the second-floor landing. A quick movement at the top of the staircase caught her eye, but by the time she turned her head, there was nothing to see but the quick flash of a bare foot disappearing out of sight.
Willow smiled. Just a little. It seemed Cameron House was not completely empty, after all.
Diana and Macwere already at the dock when Willow and Catherine approached from opposite directions. “The police found a bag of lithium carbonate in the dumpster outside Rina’s shop,”Diana said. Mac stood behind her, looking ready to burst into tears.
“So?” Catherine asked. “Why would that automatically implicate Rina?”
“Because the bag was from a ceramic supply company,” Diana replied. “Apparently, it’s also a common glazing agent.”
Mac nodded and said in a quavery voice, “It stabilizes the glazes and helps you fire the ceramic at a lower temperature so you can get brighter colors.” The tears started coming again. “But she didn’t do it. There’s no way she did this…”
A uniformed and official-looking Nick Tyler stood by the Pottery Shop, scanning the gathering crowd. Willow was unimpressed; compared to the Cameron House ghosts, Nick’s patented Intimidating Cop look was less than terrifying. She strode over to him. “What exactly is happening here?” she asked crisply.
He gave her one cold look, then turned away, refusing to speak.
Nice try, she thought, shifting until she was back in his line of sight. “For God’s sake, Nick Tyler, when has ignoring me ever worked for you? What exactly is going on?”
