Willow smiled too. She slid her chair over next to Diana’s, and they all gathered around the book. Diana paged through photos of a much younger Susan Davis, maybe in her thirties or forties. Willow had pored over these images that morning, drinking in Sue as a younger woman, sitting at her desk in what must have been her university office in one, walking on the beach in another…
Sue wasn’t alone in all the photos either. “Is that Effie with her?” Catherine asked, pointing at the other woman posing with her, much older, whom Willow almost recognized. Diana nodded; in this photo, a younger Sue posed with Effie on a tree-lined pedestrian courtyard or avenue with brick buildings on either side. They were smiling amid other wandering tourists or inhabitants—a family pointing at something in the distance, a goth-looking teen sitting on a bench glaring at nothing in particular, a child in a bright pink jacket running by… “Where is this, do you know?” Willow asked Diana.
Diana squinted and looked closer. “Looks like Boston to me. Yup—that’s the Old North Church in the background. They must have been sightseeing.” She looked thoughtful. “I knew they’d been friends forever, but I didn’t realize Effie had known Sue this long; this had to have been taken thirty-odd years ago, before she even met Rina.”
They thought they had reached the end of the album—until Diana looked closer and discovered something Willow had missed; the last two pages were stuck together. She slipped her nail between the pages and pried them apart, and they all stood looking at the last photo. “Ohh, look,” she breathed. “There they are.”
This photo, much more recent than the others, showed Sue and Effie standing on the front porch of Cameron House, arms around each other and big grins on both their faces. The three women who had known Sue best sighed, seeing in the photo the Sue and Effie they remembered, standing there so full of life and joy.
For Willow, another puzzle piece clicked into place. The woman standing next to Sue in this photo was wearing a shapeless yellow housedress, a purple sweater, and Bean boots over mismatched knee socks. Her white hair was braided up into a coronet on top of her head. Willow hadn’t recognized Effie in her younger photos, but here Willow clearly saw the woman she had seen at Sue’s memorial, sharing a pew with the ghost of Peter Talbot.
So Joel and the sisters had not been completely correct about Effie not returning after her death—though it was unsurprising that, if she showed up anywhere, it would be to attend Sue’s funeral. It made Willow wonder what else they might not know about.
“So… back to Hank,” Mac said, drawing their attention away from the photos and locket. “We have the Annabel locket with the baby photo, and maybe he is in possession of something similar, but what kind of proof could he realistically have, especially if the war hospital was destroyed? It’s not like the county probateoffice is going to see his claim and go, ‘Yeah, we guess that could have happened; here’s the deed to Cameron House.’”
Diana’s lip curled. “Oh, no? You haven’t asked me who the head county probate judge is.”
“Who is it?” Mac asked, but Catherine was clicking away again, navigating to the county probate office website.
When she saw the name, Catherine glowered. “Are you kidding? Robert Ramsey Jr.?”
Diana nodded. “Indeed. Hank Ramsey’s younger brother. And spoiler alert: Robert Jr.’s wife is the probate registrar. Andheryounger brother and nephew both work in the office of public records. With even the slightest appearance of propriety, he has a good shot at sliding it right through, since he’s got the people in place. They’re keeping it all in the family. He must have been laying the groundwork for years.”
Catherine frowned. “Plotting to inherit an estate after its already ancient heirs die isn’t the same as actually committing three murders.”
Willow nodded. “You’re right, but think it through. Sue would have been the surprise. He could have had the plan for Geralt’s slow poisoning in place even before Effie died, but then Effie left the house to Sue, and he had to act quickly; if Sue and Rina had gotten married, Rina would have inherited everything.”
Mac added, “And from what you’ve said, it sounded like Geralt was already suspicious; that would have sped up his timeline. Rina became a convenient patsy.”
Catherine shook her head stubbornly. “None of that explains how he got small quantities of poison into Geralt over all that time. He didn’t have the access.”
Mac said, “I’m with the smart librarian; I don’t think Hank could have done it. My money is still on Naomi. Shedidhave the access, and she’s the one who would benefit the most from the old guy dying. Hank and Patricia may be trying to take advantage of the situation, but again, that’s not the same as murder.”
“But,” Willow argued, “do we really believe Naomi had it in her to kill Effie and Sue first? It just—it doesn’t quite fit. No one quite fits.” She picked up the locket and clicked it open again, looking at the images of man, woman, and infant, then set it down and looked around the table. “One thing at a time: Hank’s claim that he is a Cameron. What do we do?”
Catherine replied simply, “We find the truth. And go from there.”
Willow slept hardthat night, but her dreams came in tangled snarls of violence and secrets and mystery; even in sleep, her racing mind kept trying to follow the threads of what she had learned that day. None of her circling thoughts seemed to connect properly to the others; her brain felt like a table on which someone had unceremoniously scattered pieces from five or six jigsaw puzzles and taken the boxes away.
She dragged herself out of bed a little after dawn the next morning, grumpy and still exhausted. Deciding to give her brain a rest, she was reaching for the paperback on the nightstand—the other Abel R. Douglas book—when she remembered the enigmatic note in the typewriter.
Take down this book and slowly read, it had said…a gift of memory…
Reluctantly pulling her hand from the paperback, Willow found the copy ofWidow’s Walkon the floor where she had let it fall the previous night. Was this the book Annabel meant? The one Sue had left for her with Rina?
Willow couldn’t quite remember how far into the novel she’d gotten before drifting off the night before, but soon she was back inside Marie’s story, a conflicted young woman struggling with her secret German parentage as she served on the side of the Allies, committing herself to serving wounded soldiers in the war as a flight nurse for the Red Cross. It was good writing,Willow realized, with sharp dialogue and fast pacing, shifting back and forth between Marie’s story and brief interludes of a mother standing on the widow’s walk of her home reading letters from her soldier son. Willow found herself thoroughly enjoying the fearless Marie as she worked flight after flight evacuating wounded soldiers from the front and patching them up as best she could, while the plane dodged enemy fire and tried not to get shot down. Eventually, Marie was wounded and found herself in a military hospital in England, where she finally met the soldier whose letters made up the other part of the story: Daniel Ramson, a young pilot from the States…
Willow looked up with a start, struck by the character’s initials and surname. Daniel Ramson.
Annabel’s son, whom Hank claimed to be his grandfather, had been named Douglas Ramsey.
Willow turned back to the story. Now that she was paying attention, the parallels between Hank’s version of the old family legend and this novel were too obvious to be coincidental—sure enough, as the story continued, Daniel and Marie got married days before his release from the hospital back to active duty, and she discovered she was pregnant the same day she received news that his plane had gone down, hours before the military hospital itself was bombed…
Willow was sitting up by now, reading as fast as she could. The hours flew by as she zoomed her way through the narrative—her favorite graduate-student research superpower. Marie went back to the front; as the Allies moved across Germany, and as her pregnancy began to show, she saw places she’d known as a child obliterated by shelling, still struggling with her heritage and hiding the truth of her German birth from those around her.
Even as she zoomed through page after page looking for clues, Willow was moved by the story, feeling Marie’s heartbreak and terror as she realized she was carrying Daniel’s baby, set againstthe horrors of the camps and the ill and starving survivors—while Daniel’s mother at home waited for letters from her son, letters that would never arrive.
When she had finished, Willow carefully closed the book, lost in thought.
