Chapter Sixteen
The rooftop deck at the top of Cameron House was larger than she had realized, maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. Its wooden safety railing was battered and pocked, but it looked fairly solid—except for one spot where the railing had split and was awaiting repair.
Out here, the sun was shining again, as though she had stepped out of whatever peculiar microclimate Cameron House held inside itself, back into the normal world.
And yet, the rooftop deck filled her with unease.
It wasn’t a fear of heights—no, it was the distinct sense that she was not alone.
And that the house itself had driven her up here for some purpose.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that purpose was.
Uneasiness aside, Willow couldn’t deny that the view from the roof walk of Cameron House was magical.
She felt like she could see forever—the soft pink granite mountains of Acadia National Park to the northeast, the rocky shoals on the mainland, the twin lighthouses on either side of Little North, marking the passage to the ocean vastness beyond.
Nearby in Little North Village, the white belfry of the Congregational church rose above the bluff overlooking the ocean; across the island on St. Andrew’s Hill, the steeple of the smaller Catholic church rose out of the sea of evergreens.
Closer still, a little boy in an old-fashioned newsboy cap ran happily through the broad lupine field beside Cameron House, a crow circling his head and cawing happily.
Beyond the field, a pine-needle-covered footpath led away from Cameron House and disappeared into the edge of the forest. Willow remembered her friends’ whispers about the haunted Cameron family graveyard at the end of the path; everyone seemed to have a story about it, but no one would admit to actually seeing the graveyard or its ghosts themselves.
They thought the graveyard was haunted? They should have tried the house, Willow thought wryly.
As Shakespeare said, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
Not devils, though, she realized. There was no sense of evil or malice in the presences she felt here.
That didn’t make the experience any less unnerving.
Willow turned to the side of the roof facing Sue’s cabin and gazed down the shingled drop, scanning gables and turrets for the dormer room where she had seen the curious lamplight last night.
She found it quickly, a little down and over, sitting just below the ridge jutting off the main wing.
The little room had two windows, Willow realized—the dormer facing Sue’s cabin, and another that opened onto the roof across from the widow’s walk, almost close enough to crawl to from here.
The room should have looked awkward, planted there in the asymmetrical roofline, but Willow found it charming and wanted more than ever to find it herself.
Her gaze turned again to the railing opposite her, where the top two boards had splintered violently apart, leaving a gaping space open to the roof and ground below.
Willow crossed the widow’s walk and crouched down to examine them, brushing a hand carefully over one of the jagged edges.
No rot, no weakness, just … broken wood.
This was unlike Sue, her brain told her insistently; her godmother had never been one to leave things undone, especially things as dangerous as this. Any railing in a home of Sue’s would be all but impossible to break; she would have stood for nothing less.
Willow wondered what had broken this one.
Once outside and back in the world of the ordinary, Willow and Finn continued their walk to the village.
The beautiful weather had brought out locals and visitors alike, people wandering the green shopping and eating and enjoying the day.
Two little girls in loose skirts and pinafore aprons sat on the grass, playing a clapping game, near where Willow had eaten her tres leches cake.
A bored-looking teenager with dyed black hair, nose piercing, and a cropped concert T-shirt pointedly ignored them from where she perched nearby, face buried in a book.
Willow could almost believe that the last hour had never happened.
Because it couldn’t have happened. Could it?
Willow caught a glimpse of the black-bonneted older women from the church, the pair she had come to think of as the Knitting Sisters, gazing out at the sea from an ancient stone bench overlooking the harbor.
A trio of lobstermen sat on the granite jetty next to the dock: Two of them, in hoodies and work pants, munched on slices of pizza.
The third, a few feet away from the others, she recognized—it was the low-tech lobsterman she had seen out on the water not much more than an hour ago; maybe he’d had a good morning and finished early.
As though he had felt her gaze, he turned his head and looked straight at her.
His weathered face broke into a hesitant smile, and he nodded in greeting.
It was enough to shake out the cobwebs of her terror, to return her to the world of the living. She smiled back.
The island library had once been a single-story house, renovated years ago to serve its current purpose.
Bright windows let in the sunlight, and the air carried the aroma of new carpet, paper between leather covers, and wood oil cleaner, underlaid with the faintest hint of teenager and socks from the kids who stopped by to study or do homework.
When the bell at the door sounded lightly, Catherine looked up from her computer and smiled as Willow hesitantly ducked inside, a coffee cup in each hand.
“Hey there,” Catherine said. “I’m glad to see you. How are you holding up?”
“I’m good, thanks. I don’t know how you take your coffee, but—” Before she could finish, Finn slid past her legs and made a beeline for an old, braided rug in the children’s section, where he curled up in the rectangle of sunlight. Willow looked helplessly at Catherine.
Catherine waved away her concern and gave the dog a scratch behind the ears.
“Finn goes where Finn wants to go,” she said.
“I’ve even thought of making a ‘where’s Finn?
’ Instagram account so visitors can try to find where he’s hanging out at any given time; add a little local color.
Not that Little North isn’t already dripping with it. ”
Willow smiled half-heartedly. “If you’re sure it’s okay.” She looked around at the empty room. “Wait,” she said, confused, “you guys are open today, right?”
“We are—but the truth is that on gorgeous days like this, our patron count tends to hover somewhere around zero.” Catherine grinned. “And I’m not picky about my coffee as long as it has caffeine, which I’m a little short on today—so thank you!”
“This one is light with sugar, and this one is black,” Willow said, holding up the coffee cups. “Take your pick.”
As Catherine reached for the cup with the sweetened coffee, Willow said, “I would have brought them, anyway, so the coffee isn’t a bribe, but … if it’s not an imposition, I was wondering, may I ask you some questions—history, research type of stuff?”
Catherine grinned. “The research nerd librarian is ready for you,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose and settling back behind her desk. “It’s literally my job. The obscurer the question, the better I like it. Bring it on.”
Willow reached into her backpack, rooting around till she found the World War II novel Sue had left for her. She set the book on the desk in front of Catherine. “I was wondering if you knew anything about this author. Or if you had any of his books in the library?”
Catherine’s eyebrows went up when she saw it.
“Widow’s Walk?” she asked hesitantly. Willow nodded.
Catherine picked up the novel and flipped through the pages.
“It looks old, but it’s in good shape—did you look online to see if it’s available for sale anywhere?
” Even as she spoke, she was setting the book down and beginning the search on her own.
“I did,” Willow answered, “and it isn’t. I was able to find about a dozen other titles by Abel R. Douglas, but none are still in print. Have you ever heard of him?”
“No, I haven’t,” the librarian answered.
She regarded the dust jacket with curiosity.
“The mansion on the cover looks a lot like Cameron House—I suppose it could be a coincidence, but I wonder if the author is local.” She clicked to another website and started typing a new search while Willow looked over her shoulder.
Willow nodded. “I wondered too. Think he might still be around?”
Catherine’s brows drew together as they always did when a search proved trickier than usual.
“No information anywhere, no bio. I can’t find a website for the publisher, so they may have been a tiny house or one that went out of business before there was even an internet.
A couple of volumes pop up on the used book sites and a few on eBay. ”
“Hey, I know that one,” Willow said, pointing at one of the titles on the screen, its cover showing the image of a woman looking out at the ocean. She peered closer. “Weather the Storm. Sue had a copy of it; I found it in the loft on the nightstand.”
“Hmm,” Catherine said distractedly, still searching.
“There’s Weather the Storm again; I think it might have been his last book.
Here’s Will to Live, and Sea of Secrets …
I don’t see Widow’s Walk anywhere, though.
” She pulled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“Where did this one come from, if you don’t mind my asking? ”
“Sue saved it for me,” Willow said. “Rina left me an envelope last night of things Sue had set aside for me.”
Catherine turned away from the computer and gave Willow a troubled look. “Sue left you this particular book? Creepy.”
“Why do you say that?” Willow asked, stiffening.
Catherine blinked in surprise. “You don’t know? No one told you?”
“Told me what?”
“About Sue,” Catherine said hesitantly. “How she died. Where she died.”