Chapter Eighteen
It would take hours, days, Willow realized, to go through all the boxes. The flow of documents seemed endless, mostly scans of articles from old newspapers—local ones from Little North as well as wider-reaching publications from the mainland.
The third name, which looked to be in the same handwriting as the bulk of the document: Joel Drummond. Interesting, she thought. And a little surprising that Nick didn’t know his descendant, if the Drummonds have been on the island for this long.
She kept going. In the next folder, Willow found a reproduction of an old daguerreotype photo. A young couple stood in the center of perhaps a dozen others, all formally posed, she in a heavily bustled white gown and veil, he in a frock coat and top hat.
On the other side of the bride stood a man with a neatly trimmed beard and slicked-back dark hair. The photo was too old and the quality too fuzzy to see the silver threads in his beard—or the kind steadiness of his gaze—but Willow’s skin rippled with gooseflesh as her memory filled them in.
This wasn’t a photo of a descendant of the Joel Drummond she had met in Cameron House yesterday.
It was the same man.
It couldn’t be, and yet it was. He was even wearing the same suit.
She looked again at the photo and saw, among the festively dressed members of the wedding party, a pair of elderly women seated in chairs in front of the group, familiar faces smiling from beneath the unbroken black of their bonnets.
Almost afraid to look, Willow turned the photograph over and read the writing on the back: “Efric Drummond and Andrew Cameron, wedded June 16, 1880.” Among the names written below the inscription were Joel, Delphine, and Dorothy Drummond.
“Not possible,” Willow murmured, mentally pulling the pieces together.
She felt lightheaded, as though there were not enough oxygen in the room; her heart was pounding so hard she was sure Catherine would come in to see what the racket was, and the ceiling lamp above her seemed to grow dimmer.
Willow rose, swiftly exiting the archives room and making her way outside the library, where she leaned against the doorjamb and gulped in the fresh air as her mind struggled to process what could not be real, yet somehow … was.
The little boy she had seen yesterday morning from the Cameron House roof was running along the beach, the crow flying in circles around him and cawing as the child laughed in delight; curly blond hair tangled in the breeze as he waved his cap in the air.
She knew who this boy was, she realized with a shock; less than an hour ago in a pile of old articles, she had found one announcing the death of Thomas Cameron, age ten, in 1925, an unframed family photo tucked in beside it of a towheaded little boy with curly hair.
She went back to the archives room and dug out the photo, confirming it; this was the same boy.
Not possible.
But what if it was?
Her brain was whirling again; it could not accept the pattern the moving puzzle pieces were beginning to form, but it was inescapable.
The ancient black-clad sisters with their knitting.
The scattering of villagers wearing simple outdated clothing—clothing that, she now realized, was not that of some “plain” religious sect but simply … old.
The boy running with the crow, the little girls in their pinafores playing on the green, the broad-shouldered lobsterman in his ancient dory. Joel Drummond, who had held Geralt Talbot’s hand and looked into his eyes …
(Yes, my friend, we get to go on.)
Going on, outside of their time, unchanging. Still living—or whatever one would call it—on the island that had been their home. In fact, Willow realized with a chill as she vaguely recalled her visits to the Quaker meetinghouse when she was a child, they had been here all along.
And then there was the house itself, the glow of a gas lantern in the turret window, the breathing walls and secret passageways, notes typed on old manual typewriters, the widow’s walk.
Cameron House itself, looming tall and imposing over the village its founding family had built, full of more secrets than she had even dreamed.
Half an hour later, Willow stood gazing up at the imposing front doors of the mansion. She hesitated for a moment. Did she dare go up to the door? Should she turn the knob? Knock?
A faint click; the door opened gently inward as if in invitation.
All right then.
Willow walked slowly up the stairs to the big porch, pausing at the threshold, then stepping inside the foyer.
Nothing had changed, and yet everything felt different; this was how the room had felt when Geralt was lying on the floor gasping, Joel kneeling beside him—thick, rich, full of something inexplicable.
Goose bumps zinged across her skin again as she let the strangeness wash over her, but this time, she felt no impulse to run.
Willow turned her head to the rocking chair in the sitting room, draped with its green-blue shawl, sure she had seen someone sitting there.
The chair was unoccupied. But it was, very faintly, rocking.
Her eye then thought it caught movement at the top of the staircase—perhaps a glimpse of a woman in black and white, wearing a crisply starched apron and a bright cap on her head, like a maid’s uniform—but again, when she looked, there was nothing there.
A whiff of cooking smell wafting from the old kitchen—garlic, perhaps—and fresh fish, gone as quickly as it came.
The sound of a footstep down the hallway where there was no foot to make it, and farther off, the distant clicking of an old typewriter punctuated by the ding of the carriage return.
A fleeting image of two identical young men seated on either side of the chessboard in the foyer, one reaching over to move a piece …
From the glass doors locking away the dark library to her right came the unmistakable chonk of a bolt being turned and the click of a latch released. Then only silence, and waiting.
The words of Sue’s letter, read over and over until they were memorized, echoed in her mind. The Willow I remember, it whispered, could never resist mystery or adventure.
Crossing the distance to the shadowed library doors, Willow reached out to the twin brass doorknobs and took hold of them.
I hope life has not crushed that quality out of your spirit.
Willow turned the knobs, pushed the doors open, and stepped inside the headquarters of the North Islands Historical Society.
The first thing she noticed was the library’s cavernous size; the second was its smell—the familiar sweet-smoky blend of wood pulp and mustiness and time, with a touch of furniture polish and lemon, common to old libraries everywhere. Willow had spent enough hours in them to know.
Wall sconces gave a little light, but they created more shadows than they banished in the massive room.
The library walls rose two full stories, lined with books from floor to impossibly high ceiling, gleaming shelves sharing space with framed paintings and photographs.
In one corner, a wrought iron spiral staircase twisted its way up to the second-floor catwalk.
A massive freestanding fireplace dominated the center of the room, at the base of an equally massive chimney; the remainder of the room extending beyond it was shrouded in darkness.
The fireplace with its grand granite hearth was flanked by comfortable chairs and a Victorian settee, a perfect place to sit in the warmth and read or perhaps knit. The floor was burnished oak hardwood; side nooks and turret alcoves with deep chairs and jewel-toned rugs created cozy reading spaces.
Willow had never been in such a wonderful room in her life.
She walked around slowly, taking in the generations of paintings and photos.
The clothing and hairstyles reflected every decade from the late 1700s through to maybe the 1950s.
A photo in an ornate oval frame showed a couple standing arm in arm; another photo contained two lanky young men, like mirror images of one another, grinning rakishly at the camera from opposite sides of a chessboard.
Farther down, a small painting caught her eye, of a broad-shouldered man in a dark blue lobster dory with the name Susannah painted into the bow—her low-tech lobsterman, when his boat was new.
In one of the larger paintings, she recognized Efric and Andrew Cameron, the couple from the wedding photo she had found in Catherine’s library archive.
In this image, they were surrounded by children; Willow realized the artist had caught far more than the stiff elegance one might expect of the typical family portrait.
The elegantly dressed mother in the high-backed chair showed a hint of frazzled desperation as a pair of identical toddler boys—would they grow up to be the young men at the chessboard?
—tried to escape from her lap. Behind the chair, the father figure stood tall and stiff, his hand on his wife’s shoulder, looking both paternal and powerful; next to him stood an older boy, perhaps sixteen, equally stiff, as though attempting to look exactly like his father.
A small plaque beside the painting read: Andrew and Efric Cameron, and their children Andrew Jr., Donal, and Dougal. And Annabel. 1897.
The teenage boy was no doubt Andrew Jr., which meant the babies had to be Donal and Dougal. But—Willow looked at the painting again, puzzled—where was Annabel?
She felt her face break into a smile when she saw, in the background of the painting, a pair of small bare feet peeking out from beneath the window curtains, a set of small fingers at the side of the curtain, and the hint of a face peeking around the edge from the shadows.
A childhood memory slammed hard into Willow’s mind: Her parents, hosting some holiday in their home, had demanded that she remain in the big room where everyone talked and clinked their dishes and silverware, conversations layering over one another, tangling and jangling in her brain.
Willow hated it, had always hated it; as the minutes dragged on, she had moved slowly backward to the edges of the gathering, then to the wall, then to the curtain, and then behind it.
She had stayed there, perched on the windowsill like Jane Eyre, warm and unnoticed and silently swathed in the heavy velvet, until an adult found her and abruptly yanked the curtain back.
Everyone had laughed, and the moment, though never repeated, became a joke to retell every year, about Willow and her antisocial nature.
She had laughed too, of course; that was what one did, and no one bothered to notice the bleakness in her eyes as she did so.
You and I would get along well, Annabel, she thought. In fact, I’d very much like to meet you.
She gave a little pinched shriek as the library door suddenly slammed shut behind her; heart in her throat, she whirled to face it just in time to see the bolt turn—with no hand to turn it—and hear it settle with a hard thunk into place.
A familiar voice spoke from the center of the room. “Good afternoon, Miss Stone. Thank you for joining us.”