Chapter Nineteen
The fireplace, cold and shadowed but a moment ago, now crackled merrily, sending warm light into the room. Joel Drummond sat calmly on the hearthstone, peering through narrow spectacles at the ledger on his lap and scratching away in it with an ancient fountain pen.
He eyed her over the top of his glasses, then closed the ledger and put it beside him on the hearth, setting the pen precisely in its center. Willow walked slowly across the library, moving, with each step, farther from the safe and rational island outside and closer to … she didn’t know what.
Joel’s dark, implacable eyes followed her as she approached. He did not speak, only waited.
Later, Willow would think, It would be easier if he were transparent, or had some ectoplasmic aura rising from him, or, I don’t know, sparkled.
But the man before her looked so absurdly normal that her brain could hardly compute his existence.
Normal, except for his old eyes that seemed to see everything.
“Are you … real?” she heard herself asking, wincing as her voice cracked a little.
The corner of his mouth quirked, the faint shadow of a smile. “It would seem so.”
Her heart was thudding so hard she was sure he could hear it. “I saw a photo. Taken in 1880. Of … you.”
Joel tilted his head curiously. “Did you? Which one?”
“Efric and Andrew Cameron’s wedding.”
He nodded. “Ah yes. That was one of the earliest family photos; Andrew was very proud of it.”
Another long silence; she struggled for what to say next, and he waited.
Once she found her voice again, the questions tumbled out. “But how … how are you here? Why are you here?” She paused. “Why am I here?”
He nodded as though she had asked him to tell her about the weather.
“Three excellent questions. With very different answers.” He unfolded himself from his seat on the hearth and began pacing slowly back and forth, his hands behind his back.
“The how is … complicated. We do not fully understand ourselves the mechanics behind our presence here, and no one gave us a guidebook.”
“A guidebook would have been helpful,” said the elderly black-bonneted woman sitting on the divan, fingers swiftly feeding yarn through her knitting needles.
Willow started; the woman had not appeared, exactly; she simply was.
“Remember? Like that ghost story film Effie let us watch about the nice young couple who died on the little bridge,” she said, eyes flicking up and down from her knitting, to Joel, to Willow, and back down again.
Her sister, sitting next to her on the couch where a second ago there had been no one, picked up the story. “Yes, I remember—but they neglected to read it, and they had so much trouble with that vulgar little striped man in the attic—”
“Ladies, please,” Joel said, clearly irritated; the women gave each other a knowing look and returned to their knitting with studied innocence.
Willow looked in bewilderment from one woman to the other and then back to Joel. She was either losing it or this was real.
How could this be real?
He gave Willow a pitying look, then gestured to the women. “Delphine and Dorothy Drummond, meet Willow Stone. She is Dr. Davis’s goddaughter.”
“Call me Dellie, please,” the first woman said with a rosy-cheeked smile. “And my sister is Dot. A pleasure.”
Willow cleared her throat awkwardly. “It’s very nice to meet you too,” she said. “I saw you at the church, I think.”
Dot shrugged. “Well, of course we had to pay our respects. Even if Miss Susan was not a proper Cameron, she did her best.”
There was an uncomfortable pause, and then Dellie said brightly, “Do you enjoy ghost stories, Willow dear? Effie loved watching them on her big television. Such a marvel, all those people moving around on the screens as clear as though we were looking through a window at them.” She leaned confidentially in Willow’s direction.
“Joel will pretend he was too busy with numbers and ledgers, but he enjoys them as much as we do.” She resumed her knitting.
“Remember, Dot, that film about the young woman with the pottery wheel, whose beau was murdered, and his ghost came back to avenge his own death?” she asked.
Dot nodded. “So exciting—and such a handsome young man—improper, of course, sharing a home together before marriage, but oh, Dellie, weren’t they so much in love—”
“Ladies,” Joel snapped at the sisters. He turned back to Willow. “Miss Willow Stone, meet the North Islands Historical Society. The original membership, in any case; there are of course many others now.”
Willow’s eyes darted from one to the other of the matter-of-fact trio. “You’re … ghosts.”
The little quirk at the corner of his mouth returned. “An archaic word, bearing the baggage of ages.” His shrug was nonchalant. “I suppose it is as serviceable as any.”
“But…” Willow remembered something else. “When I saw you the other day, you helped support Mr. Talbot when we tried to get him to the couch. How could you do that if you aren’t … real? You had your arm around him. You touched my face when…” She shuddered, not wanting to revisit the experience.
“We are very real. Just not tangible in the way you understand reality. And I didn’t truly touch you—or him,” he said.
“I gave the appearance, but your mind filled in the rest. Here,” he said, holding his hand out to her—outstretched, as real as her own, every pore and hair and crease, rounded fingernails and ragged cuticles and a smudge of ink on his second finger.
Hesitantly, she reached back with her own hand to clasp his; for an instant, she felt his fingers around hers, the warmth and solidity of his steady hand, but as she looked down, she realized they were not touching at all, hands hovering a breath away from each other.
He withdrew his hand from hers and took a step back, resuming his slow pacing. “Suffice it to say that in our state of being, we can only physically interact with things that existed when we lived. Newer objects, and of course humans, we cannot.”
“Tell her about the talismans, Joel,” Dot said.
Dellie jumped in before he could speak. “You see, dear, most of us have one thing, one tangible object,” she said. “An item that was important to us in life, that can interact with both past and present.” She waved one of her knitting needles in Willow’s direction. “Here, touch it,” she said.
Willow did; the needle felt solid and firm and exceedingly … ordinary. She looked at Joel, then down at the antique fountain pen on the hearth. “Yours is … your pen?”
He nodded. “It is. Even filled with modern ink, on modern paper. These … mediate for us.” He looked vaguely embarrassed.
“Again, I do not understand the mechanics. But these help us accomplish our purpose.” He gestured around the library.
“Ghosts, spirits, shades—whatever you call us, we are here, and it is our responsibility to see to the house and the rest of the family. Which brings us to your second question: why we are here.”
He stopped pacing and looked at her. “Miss Stone, were you aware of what Dr. Davis was attempting to do for us?”
Willow thought again of Sue’s letter. Please come back to Little North—and this is important—come soon … you are still part of this place, and it needs you. She shook her head. “No; she wrote me a letter months ago, but I only received it last week. I came as soon as I could, but it was too late.”
“Dr. Davis was working with us, with the historical society,” Joel said.
“It was Effie’s idea; she knew that between herself and Geralt Talbot, the Cameron line was coming to an end.
But she believed there were others, descended from previous Cameron generations; if one could be located and brought to Little North, our problem would be solved. ”
“What problem?” Willow asked.
“The problem of our being,” he said heavily. “Our existence here requires a living Cameron on the island, taking responsibility for this house. Once the last is gone, our hold—all of us—will begin to fade until we … cease.”
“So you can imagine our reaction when Effie left the house to a non-Cameron,” Dot said acerbically.
“Indeed,” Dellie said. “A questionable decision, not discussed with the family.”
“I’m sure Miss Effie had her reasons,” Joel said, then fixed his eyes on Willow’s again.
“We believe Dr. Davis, despite not being a Cameron herself, was on the cusp of a discovery—that she had learned something and was pursuing a lead to another Cameron family branch. She brought you back, I suppose, to ask for your help in finding it.”
Willow blinked. “Me? Why?”
“Your third question.” Joel shook his head.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Miss Stone.
She wanted you here, and Effie concurred, and neither deigned to share their reasoning with us.
” He held out his hands in a gesture of resignation.
“But here you are. It’s not unusual for islanders, especially the old families, to see us from time to time, though they rarely pay us any mind.
It’s infrequent for someone from Away”—Willow could all but hear the silent capitalization—“to notice us, but not unprecedented, particularly if some aspect of their lives resonates with ours or has a particular connection. We suspect that Susan’s bond with Effie, and yours with Susan, are what give you this ability.
But that won’t be enough to sustain us.”
“But Sue wrote to me,” Willow said. “She must have known something. She must have had a reason.”
Joel’s mouth set in a grim line. “Yes, she must have. But she is gone, and whatever she knew seems to be gone with her.”
“And why is she gone?” Willow asked. She took a few steps closer to him. “What happened to Sue? How did she die?”
Joel winced and turned away, facing out the window. “Please, Miss Stone.”
“Joel, please, tell me!” This time, she would not back off, she would not relent. “Someone pushed her, didn’t they? Who pushed her?”
“I don’t know, Miss Stone,” he said tightly.
“And Effie,” Willow went on, heedless of Joel’s growing tension, “how did Effie die? Did someone kill her too?”
“I don’t know!” he cried in frustrated fury.
“But … why?” Willow asked, bewildered. “Why don’t you know?”
He whirled on her and snapped, “Because I was not there! I wanted to be, I tried, but I could not see, I could not reach them, and then they were … gone.” He sank dejectedly into one of the wingback chairs.
Dellie said gently, “My dear Willow, you need to understand—when Effie died, everything started to unravel. Without bodies to tether us to time and space, the daily rhythms of sleep, of food, of age, our existences have always been a bit … disjointed. Fragmented. And now?” She raised her hands helplessly and let them fall.
“With Effie gone and Geralt Talbot slipping away, we are slipping too. Not only the present but also the past; it is all beginning to fade.”
Dot reached over and squeezed her sister’s hand; their faces were filled with unease. “Most worrisome of all,” Dot said, “Effie is not here. She should be here, with the historical society; she took care of this house, and us, longer than any other Cameron. She died. But she is not here.”
“Perhaps,” said Dellie hopefully, “she is simply taking a little longer to arrive?”
“It’s been months,” Dot said acerbically. “If she were coming, she would be here by now.” Then she looked quizzically at Willow. “It has been months, hasn’t it?”
Willow nodded.
Dot sighed. “I thought so,” she said with a hint of tears in her voice. “I just … I can’t remember…”
Willow turned back to Joel … but he was no longer there. When she turned back to the sisters on the divan, it was empty too. The fire was out, dry wood stacked and ready as though it had never burned; Willow was alone.
Then why did she feel as though the house was still watching her?
She exited the library, pulling the door shut, jumping as the lock slid into place behind her.
Glancing into the sitting room, Willow noticed a decorative pillow lying on the floor next to Effie’s rocking chair.
She was sure it had not been there earlier; maybe Finn had knocked it down this morning.
She picked it up and glanced at it idly; it was brightly embroidered all over, in the pattern of a tree whose cascade of trailing branches sheltered a flock of birds—bluebirds mostly, with a single brown one perched off to the side, as though the pillow’s creator had run out of blue thread before finishing.
There was an indentation in one side, the size of a foot, or perhaps a face; Willow fluffed the depression out and put the pillow back on the couch, unsure why this innocuous object suddenly made her feel so uneasy.
She needed to get out, to get back to the cabin, to normalcy and sunlight and the world of the living.
But the front door would not open. She twisted the knob, tried to turn the bolt, but it was fixed shut. Willow felt panic rise in her throat; now the whispering was back, the soft crescendo of voices, invisible eyes fixed on her. Willow whirled around to greet whatever new strangeness awaited …
Silence fell; there was no one there. The room was deserted, as it had been moments ago.
Just the rocking chair, and the embroidered pillow, back on the floor again exactly where it had been before Willow picked it up.
Like the afghan after Geralt’s collapse, like the broken fragments of his cane that had sliced into her hand and yet were gone minutes later, the house had … reset.
This time when she turned back to the door and flipped the bolt, it opened. Cameron House let her go.
It knew she would return.