Chapter Twenty-Two
When Diana got back from her deliveries the next morning, Willow and Catherine were already waiting at the café with Mac. Rina had not yet arrived. This worried Diana; her friend should have been there by now.
Rina was not okay. Diana had known her for too long not to be able to see it, though her old friend tried to hide her pain beneath a patina of normalcy.
Truth be told, Diana was not okay either; none of them were.
The loss of Sue was too fresh and raw, and Rina’s grief so huge, that none of them had yet found time to deal with their own.
When Diana Reyes had arrived on Little North twelve years ago, she had not planned to settle there permanently—she only knew she needed to get away from Boston, find somewhere quiet and steady where she could raise her child and heal her heart.
But she had fallen in love at first sight with the ramshackle old house with its leaky roof and sagging front porch; Susan Davis, island handywoman and fellow smash-the-patriarchy feminist, had helped her renovate the building and make it beautiful.
More than that, Sue was her first friend on Little North, eventually becoming the closest thing to family she and Mac had ever known.
Diana looked around at the quiet group. Catherine sat cross-legged on a cheerful calico cushion on the wide bay window seat, head down, clicking away at the small computer balanced on her lap.
Mac sprawled sideways in one of the soft chairs beside the window, one leg dangling over the chair’s arm.
For God’s sake, Diana thought indulgently, she’s an adult. Can’t she wear shoes inside the shop?
She took note of Willow as well, curled up in the other chair.
Diana hadn’t been the best jury selector in her firm for nothing—after years of practice, Diana could read body language as easily as law briefs.
The other night at the cabin, Willow had begun to relax and open up; today, the invisible walls were up again, thick and impenetrable and vibrating with energy. Something was up.
Diana’s glance skated over to the bakery case and back to the crumb-covered plate in front of Mac. She said in the mixture of exasperation and alarm familiar to all parents, “Please tell me you didn’t eat all the scones before the lunch rush?”
“Relax, Mom,” Mac said lazily, popping the last bite of a cranberry-orange scone into her mouth. “We put a new batch in the oven; there will be plenty.” From the kitchen, a timer dinged. “There they are. I’ll pull them out to cool.”
Before she could move, the bell over the door jingled again, and Rina entered the café, looking agitated. Willow uncurled from the chair and stood up quickly. “It’s okay, Mac, I’ll get the scones,” she said, hurrying into the kitchen without meeting anyone’s eyes.
Interesting, Diana thought. Something’s definitely up.
As Willow slipped out, Mac called, “Bring back a plate with a few fresh ones for us—” She caught Diana’s glare. “I mean, for Mom and Rina, okay?”
“Got it,” Willow called back, already out of sight.
Rina hadn’t noticed Willow’s precipitous departure. “Did you all hear what happened last night? Have any of you been to the village yet?” she asked.
Diana, on the verge of following Willow into the kitchen to try to talk to her, turned back to Rina. Mac and Catherine looked up blankly.
“No one’s told you?” Rina continued. “About Patricia Ramsey?”
They looked at one another blankly.
“Did she finally murder her husband?” Catherine asked.
Diana chimed in from behind the counter, where she filled large mugs of coffee and handed one to Rina, “Or decide at last to pay someone to give her highlights?” It was an open secret on the Island; Patricia was so vain that she wouldn’t even let the ladies over at Stacia’s salon see her graying roots, so she dyed her hair herself at home, to results only marginally better than her organ playing.
“Drive her car into a tree again?” Mac asked.
“A hundred points to the girl with the tattoos and rainbow hair,” Rina said dryly, leaving Mac looking shocked and a little guilty. “She’s saying someone cut the brake lines on her car and sent her down Boulder Hill after her gig at the Raven.”
Diana and Catherine looked at her dubiously. “Patricia Ramsey?” Catherine said, shaking her head. “Saying someone cut her brake lines?”
Diana added, “As in, someone tried to kill her? Where did you hear this?”
“Ask Willow,” Rina said, gesturing to Willow as she reentered the room, a plate of miniature scones in one hand and a fresh coffee cup in the other. “Apparently, she was there.”
Four sets of eyes swung around to fix on Willow, who awkwardly cleared her throat and brought the plate over to the little table.
Resuming her perch on the corner of the couch, she said uncomfortably, “Um … yeah.” She took a gulp of coffee.
“Naomi texted me last night and wanted to talk, so I met her up at the big pub up the hill on Great North. Patricia and her band were playing; I left right after she did and saw her car at the bottom of the hill as I came around the curve. She was…” Willow remembered the blood pouring down Patricia’s face, the terrified hand gripping hers, the unsteady wobble as Willow helped the shaken woman away from the crash.
“She’d bumped her head and was kind of beat up, but she seemed to be mostly okay.
Then it was all cops and paramedics and …
of course … Nick.” She scowled. “The way he acted, it was like he thought I’d done it. ”
“Isn’t it more likely she had one too many glasses of bad rosé and lost control?” Diana asked pragmatically. “I thought cars were designed now to make sure the brakes can’t fail precipitously like that.”
“Not if she was driving one of Ramsey’s old vintage numbers,” Catherine said. “Automobiles made after 1967 have dual master cylinders to prevent that kind of complete failure, but older cars don’t.”
They all stared at her.
“What?” she asked. “I dated someone once who was into vintage cars.”
“Because that’s so totally in character for you,” Mac said dryly. She glanced at Willow. “You were at the Raven to meet Naomi?” she asked curiously. “What was that like?”
Willow wasn’t sure what to say. She was lonely and sad and ate a hot fudge sundae and drank too much and wears twelve-hundred-dollar boots and hasn’t betrayed or lied to me that I know of, which is more than I can say for all present company, and she may be having an affair and it’s possible she poisoned her husband but I don’t think so, she wanted to say but didn’t.
Instead, she said, “She’s … nice. Nicer than I expected.
” She paused. “And she’s worried about Mr. Talbot.
She said he somehow got a huge overdose of lithium, and that’s what’s making him so sick. ”
The room was silent.
“Lithium,” Diana said thoughtfully. “I vaguely remember it from the periodic table, but aside from batteries, I have no idea where it would show up in real life.”
Catherine said, “Lithium carbonate. It’s prescribed as a mood stabilizer for people with bipolar disorder.” She turned to Willow. “I don’t suppose he’s prescribed it, and maybe he accidentally took too much?”
Willow shook her head. “Naomi says no. She knows all his medications, and lithium isn’t one of them.”
“If she’s telling the truth,” Rina said.
“Right. The truth.” Willow’s voice was tight.
Diana’s internal radar pinged again. It wasn’t just Willow; her people-sense had picked up two more items of interest during the previous exchange.
First, Catherine had not needed to type anything into a search engine to know lithium’s primary pharmacological use; as with the peculiarities of brake line construction, she had already known.
Second, when Diana had asked about lithium’s real-world applications, Rina and Mac had shot a quick look at one another, then looked away and avoided eye contact with each other or anyone else.
“Lithium poisoning.” Catherine was typing again. “Let’s see what I can find—whoa.”
“What?” Willow and Mac demanded.
Catherine read from the site. “Apparently, signs of lithium toxicity include vomiting, confusion, muscle shaking and weakness, slurred speech, diarrhea and frequent urination, and excessive thirstiness, among other things.” She looked up at them. “This sounds familiar.”
Mac said soberly, “He was shaking, slurring, doing a lot of the things on that list right before Rina gave him lemonade. We all saw.”
Catherine nodded, still scanning the page.
“They are differentiating here between chronic toxicity—where you take in a little at a time until you’re overloaded—and a onetime ‘acute’ overdose.
It looks like chronic poisoning hits the neurology, and the GI issues are more likely with an all-at-once overdose.
” She frowned, looking around the room. “The thing is, looking down this list—memory problems, kidney failure, muscle tremors, weakness—an awful lot of them seem to go right hand in hand with, you know, the stereotypical ailments people expect for the elderly.”
Catherine looked up from her computer, her face troubled.
“All these symptoms—if they happened to a young person, any doctor would be all over it. Maybe they would even with an elderly person, given the chance, but if Geralt himself believed it was nothing more than old age catching up to him, he might not have gone to the doctor to find out. Maybe if he’d seen someone, they would have tested and found it, but… ”
Curled up on the couch, Willow’s thoughts were running in circles, hampered by her efforts to pretend Rina wasn’t in the room; the hurt was too raw, the anger too fresh.
Be careful who you trust, Naomi had said.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? Willow thought bitterly.
She couldn’t trust Rina, who had, according to Naomi, been responsible for Willow not receiving Sue’s letter in time.
She couldn’t really trust Mac or Diana either, because they were Rina’s best friends.
She couldn’t trust Geralt, even, the person with the best reason to have Sue out of the way—nor, for that matter, Naomi, who had the best reason to have Geralt out of the way.
She was pretty sure she trusted Catherine, who had hinted at her own doubts yesterday at the library …
but even that might have been a step further than was safe.
For that matter, she wasn’t sure she could even trust her own mind, which was pretty sure it had spent part of yesterday afternoon talking with ghosts.
But Geralt had been sick before Rina gave him the lemonade. They’d all seen it. Did she honestly believe a complicated string of different people were each individually taking out Cameron heirs, one at a time? No. Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Not that anything about this was simple.
She took a deep breath. “It’s not just Geralt,” she said in a flat voice. “It’s about Cameron House. And who gets to own it.”
Still looking down at her lap, Willow related the conversation she had heard in the foyer of the church after the memorial, and her suspicion that not only Effie but also Sue had been murdered by someone who wanted the mansion for themselves.
And she told them about Sue’s efforts—she carefully did not tell the group that a group of ghosts had told her this part—to find another member of the Cameron line to inherit the property.
When she finished, there was a shocked silence.
Mac said, surprised, “Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?”
Diana shook her head, chagrined. “I feel like an idiot. It seems so obvious, but I don’t think any of us even thought to connect Effie’s death with Sue’s; she was ninety-nine and went, as far as anyone could tell, peacefully, the way she wanted to.”
Catherine nodded. “I admit, it crossed my mind to wonder after Sue died, but I had nothing to base it on. And you have no idea who the other man was?” she asked Willow hopefully.
Willow shook her head. “No. I’ve been going over and over it trying to figure out if I’ve heard him before, but they were too quiet—I never actually heard the voice itself in normal speaking range.”
Catherine was frowning. “‘Now that the old lady’s gone and the lesbian’s out of the way’ … are you sure that’s what he said?”
Willow nodded emphatically. “I’m sure. Exact quote.”
Mac’s expression was skeptical. “You can remember word-for-word conversations from two days ago?”
“I, um, have a sort of photographic memory for what I hear.” Willow looked up. “There must be a word for that, but…”
“Echoic memory,” Catherine said absently, still clicking from web page to web page, learning all she could about lithium toxicity. “Eidetic memory is for visuals; echoic memory is for sounds.”
Mac grinned. “As usual, our librarian, the smartest person in the room.”
“Oh, shut up,” Catherine said half-heartedly, still studying the screen.
Rina’s voice, tight and harsh, shattered their levity. “You’re suggesting someone killed Sue. That her fall wasn’t an accident. And that you had actual concrete information about it that might have given the police something to go on, and you kept it to yourself.”
The room went very still.
Willow forced her voice to stay even. “I’m not suggesting anything; I’m relating what I heard.”
Mac spoke hesitantly into the charged silence. “It makes a twisted kind of sense. All three owners of Cameron House, within the space of a few months? How can that be a coincidence?”
Rina wasn’t looking at Mac, though. Her eyes were locked on Willow, her face white except for two bright spots of color on her cheeks. “And you didn’t think I had the right to know about this? You didn’t think it was something you should have told me?”
Willow raised her chin defiantly. “I’m telling you now.”
“How dare you keep this from me!” Rina said, rising to her feet. “You had no right—”
But Willow was on her feet as well. “How dare I? Keep things from you? How can you even—” Willow heard her voice rising, could feel her control about to slip away, and stopped mid-sentence.
She turned and fled the café.