Chapter Twenty-Three
Rina stood frozen, as though carved out of marble.
Diana wanted to move to Rina’s side, but she didn’t. She could guess now why Willow was upset; Rina had confided in her about the unmailed letter shortly after Sue’s death. Diana had been supportive; she would still be supportive. But support was not always gentle.
“Go after her,” Diana said firmly to her friend. “Now. No backing down, no putting it off. Follow her.” Rina opened her mouth to protest, but Diana cut her off. “You knew it was going to come back and bite you in the rear eventually, and now it has. Deal with it.”
Diana knew Rina would continue to argue, would summon back the anger that had always been her way to avoid feeling the more complex emotions of shame and grief and guilt, but Diana did not give her the chance. “Willow deserves better. Sue deserves better,” she said. “Go.”
Rina let out her breath, let her head drop in resignation. Without a word, she exited the café.
In the silence that followed, Mac shook her head. “Geez, Mom, sometimes I forget how tough you can be.”
Diana rubbed her temples; she could feel a truly formidable headache in the offing. “She needed it.” She looked out the door after Rina. “I hope they can figure it out. Sue would want them to.”
Mac looked at her watch and started gathering her things. Her mother frowned. “You’re leaving too?”
Mac gave an exaggerated sigh. “Work. I have a shift this afternoon.”
“I thought you didn’t start for another half hour,” Diana said.
“Yeah, but Mike wanted me to come in a little early; he has to take off for some family thing. I told him I would.”
Diana nodded absently. “Okay then. See you later.”
She looked worriedly after Rina and Willow. She’d done all she could; it was up to them now.
Rina grimaced when she realized Willow had taken the path down to the same beach, the same jetty where she had sat and had her argument with Imaginary Sue the day of the memorial.
She picked her way across the round cobbles to where Willow sat on the jetty, knees pulled up to her chest, looking out at the sea.
Rina swallowed the lump in her throat and said hesitantly, “Willow?”
“Go away,” was the reply.
Rina fought the urge to do exactly that, stayed put, and tried again. “Willow, I’m sorry.”
“You knew about the letter,” Willow said in a flat voice. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew, because she asked you to mail it for her. And you didn’t.”
Rina closed her eyes. You lied to me, Sue’s memory had said to her the other day, on this very jetty. That’s not like you either.
“It was a horrible thing to do,” Rina said finally. “I wanted to tell you, to come clean, but I didn’t know how to say it, how to—”
“How to tell me that instead of mailing the letter, you hid it away?” Willow continued, lowering her knees and swiveling her body to face Rina. “How you betrayed me, betrayed your fiancée, in the exact same way my parents did?”
She was standing now, facing Rina, her face red, her eyes fierce.
“How Sue asked you to do this one thing, and you decided to lie to her, and then me, and pretend I had blown her off? And she died thinking I didn’t care enough to come back, didn’t love her, didn’t want her?
” Willow’s voice started to shake as tears threatened to well up; she tried and failed to push them back.
“How you took away my last chance to see her again, to say goodbye?”
Rina was starting to cry now too, reaching her hands out as though begging Willow to take them, to forgive her. But Willow barely saw. She backed away a few steps, shaking her head wordlessly, and fled up the bank, running as far from Rina as she could.
A slim figure in a gray hooded sweatshirt, overlong sleeves dangling over small hands, watched the pair, unseen, from the dock.
Satisfied that Willow had gone in the other direction and Rina was still on the beach, the lurker slipped casually behind the dock and through the back door of the Pottery Shop.
A few minutes later, the door opened again; the same figure cautiously peeked out and, seeing no one else on the dock, casually set off toward the village.
Reaching the dumpster at the top of the dock, the figure opened it and dropped something inside—a paper-wrapped package tucked inside a ziplock bag—and kept walking.
Once clear of the dock, she pushed back the enveloping hood and tugged the sweatshirt off, tying it around her waist. After one last surreptitious glance left and right, she ran her fingers through her multicolored hair and gave it a toss. Then Mac Reyes headed for the bike shop.
She arrived only a few minutes late.
Willow ran until her rage and tears burned out and her mind quieted, till there was nothing left but the blood pounding in her ears and the ragged sounds of her breathing.
The beautiful morning had faded into an afternoon of chill and damp; the mist in the air was thickening, threatening to blanket the remainder of the day in a heavy, wet fog. Willow didn’t care.
At first, she was only running from—from Rina, her protestations and pleading. But at some point, she realized she had a destination.
Of course. She was running to Cameron House.
When she got there, she collapsed against the gatepost, eye to eye with one of the stone lions who guarded it. It did not look particularly sympathetic, but she hadn’t expected it to.
After catching her breath, she made her way up the stairs to the front door. She reached out a tremulous hand to the heavy knob. Before her hand could touch it, it turned on its own. With a soft creak, the heavy door swung inward.
Willow stepped inside the entry hall.
Without the bright sunlight of the previous day, the interior of the house was bleak and cold. Whatever had made Cameron House feel alive and thrumming with awareness was not here today; it felt hollow and abandoned. Today, it was just a house.
Willow stepped inside a little farther. “Joel?” she called out hesitantly. “Dellie? Dot? Are you here?”
She entered the sitting room, which was as chill and empty as the foyer. The rocking chair was still. She tried the library doors; they were, once again, locked tight.
Her shoulders sagged; she leaned her head against the library door in despair. “Please,” she murmured under her breath, without any real expectation of response. “Please, let me come in. Please let me—let me help.”
“There is no help left for us,” Joel said from behind her. “It’s over.”
He stood in the front room beside Effie’s chair, gazing out the window. His hands were clasped behind his back in what Willow was beginning to consider his characteristic stance, but today, the lightness was gone; replaced by an aura of bitter futility.
Willow said frantically, “Please, there must be something I can do—”
But Joel was shaking his head; his next words hit like a slap of icy water.
“There is nothing you can do. Nothing at all.” He looked across the room to her, and there it was again, the look of implacable disappointment.
“You are young, Miss Stone. Dr. Davis was strong and focused and unafraid. But you?” The pitiless clarity in his eyes pierced like a blade.
“You’ve shaped a whole life around avoiding what you fear, staying away from that which makes you uncomfortable.
You have some small amount of spine, but there is no steel in it; when faced with challenges, you buckle and withdraw. ”
Willow stood frozen, the impeccably aimed words biting into her like tiny missiles and exploding on contact. Please stop, her spirit begged. I know it’s true, but please stop.
She was suddenly aware of Dot and Dellie, sitting on a nearby sofa, knitting calmly. Dot elbowed Dellie gently and murmured, “Hear that, Dellie? He thinks she’s weak.”
Dellie snorted, somehow managing to remain ladylike as she did so.
“Well, that’s our Joel. He never understood women in the slightest. We both know it.
” She gave Joel an irritated glance, then nodded at Willow.
“Don’t worry, dear. You don’t know what you’re made of yet, but you will. They all will.”
Then Dellie was no longer there, and neither was her sister. Joel closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them, they had regained a little of their gentleness.
“It’s not your fault, Willow,” he said quietly. “We needed another Cameron.” He looked wistfully, longingly, around the room, out the window at the sea, as though he knew it would be the last time. “Now our time has run out.”
And then he, too, was gone.