Chapter Thirty-Eight
It took three tries to find the key that opened the Cameron House back door; Willow slipped inside out of the rain and wind, through the shabby old kitchen, and into the foyer.
She was beginning to get accustomed to the mansion’s shifting moods; today, with no sunlight to filter flickers of magic through the stained glass window above the grand staircase, all was cold and dim, like a sepia photograph.
The only sound was the whine of the wind outside and the persistent tapping of raindrops on the roof; within the thick walls, all was still.
Willow hesitantly moved through the rooms on the first floor, looking for any sign of movement or presence. Kitchen, sitting room, dining room … all was completely quiet.
In the rear corner of the house, Willow came upon a cozy modern bedroom suite she had not noticed before, completely unlike the rest of the antique-laden house.
This was Sue’s room, she realized in a rush; her godmother had avoided the grand bedrooms of the mansion and instead claimed this simple space for herself.
Willow smiled at how characteristically Sue that choice was.
A layer of dust had settled over the space in the weeks since Sue’s death, but Willow could still appreciate the quiet, contemporary elegance of the space.
She suspected from its location that the room might have begun life as part of the food storage and preparation area of the house, but if so, it had been thoroughly remodeled since then.
It held a Mission-style bed, with a pair of simple chairs in one corner; a gorgeously carved desk sat against the wall, strewn with books and papers.
The contents of the bookshelves lining the walls were varied and eclectic, important-looking leather-bound first editions and historical texts sharing space with the tales of Avonlea and Narnia and Pern that Willow had loved as a child.
The novels of Abel R. Douglas were there too, with one conspicuously bare spot where Widow’s Walk would have gone.
This room feels like Sue, Willow thought.
Reluctantly, she left the comfortable room behind.
Finding the key on the first try, she turned the handles to the French doors of the library.
The latch gave way with a familiar thonk; she stepped in and turned on the light—but this room, too, was deserted.
Willow peered into alcoves and corners, giving second and third looks to the chairs and couches to make sure they were as unoccupied as they first appeared.
They were. Today, the once-haunted mansion felt like no more than an empty old house.
Willow climbed the wrought iron spiral staircase in the corner, carefully making her way into the shadowy section above and past the massive fireplace where Willow had first met Joel and the Misses Drummond.
There were bookshelves up here too, stretching into the dim recesses of the second floor; on the other side of the library would be the second-floor corridor, Willow remembered—a long stretch of bare wall.
Or maybe not fully bare. On this side, the wall was not flush; the corner bookcase protruded slightly from the others.
Willow grinned. Of course the Camerons would have more than one entrance and exit to the library.
Once she knew what she was looking for, the little switch was easy to find.
The corner bookcase opened inward on silent hinges, releasing Willow into the shadowy corridor behind it.
From the end of the hallway, a faint sound drifted to Willow from the other side of the stained glass double doors—a brief murmur of voices, a whisper of music. Willow hesitantly opened one of the heavy doors and slipped inside.
She stood in a small octagonal chapel. Frescoes of biblical scenes, and more stained glass, lined the walls.
To Willow’s delight, a tiny tracker-style pipe organ sat nestled in a corner.
Her fingers itched to see if the ancient instrument would still play, but she restrained herself—the slightest movement could crack old leather bellows into dust or disrupt families of music-loving rodents that might have made their homes in the depths of the instrument.
For an instant, as though in response to her thought, a current of air seemed to move through the little organ, breathing through the old pipes, wheezing out a few notes of a melody she almost recognized.
Out of the corner of her eye, Willow caught a glimpse of a man and woman standing by the altar, smiling at each other as a clergyman wrapped his stole around their joined hands.
She whipped her head around, but they were not there.
Now she was looking at a casket, too small to be an adult’s …
laid atop it was a single crow-black feather.
Then casket and feather were gone too, and the organ was silent.
Willow slipped out of the chapel and gently closed the doors.
The house, and the ghosts, were still here, at least a little. Joel might have given up on her, but someone—or several someones—had not.
The broad corridor curved around and led her beneath an archway trimmed in vine-carved wood.
Willow felt her face break into a smile as she stepped into a high-ceilinged open space with broad windows and gleaming floors.
Here was the other side of the sea swirl of stained glass that presided over the foyer, dominating the grandeur of what could only be a ballroom.
Eyes shining, Willow slowly moved around the room, admiring the ornate curls of woodwork that drew the eye up from the walls to the starry-painted ceiling.
Her imagination filled with images of finely dressed men and women dining or dancing in this room, engaging in sparkling conversation over slim champagne flutes, or slipping out through the row of glass doors to walk arm in arm in the moonlight on the balcony outside.
Through the windows Willow could see the balcony opening onto a terrace extending outward.
For a moment, she heard fragments of music, the swish of fabric as couples danced and laughed …
There was the handsome young man from the chapel, in a tuxedo instead of the suit and fedora in which she was used to seeing him, dancing with a young woman in a white gown—Peter and Marisa, gazing at each other with eyes full of love and hope for a long and happy future together …
The room was empty again.
Willow went back to the second-floor landing and the stretch of wall where the hidden door to Annabel’s garret had been and pressed the subtle switch she had seen Annabel’s ghost touch two nights ago.
Nothing happened.
She frowned. Had she missed the spot? No, she was sure she had it right; the lever simply wasn’t working.
Evidently, Annabel didn’t want company today. Dejected, Willow returned to the grand staircase.
On the floor at the bottom of the stairs—to no great surprise—she found another typed missive, this time Shakespeare:
not one now to mock your own grinning? quite chapfallen? now get you to my lady’s chamber … --WS
Willow had to give her literary note-leaver points for knowing more than the first line of the “Alas, poor Yorick” scene from Hamlet. But this was less than helpful. Willow glowered and said to the air, “Well, I tried, but she won’t let me in—”
She stopped. Something was niggling at the back of her brain, something she had missed.
She turned in a slow circle in the grand foyer, trying to pick up what was different from the last time she had stood there.
She scanned the smooth wainscoting, the heavy sideboard, the small table with its chess pieces polished to a bright glow …
and she had it. Willow grinned and mentally face-palmed; her quote-loving ghost was right to be a little salty—Willow had blown right past the obvious.
It wasn’t Annabel’s chamber the note was sending Willow to—it was Sue’s.
Willow hurried back to Sue’s bedroom, with its weeks-old layer of dust, and she knew she had been right.
Every room Willow had visited in the whole of Cameron House had been clean, polished, practically gleaming, and it had not occurred to her till now to question why or how.
But the memory clicked into place in a brief flash: a glimpse of a young woman in a long black dress with starched white cap and apron.
“A self-cleaning haunted house,” Willow murmured to herself.
“That’s … convenient.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about the ethics of a ghostly cleaning staff condemned to spend the afterlife in service, but she would wrestle with that later.
The more immediate follow-up question: Why was Sue’s room the only one with a layer of dust?
Willow surveyed Sue’s room with new eyes.
Joel had said the ghosts could only interact with material things that had existed while they lived, which made the antique-filled rooms of Cameron House perfectly accommodating for even the oldest Cameron spirits.
Sue’s room, on the other hand, was full of “new” things—abstract area rugs, contemporary furniture, modern window treatments, a coat of paint in a cool shade of cream that Willow knew would not have been original to a Victorian home—even the elaborately carved desk was clearly a newer custom piece, rather than an antique.
Neither deigned to share their reasoning with us, Joel had said acerbically of Sue and Effie when Willow had asked what the pair had been planning for the house.
Effie, and Sue after her, had shared their home with generations of the family’s ghosts.
To keep certain things private, they would have needed to carve out a place in the house where the rest of the mansion’s inhabitants could not enter.
That’s why they had needed this room, remodeled and decorated for its twenty-first-century inhabitants.
My lady’s chamber, the note had said—not Annabel’s but Sue’s.