Shadow Notes by Laurel Peterson (cool books to read txt) 📗

He fiddled with some documents on his desk. “If she did suffer some trauma way back when, Clara, why bring it up now? Wouldn’t that hurt your mom’s case more than help her?” He leaned back in his chair so far that he could have toppled through the window behind him if it were open.

“Only if it connects with Hugh’s death. Does it give her a motive? They’ve been friends all these years. Why would she want him dead now?”

He looked a little shocked. “You’re jumping to conclusions, Clara. Your mother’s not a killer.”

“I need to know what happened if I’m going to help her clear her name.”

He cracked his neck first on the left and then on the right, toyed with his wedding band. A lot of tics to decide if he should tell me. “You should talk to your mother,” he finally said.

“She won’t talk to me. Someone broke into the house last night and threatened me with a knife. I need to know—I’m involved now.”

“It’s her story,” he insisted. “I can’t tell it for her. Anyway, she didn’t tell me everything.” He turned his head away.

“What’s your relationship with her like?” The leather creaked as I leaned forward.

He smiled a little, breaking the tension. “Your mother was my first kiss.”

“Really?” I laughed. “That’s great!” I settled back, feeling my body unkink a smidgen. Finally, something benign and a little racy about her, the upstanding model citizen.

He looked a little surprised. “She never told you?”

I shook my head. “She hasn’t told me a lot of things.”

He shrugged. “We were eleven or twelve, I don’t remember exactly, at a party, some birthday for a friend who moved away a couple years later. We were drunk on cake and ginger ale, running around in the hot sun, jumping in and out of this guy’s pool. Your mother was beautiful, even then. She was as graceful and powerful as that Arabian she always wanted your grandfather to buy her.”

He paused and ran his hand over his head. The streetlight through the window gleamed off the damp sheen his hand left behind. “Anyway,” he continued, “I persuaded her that an amazing bug was lurking behind a big bush in the garden. I took her hand and pulled her over there with me, although I didn’t have to pull too hard. She’d just come out of the pool, and her body was sleek with water. She smelled like chlorine and sunshine, and her hand was cool and a little sticky.

“When we got around behind the bush, where no one could see us, I realized I didn’t have a plan. What was I going to do if she didn’t want to kiss me? What if she screamed and ran?” He smiled. “People would still remember it and be asking me, ‘Nat, what were you doing with that girl in the bushes! Lucky for me, your mother had a plan. We got into that dark, cool corner—there was even a little bench—and she sat me down, took my face in her hands, and kissed me smack on the mouth. Then she sat back and looked at me with those green eyes. I told her I loved her, and she said she knew, and then she kissed me again. I thought I was going to die right there. I’d closed my eyes, and by the time I opened them again, she was gone.”

I laughed. “That’s a great story, Nat.”

“Yeah, she always knew exactly what she wanted, even if she didn’t get it.”

“Didn’t get it?”

“We’ve been friends a long time.” He wiped his hand over his bald spot again. “Your mother’s a good woman, Clara, but her actions don’t always come across the way she wants them to. I know you feel she abandoned you, left you to figure out how to grow up on your own because she was in emotional cold storage. She’s told me you feel that way. But she did the best she could.”

He was the second person to tell me that. It would have been nicer if she’d told me. “You know a lot.”

He nodded. “I know more than I should. My wife’s been pretty tolerant all these years. Knew that I loved her first and foremost, but that I had a responsibility to Constance she couldn’t stand in the way of.”

“Responsibility?”

“I should have stopped what happened. I offered to stay with her that afternoon, and she waved me off.”

“What afternoon, Nat? What’s the trauma?” Now. He would tell me now, and I would know why my mother had shut me out all those years. I hunched forward, waiting.

He crashed the front wheels of the chair to the floor and abruptly stood. “I’m sorry, Clara, I can’t. When you see Constance, you tell her I said it was time. She’s creating a monster for all of us if she doesn’t set the record straight.”

Chapter 11

Frustrated, I stood on the street outside Nat’s office in the late afternoon darkness. Why wouldn’t anyone talk to me? At least I had confirmation of a trauma, but what did it have to do with Hugh’s murder? I was getting blocked at every turn, and I had to find out fast, because the minute Mr. Black Leather or his employer found out I was asking questions again, they would come back. And Mother was still in jail.

Nat was right. Everyone was right. Going to Mother would be the easiest, most direct route, but every time I asked for answers, she suggested I meditate. I didn’t have time for that. While I was meditating, someone out there was plotting to kill me and lock her away for twenty-five-to-life.

Cars moved slowly through the icy air, navigating the clutter of Christmas shoppers and traffic. I stepped under the streetlight and rummaged through my bag, extricating the envelopes with the notes on Andrew’s campaign donors. I flipped through them like a pack of cards, wondering who could be useful. Mother had lived in this town all her life. Someone