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

pulled the Land Rover as far off the main road as I could. The only way I could see to be a little covert would be to go back on foot and hope I didn’t meet Hetty coming through the woods. At least the ten or so minutes it would take me to walk down the driveway would also give me time to make sure no one else was there.

The frozen denim had melted a bit in the car, but as I stepped back into the chill, the wind whistled through the fabric as if I were wearing lace and chiffon. I hustled as fast as I could; the drive crunched underfoot, and my jeans stuck to my legs, icy cold. My head pounded and everything remained blurry at the edges. In the distance, I heard the occasional car and a metal banging, like a screen door against its frame.

When I neared the clearing, I paused in the shadow of a spruce, inhaling its resiny scent, to see if Hetty had arrived. From where I stood, I thought I saw only my tire tracks and footprints, but to be sure, I moved along the edge of the clearing, from tree to tree, hoping that if Hetty had gone inside, she was too busy worrying about what I’d found to look out and see me.

I pulled my phone out, yanked off my gloves and opened the photo app. I took two pictures of the house, one with a close-up of the garbage bag, then shoved the phone away again, and ran across the clearing to the steps, scooped up the bag and hightailed it, slipping and sliding, down the drive. The slug had to deal.

In the car safely headed for home, I turned the heater up high and deep-sixed my idea of visiting Hetty. Not with that wall of photos. Instead, I burned up road back to Mother’s, divested myself of my wet clothes and made myself a large cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. Next, I spread newspapers on the floor in the mudroom and starting sifting through the garbage. For all her organic farming ways, Hetty seemed to survive on beef jerky and chocolate cookies. Mixed in with those wrappers were rejected photo prints and memory cards. Two, to be exact.

That’s when I realized I didn’t have a memory card reader. I usually hooked the camera up to the computer. I put my coat back on and wasted another hour and a half going to an office supply store, getting help finding the right card reader, standing in the endless Christmas line, and coming home again.

By the time I reheated the chocolate and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to go along with it, I realized the slug was mostly gone. Comfort food, sifting through garbage, and long waits at Christmas cash registers were apparently good for recovering from bad dreams. I got the card reader set up and scrolled back through Hetty’s photos. The pictures of Pete Samuels were there, along with ones of me and Pete at dinner, taken through the window of the restaurant. She’d stood outside in the cold and the dark to take them. I shivered. The few photos of Pete taken prior to the ones of us together looked posed. He stared straight into the camera, with a challenging glare.

Why was she taking pictures of Mary Ellen, Pete, Hugh and me? And why had she left those voodoo dolls?

Okay, photos of two men and two women. Of the two men, one had been a psychologist; the other, a police detective. Had they known each other, other than superficially? Mary Ellen certainly knew Hugh, but something about the photographs of Mary Ellen felt different to me. They were mostly of her alone, in a location I couldn’t identify.

Hetty had tried to get as close as possible to Hugh to take photos. There were shots of him in his office, taken through the patio sliding doors, as if she’d perched behind the rocks on his property with a zoom lens. One shot apparently had gone wrong; it looked as if a blonde ghost was streaking across the camera lens. Other shots caught him at dinner downtown and at parties or with Mother and a handsome, silver-haired man. Who was that guy, anyway? Was that the new boyfriend Pete had mentioned?

I copied all the photos onto my laptop, printed them, and stuck the pictures in an envelope with a note that explained where they had come from. I labeled it with Chief DuPont’s name and took it to the police station, where I left it with the desk sergeant. The desk sergeant knew me, glanced at the envelope with interest, told me Mother was in with her lawyer and couldn’t see me just then. I’d been so absorbed in my own quest, I hadn’t even thought about asking after her. Bad, Clara.

As for the pictures, I’d have to take my chances with the breaking and entering—and if I were lucky, no one would ever know. If Hetty was stalking me and two other living people, I needed to know why, and I wanted the cops to know, too—just in case.

As I drove home again, I mulled over possibilities. What—if anything—was Hetty’s relationship with Balaclava Guy? Maybe she’d snapped the pictures, constructed the dolls, and had Balaclava Guy deliver them to my pillow. Why? Just to scare me? Why scare me? Revenge for things that happened in high school?

Why would Hetty care about Mother’s innocence or guilt? One ­possibility was that Hetty had killed Hugh and set Mother up. What had Mother done to cause Hetty to choose her as the fall guy? As far as I could tell, Hetty loathed me, not Mother. But Hetty’s cottage, a miniature of Mother’s—what was that all about?

Maybe Hetty’s photographs were a lover’s obsession, although that appeared unlikely. Didn’t stalkers shadow one target at a time? I mean, who could handle Hugh, Pete, Mary Ellen and