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

of a driver. The car was running, exhaust steaming into the bitter December air. Junior waited, sans gloves or coat, his thin-soled loafers soaking up the chill from the graveled drive. I’d draped Mother’s mink wrap across my shoulders.

“Bit of overkill, no?” I gestured at the limo.

He rolled his eyes. “Just get in,” he said.

Mary Ellen had been far too busy that evening to corner for a chat about Hetty’s photos. She even seemed to avoid me, which meant cajoling whatever Junior knew out of him was my next best option. Thankfully, the slug had shrunk so I could function, although my general wooziness remained, and I’d felt flashes of pain in my arms and back and forehead all through the party. That meant time was running short. I needed answers quickly, or the hallucinations would begin. As I speculated on the lengths I might be willing to go to get information from Junior, I heard the door open behind me.

I turned to see the chief. His cop eyes flickered over the limousine, my figure in Mother’s clingy gold lace dress, young Winters. His cop eyes said, Don’t get in that car.

I smiled. “Chief DuPont, have you met Andrew Winters, Junior?” He smiled back but it didn’t get past his mouth. Stepping forward, he held out his hand. Junior reeled a bit from the ice in the chief’s gaze, but shook anyway, as a good upper-class boy should.

“Mr. DuPont is our new chief of police.”

Junior stilled like a rabbit in the grass when it hears the hawk screech, then managed to nod.

“Y’all goin’ out?” The chief thickened his southern accent to pure syrup.

“To dinner, yes.”

The chief slung his arm around me, as if somehow we were an item. For a few brief seconds, it felt like home and the pains receded. “I like this girl, so you take good care of her.” I wasn’t even sure this was a date, but I guess it looked like one. I’d dressed for the fundraiser, not dinner, but the chief wouldn’t know that. I sighed. Maybe I should have taken more than one night off between dinners with strange men to think things through.

“Yes, sir.” Winters opened the limo door. “We have a reservation, Clara.”

I slid gently from DuPont’s hold. His fingers grabbed my arm. Something else lingered in his eyes, but I didn’t know how to read it. I patted his hand and stepped into the car. He stood there until we drove out of sight.

I looked around the car. A little brass nameplate screwed into the back of the driver’s seat spelled out the name of the Winters law firm. A bottle of champagne chilled in its own built-in cooler; Junior poured me a glass as the driver pulled the car onto the Merritt Parkway. “Where are we going?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“What is this, twenty questions?”

“If you like.” He touched his glass to mine. “A toast: to meeting the most beautiful woman in town and capturing her on the first day.”

Capturing?

“We have reservations for two at ten-thirty,” Junior said. “Drink up.”

The restaurant he’d chosen, an intimate space off lower Park Avenue, served overpriced, undersized portions of the latest fad in haute cuisine. The waiters treated me as if I didn’t deserve what I was getting, but Junior, of course, they treated with great, if icy, respect; I imagine they assumed he carried the cash.

My unease persisted. Junior himself entertained cleverly, telling me stories of his nightmares in law school: professors who assigned impossible reading loads, forgetting an exam, the competition for editor of the law review and for summer internships.

Through it all, he conveyed his high ambitions, but in a sufficiently self-deprecating way that expressed his own self-aware judgment of those ambitions as superficial at worst and as earnest at best. Even the public defender’s office was held up to a certain ridicule as a path to district attorney or a successful criminal practice. And throughout his discourse, he ignored the luscious parade of young women on the arms of gray-haired financiers, an admirable show of fortitude.

Sure, he came on to me, which surprised me given the difference in our ages, but it felt half-hearted. Some dark, snaky part of me wondered if his father had put him up to it, although what Senior would want from the interaction stumped me. I was just his employee and only in town for as long as it took to sort out my mother before hightailing it out of here again. Paris was calling. Insistently. I’d even dreamed briefly—a pleasant dream for once—about wandering lost in the Musée D’Orsay.

“What are you thinking about?” Junior picked up his wine glass and drank off what remained, gesturing to the waiter for a refill. The waiter complied, and then delivered elegantly composed salads of five slices of endive centered on three perfect raspberries.

“Romeo and Juliet. You know, Mary Ellen and my mother have been feuding since before you were born.”

“Yeah. Which makes me wonder why you’re working on Dad’s campaign. You’re not a mole, are you?” He smiled, but I knew we’d reached the reason for the evening. Then, I remembered the dip in Winters’s poll numbers. What kind of father would send his son on this kind of dirty mission? What kind of son would accept it?

I said, “Just trying to rattle things at home. Do you know what Mary Ellen and Constance have against each other? Mother never told me.”

He shrugged. “Something your mother owned that she wouldn’t give Dad. Something that belonged to him, he says. I don’t know what.”

Then he continued telling me about his ambitions almost as if his only goal in asking about my motives was to be able to report that he’d done it. He didn’t seem to care about my answer. “I can live without Dad’s kind of ambition. I know I just said I’m interested in being D.A., and that’s no small ambition, but if I never get there, that’s