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

one hundred dollar bills and handed it back. Within minutes, the limousine collected us and headed for Connecticut.

The next day, Mother summoned me to the jail.

Chapter 14

I showed up at the jail in a gray, pinstriped pant suit with a neon pink chiffon scarf I’d borrowed from Mother’s scarf drawer. I’m not sure what kind of statement I was making by parading her own clothes in front of her, but maybe provoking her would produce a chance to ask her about the photographs I’d found at Hetty’s. Maybe she would know why Hugh was in them.

“Is that mine?”

“Isn’t it pretty with this suit? I hope you don’t mind. So many of my things are in storage.” I planned to return to Paris, hadn’t shipped all my things home.

She raised an eyebrow, a dark slash on pale skin. “You have more?” She hadn’t lost any energy or fight.

“What do you need, Mother?” If I could get her talking…

“You dined with Andrew Winters, Junior, last night.”

“Who told you that?”

She twitched a bony shoulder. “I have my sources, Clara. I’m not completely cut off from the world in here.”

I waited.

She sighed. “Pete Samuels.”

How disturbing. “Where’s he getting his info?”

“He’s a police officer, Clara.”

“Why would he share anything with you?”

“Does this matter for some reason?”

“Don’t you think it’s curious?”

“I’ve known Pete since he was three, and he’s doing something nice for me by keeping tabs on you while I can’t.”

Maybe that’s why he’d taken me to dinner. “You need to keep tabs on me?”

“You’re running around with Andrew Winters, Junior.”

“So?” I didn’t mention the squitchy feeling in my gut or the pain in my arm, but I did wonder why she trusted Pete. I didn’t.

She leaned across the institutional gray table. “If the devil existed, that family would have sold their souls to him for power and money.”

“Junior didn’t try anything he shouldn’t have, he paid for dinner, he dropped me home at a decent hour, and he was polite. What more should I want?” Besides, only Junior thought it was a date.

“You have flawed judgment when it comes to men, Clara. Speaking of which, how is that divorce of yours going?”

I was getting whiplash from her conversation shifts. “We’re still negotiating.”

“What’s to negotiate? He keeps what he brought into the marriage and you keep what you brought in.”

“Ah, yes, but he hasn’t worked in a dog’s age, so he thinks I should pay him alimony so he can continue to ride his bicycle: working would get in the way of training. My lawyer and I disagree with that; his lawyer is trying to talk some sense into him, but so far, Palmer’s got his heels dug in. My lawyer will call when she has a tentative agreement in hand.”

Just laying it out for her exhausted me.

“You’re pretty cavalier about a man you said you’d love ‘til death do you part.’”

“You would be, too, if you’d lived with him. He seemed perfect; he had charm, could make everyone in the room laugh at his jokes. Once you got beneath the charm, you realized he was nothing but a self-centered bastard who wanted whatever his greedy little self could lay its hands on.”

“Sounds like Andrew Winters.”

“Maybe the son isn’t cut from the same cloth as the father. You’re not always right, Mother.”

“Oh, yes I am! I can’t imagine why you consistently choose so badly; your father…” She stared at me. “He was such a good man.”

“How very Freudian of you. Since we’re discussing Freud, maybe it’s you I inherited my man judgment from.” She looked at me in shock. I’d never criticized her before. Not aloud. I held my breath, waiting for the lightning to wham through the cement block walls and ignite me.

“Clara—”

I plowed over her, hoping for thirty more seconds before spontaneous combustion. “Sneaking around with a married therapist for twenty years doesn’t count as the greatest of role models for your daughter.”

She drew herself up. “Hugh and I didn’t ‘sneak around.’ Maria knew all about it and came often for dinner when she was in town.” She sounded ­defensive, and the pink dusting her cheekbones turned an angry red.

My first piece of a real, hard fact. “When did this non-affair start?”

“After your father died.” She asserted it, daring me to question her.

That part didn’t matter as much as she might imagine. My father had given up expecting things from her a long time before he died.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” she said.

“Had it ended?”

“Six months ago. We remained good friends, but Hugh liked women, and I got tired of being one among many, even if he assured me I was the most important.”

Something in me cracked open and dissolved in relief. She was talking. If I could just keep it going. “If everyone knew Hugh slept around, why did they attack you for it? And what about—?” I stopped. I couldn’t ask her about the new boyfriend. Not yet.

Her face was slowly returning to its normal color. “Jealousy, I suppose. I hung onto him the longest. Besides, Mary Ellen had wanted him since god-knows-when, and anything I have that Mary Ellen doesn’t is fair game. She spread the rumors, Clara. No one else cared enough to be vitriolic about it.” She shook her head and muttered the next bit, scratching at something on the table surface with a manicured fingernail: “As if she hasn’t taken everything from me.” Then, while I was wondering not only what that meant but how she maintained a manicure in jail, she looked at me again. “That’s why I don’t want you hanging out with that family.”

“Because Mary Ellen has taken everything from you, Mother? What has she taken?” I asked it quietly, as if I were coaxing a sparrow to take a seed from my hand. This was more important than the photographs, and for a moment, I thought she would tell me. Her face softened and she reached across for me. “Nothing. I have you, right? How could I blame her