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

hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.” The door shut gently.

She still refused to tell me anything, although I’d tried in the car on the way home from jail. “We have to talk at some point.”

“I need more time, Clara.”

“For what?”

“I’ll tell you when we talk.” Mother was talented at circles.

Half an hour after Mary Ellen’s call, I parked at Loretta and Ernie’s stables, and stepped from the car. Mary Ellen stood by the gate with the reins of two horses in her hands. She handed me a helmet with her other hand and cocked her head toward the horse nearest her. “This one is yours. His name is Horace.” She handed me his reins, turned and glided up onto her horse, to whom I had not been introduced. She pointed him (let’s name him Juvenal) toward the trail that ran off to the side of the paddock, and called over her shoulder, “C’mon, Clara, or we’ll be late for work.”

I thought this was my work for the day.

I clambered up on Horace, apologizing to him for my clumsiness, and whispering thanks to whatever gods might exist that I managed to get on him at all. The last time I’d been on horseback was in my teens. He didn’t seem to care and amiably followed his buddy into the woods, where I immediately got nailed by a branch slapping back from Mary Ellen’s passage.

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t you see that coming?”

And wasn’t that the theme song for my whole life at the moment.

“Isn’t it beautiful out here?” she trilled, as if nothing had happened. I patted my cheek to locate the welt.

“Lovely,” I ducked another branch. If it hadn’t been twenty degrees, snowing, and Mary Ellen, the morning would have been enchanted. Snow frosted the evergreens, and the air had that silence it gets when cold tamps down all the sound. The trail wound along a little brook, and, when the horses paused, I could hear water tinkling under the ice and around the rocks in its path. We tapped our way along for almost ten minutes, and I remembered what I enjoyed about being out in the morning on a horse. A kind of solace grew between horse and rider, a total focus on the sensations of each other and the trail. Then Mary Ellen broke the quiet.

“So, Clara.” I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to answer or if she was thinking of what to say next. I didn’t respond, engrossed as I was in my momentary sense of peace. She let me alone for two more swinging branches and a little ravine where I thought I would slide off the horse right down his neck and over his head, and then said again, “So, Clara.”

“Do you have a point?” I asked, too annoyed that she’d interrupted my serenity to be politic.

“Tetchy, tetchy. Morning isn’t your season, is it? Did you know your mother and I used to ride together—on this very trail?”

“Really? This very trail?” I didn’t even try to avoid sarcasm.

She ignored me. Best practice, really. “She was a fine horsewoman, your mother.” An original statement—right out of an English novel.

“Was a fine horsewoman?” I asked, but Mary Ellen didn’t respond.

“We raced each other across the meadow, not too far ahead.”

“What for?”

“No competitive spirit?”

I sighed again. I should have had a second cup of coffee and some food. “If there’s something worth competing for.”

“Like, say, your mother’s life?”

Her statement jolted me to attention with all the wired-up electricity of an adrenalin surge. Prickling flashed around my heart. “What?”

“We all have our price.”

“What’s yours?” I snapped.

Mary Ellen laughed, a peal that rang out like the Tower of London’s bells before a beheading. “None of your business. Now, do tell me all about that little cottage of your mother’s that’s hidden out there behind Loretta and Ernie’s house. There must be a good story behind it.”

How could she know about the cottage? Mrs. Gardner said no one knew except her, Ernie and my mother. But if she knew, then who else knew? “I only know about Hetty’s cottage with all the photographs of you on the wall.”

Her back stiffened, but she wasn’t deterred. “Of course you know about your mother’s cottage. You’ve even seen the inside. I’m not supposed to know, but I do, because I know how get people to do what I want.” I thought about all the stable hands in Loretta’s yard and the power of curiosity and money. “You haven’t learned that yet, Clara, but I could help if you’d let me. It’s almost like we’re family, you know.”

My laugh was a harsh, startled sound in the cold air. “Why? Because you and Mother were friends years ago?”

“I also know that your mother has had a key for years and years and that she never let anyone else in there. Your father didn’t even know about it, but I’ve peered in the windows.”

A squirrel scrabbled across the snow in front of us as if running for its life.

“It’s very pretty inside, all that turquoise and white, like a Caribbean island. I’ll tell you what she used it for—her trysts. You may think that Hugh was her only lover, but she had others before and after your father. Some lost their marriages. You know, she was the first girl to…have a boyfriend in high school. She has quite a reputation, our girl. This police investigation could be quite humiliating. You should watch yourself, too. Sounds like you’re on your way to that sort of reputation also.” She said it all as if she were giving a freshman lecture on the basics of geology.

“Did something specific happen, Mary Ellen? Or are you telling tales to see what I’ll do?”

She looked back at me briefly, a mistake, since when she looked forward again, a branch slapped her face. Glee welled up in me and I nearly laughed.

She didn’t acknowledge the pain. “Your mother and I double-dated to the junior prom. We weren’t juniors, but