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

from her Irish heritage. The lines on her forehead and around her eyes were accentuated by the long shadows that stretched across the room from the front windows, where the sun was disappearing through the trees in early winter twilight. Mother sat by her side, holding her hand. Ernie had gone to make more coffee. We waited until he got back with the tray, mugs and a pot, and more of the sliced sweet bread.

“Zucchini,” he said when he saw me looking at it. “Loretta grows about eighty pounds of it in the summer.”

“Oh, Ernie.” Loretta looked at him with a tired half-smile. “Don’t exaggerate.”

He shrugged and gave me an insider grin.

Loretta said, “I’m sorry to drag you back here, Clara. You must have other things you’d rather be doing, but Constance thought you should hear this directly from me.” She’d been staring into her mug, but now she looked straight at me. “I know things have been difficult between you two for some time.”

Oh, no. Not the make-up-with-your-mother talk. Not now.

Loretta used one hand to push her hair behind her ear. “Hetty and I had that kind of falling out, too, and we never got a chance to make it up before she…” She stopped.

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay—you and Constance need to fix what’s wrong between you.”

I looked at Mother. She looked at me and said, “I didn’t tell her to say that.”

“I’m saying it all on my own. I’ve watched this between the two of you for a lot of years, and you, Constance, are not without fault here.” She shook her head. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

This time, she looked at Ernie and he smiled her some encouragement. “Constance mentioned that she’s worried about your working on the Andrew Winters campaign. Those Winters…I want to tell you about Hetty, so you can see why you need to be careful.

“Hetty had been seeing someone,” she said and I snapped to attention. “We probably never would have found out if old Uncle Roland hadn’t died suddenly of a stroke in the middle of the night. He was her favorite uncle. She didn’t answer at the house or on her cell and I was worried sick. She found all the messages the following morning, said she’d been out with a friend and had turned off her phone. Very unlike her: Hetty always wanted to be disturbed. It gave her a sense of belonging.” She sipped from her coffee mug, made a moue of distaste and set it down.

“It was also surprising that she didn’t want to tell us who he was. Hetty hasn’t had—didn’t have—many boyfriends in her life. She could have been pretty, but she had no social graces. I showed her, but nothing stuck.” She twisted her wedding ring around on her finger. “After her father died, she needed attention so badly. Ernie tried, but she never recovered. I guess one doesn’t, but some people manage to go on better than others.” She smoothed her skirt across her lap, plucking at a thread near the hem.

“At about that time, she began working for the Winters campaign—just some canvassing in her neighborhood, a couple of donations here and there, which she couldn’t really afford since the farm was just starting to break even. Then, she attended two or three fundraisers to scope out likely ‘targets.’ That’s what she called them, and that’s when I started to get uneasy.” She looked up at Ernie, and he took her hand and nodded. A little click fired in my brain.

“I pressed her a bit on this man’s identity, and when she remained adamant about not telling me, I presumed he was married. Ernie and I also believe he was connected to the campaign, her reason for putting in so much time. She told me she would bring him home to meet us, but the time wasn’t right. I tried to tell her being involved with someone married was a painful and disastrous choice, even if—or maybe especially if—the man did leave his wife. Hetty wouldn’t listen. She said I didn’t know what I was talking about.” Her voice broke, and she paused to regain her composure. “I must have pressed too hard because she finally told me to mind my own business. We hadn’t talked since.”

She stopped. The wall clock snapped through several seconds. “When was that?” I asked.

“About when you returned home.”

I thought about the campaign office. Would Winters Senior—just about the only guy who fit the description—risk an affair during the campaign? It seemed unlikely. He wanted this seat more than anything, and the voters didn’t look too kindly on sexual peccadilloes. So who could it be?

Mother walked me out to the car, and I insisted we had to talk. “Two people have died, Mother. How much longer before we put our heads together?”

She agreed to meet me at home at the end of the day. Despite her urging, I wanted to put my time in at the campaign. I didn’t know what she was going to tell me, but I was still collecting donor notes, and until I had answers, I didn’t want to close down any options. Besides, something nagged at me in what Loretta had just said, something that went along with something Winken said, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. That something, I was sure, was somewhere in those notes.

When I got home that afternoon, I left Mother to open the Chinese take-out containers, while I printed out the notes from my laptop. When I returned, she handed me a set of chopsticks and got herself a fork. She spooned precise, but very small portions of each dish onto her plate and ate them separately, savoring each bite and refusing to talk until she’d made her way through one full glass of wine. I drank a glass of seltzer. Last night’s excesses were still with me, and I wanted a clear head.

Mother put down her fork. “Loretta’s right, you