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

“Your mother is ready to go. May I show you the way?”

I shook my head a little to clear out the dream. “What happened to Bailey?”

“Your lawyer’s gone.”

She left me snoozing in the lobby of the police station. Nice. We could talk about that when her bill arrived. He led the way, allowing me to be diverted by his incredible, uh, shoulders. They filled out a taupe wool suit that looked custom made. No wedding ring on his left hand. His black hair curled tightly around a dark skull, and a thin rim of bright white shirt gleamed between the dark skin of his neck and the collar of the suit. I imagined he was a detective, since he wasn’t wearing a uniform—and what a nice detective package it was. Then I chided myself. Checking out the guy who jailed my mother wasn’t cool. I distracted myself by wondering if it was a challenge to be a black police detective in this oh-so-white town.

Mother sat at a table in a gray box of a room. The one door contained a small window threaded with wire through which I could see the guard. I sat down opposite her. Even after a night of questioning, she remained regal. The only sign that all was not well were her eyes, which seemed pinched, as if she’d rubbed them after cutting up jalapenos. “Clara.”

“Mother.”

“Thank you for calling Bailey.” The thaw was akin to flake ice. Not solid, yet still ice.

“Of course. What evidence do they have?”

“None.” Her right shoulder moved up a quarter of an inch and then down again, her version of a shrug. “Some meaningless fingerprints. I handled the fireplace poker the last time I visited Hugh; I’m better at keeping fires going than he is.”

“And the witness?” We stared at each other. I had never known what she was thinking. Then I remembered Paul’s suggestion that I ask her. What I really wanted to know was whether or not she had had an affair with Hugh, but I didn’t ask that. “What’s going on, Mother?”

Finally, she said, “You must be very careful, Clara.”

I spread my hands out in front of me to make the universal gesture of what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about.

She looked away. “Fire.”

“Fire? Are you kidding? Because of some poker—”

“Talk to Paul.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I remembered my dream in the lobby and got a weird little shiver. I ­wondered if I should tell her about it, but I didn’t feel like listening to her dismiss me yet again. I had accepted the fact that she would never acknowledge my intuition. But now I had to try to reach her across the divide my dreams had created.

“Mother, I—”

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Have they arrested you?”

“No, but I assume they will shortly. The witness took a photograph, Clara.”

“What? Did you go to Hugh’s last night?”

“No.” Her shoulders sagged a little, then straightened, as if the ice in her spine had melted and refrozen. “But someone wants it to look that way.”

“You think you’re being set up? Who would do that?”

But she refused to say anything more. I couldn’t do anything else, at least not here. The guard asked if I needed help finding my way out and I told him no. Big mistake. It took me ten minutes to find my way back to the lobby, but that could have been more about my confused state of mind than the layout of the police station.

Blood coated Mother’s hands, clothes and face. Blood-glazed bone poked through the skin of her knees. She tried to crawl, using her elbows to pull herself toward me. Red varnished her face. As I watched, it grew and spread, as if it were alive. It flowed from her eyes like tears, down her body, reaching across the dead space between us…

I’d woken myself from this dream four times tonight, pain like electric shocks radiating across my chest. Even when I forced myself awake, it took several minutes before the pain eased, and, if I fell back to sleep, the dream picked up where it left off. At three a.m., exhausted and panicky, I turned on the light and sat with my arms wrapped around my knees until the sun crept over the horizon.

I slumped down to the kitchen in my white flannel PJs and made coffee, doctored it with sugar and real cream, and took it into the solarium, where I curled into a settee and stared out through the floor-to-ceiling windows to wake up. The dreams often left me feeling both drugged and anxious, as if I’d taken a sleeping pill and couldn’t quite shake the effects. The dreams before my father died had caused insomnia, anxiety, and finally panic attacks. It wasn’t a state I wanted to return to.

Outside, a gentle hill sloped to a pond just skimmed with ice. Once, when I was ten, my mother had held a skating party for me and four of my friends. Mother rented skates for the girls who didn’t have any, and when we had had enough of giggling and falling on our butts and tramping through the snow, she set us up in the solarium with a hot chocolate party, complete with new stuffed animals, gingerbread cookies, tea sandwiches, perfect little cakes with icing, strawberries and flowers, and a new fairytale book for each of us. I still had the book. Come to think of it, she’d even gotten the editor to sign them for us. It was the only memory I had of her doing something for me that wasn’t coldly practical.

I wondered what had happened to those girls. They could still be living around here, married to stockbrokers or IT specialists or hedge fund traders or wannabe politicians. After all, that’s the kind of girls we were, after we went to graduate or law school. Had to have the education, even if we never did a thing with it. Like