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

“There are two witnesses here to your threats, Mary Ellen.”

“Should I call Kyle?” I asked her.

Mary Ellen sneered. “Oh yes, let’s get your little boyfriend involved. Your little black boyfriend. Let’s just see who the judges believe in this town, me and my brother or that newcomer with his sketchy history.”

Sketchy history? What sketchy history? Was that why he wouldn’t talk about New Orleans?

Mother said, “All these years, Mary Ellen, and you’re still his lackey. Don’t you want a life of your own?”

“I’ve been a part of it from the start.”

Mother’s eyes turned ice cold and she leaned forward. “Yes, Mary Ellen. I have known all these years you sold me to your brother for a prom date.”

I looked back and forth between them. “I don’t get it.”

Mother sighed. “Mary Ellen delayed your grandfather, telling him some story about her college prospects and how excited she was to be going to his alma mater. As I recall, you never did go to Princeton, did you?”

Mary Ellen didn’t look ashamed or contrite. She looked the same as always: calculating. I wondered if she practiced that look in the mirror. Aunt Mary Ellen. I shuddered, suddenly feeling her blood in my veins, and flashing on the blood dreams. Maybe that’s what they’d meant—it was the blood that was coming for Mother—the blood connection she had with the Winters through me. My vision was suddenly filled with blood, and I shook my head to clear it, but I still felt it in the back of my throat.

I said, “You’ve done your duty. Is there something else you want?”

Mary Ellen‘s voice took on a wheedling tone. “Andrew wants to win. If there’s some way you could tell me what the outcome of this election would be…if it were negative, maybe what we could do to change that…” She tipped her head to the side, shrugged her eyebrows, as if to say we knew what she was talking about.

Mother’s chin went up.

Uh oh.

I thought about making more coffee. I thought about getting out of the kitchen. I thought about moving to Antarctica. I thought about all the lovely long, lazy days I’d had when I could do pretty much whatever I wanted without worrying about the consequences. I thought about life before I knew how I’d been conceived, before I knew for sure that Mother had the same gift I did, before I remembered hurting Hetty and tried to apologize, before I met Andrew Winters. I thought about working in the garden with my father, about finding Mother’s meditation house. And I thought about how everything in my life, and everything in my mother’s life stemmed from this question, the one that Mary Ellen was again asking my mother, the one that had nearly destroyed her life thirty-five years ago.

Why is it that we have to keep answering the same questions? It’s as if, in each new incarnation of the soul, a new torment must be overcome. It would be so much easier if we could deal with all the suffering in one lifetime and then proceed directly to “go.”

When I become God, I’m going to make it work that way.

I pulled myself out of my wandering thoughts. I wanted to put my head down on the table and take a nap, but Mother and I had to deal with the suffering embodied by Mary Ellen and Andrew Winters and their incessant greed for power. Mary Ellen was still talking. Mary Ellen was always talking. “If you’d just helped us all those years ago, Constance, your life would have been so different. You and I, we might still be friends.” Was that cajolery I heard? “If you’re unwilling, perhaps Clara…?”

In a split second, the temptation offered to my mother all those years ago became mine. I guess that’s why they call it temptation. It’s so silky and it seems that giving in will solve all your problems. Just this one time. Just this one thing. Just this, and everything else will be easy. No consequences. The snake in the Garden of Eden was female for sure—or at least spoke the male will with a female voice.

Then I realized that it offered absolution. I hadn’t done the right thing by my father and I’d lost him. Mother couldn’t give the Winters what they wanted; it would destroy her. But I could. I could get the Winters off Mother’s back and my dreams off mine, and go back to Paris, far enough away that Winters wouldn’t bother to come after me. He just needed the one answer, and I could supply it. I could save my mother. Finally, something made sense, something I could do to make it all come out all right.

Before I could think about whether using my intuition for the Winters was a good idea, I had to get everyone out of this room alive. The kitchen was filled with knives, hot coffee, heavy cutting boards, too many possibilities to count. If she did something, it would only make her appear more capable of having murdered Hugh, even though she couldn’t have murdered Hugh, right? Because she’d said she hadn’t murdered Hugh, and why would she, and anyway, it had to be one of the Winters because they were evil.

Stop.

I shook my head again. I must have looked like a wet dog.

I glanced at Mother. Her lips were parted, teeth bared, as if she was going to bite some part of Mary Ellen’s anatomy off.

Okay, I would go with Mother’s version for the moment. I said, “We’re not fortune tellers, Mary Ellen. We don’t see what you want us to see. Whatever intuition we get may have nothing to do with the question you ask, or we may get nothing at all. Asking us the same question over and over will not change the truth. Either way, threatening our lives is a prosecutable offense. A lawyer’s sister should know that.” I stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse