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

like part of her foundation had washed out from under her. Her long silver braid gleamed in the overhead light. Mother offered her coffee or wine, but she shook her head. “I’d rather just get this over with,” she said. Then she told us that, just before Mother’s fête, Hugh had closeted himself with an old friend, Vance Hardison, the Republican party boss for the entire Western district. Vance had tremendous influence, enough to investigate a candidate’s ethics, even one as well established as Winters.

“Vance sat next to me at dinner,” Mother said.

The silver-haired man.

I said, “So Hugh knew about the blackmail?”

“He pieced it together from client complaints,” Maria said.

Bailey said, “But there’s no evidence unless they testify, right?”

“Then we find someone to talk,” Mother said.

Maria slid her hand down her braid. “We might find someone, but that only solves the blackmail. Two people have been murdered, one of whom I loved very much.”

“Can you tie Andrew to the murders?” Bailey asked.

Mother said. “He never did his own dirty work.”

“Someone got close to both Hugh and Hetty,” Bailey said.

I scrubbed my face. “What about Hetty’s mystery boyfriend? He was associated with the campaign.” Something slid through my consciousness, a color, a dim flutter of green spiked with a thin drool of yellow.

“We don’t know who he is,” Mother said. Maria stared across the room at the clock, tapping her finger on the table.

Bailey picked off a couple grapes. “This stinks.”

“In the meantime,” Maria said, “we don’t know who else threatens him, who else he thinks he might need to kill.”

“Oh, yes we do.” Mother stood and left the room. We looked at each other, then followed her into the library, where, as if we were in some nineteenth century novel, she pressed a button on her desk to slide open a panel in the wall. Behind: a fully stocked gun rack. Where had that come from? I thought all the guns were stored in her closet safe. Apparently, Annie Oakley owned a whole other stash.

She pulled a shotgun down, cracked it to check the load, then pumped it. The bark resonated loudly in the small room. She hefted a Glock in her other hand.

“You got licenses for those things?” Bailey asked, casually offhand.

“Of course.”

I kept my mouth shut.

“Do you remember how to shoot, Clara?” She handed me the Glock.

I extended my hand to take it—of course I would take it because Mother was handing it to me, even though I hadn’t had a license in years. I didn’t look at Bailey.

Chapter 26

Mother marched off to New York the next morning to deal with Dr. Gary Hankin, whom she deemed the most likely to cave under pressure. “He’ll testify,” she insisted. In her emerald green suit and four-inch heels, she had “dressed to kill” she said, and smiled evilly. I wondered if she’d tucked a pistol in her purse.

Maybe my bad feeling about her visit came from another almost sleepless night, afraid I would inadvertently set off the handgun she’d parked by my bedside. When I had finally drifted off, I dreamed of voodoo dolls, large and animate, bleeding from their pin wounds. It should have been zombie-funny, but instead I ran and ran, feeling their breath, like a feather touch, between my shoulder blades. Now, in an empty, slightly frightening house with a head that still ached and a mind that felt as if it were floating free of my body, I wanted to blot the images out.

I needed somewhere quiet to think. I’d made the intuition work for me once; maybe I could do it again. I had to figure out who Hetty’s boyfriend was. The meditation cottage was quiet, isolated, perfect—and Mother wouldn’t use it today. I levered myself out of the chair, collected the gun, and drove there.

The stable yard was still. I parked and followed the path through the hedge, and, once inside, checked all the rooms. It looked as though no one had visited since I had last been there. The house had only two doors, both locked, and I would hear anyone trying to break in. I took the gun from my bag and dropped it in a kitchen drawer where it would still be easy to access, but I wouldn’t shoot myself by mistake. I turned up the heat, brewed tea, then settled cross-legged on the floor, pillows jammed between me and the wall for support, and began the breathing meditation Paul had taught me.

It was hard to concentrate. All these secrets. Whatever I had thought about my life before coming home had eroded over the past weeks. Michelangelo famously said he didn’t sculpt, but merely revealed the image already in the marble. I, on the other hand, felt as if one more hit of the chisel would crumble the entire stone into dust. I drifted into half-awareness, returning to Mother’s Christmas fête, ­arranging everyone at the dinner table, watching the eyes that watched me. Hugh to my right. Mother at the head. The polished, silver-haired man—Vance—to Mother’s right. Hetty across from me. Hetty watching Hugh. Hetty with that long dissertation on sheep diseases by the Christmas tree, as if she were keeping me from something.

Hugh? I couldn’t imagine Hugh as the boyfriend, especially if he thought she was a fraud. So maybe her photographs of Hugh weren’t about her being in love with him, as I’d first thought, but some kind of monitoring, looking for something to get Hugh to lay off his attacks on her business. Maybe she needed that extra income from the readings to keep the farm going.

I let her photographs float through my imagination: Hugh, Mother, me, Pete Samuels, Mary Ellen. What did we have in common? Hugh, Mother, me: Hugh’s murder. Pete, Mary Ellen, me: working the Winters campaign? I’d seen him that one night as security, if that’s what he’d been doing there.

Was Pete Hetty’s lover? I had a hard time seeing it, but maybe that’s why I’d been in such pain on our