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

and back. I had to get help. I zipped up my sweatshirt over the torn tee shirt, and wrapped myself in my coat, stuffing the gun in the pocket. Then I stumbled out the door and across the drive to the main house. Gentle snow had started to fall, and a thin new coating lay over the old.

Ernie answered the door, bleary eyed. “Clara! What’s the matter? Is Constance all right?”

“Mother’s fine. You’ve got to come. I hit Andrew Winters and I think he needs medical attention.” I punched buttons on my phone to call Kyle.

“Are you okay?” Ernie asked.

“I’ll be fine.”

Ernie nodded without asking any further questions, a measure in that moment of how much he loved my father.

Kyle picked up. I said, “Please come. Andrew Winters just attacked me.” I told him where I was.

“Are you safe?”

“Yes.”

“Ernie?” Loretta called from the top of the stairs.

“It’s okay, honey, go back to bed.”

“Ernie, the cottage is burning!” She rushed past us and into the kitchen for the phone.

We ran across the grass as police sirens wailed up the drive. I hoped fire sirens wouldn’t be far behind. Had Andrew gotten out? How had the fire started? The flames leapt and cackled like a priest at an Inquisition burning, smoke twisting black and pungent into the blacker sky. But as we burst through the hedge, Andrew wasn’t the Winters we found. Instead, a triumphant Mary Ellen stood, holding a red plastic gas can.

“Mary Ellen! What are you doing?”

She turned sharply, her face etched with hard black and gold lines from the fire. “You’re supposed to be dead. I blocked the doors!”

“Andrew—did he get out? Is he with you?” I panicked. The ribs of the cottage stood out like a whale carcass on the beach.

“Andrew’s in there?” Her face melted in the heat, and she sagged to the ground. “Oh god. I thought—he wasn’t supposed to be here. It’s only eleven.”

“He came early.”

“Nooooooo!” She lunged at me swinging the gas can wide, as if to strike me. A strong hand came out of the darkness and seized her arm mid-swing.

“I’ll take it from here.”

Before she could twist to see who it was, the chief had locked her hands into cuffs. “You can tell the rest of your story at the station, Ms. Winters.” Joe materialized from the edge of the fire and took her arm.

That left me to face the chief. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would get so out of hand.”

“That’s the nice thing about you, Clara. You’re always willing to apologize after you’ve done something horrendous—like burn down someone’s house.”

“Actually, it was my mother’s house. Well, she rented it from Ernie and Loretta. She probably won’t need it any more. I mean, we have a big house—”

And then I couldn’t really breathe properly because I’d been folded into a hug, strong arms around me, and stupid me, like a baby, started to cry, huge gulping sobs that I couldn’t get to quit, and I was getting his really nice coat all damp and snotty. I pulled away to wipe my nose. The chief pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket.

“Sit down,” he said. “The firemen have the blaze under control and they’ll call when they need me.”

We sat on Ernie and Loretta’s porch. Light from the flames backlit the hedge and we could hear the firemen as they yelled to each other. Flakes of snow spun and melted above the fire in the midnight air. “Tell me what ­happened,” he said at last.

I told him how I’d offered Winters an intuitive reading if he would tell me about Hankin, how I’d had surveillance equipment installed, and how I planned to give the police the recording so they could investigate and toss Winters in jail forever and ever. And ever. But when the tarot offered up only death and failure and I just laughed, he had freaked out and I’d been afraid he was going to rape me like he’d raped my mother—

“Rape his own daughter?”

I tried to shrug, but it came out like a convulsion. “He kept ripping at my clothes.” The chief pulled me under his arm and I told him Winters kept asking about a wire, so maybe it wasn’t rape after all and I’d fought him off with the nose thing, and then I’d smacked him on the side of the head with the gun in the drawer.

“Gun? You brought a gun tonight?” The chief, suddenly tense, cut through my babble.

“It was in the drawer.”

“Do you have a license?”

“Mary Ellen threatened me, so Mother armed me. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I threw it in a drawer and forgot about it.”

He shook his head at the image of my mother arming me. “Did you ­discharge the weapon?”

“If you mean, did I shoot it, then no. I grabbed it by the barrel. Do you want it? Here.” I pulled it out of my pocket and started to hand it to him.

“Put it away, Clara. We’ll deal with it later. What about the license?”

“I haven’t had a license in years. Mother does, though.”

I felt him relax. “I can work with that. Her place, her license, her gun. No one needs to know otherwise, Clara, okay? Carrying without a license is a one-year mandatory minimum.”

“In jail?” I squeaked.

“In jail.”

“Is it over? Will this get Mary Ellen put away?”

“Catching someone in the act is a pretty good guarantee.”

“She didn’t mean to kill him.”

“She meant to kill you. I heard her say it.”

“So did I.” Ernie sat next to me on the porch steps. “I’ll testify, too.”

I said, “I didn’t mean for him to die. He was my biological father…even if he was…do you think I could be insane like that?”

“You have your moments.” The chief’s dry chuckle comforted me.

When Loretta came out and shooed us all into the house, I realized I was shivering. She put a blanket around my shoulders, and I sat on the couch with my teeth chattering at the rim of a