Shadow Notes
A Clara Montague Mystery
Laurel Peterson
Barking Rain Press
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events described herein are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Shadow Notes: A Clara Montague Mystery
Clara Montague Mysteries, Book 1
Copyright © 2016 Laurel Peterson (www.laurelpeterson.com)
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Edited by Ti Locke (www.urban-gals-go-feral.blogspot.com)
Proofread by Barbara Bailey (www.barkingrainpress.org/barbara-bailey/)
Cover Artist: Stephanie Flint (www.sbibb.wordpress.com)
Author Photo: Ute-Christin Cowan (www.utechristinphotography.com)
Barking Rain Press
PO Box 822674
Vancouver, WA 98682 USA
www.BarkingRainPress.org
ISBN Trade Paperback: 1-941295-45-2
ISBN eBook: 1-941295-46-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939879
First Edition: May 2016
Printed in the United States of America
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Dedication
For my father, who never said there was something a girl couldn’t do, and for my mother, who showed me how to hang on even when things got rough.
Thank you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgements
Also from Laurel Peterson
Coming Soon from Laurel Peterson
About Laurel Peterson
About Barking Rain Press
Other Titles Available from Barking Rain Press
Bluffing is Murder
Dangerous Denial
Frostbite
The Hanged Man’s Noose
The Immaculate
Never Again
Padre: The Narrowing Path
Requiem in Red
The Revolving Year
Chapter 1
All I wanted was to blow this little Spanish town and my soon-to-be ex-husband, head to Paris, and bathe my wounds in Chanel and walks along the Seine. But I’d had a terrifying dream. The last dream predicted my father’s death. This one predicted my mother’s:
I’m standing at the edge of a vast green field. The field slopes up and loses itself in the bluest of blue skies, pure like the polished cobalt that stretches over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. In front of me is a paddock with three lean and muscular horses, brown and sleek in the bright afternoon sunshine. The afternoon breeze fluffs their tails. I recognize this place as home, although I have never lived anywhere that looks anything like this.
In the distance, I see my mother running down the hill. Her arms stretch out toward me, overbalancing her, and she stumbles, falling to her knees in the soft grass. I can’t see what frightens her. The pasture is empty. She screams my name: “Clara! Look out!”
I turn. Behind me hangs a dense cloud, green-black like the sky before a tornado. This cloud, though, is more like a mass, something palpable, living and dense and suffocating. It is almost upon me. I turn to run toward my mother, only to find a dark mass almost upon her as well. If they shroud us, I know we will never find our way out, we will never find our way to each other. Mother is weeping in the middle of the field. “Clara, please. Help me.” When I finally reach her, she is laid out, as if for a grave, arms folded across her chest, her face as white as empty paper.
I woke exhausted, shivering and cursing into my pillow. I couldn’t fall back to sleep, no matter how I tried to calm myself with restful thoughts—salmon antique roses against a gray stone wall, the lull of rain pattering on stone courtyards. All the reasons I didn’t want to go home kept intruding.
Going home meant returning to Mother; it meant dealing with my own guilt. I’d never told her my dream about father’s death, how I’d seen the sleek black casket, the priest, my father’s face made up all waxy or plastic, as if he belonged at Madame Tussaud’s. I’d never told her he’d whispered from the casket, “Heart attacks happen, Clara.” I knew when he’d said it that I could prevent it, but I hadn’t. I blamed myself. I blamed her.
Mother lied. When I was little, before I knew better, I would tell her my dreams, and she would get this frightened look on her face. The look intensified whenever my dreams corresponded to real life. Like the time I dreamed that Timmy Lefkowitz would throw up blood, and then he did on the playground the next day. I shouted at her that if we’d told Timmy’s mom or the teacher, they might have kept Sean Gallagher from beating Timmy half to death in the bathroom because Timmy said the Virgin Mary was just another girl, not a saint.
She said no one believed in dreams or intuitions until after something happened. She claimed nothing I could have said would have changed what happened, and telling people only made them frightened of me. I was going to have to get used to that, and if I didn’t, people would call me crazy. In fact, until I gave up telling her much of anything, she would say, “It’s just a dream, Clara, a coincidence. You mustn’t tell anyone about your dreams.” She’d make me repeat it, as if I were in detention, writing a hundred times “I will not tell lies.”
Then I’d had the dream that predicted my father’s death, more terrifying than any dream I’d ever had. Was it symbolic? Real? She would tell me to ignore it, as she had all the others. I didn’t want to frighten my father, in case it wasn’t true, and I didn’t want to stay silent, in case it was. While I was paralyzed by indecision, he died. I hadn’t forgiven myself for ignoring my intuition. That was fifteen years ago.
Now, here I was again and this dream felt the same: if I didn’t act on it, Mother would die. She’d pushed me away, but she was my mother, and no matter how angry I was with her, I couldn’t lose another parent. If I saved her, maybe then I would have done something right,
and if I’d done something right, maybe she would be the mother I wanted.
I rolled over and looked at the clock: six a.m. Sliding out from the covers, I shivered for a moment. On the floor lay three packed suitcases. I picked up the phone and dialed United’s international desk. “I need to change a flight,” I said.
Chapter 2
Hugh Woodward was my date at Mother’s annual Christmas fête. Twenty-four hours later he was dead. I’d arrived home two days earlier from Girona, Spain, where my ex-stockbroker and soon-to-be ex-husband was in an early mid-life crisis. He was an annoyance of a man with rimless glasses and too much chest hair who, at forty, believed he still had a shot as a professional bike racer. Mother was startled to see me, and that was the only emotion she expressed—the only thing she expressed—in the entire two days. In fact, other than greeting me at breakfast and asking after my day when she arrived home around ten p.m. from some function, she said little to me. She absolutely refused to be available for the conversation I needed to have with her.
On the day of the fête, Mother ended up with an odd number for dinner because Mary Ellen Winters canceled at the last minute with some excuse about a crisis in her brother’s special election campaign. The incumbent had dropped dead of a heart attack on the Senate floor a week after Labor Day, providing Andrew Winters with an early opportunity to declare his bid for the seat. The special election would be held in early February, so none of the Winters made it that evening.
That left Hugh Woodward, an old family friend, without a dinner partner. Mother always invited the whole town to the party, friends and foes alike, and insisted on having an even number of guests at the table: an etiquette rule she refused to break. I was conveniently available. “Clara, darling, you will help me out, won’t you?” Just a touch of guilt, just a touch of intimacy—my mother’s trademark.
I hated these parties. Most of the people were perfectly nice, but the ones who weren’t—the ones who played political games, did frenetic charity work, pretended to like people because they had more social status or money, or used Botox while making sly little digs at someone else’s skirt size or cellulite—those were the ones I couldn’t wait to ditch when I left town, even though they existed everywhere, even inside me.
“Of course, Mother.”
She lifted her cheek toward me, and I kissed her. That’s what one did.
Mother held her fête in early December, after the first snow had fallen, but before the roads had clogged with angry shoppers. Connecticut was particularly beautiful, her green hills and pearl lakes just crisp, not frozen, the dust of winter newly laid, glittering with red decorations of holly berry and window poinsettias.
Mother’s house—she’d inherited it along with a pile of money from her family—was a long, low Frank Lloyd Wright-ish affair crowded round by woods and overhung with pines. Father had landscaped thirty years ago with privet and holly, rhododendrons and grass; only the holly and privet were left, the rhododendrons and grass having given up the ghost when the sun disappeared into the clouds of green leaves, and my mother’s disapproval became so strong it floated from the house like the scent of burnt toast.
All that green stood out spectacularly against the weathered gray stone of the house. One summer, Fine Gardening had even done a spread. They’d planted flowers in father’s garden; he’d had them dug up again at the end of the day.
Promptly at seven o’clock on the evening of the fête, I presented myself in a short red cocktail dress and silver sandals. One didn’t show up late to Mother’s parties expecting a flexible cocktail hour. Show up at seven forty-five and one had only fifteen minutes to gulp down the first martini before being called to dinner. Besides, being on time let me scope out the room for candidates likely to give up Mother’s secrets. My dreams of a civil conversation with her hadn’t lessened any, now that I was home, but her reticence required new tactics.
The downstairs rooms twinkled with gold, red and green trim, and tiny white lights. The window drapes and throw pillows had been changed to red, green and gold velvet, two large coffee tables held elaborate crèches, and a pine bough garland festooned with crimson bows and real-looking fake cranberries draped the fireplaces.
Mother’s Christmas fête was strictly black tie. Women in body-draping dresses, thinner than they were at seventeen, their skin professionally smoothed, decorated men distinguished with early gray hair and tuxedos, whose eyes roamed the room for women more good-looking than their wives and men richer than they were. Their superficially delighted expressions registered underlying anxiety, perhaps at their own sense that they weren’t having as much fun as they should be. Perhaps because that anxiety was roughly akin to the seventh-grade schoolyard, they wielded an exacting social power, determining in a glance wielded like a Michelin four-star chef’s paring knife whether or not a newcomer was worthy. It was exhausting to be part of their world and devastating to be rejected.
Martini in hand, I’d gotten trapped by Hetty Gardner, stepdaughter to my father’s business partner, Ernie Brown. She was an organic lamb farmer and claimed she was selling to the biggest chefs in New York—which meant her business had a slightly better than fifty percent chance of survival. She’d cornered me by my mother’s stadium-sized Christmas tree and was holding forth on the merits of homeopathic remedies for sheep diseases, while shooting glances at Hugh. Unable to pry myself loose from her without a small shower of ornaments traveling with me, I suffered through her litany until Mother rang the cowbell for dinner.
So much for checking out the crowd.
Of course, Mother created seating charts. She alternated men and women, broke up couples, and put rivals (usually) at opposite ends of the table. I was seated next to Hugh, a not unsurprising choice, given that I’d replaced Mary Ellen Winters, my mother’s oldest enemy. Their enmity began long before I was born, and Mother had never deigned to tell me its source. What amused me was the subtext: Mary Ellen would see being seated next to Hugh Woodward as a message from my mother: “Get some help.”
Hetty sat across from us, watchful, her bare, buff arms shining in the candlelight. Mother sat at the far end of the table, with a polished-looking man, silver-haired and square-jawed, to her right. Hugh Woodward was also handsome, but the softness in his cheeks and gut would soon shape him like a whiskey bottle. He had been my mother’s therapist for twenty years. I’d overheard gossip in town that an affair between them broke my father’s heart. Whether it was true or not, Mother’s independent self couldn’t be touched by either my father or me.
The line between therapist and friend was blurred early on. Hugh frequented our family dinners and often spent holidays with us. After my father died, Mother always mentioned Hugh in the Christmas and birthday cards that never failed to find me, no matter where in the world I was hiding. He was the perfect person to answer my questions.
I looked down the table at Mother, this woman whom I mirrored in so many respects. We were both petite and lithe, shared the same green eyes with the littlest uptick in the corners, and long thin toes that made finding sandals difficult. We both laughed with a gurgle. We liked Mendelssohn and take-out Chinese. Not that she told me these things: I knew from watching her, seeing the take-out cartons in the refrigerator, and eavesdropping on her conversations. I knew she kept a stash of detective novels by her bed; at nine or ten years old, I’d snuck into her bedroom when she was out for a forbidden read. Curling into the pillows on her bed, I smelled her perfume, lay where she lay, tried to become her for those few precious hours.
Unfortunately, rumors like the one about Hugh Woodward and my mother linger in the community brain, making inroads like worms in dirt. I know part of the motivation for what I did was that rumor, a pure, driving need to know my mother. But finally, we are all unknowable, the psyche impossible to collapse into a package that can be dissected and neatly labeled. It didn’t stop me from trying, from trampling into the spaces others wished to
keep private.
“So, Clara. Constance tells me you might be job-hunting in the new year.” Hugh spooned up some of the delicate scallop soup that comprised my mother’s first course.
Leave it to Mother to share my life along with her own. “Yes. Maybe.” If I hadn’t returned to Paris.
“Something using your degree in landscape architecture?” It sounded patronizing, but it was hard to tell since his mouth was full of roll.
“Mm. My Ph.D. From Harvard.” I couldn’t resist.
“Yes, I remember. What have you been doing with all that education?” he asked.
“A little of this, a little of that.”
As Hugh knew, I didn’t have to work. I’d inherited my father’s money, half his landscape architecture business, and his passion for the land. While that passion had propelled me through graduate school, I had never taken on my half of the business, and had instead let father’s partner handle it for the last fifteen years. Any work I’d done had been short-term because I needed to explore the world.
Hugh said, “You don’t sound thrilled.”
I laughed and drank a little more wine. I had to finish this glass. A different wine would be served with the next course. “It’s kept me busy enough I suppose.”
At the laugh, he’d turned and looked at me, assessing. He seemed to notice everything—the blonde hair, the green eyes, the pointy chin and freckles, the skinny, pale mouth. Some men found the combination appealing, but Hugh’s thoughts weren’t clear. I suppose psychologists have long practice in bland, neutral faces. “We haven’t seen you in a long time, Clara.”
Mother’s servers came by right about then and unloaded another half bottle of wine—a new one—into my Baccarat and Hugh’s. Cleared the soup. Brought the first course, a pasta tossed with golden caviar on a gold-rimmed plate. I dizzily twirled some around my fork, noticed Hetty staring at Hugh again.
“I’ve been avoiding the place.” I laughed once more, taking in the voluptuous flower arrangements, the crystal chandeliers, the excess of small, white, glittering candles, Hetty’s intense and inquiring face across the table.
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