Shadow Notes

by Laurel S. Peterson

  And there was something else. What was there? What was I seeing but not recognizing?

  I grabbed my phone from my jacket pocket and photographed each of the walls, then took pictures of the rest of the room, a couple of the kitchen and the garbage, and the table with the Tarot cards. Something crashed outside.

  I ran to the back window, shoved it up, and clambered out. Pulling it closed behind me, I slogged as quickly as I could to the front. A quick look from the edge of the cabin showed the coast clear, so I jogged to the Land Rover, jammed the key in the ignition and high-tailed it out of there. I thought I heard someone yelling, but that could just have been the sound of the ice beneath my tires. I didn’t see anyone in the rearview mirror, and no one chased me down the drive. Maybe I was in the clear.

  I had to take the pictures to Kyle, but I couldn’t tell him I’d broken into Hetty’s cabin. Plus, I needed a shot of the outside right after all the interior pictures I’d shot. My phone would register the time and location link. That wasn’t evidence Kyle could actually use, but maybe it would get him a search warrant. Then I thought about that bag of garbage sitting on her step next to the bucket of cigarette butts. Garbage was fair game, right? At least it was in all those TV detective shows. But that meant going back and risking that Hetty had returned in the meantime. Damn.

  I drove to the end of the lane and pulled the Land Rover as far off the main road as I could. The only way I could see to be a little covert would be to go back on foot and hope I didn’t meet Hetty coming through the woods. At least the ten or so minutes it would take me to walk down the driveway would also give me time to make sure no one else was there.

  The frozen denim had melted a bit in the car, but as I stepped back into the chill, the wind whistled through the fabric as if I were wearing lace and chiffon. I hustled as fast as I could; the drive crunched underfoot, and my jeans stuck to my legs, icy cold. My head pounded and everything remained blurry at the edges. In the distance, I heard the occasional car and a metal banging, like a screen door against its frame.

  When I neared the clearing, I paused in the shadow of a spruce, inhaling its resiny scent, to see if Hetty had arrived. From where I stood, I thought I saw only my tire tracks and footprints, but to be sure, I moved along the edge of the clearing, from tree to tree, hoping that if Hetty had gone inside, she was too busy worrying about what I’d found to look out and see me.

  I pulled my phone out, yanked off my gloves and opened the photo app. I took two pictures of the house, one with a close-up of the garbage bag, then shoved the phone away again, and ran across the clearing to the steps, scooped up the bag and hightailed it, slipping and sliding, down the drive. The slug had to deal.

  In the car safely headed for home, I turned the heater up high and deep-sixed my idea of visiting Hetty. Not with that wall of photos. Instead, I burned up road back to Mother’s, divested myself of my wet clothes and made myself a large cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. Next, I spread newspapers on the floor in the mudroom and starting sifting through the garbage. For all her organic farming ways, Hetty seemed to survive on beef jerky and chocolate cookies. Mixed in with those wrappers were rejected photo prints and memory cards. Two, to be exact.

  That’s when I realized I didn’t have a memory card reader. I usually hooked the camera up to the computer. I put my coat back on and wasted another hour and a half going to an office supply store, getting help finding the right card reader, standing in the endless Christmas line, and coming home again.

  By the time I reheated the chocolate and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to go along with it, I realized the slug was mostly gone. Comfort food, sifting through garbage, and long waits at Christmas cash registers were apparently good for recovering from bad dreams. I got the card reader set up and scrolled back through Hetty’s photos. The pictures of Pete Samuels were there, along with ones of me and Pete at dinner, taken through the window of the restaurant. She’d stood outside in the cold and the dark to take them. I shivered. The few photos of Pete taken prior to the ones of us together looked posed. He stared straight into the camera, with a challenging glare.

  Why was she taking pictures of Mary Ellen, Pete, Hugh and me? And why had she left those voodoo dolls?

  Okay, photos of two men and two women. Of the two men, one had been a psychologist; the other, a police detective. Had they known each other, other than superficially? Mary Ellen certainly knew Hugh, but something about the photographs of Mary Ellen felt different to me. They were mostly of her alone, in a location I couldn’t identify.

  Hetty had tried to get as close as possible to Hugh to take photos. There were shots of him in his office, taken through the patio sliding doors, as if she’d perched behind the rocks on his property with a zoom lens. One shot apparently had gone wrong; it looked as if a blonde ghost was streaking across the camera lens. Other shots caught him at dinner downtown and at parties or with Mother and a handsome, silver-haired man. Who was that guy, anyway? Was that the new boyfriend Pete had mentioned?

  I copied all the photos onto my laptop, printed them, and stuck the pictures in an envelope with a note that explained where they had come from. I labeled it with Chief DuPont’s name and took it to the police station, where I left it with the desk sergeant. The desk sergeant knew me, glanced at the envelope with interest, told me Mother was in with her lawyer and couldn’t see me just then. I’d been so absorbed in my own quest, I hadn’t even thought about asking after her. Bad, Clara.

  As for the pictures, I’d have to take my chances with the breaking and entering—and if I were lucky, no one would ever know. If Hetty was stalking me and two other living people, I needed to know why, and I wanted the cops to know, too—just in case.

  As I drove home again, I mulled over possibilities. What—if anything—was Hetty’s relationship with Balaclava Guy? Maybe she’d snapped the pictures, constructed the dolls, and had Balaclava Guy deliver them to my pillow. Why? Just to scare me? Why scare me? Revenge for things that happened in high school?

  Why would Hetty care about Mother’s innocence or guilt? One ­possibility was that Hetty had killed Hugh and set Mother up. What had Mother done to cause Hetty to choose her as the fall guy? As far as I could tell, Hetty loathed me, not Mother. But Hetty’s cottage, a miniature of Mother’s—what was that all about?

  Maybe Hetty’s photographs were a lover’s obsession, although that appeared unlikely. Didn’t stalkers shadow one target at a time? I mean, who could handle Hugh, Pete, Mary Ellen and me all at once?

  I pulled into the garage. Whatever Hetty’s obsessions, they were distracting me from figuring out Mother’s trauma, and I was more than ever convinced her trauma lay at the heart of everything. I could feel it in my gut, even if nothing I had found so far confirmed it.

  My watch read three o’clock. Time enough to head back to campaign headquarters and use my newly found leverage. I ran into the house to print a couple copies of the photographs, just in case.

  I arrived about three-thirty, which I could justify since I needed to attend another command performance fundraiser that evening. I opened my bottom drawer and dropped in my purse and its curious photographs, then turned to toss my coat over the back of the visitor’s chair next to the desk. Someone was sitting in that visitor’s chair. I gave a little cry and stepped back. The slug protested. It didn’t need any more drama today.

  He grinned. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I felt my face grow furnace hot. “Jeez. Don’t sneak up on a person.” I set down my coat, hoping my flush would disappear by the time I turned back. No such luck. His long legs stretched out in front of him, draped in fine-gauge navy wool. The suit jacket had apparently been abandoned elsewhere, since his pale green shirt and dark green tie were unadorned. Blond hair, blue eyes, a slightly crooked nose—a freakish lacrosse or skiing accident, no doubt—topped a square chin, and thin patrician lips.
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  He held out his hand without getting up. “Andrew Winters, Junior.” My face must have betrayed surprise, because he leaned in, pulling me toward him and whispered, “Right. You didn’t think my mother was capable of doing anything as messy as reproducing?” He rubbed his thumb across my hand, then released me. What was it with guys and that move?

  I sat down abruptly, surprised my head still sat on my shoulders, given the thumping going on between my ears. “I, uh, they don’t talk about you. In fact, they don’t talk about any of their children. I didn’t even remember they had children.”

  “I’m the bad seed. Law school, yes, but I’m headed for the public defender’s office.”

  “A noble goal, if a tiring one. Or so I’ve heard.” My skirt slid up slightly as I crossed my legs. His eyes rested there a moment before returning to my face. He’d inherited some things from his father. I pulled it down again. “You’re home for the holidays?”

  He nodded, talking about his law career as if I hadn’t mentioned another topic. Typical—of men, I could say, but it was also a Winters trait. I found men obsessed with themselves interesting—for a time. Men like my soon-to-be-ex, for instance.

  “It’s the wrong side of the tracks. I’m supposed to join my father’s firm this summer, become a partner, buy a house in town, raise blond children. You’re not available for that, are you?”

  I put my chin in my hand—it would steady things, yes?—and studied him, my eyebrows raised. He was funny. I liked that. “Raising blond children? Not at the moment. Thanks, though. I appreciate being considered for a part in your truly meteoric rise.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mary Ellen step into Andrew’s office. Ah, my quarry—dressed in what appeared to be Carolina Herrera, the softest look I’d yet seen her wear.

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I thought if I could find the right woman, it might make Dad’s plan palatable.”

  I shook my head. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty-seven. Why? Am I too young?”

  “I’d have to know a bit more about you than your career plans.”

  “Great. It’s settled then.” He stood up, pulling the secretive suit jacket from the floor where it had dropped behind the chair. Armani. On the floor. No wonder he was the bad seed.

  “What is?”

  “Dinner. With me. Tonight. Eight o’clock. I’ll pick you up.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got your Dad’s fundraiser.” Never mind that I couldn’t ­comprehend remaining awake that long.

  But, the snake in the Garden of Eden whispered, he might know why Mother and Mary Ellen hated each other, which might tell me about my mother’s trauma, which might give me a way to get her out of jail. The slug was on a roll.

  “Blow it off,” he said.

  “Not possible. I’m sure you know a bit about that.” Mary Ellen stepped out of Andrew’s office and glanced at us. I tried to smile perkily at her, but it came out like a grimace. She raised an eyebrow at me, got her coat and sashayed out the door, along with my opportunity to question her.

  “We’ll go after the fundraiser’s over. It can’t last longer than ten, right?”

  I tried to refocus on Junior. “You think you can find a restaurant in this town still serving at ten?”

  “No problem.” He grinned again, swung the jacket over his shoulder and sauntered off toward his father’s office.

  As I flicked on my computer and pulled up the file I needed, I felt a little knot in my stomach, a warning. Handsome yes, but he was a Winters. And for god’s sake, I was divorcing my husband. Since when did I date guys to get information? I twitched around a little in my chair, trying to get comfortable as I thought about why Junior bothered me. I was beginning to listen to myself, but knowing when my intuition spoke and when my imagination spoke still wasn’t clear.

  Why would Junior home in on me? Maybe he liked flirting, or he was sent by his father or Mary Ellen. Do your part, son: wine and dine the new girl. Maybe that’s what the knot was warning me about.

  Later that evening, I stepped outside the latest palatial mansion used to persuade the party adherents into giving up their cash, and found Junior standing by a black stretch limousine. Light from the portico glimmered off the high-gloss paint and reflected off the smoked windows. I could barely see the dim outline of a driver. The car was running, exhaust steaming into the bitter December air. Junior waited, sans gloves or coat, his thin-soled loafers soaking up the chill from the graveled drive. I’d draped Mother’s mink wrap across my shoulders.

  “Bit of overkill, no?” I gestured at the limo.

  He rolled his eyes. “Just get in,” he said.

  Mary Ellen had been far too busy that evening to corner for a chat about Hetty’s photos. She even seemed to avoid me, which meant cajoling whatever Junior knew out of him was my next best option. Thankfully, the slug had shrunk so I could function, although my general wooziness remained, and I’d felt flashes of pain in my arms and back and forehead all through the party. That meant time was running short. I needed answers quickly, or the hallucinations would begin. As I speculated on the lengths I might be willing to go to get information from Junior, I heard the door open behind me.

  I turned to see the chief. His cop eyes flickered over the limousine, my figure in Mother’s clingy gold lace dress, young Winters. His cop eyes said, Don’t get in that car.

  I smiled. “Chief DuPont, have you met Andrew Winters, Junior?” He smiled back but it didn’t get past his mouth. Stepping forward, he held out his hand. Junior reeled a bit from the ice in the chief’s gaze, but shook anyway, as a good upper-class boy should.

  “Mr. DuPont is our new chief of police.”

  Junior stilled like a rabbit in the grass when it hears the hawk screech, then managed to nod.

  “Y’all goin’ out?” The chief thickened his southern accent to pure syrup.

  “To dinner, yes.”

  The chief slung his arm around me, as if somehow we were an item. For a few brief seconds, it felt like home and the pains receded. “I like this girl, so you take good care of her.” I wasn’t even sure this was a date, but I guess it looked like one. I’d dressed for the fundraiser, not dinner, but the chief wouldn’t know that. I sighed. Maybe I should have taken more than one night off between dinners with strange men to think things through.

  “Yes, sir.” Winters opened the limo door. “We have a reservation, Clara.”

  I slid gently from DuPont’s hold. His fingers grabbed my arm. Something else lingered in his eyes, but I didn’t know how to read it. I patted his hand and stepped into the car. He stood there until we drove out of sight.

  I looked around the car. A little brass nameplate screwed into the back of the driver’s seat spelled out the name of the Winters law firm. A bottle of champagne chilled in its own built-in cooler; Junior poured me a glass as the driver pulled the car onto the Merritt Parkway. “Where are we going?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “What is this, twenty questions?”

  “If you like.” He touched his glass to mine. “A toast: to meeting the most beautiful woman in town and capturing her on the first day.”

  Capturing?

  “We have reservations for two at ten-thirty,” Junior said. “Drink up.”

  The restaurant he’d chosen, an intimate space off lower Park Avenue, served overpriced, undersized portions of the latest fad in haute cuisine. The waiters treated me as if I didn’t deserve what I was getting, but Junior, of course, they treated with great, if icy, respect; I imagine they assumed he carried the cash.

  My unease persisted. Junior himself entertained cleverly, telling me stories of his nightmares in law school: professors who assigned impossible reading loads, forgetting an exam, the competition for editor of the law review and for summer internships.

  Through i
t all, he conveyed his high ambitions, but in a sufficiently self-deprecating way that expressed his own self-aware judgment of those ambitions as superficial at worst and as earnest at best. Even the public defender’s office was held up to a certain ridicule as a path to district attorney or a successful criminal practice. And throughout his discourse, he ignored the luscious parade of young women on the arms of gray-haired financiers, an admirable show of fortitude.

  Sure, he came on to me, which surprised me given the difference in our ages, but it felt half-hearted. Some dark, snaky part of me wondered if his father had put him up to it, although what Senior would want from the interaction stumped me. I was just his employee and only in town for as long as it took to sort out my mother before hightailing it out of here again. Paris was calling. Insistently. I’d even dreamed briefly—a pleasant dream for once—about wandering lost in the Musée D’Orsay.

  “What are you thinking about?” Junior picked up his wine glass and drank off what remained, gesturing to the waiter for a refill. The waiter complied, and then delivered elegantly composed salads of five slices of endive centered on three perfect raspberries.

  “Romeo and Juliet. You know, Mary Ellen and my mother have been feuding since before you were born.”

  “Yeah. Which makes me wonder why you’re working on Dad’s campaign. You’re not a mole, are you?” He smiled, but I knew we’d reached the reason for the evening. Then, I remembered the dip in Winters’s poll numbers. What kind of father would send his son on this kind of dirty mission? What kind of son would accept it?

  I said, “Just trying to rattle things at home. Do you know what Mary Ellen and Constance have against each other? Mother never told me.”

  He shrugged. “Something your mother owned that she wouldn’t give Dad. Something that belonged to him, he says. I don’t know what.”

  Then he continued telling me about his ambitions almost as if his only goal in asking about my motives was to be able to report that he’d done it. He didn’t seem to care about my answer. “I can live without Dad’s kind of ambition. I know I just said I’m interested in being D.A., and that’s no small ambition, but if I never get there, that’s fine. I’d rather have fun and make a difference in the world.” He came in close and lowered his voice. “Dad told me once that he wants to be President. I think he’d give up almost anything for that.”