“Bailey?” I said. “Why don’t you tell her?” Revenge is sweet.
No reaction. All that court training came in handy. Finally, Bailey said, “We wanted to clear the air.”
Hetty’s hand shook as she sipped again. “You can’t make up now for the fifteen, seventeen, whatever years of hurt you’ve caused.” She was almost hissing, but tears glimmered in her eyes. The nearest diners looked over curiously.
“Hey, guys! Imagine finding you here.”
It hadn’t seemed possible for Hetty to go any whiter, but Andrew Junior’s appearance seemed destined to make her collapse. He slipped in next to me with a friendly kiss on the cheek. Bailey raised her eyebrows. I suggested Hetty needed something stronger than water, since she looked as bleached as new wool. Junior gestured to the waiter and ordered a round of brandies.
Yeah, great idea. More alcohol.
“How are you?” he asked me, after the drinks had arrived. He touched my hand briefly. “I had fun the other night.”
“Me, too.” I realized it wasn’t a lie. Even if I did have reservations, I had that sense of being aligned with him.
“You feeling better, Hetty? Brandy always warms me up.” He slid closer. Must have learned that move from his old man.
The alcohol hadn’t improved Hetty. She appeared to be in a catatonic state of mute terror, only her eyes flicking rapidly between me and Junior, like some awake version of REM sleep.
“Hetty,” I echoed, “are you okay?”
“You’re friends?” She nodded at me and Junior.
“We met a couple of days ago.”
“When did you get home, Andrew?” Bailey tried to smooth the conversational awkwardness.
“Just before Christmas. Figured I’d see the family until court starts up again after the new year.” He looked at me, as if searching for something.
“You must get home a fair amount.”
“For an overnight or dinner. I don’t have a lot of time available, but over the holidays nothing particular keeps me in the city—” at this, he glanced at me again—“so why not hang out here?”
Bailey said, “Are you helping with your dad’s campaign?”
“No.” He paused, then showed himself to be a politician cut from Winters cloth. “But Dad’s got so many great people, really loyal…this time.” He looked at Hetty. “And all the targeted campaign work is really paying off.”
Hetty leapt from her seat. Junior grabbed at Hetty’s brandy glass as it slid toward the edge of the table and nearly into mid-air.
“Hetty, be careful.” I meant it on too many levels to articulate.
Oblivious, she scuttled across the dining room, yanked open the door, and practically threw herself out. Her pale face looked in on us for a split second before she disappeared into the night.
Chapter 17
I fell asleep on the couch in the solarium and woke with a start from a dream about Hetty’s attacker, with the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils. Mother stood over me. She’d turned on every lamp in the room. I sat up, shielding my eyes from the light. “What’s the matter?”
She sniffed. “It’s two in the morning and you were snoring like a common drunk. Couldn’t you even make it to your bed?” She sat down in the chair across from me and surprised me by wringing her hands. “What’s going on, Clara?”
I rubbed my face, trying to think clearly. The last thing I remembered was leaving Bailey at the restaurant. That wasn’t good, since I’d obviously driven home and parked myself on the couch before passing out.
“I don’t know what you mean.” I stuck to my innocence in arguments with Mother, until I knew what the argument was about.
“I’ve been home for two days. I find your things in my bedroom and bath as if you’re living in my room. You work for the Winters, date their son, and ride with Mary Ellen. You’ve asked Nat Mueller personal questions about me, and Wendy Hankin tells me you’ve badgered her husband for my medical information. Is that clear enough?”
Too much alcohol lingered in my blood for this conversation, so I picked the things in her litany I could actually disagree with. “You won’t talk to me. Did you expect me to sit idly by while people accused you of killing Hugh? And I’m not ‘dating’ Andrew Junior. We went out for dinner. Once.”
“You can’t do that again, Clara.” She said it without heat, not as if she were the mother of a recalcitrant teenager she was trying to control, but as if it were a given.
“Why should it matter? It’s just something to perk me up while I deal with my divorce. I’m not going to marry him. He’s too young for me anyway.” I smiled and Mother grimaced. I’d had dinner with Junior only because I wanted information, but I wanted to see what reason she would give to dissuade me.
“No. I can’t allow it.”
As if she had power to stop me. Besides, it didn’t matter. I would do what I wanted, anyway. The dreams had to stop, so I had no choice but to do what I thought was right, even going out with Junior again and peppering him with questions about Mary Ellen. I was not going back to that Zurich hospital.
“You’ll do what if I go out with him again? Restrain me physically from walking out the door? Really, Mother. And I will do whatever is necessary to get answers. I’m not doing it for fun. I’m doing it because my dreams need to stop, and the moment they do, I’ll be out of your hair again. So unless you’re going to surround me with armed guards, you’re out of luck.”
Mother was made of armor. “Oh, I know I have no real power over you, but other ways exist to make sure you don’t see him again. Anyway, you’ll just not do it, and then we don’t have to have this discussion anymore.”
Ramping up the argument, as much as it might give me a perverted satisfaction, wouldn’t gain me anything. Plus, I didn’t have the mental stamina for it at the moment. “What do you really want, Mother?”
“Get away from the Winters family, all of them. Quit the campaign, stop seeing Mary Ellen and Andrew Junior.”
“Why?”
“I’ve already told you why.”
“Tell me again.”
“No.”
She’d done that when I was a kid, too. She’d tell me once, then refuse to repeat it or explain. If I didn’t get it the first time, that was my problem, and it would be an even bigger problem if I didn’t obey, whether I understood or not.
“Do you know why I’m involved with the Winters family?” I asked.
“To spite me, I imagine.” She sounded resigned, stared at the wall past my shoulder.
I swung my feet to the floor. I really wasn’t ready for this. “It started there.” I stopped, started again. “No, that’s not fair,” I said as she looked at me. Her face was washed with incredible sadness and longing, as if none of her dreams had ever been hers to hold. “My motives aren’t so easily read. Part of me wanted to pay you back for father. I believed that if you had allowed me to talk about the intuition, I could have told you I dreamed his death.” She started to speak, but I held up a slightly shaky hand. “I know that’s not true now. My own fear kept me silent.”
“You were a child.”
“I was a young woman, and now I need to make amends by helping you. You’ve been accused of murder. In this town, who better to know you than your oldest enemy? I didn’t assume the information would come without bias, but I did assume there would be information and connections. Mary Ellen could get me in.”
Wearily my mother said, “At what cost, Clara? I can only imagine what that woman has told you to turn you against me. Not that she would have needed to work very hard.” She turned her head away, stroked the arm of the chair. “Has she succeeded?”
“You were a little wilder than I had imagined, if what she says is true, but I’m not here to judge you.”
“You do judge me, Clara. You judge me harshly for all my failings. Especially for yo
ur father.” She looked shrunken and tired in the chair, her bathrobe around her like an oversized blanket around a doll.
I stood up.
She looked wistful. “I’m sure you’re tired.”
“I’m beyond tired,” I said. “If we’re having this conversation, I need coffee. Are you coming?”
She nodded, trying to conceal her surprise. In the kitchen, I ground beans, rinsed the gold filter, measured water. Each second of ritual gave me more time to wake up. When the coffeemaker began its drip, I got out cups, sugar, spoons and milk. Mother suggested something to eat, but I shook my head, the surfeit of dinner still with me. When it was ready, I poured and sat opposite her at the table.
She spooned some sugar into her drink and stirred. When she began talking, she spoke toward the Subzero over my shoulder. “The intuition you have: all the women in the family inherit it. I have it, too, and so did your grandmother and great-grandmother.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“No one in the family talked about it. My mother told me what it was and how I could use what I learned from the intuitions, but that was it. I wasn’t to tell anyone, including other members of the family about the dreams and feelings.
“I didn’t listen. I was young, and it was a time when we did tarot readings for each other and talked about ESP. We bared our souls to friends and complete strangers. We thought we were being open and trusting, and I thought my gift could be used for the greater good. So I told Mary Ellen—my best friend—and I told Loretta Gardner, and somehow it got back to my mother. She grounded me for a month: I couldn’t call anyone, watch TV, listen to the radio, or go anywhere. It was worse than just being grounded, it was house arrest, almost solitary confinement. She didn’t speak to me for that entire month. Thank goodness I had school, or I would have lost my mind.
“At the end of the month, she informed me I would be attending a boarding school for the last two years of high school and if I told anyone there about my gift, I would be cut off from the family, no questions asked. The family would never help me again.”
I waited, shocked, as she blew across the top of the coffee and took a sip. How could a mother say that to a fifteen-year-old?
“What did you do?”
“You know the rest, Clara.” She looked at me, perhaps because some part of what she was about to say was the lie. “I got pregnant with you, and that botched my mother’s plans. You can imagine the scandal, but I finished high school—the GED, almost a sin in this town—and your father and I got married.”
I couldn’t tell which part was untrue.
“I adored you from the moment you were born, Clara. But you were a girl, and I knew you would inherit the gift, like all the other women in the family.
“Since it had led to such pain for me, I tried to train you out of it. Obviously, I failed, and, obviously, I hurt you in the process. I’m truly sorry for that. I believed not having the gift would be the greater good. After your father died, I changed my mind, but by then, I’d already lost you.” She fell silent.
She cared that she’d lost me? Pain slit into my gut and made me nauseous. “What’s the cottage?”
“Hugh brought me back to my intuition, encouraged me to find a ‘safe’ space to practice. Loretta suggested I fix up that little house. It’s always been a very quiet arrangement.”
“Hugh knew about your intuition, too?”
She nodded.
“Could that be why he was murdered?”
She looked startled. “Why would anyone care about Hugh’s secrets? He’d taken an oath not to share them.”
“And if, for some reason, he suddenly was willing to break his oath?”
“Are you asking me if I murdered Hugh?”
“It’s a motive.”
She picked up the cup, twisted it ninety degrees, put it down again. Nudged it with her finger. “Everyone knew anyway—Mary Ellen made certain of that.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t kill him. Do you really think I could?” That look of sadness re-inhabited her face.
“No,” I said slowly. “Do you know who did it, like you claimed at his memorial service?”
She shook her head. “I’d love to pin it on that despicable Winters clan, but I can’t see any connection between them and Hugh.”
I opened my mouth to ask her why she hated them so much, when the phone rang. My mother pushed herself up from the table with a frown. I glanced at the clock. It was five minutes past three. Her hand remained suspended over the receiver for two rings before she picked it up and greeted the caller with apprehension.
She listened a moment, said, “I understand. We’ll be right there.” She turned, her face suddenly drawn in on itself. “Hetty’s been murdered.”
We arrived at the stable at three-thirty on the longest, darkest night of the year. Only one or two stars glimmered between the sheets of cloud that covered the sky. “She was murdered here?” I asked as we pulled in.
“She was murdered near her farm. We’re here for Loretta. I didn’t want to leave her and Ernie alone tonight.”
“Oh.” I’d figured we were going to the murder scene, pictured a body bag with Chief DuPont supervising the action. Then, I could confess that I hadn’t told Hetty about my vision, hadn’t warned her to be careful. There, I could get absolution for my guilt. Instead, that guilt would further cloud my intuition, the only thing that might help.
An outside light shone by the front door. A dim glow emanated from the curtained window to its right. Ernie opened the door and waved us into the front room where Loretta sat, red-eyed and tense on a bright floral couch. She leapt up and ran to my mother. “Oh, Constance,” she sobbed. Mother wrapped her arms firmly around Loretta and led her back to the couch, where she crumpled. Ernie suggested he and I make coffee in the kitchen.
“I’m so sorry.” I stood near the sink, feeling useless.
He gave me an appraising look. “Thank you, Clara.” His long, thin fingers swung open the coffeemaker’s basket. “I know there was no love lost between the two of you.”
“We tried to set that right tonight, Ernie.” I breathed a prayer of thanks to Bailey. “It was a long time ago.”
“I got the time, if you want to tell me the story.”
So I told him about Hetty, only editing out my final vision of a man’s arm across Hetty’s throat. He listened, leaning against the counter.
Ernie reminded me of my father: gentle and kind, but no free pass either. He stood about six-foot-one, with broad shoulders and dark brown hair that, even in his early sixties, was just now thatching itself with silver. He wore loose jeans and a flannel shirt with the tails out. Thick wooly slippers kept his sockless feet warm on the tiled kitchen floor. A tiny diamond stud shot a spark from one ear.
When I finished, he said, “Something wasn’t right with her recently. I don’t know what, and she didn’t confide in me. She and Loretta had been distant for several months. Maybe when the police are done with her farm, we’ll find some answers.” He shook his head. “She was a strange girl, even Loretta knew that. She never recovered from losing her dad.” He saw my face. “Hetty didn’t know how to be herself. She was too busy trying to impress someone, anyone, all the time, but she wasn’t impressive, at least not in the way she wanted to be. I’ve never seen anyone with such an intuitive grasp of what those sheep or her farmland needed, but those weren’t going to get her very far in the local society she wanted to be part of.” He stopped, tangled in his own sentence.
“And was she an intuitive, Ernie? Did she…was the little house on her farm where she, I don’t know, saw her clients? It’s so like the one out back here that Mother uses…”
He shrugged. “Loretta said so. I’m not one to judge one way or the other.”
At least that explained some of the rumors about her.
“Why are we here, Ernie? I know Mother and
Loretta are friends but…”
“Loretta was like a big sister to your Mom while she was growing up. They’ve been close a long time.”
“You guys never come to any of the parties, I never see you in town, I didn’t know Mother and Loretta were this close.”
“Oh, the party scene doesn’t matter, and your mom knows it. She always invites us, and we always say we’ll see her some other time. Who needs to stand around drinking gin with a bunch of people who want to spout nonsense in fancy clothes?” He had a point.
The coffee gurgled and spit its readiness. “Mugs live in that cabinet above the stove and sugar’s in the pantry on the first shelf.” He opened the refrigerator and took out milk and a loaf of sweet bread. Together, we loaded the tray. Just before he pushed through the front room door, Ernie said, “You and me have some talking to do.”
“I’ve got to resolve this first.”
He swung into the living room without another word.
Loretta and Mother sat holding hands, two frail china figurines perched carefully side by side. Loretta had stopped crying. Ernie set the tray on the low, carved table in front of them. When everyone had a cup, he slouched into a chair. “They found her by the side of Levittown Road in her car. She’d been shot once, in the head.” His voice was quiet, almost monotone.
The image punched a hole in my gut, and the vision I’d had in the bar flashed through my mind again. If I’d only responded when she asked what I’d seen. She’d known there was something; I could see it in her eyes. I could have warned her. She might still be alive.
Ernie went on. “That new police chief said it looked like an assassination; he thought the assailant had been hiding in the back seat. She was parked on a road she never drove, one that wasn’t a direct route from town to her farm.” He looked at Loretta. “Clara tells me she saw Hetty at The Peak. She left at about eleven-thirty or so.” He turned to me. “You’ll tell Detective DuPont?”
I nodded. It was the least I could do.
Shadow Notes Page 18
