Shadow Notes

by Laurel S. Peterson

  I looked at her questioningly.

  “I have done a fair amount of research on the subject over the years.” She shrugged. “Hugh encouraged it. I wanted to know how I could use the gift.” She straightened in her chair, a proper lady. “However, nothing presented itself that was, well, appropriate.”

  “What did Winters want to know?” Bailey asked.

  “He wanted to know how to achieve the Presidency. That’s all he’s ever wanted. Lord knows what would happen once those four or eight years were over. God forbid we would ever have to suffer through them.”

  Bailey threw her head back and let out a monster sigh. “Thanks, Clara. You’ve created the perfect storm. On the one hand, the partners and the election law guy are going to blame all this on me. On the other, if there’s a trial, I’m the criminal attorney. Billable hours are always good news.”

  “That’s cold,” I said.

  She laughed.

  The doorbell rang. Mother went to get it and we heard low voices. A moment later, she and Maria walked into the kitchen. “Maria has news.” She looked at me. “This is what I’ve been waiting on, Clara.”

  Maria sat down next to Bailey, looking tired, 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 date. It still didn’t make sense. Why would my going upstairs with Hugh have provoked her to call Pete?

  Why would Pete kill Hugh?

  Then, with the kind of certainty that always came with intuition, I knew who could tell me. Hetty had been a loner, but even loners told someone when they fell in love, even if it was the person at the pharmacy counter. Homeopathic remedies for sheep diseases.

  I scrambled up and headed across the yard.

  Ernie looked surprised to see me. “What’s up, Clara? You come with an answer about your Dad’s firm?” He smiled, not believing his own words, and gestured for me to sit. Too antsy, I shook my head.

  “Who was Hetty’s vet? Someone who used homeopathic stuff.”

  He settled on the couch, gray lines etching his face. “David Warren. You know him, don’t you? He was married to Mary Ellen Winters before he got smart.”

  I sat down suddenly.

/>   “Warren’s practice is in Stamford. He and Morty Hein are pretty much the only big animal vets around. David does dogs and cats too, to pay the bills, but I think he likes working with the horses and cows best.”

  “At the Christmas party, Hetty mentioned a natural remedy for her sheep. Could he have recommended that?”

  “Sure. Warren uses natural remedies a lot. Hein doesn’t think much of that ‘new-fangled’ stuff.” He managed a grin.

  “Did Warren attend the funeral?” I was trying to put a face to the name.

  “Nice looking guy, gray-haired, tall. He spoke briefly about her and the farm.” He stuttered over his words. I gave him a minute to recover, trying to recall the man.

  “Were they close?”

  “I wish I knew, Clara.” He rubbed his finger around the diamond stud in his ear. “Hetty became a stranger. I don’t think she let anyone know her.”

  Could Warren be Hetty’s affair? If not, would he know if Hetty was having an affair with Pete Samuels?

  Ernie let me look up the address in their phone book, and I hugged him goodbye on my way out.

  In Connecticut, one goes from lush, large properties surrounded by white fences or charming stone walls to public housing circled with wire fencing like a prison yard with disquieting speed, sometimes in the space of five or six city blocks. In this case, it took ten minutes from my secluded and seemingly safe enclave into the more urban area where Warren practiced. His office was well-located to serve farms like Hetty’s, and the small pet owners that, as Ernie said, paid the bills.

  Warren’s clinic resided in a small, golden brick office building. A large apartment complex rose on the right, laundry hanging off its balconies, and on the left was an empty lot and a big hole where someone had started to build several years earlier. Piles of rock and rotting plywood lay stacked behind the eight-foot wire fencing, and flapping signs read, at intervals, “Keep Out.” Given the amount of graffiti on propped-up plywood, the signs didn’t seem to be working all that well.

  I arrived just before noon, hoping to find Warren ready for lunch. He had already gone, but his friendly receptionist sent me the next street over to a deli where she said I’d find him sitting at a corner table reading the American Journal of Veterinary Research and eating a ham sandwich.

  The deli was crowded, with a long line out the front door, and most of the tables filled with cops and road crews working their way through big sandwiches or plates of rice and beans. I edged through the din, trying not to bump too many elbows. When I pulled out a chair and sat down at Warren’s table, he gave me a sad and bemused look and shut his magazine.

  “Clara Montague.”

  Startled, I said, “You remember me?”

  “Hard not to remember the daughter of the woman my ex-wife hates more than anyone else in the world.” He quirked a corner of his mouth at me. From the silver hair, I guessed he was a little older than Mary Ellen, but his easy manner, dirty jeans and work boots made me wonder how she had ever said yes to his proposal. “It’s a good thing she finally had a daughter of her own, took the edge off her jealousy.”

  My face must have shown my shock.

  He said, “You didn’t know Mary Ellen was jealous of your mother?”

  I closed my mouth enough to form a word. “No.”

  “Didn’t matter what your mother did, Mary Ellen had to one-up her, even if your mother never knew she’d been one-upped. Exhausting stuff.”

  My emotional fatigue at the revelations was so great at this point that the lump on my head felt like a minor wound. “That’s not it,” I managed to get out. “I didn’t know she had a daughter. She—you have a daughter? How old is she?”

  The girl would be my cousin. My trip from only child, isolated from her family, to having half-siblings and a cousin was giving me rope burn. Wait. That meant Andrew Junior was my half-brother. No wonder Mother and Mary Ellen had flipped out at my marriage proposal joke.

  “Fourteen. Beautiful like Mary Ellen. Nice, like me.” He smiled, the sad one again.

  She’d been born after I left, but how could I not have known? “Do you have custody of—?”

  “Emma.”

  “Mary Ellen never mentioned her.”

  “That was a condition of our divorce. Emma lived with me, and Mary Ellen couldn’t interfere. I don’t think she really wanted a child; Emma came late in the marriage. It’s not true, but it felt like Mary Ellen filed for divorce the day she gave birth.”

  “I…I’m sorry.”

  “What can I do for you, Clara? I imagine it’s not an animal problem you’re here about.” He picked up his sandwich and took a bite.

  “You knew Hetty Gardner pretty well.”

  “No one knew Hetty well.” He put the sandwich down and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “I knew her better than most, I guess.”

  “Did you meet when she started the farm?”

  He nodded. I noticed his skin wasn’t as sun-toughened as I expected for someone who worked regularly out-of-doors, and his eyes were a nice shade of pale blue, like Paul Newman’s. I wondered if he wore a hat to protect his skin, or maybe he was always in the barn with the animals and so—Get a grip, Clara. I forced my brain back to the task at hand. “Ernie and Loretta told me Hetty was having an affair with someone close to the campaign. I’m hoping you can tell me who that person was.” Confirm who that person was.

  Warren leaned back in his chair. “Why should I do that?”

  I breathed out in satisfaction. “So you do know.”

  “I’m about the only person on this planet the Winters family can’t touch. I know too much, and they know I know it, but I worked out my deal with the devil, and they leave me alone and I leave them alone. That was the price for keeping my daughter safe.”

  “You won’t help me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I looked around at the environment he’d chosen, so different from the one Mary Ellen inhabited. These were working people who figured out how to divide up the paycheck to cover their needs, who felt lucky to have jobs, even if they complained about them, and who didn’t have time for the kind of games played by the Winters family. It seemed that Warren wanted to connect his daughter to this world—real people with real concerns. Andrew Winters pretended to understand it, made pretty campaign speeches reminiscent of trickle-down economics, but he didn’t have a clue.

  I reminded Warren about Hugh’s murder and its connection to my mother. I told him I thought Hetty had alerted someone to my talk with Hugh, most likely the person she was having an affair with, and as a result, Hugh had been killed. I told him how Loretta had figured out that Hetty was having an affair with someone involved in the Andrew Winters campaign.

  I sputtered to a stop. I didn’t want to tell him what I actually thought; I wanted to see if I was right first. If the intuition was working as well as I thought it was.

  Warren’s eyes glittered as I spoke, as if I’d awakened some sleeping dragon in him. When I finished, he leaned in so close I had to force myself not to skitter back. “You have the answer, Clara. It’s just your basic assumption is wrong.”

  He smiled evilly, the most disturbing version of any smile he’d given me so far. Something I’d said gave him a triumphant, vengeful pleasure. He said, “Who is the person closest to the campaign, aside from Winters himself?”

  “Mary Ellen.”

  He kept watching me.

  It sank in. Not Pete. “Hetty was having an affair with Mary Ellen?” Shock nearly strangled my vocal chords.

  “You’ll notice I didn’t tell you that.” He wrapped up the remains of his sandwich, picked up his magazine, and strode laughing from the deli.

  I sat in the Land Rover, stunned by what I’d learned. Even though I had no evidence that Hetty called Mary Ellen the night of the party, the logical conclusion was that she did. I tried to a
ssemble a reasonable scenario.

  Hetty saw me leave with Hugh and called Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen freaked out, believing Hugh would spill the beans about Mother’s rape and the DNA report to me. She would assume—and she was right—that he wouldn’t tell me all he knew the first time he saw me; I’d been gone for years. Why would he trust me right away? I should have figured that out, too, but I’d been caught up in the dreams.

  Mary Ellen would also assume that I wouldn’t hesitate to use information from Hugh to bring down the campaign. Was it Hugh’s timing that got him killed? Did Mary Ellen realize that, if she got rid of him quickly, she could keep her precious brother’s dream safe? And was she so impulsive or arrogant that she’d murdered Hugh herself? She’d already tried to get me to fall off a horse.

  That’s when I got scared. Until now, I’d been scared for Mother: scared because of the dreams, scared of losing her. Okay, I’d been scared for myself, too, but only because the dreams could overwhelm me, and staying here could drown me in the old stuff I’d run from. But Mary Ellen’s willingness to engage in an affair with Hetty, someone she must have despised, merely to control her, told me she would do anything.

  I pulled out the chief’s card and called his cell number.

  After I’d explained, he said, “Hetty could have an affair with anyone she wanted. I don’t see how it’s pertinent.”

  So I told him my theory about Hetty telling Mary Ellen about me and Hugh.

  He didn’t sound convinced. “Confidentiality rules would keep him from sharing any of your mother’s personal history. Mary Ellen knows that.”

  “Unless Mother gave him permission.”

  “Did she?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t you do something? Take Mary Ellen in for questioning?”