Shadow Notes

by Laurel S. Peterson

  I hoped I’d killed the bastard.

  God, I hoped I hadn’t.

  Hanging onto the counter, I clambered to my feet. I could still walk, despite the pain in my knees 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 teacup until my gut unlocked. Somewhere in there Mother showed up and the chief left, the firemen and the ambulance corps finished their work, and then sometime around seven-thirty, the sun came up officially on the first day of the New Year.

  Chapter 29

  I’d made it home for a couple of hours of blissful, dreamless sleep before Mother woke me for a shower. I dressed in velvet leggings and a thick, creamy, hand-knit sweater. Two cups of French press coffee later, I was just about steady on my feet. Mother, looking happier than she had since I’d arrived home, installed me in the solarium with a blanket over my knees. “The guests will be here in a few minutes and you can play hostess. The caterer already arrived, so there’s nothing to do.”

  The chief appeared, shaved and showered, a half-hour early to update us, but Mother left him alone with me after promising coffee. The sun shone over last night’s crust of snow and in the windows like stage lights, making the room cozy and warm.

  Mary Ellen still refused to talk and had hired a big name New York lawyer to represent her. However, Jennifer had shown up at the police station about an hour after Mary Ellen’s booking and offered to talk about twenty-five years’ worth of dirty Andrew Winters deeds. Without Andrew there to cow her into submission, she wanted a clean start for herself and her children. The chief studied my face. “You were the target—ever since you and Hugh had your, uh, discussion.”

  I felt my face heat up like an electric burner. He laughed. “Hetty saw you go upstairs together and called Mary Ellen. The Winters were already planning to kill Hugh because he’d pieced together the blackmail scheme, but now they weren’t sure what Hugh told you. Andrew knew he could keep your
Mother quiet by threatening your life, but you,” he shook his head slightly, “were a wild card. You left all those years ago because you hated your mother. You even told Mary Ellen that at lunch.”

  “You couldn’t possibly know what I said to Mary Ellen.”

  He grinned. “The job of a small town cop is to be in everybody’s business. I have spies everywhere, and that waiter is a terrible gossip. Very useful for keeping track of Ms. Winters. Did you know she set that barn fire as a test run?” He shook his head again. “I know more about people’s lives around here than anyone should.” He paused, unhooked his fingers and then hooked them up again. “The point, Clara, is that they hired you onto the campaign to find out if you knew about the blackmail. If you did, Mary Ellen had plans.”

  I pushed the sleeves on my bulky sweater up, as if letting in some cooler air would ease my sudden claustrophobia. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. Winters told me Pete killed Hugh. But Pete told me there was female DNA on Hugh’s body, implying it was Mother’s.”

  “Pete didn’t know whose it was, until Hetty died. Her autopsy revealed healing scratches, and her DNA matched the sample found on Hugh. Maybe Hetty got physical, and Hugh pushed her away. We can only guess, since there’s no one left to tell us what happened.”

  I remembered how Hetty had looked at Hugh at Mother’s fete, her burning eyes—and the long distance shots on the cottage wall. She had stalked him, at least a little.

  “Then the threat escalated. You turned Mary Ellen in for her sins, and we caught Pete. When you offered the reading, Mary Ellen took her chance.”

  “What about Hetty?”

  “Poor Hetty.” He rubbed his thumbs together and looked out at the snow. “Jennifer claims Hetty knew about the rape—overheard your mom and Loretta talking years ago. When she needed help getting clients and making a name for the farm, she went to Mary Ellen, who, at first, ignored her.

  “Finally, Hetty pulled her trump card. To keep her silent, Mary Ellen seduced her and implicated her in their blackmail scheme with those photographs. The one with the blurred blonde that you found in Hetty’s trash was supposed to set up your mother. When you and Bailey apologized, Hetty grew a conscience; Mary Ellen decided she was a liability and had Pete kill her. What a screwed up family, even Jennifer. I’ll never understand how people stand by and watch injustice be done.”

  “But what was Pete’s motivation? Did he really want to be chief of police?”

  He rubbed a thumb along a crease in his slacks. “Soon after I arrived, he told me he deserved my job. I didn’t pay it much mind; some guy always thinks he deserves more than he’s getting.” He shook his head, pulled his gaze from the purity of the winter scene and looked at me. I looked at him.

  “There’s an old nature/nurture debate,” I said. “Until recently, I would have told you I was my father’s daughter because of nature. Now, I know I’m my father’s daughter because of nurture.”

  He seemed about to speak when Mother poked her head in. “Some of the other guests have arrived.”

  David Warren and Andrew Winters Junior walked into the solarium accompanied by a teenage girl. She was the spitting image of Mary Ellen.

  I slid to my feet and put out my hand. “You must be Emma.”

  She ducked her head, her face reddening. She looked briefly at David, who nodded slightly. She stuck her hand awkwardly into mine, but gave it a surprisingly firm shake. “I’m sorry about Mum—what she did,” she said.

  “It’s not an issue,” I said.

  “She killed your father.” She glanced at David again. It was the kind of glance I would have given my own father.

  “My father was a landscape architect who died fifteen years ago. I didn’t know Mr. Winters.” And in that moment, fifteen years of guilt lifted free. I gestured at the couch. “Please sit down.”

  I turned to Andrew Junior. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Tears filled his eyes. “Mom’s been telling us stories. I didn’t know how bad it was—for her. He—” He pressed his fingers to his eyelids to stop the trickle and spoke through his own darkness. “My sisters wanted me to tell you they were sorry. They couldn’t face you.”

  “We have time. We’re family.” He opened his eyes and moved as if to hug me, then stopped himself. I folded him into my arms. “We’ll figure it out.” Over his shoulder, I saw Mother watching from the door.

  Paul and Richard arrived next, followed by Bailey. I made them all sit down and take glasses of champagne. Richard’s color was better, and Paul told me later that the antibiotics and the de-stressing had helped put him on an even keel. Loretta and Ernie came soon after, looking worn out, but more peaceful. Nat Mueller and his wife, and Maria Leiber landed last, coming into the solarium with Kyle, who had disappeared a few moments before. They were laughing over the packages he was carrying. The larger had a red and gold bow on it, and he deposited it in my lap. Then, he sat down next to me—right next to me.

  Inside, under layers of gold tissue, was a beautiful red silk shawl embroidered with creamy white flowers. “They’re magnolias, the state flower of Louisiana,” he said. “Merry late Christmas.”

  I let the heavy fabric slide through my fingers. The workmanship was exquisite. “Where did you get this? It’s beautiful.”

  “Mama makes them. She put us all through school with her sewing. Neiman Marcus picked her up as a vendor in the eighties and she’s still selling strong.”

  “I’d buy one,” Maria said. “They must sell out before they hit the stores. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  “She can’t work as fast as she used to, even with the people she’s hired to help, and well, Katrina didn’t help any.”

  I suddenly saw that image again of Kyle surrounded by Katrina’s muddy detritus. Why couldn’t he go back to New Orleans? “I’d love to meet her,” I said. Bailey gave a quiet, giggly whoop.

  “Now’s not a good time,” he said shortly, then covered it with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  Mother came into the room with an array of cheese and little quiches arranged on a silver tray etched with whirly designs. She set it on the coffee table and moved a poinsettia to a side table, where it shimmered in the sunshine.

  Kyle handed her the other box. “There’s one for you, ma’am.”

  Mother carefully removed the paper to reveal a smaller scarf with a design of green ivy on a gold silk background. “It’s lovely, Kyle. Thank you.”

  Emma looked at me with round eyes. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  Kyle guffawed. “A date might be a good idea.”

  Her mouth formed an “oh,” but she looked at me as only a teenager in awe of a woman with a handsome boyfriend can be. Maybe we could do some sister outings—shopping or a play in the city. Something else to think about in the new year. I handed her the box. “Feel the fabric. Isn’t it luscious?”

  I turned back to Kyle. “Thank you. I feel very honored. May I have your mother’s address, so I can thank her?”

  He nodded his assent.

  I added, “You never know. She might like me so much she decides to relocate.”

  “If I keep my job, after all the damage you’ve done in this town.”

  Mother said, “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

  He looked at her, the question on his face.

  She grinned ruefully. “With the Winters out of the way, I’ve the influence, you know.”

  “Except for me,” Nat chimed in. His wife patted his leg. “But I’m thinkin’ of running for Senate, now that the Republicans need a candidate. Ya think I gotta shot?” He grinned and winked at me.

  Kyle leaned back and crossed his legs. “Mama would like you all a whole lot. She likes integrity. I sure wish I could persuade my family to leave New Orleans.”

  The doorbell rang and Mother stood, hastily untying her ap
ron. Richard raised an eyebrow at me. Paul and Maria leaned in to sample the cheese, and began passing quiches and napkins.

  I would have to find out what had happened in New Orleans later.

  I heard talking from the hall, then Mother beckoned to me from the doorway. I pushed off the blanket and padded across the room in my socks. Reaching the hall, I was suddenly self- conscious about my lack of footwear, as standing there was the handsome silver-haired man from Mother’s Christmas fête. The one she hadn’t introduced me to.

  “Vance Hardison, meet my daughter Clara. Vance and I have been seeing each other for about a year now.”

  “Vance?” The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.

  Mother said, “He’s the President of the Association of State Democratic Chairs and Chair of the Montana Democratic Party.”

  “Hugh’s friend! Hugh told you about Andrew Winters, and you started the ethics investigation.”

  He smiled and held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Clara. I’ve heard a lot about you.” It was a perfect hand, manicured and lightly tanned. A Philipe Dufour watch glimmered at the edge of his white shirt cuff, which extended the requisite half inch beyond the end of his suit sleeve. The suit itself was a gorgeous navy wool, pinstriped wispily with silver-gray. The fact that he wore a pair of Timberland work boots made the outfit eerily reminiscent of the last time I’d seen Andrew Winters, but Hardison’s mischievous smile trumped any misgivings. He knew exactly what Mother said about me, he knew what I’d said about Mother, and with all her faults, he loved her. I surprised myself by hoping it worked out.

  I turned to Mother. “A boyfriend—hidden away all this time—and no one knew?”

  She gave me a cool look. “Do control yourself, Clara. Really.”

  Ah. That’s the woman I knew and loved. “It’s lovely to meet you, Vance. Come have some champagne.” I wrinkled my nose at Mother and led the way back into the room.

  Maria leapt up. “Oh, Vance. You made it! I’m so glad.” She hugged him hard and he patted her back, resting his cheek against her mass of silver hair.