Shadow Notes Laurel Peterson (best reads TXT) 📖

I climbed the steps. The pail was filled with sand and cigarette butts. Next to it sat a bag of half-frozen garbage. I tried the knob. It was locked. Of course it was. Had I thought she would leave it open for me?

I looked around, as if for a weapon, then stopped myself. I couldn’t break into Hetty’s cottage. I leaned off the stoop toward the nearest window, feeling the dizziness press at me. I grabbed the porch railing and checked out the heavy white curtains blocking my view. There wasn’t even a slit between them. I sighed. The snow and I had a date.

I stepped carefully off the stoop and into the drifts that surrounded the house. If I was lucky, it would snow again and Hetty wouldn’t know someone had snooped. If I was unlucky, she’d show up, wondering why a strange car was at her cottage. If she found me here, she would call the police, which would put me in the sights of the police chief yet again—and neither he nor I would be happy about that.

I felt too wobbly to move very fast; the snow was deep and had drifted against the house. Most of the windows were curtained, but, in the back, one opened to the interior. I struggled through the drift, my feet sinking into the banks. Snow snuck over the tops of my boots and melted into my socks. It clung to my jeans, freezing them crisp. My breath fogged the glass as I hugged my hands around my face to see inside.

I was looking at a tiny kitchen, a near replica of the one in Mother’s cottage. Through the open door to the main room, I saw a turquoise rug and walls, a white chair and white cushions. A small table by the front door was cluttered with objects, but I couldn’t see clearly enough to determine what they were. Damn. So close…

Almost without thinking, I pushed on the window. It opened. I shoved it up as far as it would go and slithered through the gap. I was covered with enough ice to slide through just about any opening. Hastily, I pulled the window down behind me and crouched out of view. Going head first hadn’t been a good idea. The room spun around me and I tried to stabilize myself by hanging on to the windowsill. I had to look fast. Hetty might be coming through the woods to check out the engine noise.

The kitchen was half the size of Mother’s. A tea kettle rested on a two-burner stove. Ripe garbage was piled near a dorm-room sized refrigerator. I crabbed through the doorway into the main room and stood up once I had a wall to hide me from view and use for support. The clutter on the table turned out to be a pack of Tarot cards and an upmarket digital camera, a couple of memory cards and a package of batteries. A half-burnt candle sat in a puddle of its own wax. When I turned to face the wall behind me, I almost cried out. That’s why the curtains were drawn so tight. I lunged for the nearest chair and sat down fast.

Pinned on the wall was a photo gallery: Hugh, me, Mary Ellen, others. I didn’t have time to look at them all closely. Hugh, Mary Ellen and I each had our own section, and we’d been captured in a variety of places, with others and alone. My photos had all been taken since I’d gotten home, but Hugh’s and Mary Ellen’s spanned several years. Hugh’s hair grayed and his weight fluctuated, while Mary Ellen progressed from thin to thinner, from Prada to Jean Paul Gaultier and back again. On the wall to the right, a new gallery displayed photos of Pete Samuels with a snarl on his face. I wondered who he’d been looking at.

What did any of these people have in common?

Even more disturbing than the photographs were the dolls attached to the pictures. Mary Ellen, Hugh and Pete all had red dolls. My doll—green for gardens?—had about thirty pins stuck through it. Just looking at it made me feel prickly. Hetty left the voodoo doll on my pillow? How had she gotten in and out of my house?

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