Shadow Notes
A Clara Montague Mystery
Laurel Peterson
Barking Rain Press
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events described herein are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Shadow Notes: A Clara Montague Mystery
Clara Montague Mysteries, Book 1
Copyright © 2016 Laurel Peterson (www.laurelpeterson.com)
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Edited by Ti Locke (www.urban-gals-go-feral.blogspot.com)
Proofread by Barbara Bailey (www.barkingrainpress.org/barbara-bailey/)
Cover Artist: Stephanie Flint (www.sbibb.wordpress.com)
Author Photo: Ute-Christin Cowan (www.utechristinphotography.com)
Barking Rain Press
PO Box 822674
Vancouver, WA 98682 USA
www.BarkingRainPress.org
ISBN Trade Paperback: 1-941295-45-2
ISBN eBook: 1-941295-46-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939879
First Edition: May 2016
Printed in the United States of America
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Dedication
For my father, who never said there was something a girl couldn’t do, and for my mother, who showed me how to hang on even when things got rough.
Thank you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgements
Also from Laurel Peterson
Coming Soon from Laurel Peterson
About Laurel Peterson
About Barking Rain Press
Other Titles Available from Barking Rain Press
Bluffing is Murder
Dangerous Denial
Frostbite
The Hanged Man’s Noose
The Immaculate
Never Again
Padre: The Narrowing Path
Requiem in Red
The Revolving Year
Chapter 1
All I wanted was to blow this little Spanish town and my soon-to-be ex-husband, head to Paris, and bathe my wounds in Chanel and walks along the Seine. But I’d had a terrifying dream. The last dream predicted my father’s death. This one predicted my mother’s:
I’m standing at the edge of a vast green field. The field slopes up and loses itself in the bluest of blue skies, pure like the polished cobalt that stretches over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. In front of me is a paddock with three lean and muscular horses, brown and sleek in the bright afternoon sunshine. The afternoon breeze fluffs their tails. I recognize this place as home, although I have never lived anywhere that looks anything like this.
In the distance, I see my mother running down the hill. Her arms stretch out toward me, overbalancing her, and she stumbles, falling to her knees in the soft grass. I can’t see what frightens her. The pasture is empty. She screams my name: “Clara! Look out!”
I turn. Behind me hangs a dense cloud, green-black like the sky before a tornado. This cloud, though, is more like a mass, something palpable, living and dense and suffocating. It is almost upon me. I turn to run toward my mother, only to find a dark mass almost upon her as well. If they shroud us, I know we will never find our way out, we will never find our way to each other. Mother is weeping in the middle of the field. “Clara, please. Help me.” When I finally reach her, she is laid out, as if for a grave, arms folded across her chest, her face as white as empty paper.
I woke exhausted, shivering and cursing into my pillow. I couldn’t fall back to sleep, no matter how I tried to calm myself with restful thoughts—salmon antique roses against a gray stone wall, the lull of rain pattering on stone courtyards. All the reasons I didn’t want to go home kept intruding.
Going home meant returning to Mother; it meant dealing with my own guilt. I’d never told her my dream about father’s death, how I’d seen the sleek black casket, the priest, my father’s face made up all waxy or plastic, as if he belonged at Madame Tussaud’s. I’d never told her he’d whispered from the casket, “Heart attacks happen, Clara.” I knew when he’d said it that I could prevent it, but I hadn’t. I blamed myself. I blamed her.
Mother lied. When I was little, before I knew better, I would tell her my dreams, and she would get this frightened look on her face. The look intensified whenever my dreams corresponded to real life. Like the time I dreamed that Timmy Lefkowitz would throw up blood, and then he did on the playground the next day. I shouted at her that if we’d told Timmy’s mom or the teacher, they might have kept Sean Gallagher from beating Timmy half to death in the bathroom because Timmy said the Virgin Mary was just another girl, not a saint.
She said no one believed in dreams or intuitions until after something happened. She claimed nothing I could have said would have changed what happened, and telling people only made them frightened of me. I was going to have to get used to that, and if I didn’t, people would call me crazy. In fact, until I gave up telling her much of anything, she would say, “It’s just a dream, Clara, a coincidence. You mustn’t tell anyone about your dreams.” She’d make me repeat it, as if I were in detention, writing a hundred times “I will not tell lies.”
Then I’d had the dream that predicted my father’s death, more terrifying than any dream I’d ever had. Was it symbolic? Real? She would tell me to ignore it, as she had all
