Shadow

Chapter 1

“I’m telling you, Laura, this isn’t such a great idea.”

“And why not?”

Laura Cunningham could see the look on Kevin’s face. His profile, lighted by the faint green glow of the dash lights, revealed a mixture of emotions. What she saw there was a combination of anger, uncertainty, and a little boy’s pout. All because she had insisted he come along against his wishes. Well, he would have to learn to behave himself if he were going to continue crawling into bed with her. That was all there was to that. Besides, he wasn’t all that good. She could replace the little puke with almost anyone. He was on his way to retirement, if not replacement, soon enough, anyway.

“Because you didn’t tell her I was coming with you, that’s why. And because you know she doesn’t like me. Not even a little bit. As a matter of fact, I got the feeling she doesn’t like you much, either.”

“I stopped caring what that old bitch likes years ago. I’m all she’s got and everything she has is going to be mine—soon. Boy, I’ll bet that galls her no end.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it does. What if she cuts you out?”

“She wouldn’t dare. Besides, I’m the last of the Cunningham line—in our family, anyway—so she wouldn’t think of it.”

Or would she? It had been a mandated family tradition. A part of the old man’s will to divide everything among the senior members of the Cunningham family. Those who carried the bloodline straight down from the old bastard himself. They would then dole out the pittances they called allowances to the junior members. In the past that meant the family fortune had to be spread out over a large clan. Now, after certain fortuitous incidents, the clan numbered only two. The division of funds dwindled while the fortune continued to grow. Aunt Martha’s uncanny ability to make wise investments made that possible.

Laura’s investigation into Martha’s holdings was a low profile operation. She couldn’t afford to have the old bitty aware of what she was doing, so it had not netted her the total value. It didn’t matter, though. The number she found exceeded three hundred million dollars in liquid assets. As for investments, properties, and business holdings, that remained a mystery. As soon as the old bitch kicked, and that should be soon, Laura would liquidate everything. Then she could begin to invest in herself. Wise investments, of course. So far, everything was moving along as planned.

A wicked, self-satisfied grin formed. To hell with tradition, she thought. The remaining little hangers-on she would ignore or dispose of as required. As for any further Cunningham progeny, that was not an issue. She snipped that possibility early in the game. Kevin? There was a certain narrow bridge on her favorite back road waiting for him.

“I wouldn’t be too sure she wouldn’t cut you off like fat off a steak if I were you. She’s sweet and charming and all that—but she’s shrewd, too. I saw that in her right away. Do you know if she’s made a will?”

“She can’t cut me off without cutting herself off and I don’t think she would do that. No, I’m sure of that.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“Because it was one of the stipulations in the first, last, and still standing Cunningham will. My great-great-great whatever sealed that in writing back in eighteen-seventy-something. Johnathan Cunningham himself made sure things would go his way. Go his way for as long as a single descendant existed.

“And Aunty Martha? Hell, she’s a true Cunningham’s Cunningham. She wouldn’t think of going against it, and she can’t write another will to countermand it, anyway.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because of what that will says. As one of the conditions, no other will could supplant his original. If anyone attempted to do that, his will would be void and any remaining things of value donated to charity. In other words, he was a dick.”

“Where the hell did all that money come from?”

“He was some kind of a mucky-muck in the slave trade and other shady stuff so much worse no one ever talked about it. But I don’t give a damn. Everything she has is mine now.”

“You make it sound like she’s already dead.”

“It’s possible she is, Kevin. She might be.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Just keep driving, but slow down. I don’t want to be early. Eight o’clock, remember?”

That wicked little crooked-lipped smile returned. Laura settled back in her seat so she could keep an eye on the speedometer and the clock at the same time. It was important they arrive at eight. A little later was all right, but never earlier. Everyone in this crummy backwoods place knew her silver Ferrari. They could almost set their watches by it when she passed their quaint little shacks in the woods. She needed to keep it that way.

---

The house, built in the late 1800s, stood on high ground south of a small lake created by some clever beavers and their superbly engineered dam. The folks in town called it a pond, but it was big enough to support a small boat for an hour’s sail on sunny days. Not far downstream from the dam the property dropped abruptly. The waterfall there drove the paddle wheel of a tiny mill house where grain was turned into something useful until the turn of the century. It continued its creaking and groaning but that was all. The creek continued its meandering path through the property and eventually, after several miles and forks, found its way into the big Willamette, and finally into the Pacific Ocean.

The house was originally built as an escape for an embarrassingly wealthy English gentleman, one Nathaniel G. Longmont by name. It would have been out of place in the Oregon countryside had it not been fifteen miles from the nearest habitation so that its Mansard roof with widow’s walk at the top and incongruously ornate gabled dormers with steep, lanceolate windows didn’t clash with anything around it. It lay vacant and weathered gray close to a century before Martha Cunningham-King found the place and began rebuilding it for her escape. Now it gleamed in old-world elegance. It remained fifteen miles from the nearest neighbor, and Martha liked it that way.

She sidled her chair up to the railing on the balcony and set the brake.

“What a glorious evening,” she said to a Red-tailed Hawk that was scanning the grounds west of the house for some careless dinner critter to appear. The bird glanced down at her, then returned to its vigil.

From the balcony, she would watch for her niece, Laura, who called earlier in the afternoon to threaten Martha with her impending visit.

These every other weekend intrusions into Martha’s life began with Laura’s unerring time-sense at eight or, rarely, a little later on Friday evening and, thankfully, ended when the clock signaled noon on Sunday. She couldn’t understand how Laura could let a simple machine run by springs and gears, well, electronic stuff these days, control her life.

There was nothing organic about that. But, then, there wasn’t much organic about Laura, excepting, perhaps, her exotic greenhouse and herbarium. And this visit was probably going to be a continuation of the last one when Laura spent the entire time moaning about her allowance. It wasn’t sufficient was always the cry—what with the cost of living on the rise and her wanting this thing or that to stay in step with changing styles, there was never enough money. Horrid little brat, Laura. It was hard to believe her brother, Michael, had sired such a wretched cretin. Still, she was a Cunningham and that counted for something in the family’s history.

Of course, Martha couldn’t evade the fact that she had set herself up for this sort of thing. When Michael died, ten years ago last week, she remembered, Laura had barely turned twenty and still had no idea how to fend for herself. Martha felt sorry for her—then. So sorry, in fact, that she had taken Laura in for a couple of years to try to teach her how to live on her own. That was a big mistake on Martha’s part and the program met with little success.

Then, when Martha made her decision to leave Seattle, she told Laura she would have to rent an apartment because the house had been sold. The ensuing battle was incredibly ugly and Laura had as much as told her outright that Martha owed her that house. After that, Laura wouldn’t talk to her and she never came to see her again until Martha’s daughter, Sam, and her family were killed.

That’s when the visits began. At first they were spaced a couple of months apart, but the frequency steadily increased. They came to their current every other week nightmare when her son, Larry, and his family died in a plane crash on Mt. Hood just three years before. Laura insisted Martha needed company when, for Martha, the opposite was true. She really hadn’t wanted to be close to anyone after that, particularly a witch like Laura.

Martha wheeled herself out onto the balcony early, a little after four it was, so she could survey the progress that was being made in her garden. She shook off the bad memories and tried to concentrate on her landscaping effort. It was slow going because of being confined to her chair most of her waking hours for the last couple of years but, on those days when Al Brooks came by to help, there were spurts of advancement to be admired, and now was one of those times.

That morning, a rare Friday session because something-or-other had broken down at the mill, they set the final boundary stones outlining the heart-shaped area that would be home to all sorts of flowers come spring. Mainly pansies. Martha loved pansies, those flowers with cute little faces so easily imagined in their petals. Lions mostly, but with some imagination, other faces could be made to appear.

All the soil inside the beautiful stone border had been tilled and mulched and tilled again. An imported Italian fountain of hammered and polished bronze, fed by an overflowing vessel perched on the shoulder of a cherubic water-bearer, was placed in the artistic center of the heart and stood out in sharp contrast to the black earth around it. A small bird dipped and flapped vigorously in its blue and white mosaic basin and the droplets its flapping wings raised flashed varicolored in the late afternoon sunlight.

The shadow of the huge oak near the west side of the house had crept up to the edge of her garden and she involuntarily checked the time. It was just a bit after five-thirty. She was going to have to do something about that tree because its shadow covered her garden too early. It wasn’t only that she wanted the flowers to have their full allotment of light that made the tree expendable, though. Nothing seemed to grow well, if at all, in the path of its shadow.

The tree was grotesque, dark and more than a little frightening in aspect, even in summer when wearing its full gown of deep green leaves. When Fall gathered in its toll, as it was doing now, the tree’s shadow took on a menacing appearance as its bony fingers groped and clawed their way across the yard like a dark skeleton frantically crawling for cover in the hedgerow at the eastern edge of her property. It gave her the shivers to even think about it. She would talk to Al about the tree in the morning. That would give her an excuse to escape Laura’s constant babbling and whining for a couple of hours and kill two malevolent creatures with one smack, so to speak.

There was an early September chill in the air and Martha reluctantly gave up her vigil after another hour and a half. She couldn’t take the cold like when she first moved into the house in the rolling hills southeast of Salem seven years ago. That was just two years before Sam and her family died in a terrible crash. She shuddered, then turned her chair toward the door and paused to look at her reflection in the small, beveled glass panes. The woman looking back at her was old and haggard. Martha had grown terribly old in five short years. It showed mostly in her eyes. Once they had been the brightest of blues, but now they looked gray and listless with dark folds of skin hanging beneath them. Her hair was still red but was beginning to show an overcast of age and starting to frizz, too. And she felt tired much of the time—the kind of fatigue that swoops down and engulfs one completely so that the whole body seems to give up trying. So tired.

Back in the days before Sam died, she would often stay up most of the night, on the unusual occasion of an Oregon sky swept clean of its persistent cloud quilt, to witness the stars going through their circular dance. When she first took to living in the house, those nights would go well into late November. Orion dominated the sky then with his brilliance as he ran ahead of his two dogs and ice started to skin the pond out back with a glassy sheet that would crackle when she tapped her toe on its edge in the morning. But she began growing old after Sam died and lost her interest in the stars and the chill of approaching winter began to hurt her to the marrow.

She packed up her telescope and stored it away in the basement. She would have to find someone to give it to, she thought absently; someone who loved the stars as much as she did. As she turned for one more look at her garden, she noticed that the small bird that had been frolicking only moments before was floating lifeless still in the darkened basin under that damnable tree’s shadow.

Oh, you poor little dear. I can’t come for you now, but I’ll take care of you first thing in the morning, I promise.

————————–

Al Brooks had his back turned to a small, muscularly built man in a red and gray plaid Pendleton seated by a chessboard on the kitchen table. Al stirred at an already stirred cup of coffee while he thought about Malcolm’s remarks. He turned slowly to face Malcolm after setting his cup on the counter.

“First of all, she’s not an ‘old bitty,’ and I’m not being kept by her, either. I offered to work for her for free just because she’s alone way out there on Beaver Creek and a lot of what needs to be done around that place is heavy stuff. She told me she wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Said she’d pay me thirty bucks an hour for anything I did for her and hell, Mal, I’m not stupid. I go over whenever I can.”

Al wrapped a heavily calloused hand around his cup and took a seat on the smooth pine bench across the table from Malcolm Yarbrough, his boss at the mill. Al knew Mal was worried about him quitting, but he had no intention of doing that. He liked his job at the mill a lot more than being cooped up inside a claustrophobia-generating cubicle. A cubicle he’d sat in for fifteen years, pecking relentlessly at a computer keyboard while the desire to be back out in the open air grew and ate at him. He was a physicist. That’s what they said when he graduated, but his heart longed for the lush, wet green of the Oregon woods and weekends weren’t enough to sate his need.

The Yarbrough Mill hadn’t been making any money for more than three years, but Malcolm kept it running anyway. Just like his father and his father’s father had. It was an anachronism supplying custom cut lumber to a dwindling market of specialty builders and it would have to die someday soon to make way for a fast food place—maybe a convenience store. Al liked most of the men who worked at the mill and he knew only a few would be able to find other work when its feet finally went into the air.

Malcolm knew it, too, and that was the main reason it was still open. Malcolm was a good man that way, but in other ways he was a strange duck. He was one of those people who let his ego dangle in the way of his feet sometimes, like the day he bought that new Lincoln to drive a mile to work and back. That hadn’t make any sense at all to Al, but everybody does what they think they have to do, so he shrugged it off as ego dangling and nothing more.

Malcolm harped on old lady Cunningham most of the time and they weren’t getting into the small stuff they usually traded back and forth across what Al liked to call his rustic Old Oregonian table made from split pine finished with linseed oil and hand-rubbed plate drippings. Al decided Malcolm was probably worried that Martha would steal him away from the mill and he’d have to go find himself another experienced sawyer. That would be no small trick these days.

“Tell me the truth, now. You’re not thinking about trying to get your hands on a little of that money she has, are you?” Malcolm said.

“Aw, come on, Mal, she’s a sweet, seventy-five-year-old lady who came out here to get away from the city and her crotch busting bitch of a niece. If she wants to give me thirty bucks an hour that I don’t have to tell the government about, let her. But, go after her money? You know me better than that. Hell, I was making five times more than you pay me when I was working in Portland, remember?”

“Uh-huh. I also remember you’re the one who quit and came back out here to get dirty and have hometown clay stick to your boots. Give a country boy a college education, then send him off to the big city, and the country in him will always win.”

“Can’t argue that.”

“Does she know what happened out there at the Longmont place? About that rotten tree and all?”

“Not that I know of—leastwise she hasn’t said anything to me about it—and I’m sure as hell not going to tell her any of those stories.”

“You know, Al, it’s amazing to me that in seven years not one of the town cacklers has laid that one on her.”

“Yeah, it is. Then again, she’s been feeding most of them with the business she does in town. Maybe they don’t want to scare off their meal ticket.”

“Just as well. It’s only so much crap anyway. Why upset her over superstitious nonsense.”

“I like to think it’s bull, too, but you go out there and stand in that shadow. I tell you, Mal, it’s extra cold there and it feels like it’s sucking he energy right out of you.”

“Don’t tell me you, a real, honest to education physicist, believe that crap.”

“No. But I’ve been in that shadow. It’s creepy. I mean it, Mal.”

“Your imagination’s running faster than our blade. And creepy is a long way from being a scientific observation, isn’t it? She doesn’t have any kids?”

“She had two. A son and a daughter. Her son and his family were killed in a plane crash about three years ago. You probably heard about that one. Slammed into the side of Mt. Hood just about a mile from the lodge?”

“Yeah, I did. Funny, I didn’t connect the names. Engine trouble, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what they said.”

“Cripes, his wife and four kids, too. See why I don’t fly?”

“You do your share of flying on the road with that urban tank of yours.”

“My ‘urban tank,’ as you call it, is nothing compared to that thing you drive.”

“My Hummer’s practical up here, Mal.”

“I suppose—if you say so. I could buy four Lincolns for what that thing cost. What about the other kid?”

“Sam—Samantha; she’s dead, too. Happened about five years ago. Couple of years after Martha moved in to the Longmont place, but she hasn’t talked much about that one. She gets all choked up and dark when she mentions it and clams up quick. Strange, though. The whole family went with her, too. Everyone in her family disappeared inside of ten years except Laura and some distant relatives. Laura’s her niece. Fine piece of work, that bitch. Colder than that oak’s shadow. Anyway, with all she’s lost in the last few years, I’m surprised the old lady talks to anyone now.”

“That is strange. Are you sure about this, Al? I mean, an old woman with that much money up here all alone at the end of a tractor trail with no family to turn to; sounds like easy picking to me.”

“Come on, give me a break, man.”

“Just trying to push your button. Whose turn is it?”

“You made the last move last Friday, so I guess it’s mine, right?”

“Yep, must be. What time is it?”

“About ten to eight. Why? Got a hot date that Francine doesn’t know about?”

“No, but I promised her I’d be home by ten—hurry up and move.”