Search the Shadows by Barbara Michaels

Author:Barbara Michaels [Michaels, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-12-14T07:00:00+00:00

In the cold light of day—a gray, gloomy, chilly light—I decided my suspicions of Carl had been groundless. He was the one person who had no connection with my mother; he couldn’t have been more than five or six years old when she died. The intruder had to be one of a small number of people, though. A stranger couldn’t enter the grounds; a stranger would not have a key to the cottage. Possibly the searcher was one of the guards, checking on my bona fides at his boss’s request. If that was the case, Nazarian now knew that I was who I claimed to be. The theory didn’t make sense, however. If the old man had doubted my identity, he had only to ask for proof.

The weather felt more like March than mid-June. I found a laundromat that was open on Sunday. It had the grimy, used look of most such establishments, and as I put my clothes into one of the chipped machines I reflected bemusedly on the paradoxes of my situation. I was living on the grounds of one of the most vulgarly ostentatious mansions I had ever seen—doubly vulgar because of its location in the midst of poverty and despair—with daily maid service and armed guards to protect me, but I was eating out of tins and doing my own laundry. Which was, of course, no more than I deserved.

The contrast was not limited to my own position; there were other peculiar exceptions to the luxurious life style of the Nazarians—the neglect of the cottages, for example. The gardens were not as well tended as I would have expected in such an establishment either. I was willing to bet there would not have been weedy flower beds or unpruned shrubbery when the old man was up and about. Obviously Mrs. Dunlap and her husband were not as fussy. No reason why they should care, if the house and grounds had been left to the Foundation. In fact, they were probably looking forward to the day when they could leave Prairie Avenue forever. That day could not be long distant.

Aside from the necessity of doing my laundry, I had left the house that morning because I wanted to return Jon’s call from a pay phone. The phone in the laundromat was out of order. Since a conspicuous sign warned patrons that the management bore no responsibility for clothes left unattended, I had to wait till mine were done; I couldn’t take the chance of losing them, since practically every stitch I had with me was in the machine. I sat twiddling my thumbs and watching the other customers—tired housewives with their hair in curlers; girls who looked like junior-high students carrying babies who should have been, but probably weren’t, their younger siblings; a ragged man sleeping on a bench and surrounded by a palpable fog of alcoholic fumes. When the dryer finally stopped, I gathered up my clothes and went in search of a telephone. I finally found one that worked, in a drugstore, and placed the call.

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