Free Cast a Blue Shadow by P. L. Gaus Page A

Branden. I’m Will Bradenton. This is Martha’s roommate, Wendy. I don’t usually stay if Martha is going to be home at night. Crap. This looks bad, I know. But Martha isn’t here.”
    “Where do you suppose she is, then?” Caroline asked.
    “She usually goes out to the mansion with Sonny Favor,” Wendy explained.
    Will began picking up the mess in the room. Wendy lay casually back on the sofa to light a smoke.
    Caroline decided not to mention the murder of Juliet Favor. “I’ve only come for some of Martha’s things.”
    “That’s her room,” Wendy said, jabbing her cigarette toward the second bedroom door.
    “Thanks,” Caroline said.
    “Don’t mention it,” Wendy said, obviously annoyed. “Sit down, Will!” she complained. “Mrs. Branden isn’t here to run an inspection.”
    “No, indeed,” Caroline said. She picked her way across the room and turned the knob on the door to Martha’s bedroom. Before she opened the door, she turned back to face Will Bradenton. Wendy had moved to the window, where she dropped the blinds with a clatter.
    “I’ve heard mention of your name several times at my house, Mr. Bradenton. Regent’s Scholarship, right?”
    Will nodded from his position kneeling beside the coffee table. He stood up slowly with several beer cans.
    “You’re writing your senior thesis, and my husband is, I think, your Second Reader.”
    “Right,” Bradenton said cautiously.
    Caroline nodded, paused as if giving that careful thought, and went into Martha’s room.
    When she turned on the lights, Caroline found a room as ordered and tidy as the front room was a shambles. The aroma of tobacco and stale booze was replaced by a cool and fresh, pungent citrus smell. The bed was made, and the dresser top was polished. The closet doors were closed, and the floor had been vacuumed to trace a star pattern in the carpet. In addition to the bed and dresser, there was a computer on a small brown desk, a tattered recliner, a floor lamp, and a wastebasket. Surrounding these sparse accommodations, there were, on all the walls, covering every available space from floor to ceiling, both black-and-white and color photographs of Amish scenes.
    Caroline turned slowly in the middle of the room and studied the pictures. Many of the shots were of buggies traveling away from the lens. A good twenty photos featured horses, mostly Belgian draft horses, and in several of these, small children were at the reins. On the wall over Martha’s bed, the photos worked on Caroline’s memory to create a curious unease, until she realized they were of places and people she had once known, though not happily. The house and the barns were clearly the ones she remembered from Martha’s adolescence, but they had aged rather badly, falling into shameful disrepair, as if time had been a cruel partner with justice. Of the photographs in this group of people, most had been taken surreptitiously, and faces were uncharacteristically prominent, as if Martha had purposefully violated the subjects’ privacy. Caroline moved about the room and studied other photos of people, and in all these other cases, the lens had been employed to avoid faces and personalities, more in keeping with Amish prohibitions. But the photographs beside her bed would have been considered profane because the individualities had been so uncompromisingly captured there. Here, Caroline thought, given her history with these people, it made sense that Martha would invade and demean, though it was alarming that Martha would have gone back to that part of Holmes County at all.
    A cascade of unpleasent memories spilled over Caroline as she stood alone in the room. There could be no sensible reason for Martha to have gone back. And since she had gone back, the motivation to do so, or the perverse allure, must have been strong. After all it had taken to wrestle her free from that repressive society, and after the dramatic conversion to the Mennonite faith her father and