by AJ Scudiere
by
A.J. Scudiere
Published by Griffyn Ink
The Shadow Constant
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The Shadow Constant, Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2013 A.J. Scudiere
Published by Griffyn Ink. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
"There are really just 2 types of readers—those who are fans of AJ Scudiere, and those who will be."
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For The Shadow Constant:
"The Shadow Constant by A.J. Scudiere was one of those novels I got wrapped up in quickly and had a hard time putting down."
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For Phoenix:
"It's not a book you read and forget; this is a book you read and think about, again and again . . . everything that has happened in this book could be true. That's why it sticks in your mind and keeps coming back for rethought."
-Jo Ann Hakola, The Book Faerie
For God's Eye:
"I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading - it's well-written and brilliantly characterized. I've read all of A.J.'s books and they just keep getting better."
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For Vengeance:
"Vengeance is an attention-grabbing story that lovers of action-driven novels will fall hard for. I hightly recommend it."
-Melissa Levine, Professional Reviewer
For Resonance:
"Resonance is an action-packed thriller, highly recommended. 5 stars."
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This one is for Bear and Peas.
May you embrace the differences in all of us.
May you keep your eyes to the possibilities.
May you stand against giants.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go out to everyone who helped make this possible.
First, Wally Hebert, plantation restoration expert and all around great guy. The plantation tour was fantastic, and I cannot thank you enough for being willing to help me out. Your knowledge is woven throughout Hazelton House.
Secondly, thanks go to all the Aspies out there who post videos and talk openly about what it's like to have Aspergers. There are others who helped me, too, but they shall remain anonymous. Aspies are as diverse a group as any, and your invaluable information helped give Kayla a full life.
Lastly, big thank yous to all the usual suspects. My sister, Eli, who beta-reads everything, and organizes all. My husband, Guy, whose unfailing support makes all this possible. The kids, who respect the sign that sometimes appears on my office door: "You can come in, but you might have to wait until I finish killing someone." And all the fans--your posts, chats, and emails make me so happy to be doing this.
Three Months into the Reconstruction of Hazelton House
The man was back at the door again, his knocking soft but persistent. His clothes looked expensive, his left hand casually in his pocket when he’d come by. She waited while his right hand paused, then knocked again.
Kayla heard him from where she stood now just inside the carriage house; the sound carried well through these old plantation buildings, especially since this one stood nearly empty.
Switching her grasp and wiping her hands on her jeans, Kayla went out into the midday sunshine that flooded the small, grassy area between the buildings. There were noises from the creatures in the grass, but they were obscured by the rasp of the generator as it kicked up and the whir and chug got louder.
She climbed the short, wide staircase and headed across the back porch and through the standard double doors. So many things about Hazelton House seemed ordinary for its time frame.
Kayla was angered by his presumptions; he’d let himself in and turned on lights. Coming around the side and through the archway, she spotted him in the entryway, looking up at the brightly lit chandelier overhead, but he didn’t give her time to ponder his presence.
“Excuse my intrusion. No one answered my knock and the door was unlocked.” He smiled.
Looking him straight in the eyes, Kayla asked, “Where’s Ivy?”
When he only shrugged in answer, she lifted the shotgun and shot him square in the chest.
1
Old Dining Room, Hazelton House
“Wait!”
Kayla heard Reenie’s voice, and she tried to shift her weight, change the arc, but a sledgehammer was hard to stop once it was going. That was the physics of destruction. There was also the issue that taking out walls was a good method of working through your frustrations.
She’d been told repeatedly to find a good physical release, to stop telling people everything she thought, and to keep potentially hurtful things to herself. But there were no guidelines for what was and wasn’t potentially hurtful, no rules that made sense or were useful anyway. So the non-original walls had turned into a good way to release some tensions.
Like getting fired. Again.
Tension about Reenie becoming a permanent part of the family.
Frustrations about having been removed from society and told that the plantation would be good for everyone. Including her new babysitter. Which she did not need.
Kayla wasn’t the only one letting a grudge loose on the wall; it had been getting a good bashing from more than just her. But while the others had managed to stop what they were doing, her sledgehammer was already in motion and Reenie was yelling for Kayla to defy gravity.
It didn’t happen. The heavy, metal head dug deep, tearing through the horse-hair plaster and thin strips of wood that supported it. It went into the wall very near where Reenie’s hand was reaching. Kayla watched as her probably-future-sister-in-law snatched the stray limb back with a sharp “Kayla!”
She was starting to sigh as the hammer finally rested at the bottom of its arc. But she didn’t get to say anything. Evan, who had managed to simply stop mid-swing—who always managed to do what Reenie told him, when she told it—gave Reenie the ‘let Kayla be’ look that he had been employing with everyone since Kayla’s second birthday.
But what he said was, “We told everyone to be sure that all hammers were stopped before anyone put any body part in the pathway. It’s the only way we’ll all survive this.”
Evan was right. Reenie shouldn’t have reached out until she was s
ure no one was going to bash off her limb. With four of them there, geared in thick lab goggles, face masks and heavy gloves, all swinging heavy hammers, Reenie should have waited.
Instead she had reached out, her pale fingers almost disappearing behind puffs of white dust wrought by the destruction of the wall. And she’d almost lost them because Kayla wasn’t strong enough to stop her sledgehammer once it was going. And maybe, just a little, because Kayla wasn’t Reenie’s biggest fan.
Now, Reenie looked at each of them in turn. To Kayla she gave a raised-brow are-you-done? look. To Evan she nodded—a look that held a wealth of information Kayla would never decipher. And to Ivy she gave her usual suspicious look. Then Reenie reached into the wall and began to tug at something only she could see. In a moment, she produced a packet of letters.
Kayla was unimpressed. This wall had been built later than the original house, and antebellum Southerners were known for hiding their valuables and private treasures. She already had a metal detector set aside to sweep the backyard in hopes of finding silver buried during the Civil War. They had found treasures galore in the attic and outbuilding. And with the paperwork Evan had talked Reenie into signing, it was one quarter Kayla’s . . . that thought alone brought a smile to her face.
But Kayla didn’t care much for correspondence. She knew little of the drama that was love in the 1870s—she knew little of love in her own era. She was just trying to become an unqualified adult, support herself, keep a job. It was more than a touch humiliating to be rapidly approaching thirty and not yet have completely mastered those simple tasks. So she didn’t care that Reenie was oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over what looked like a packet of old love letters.
But Reenie did.
Apparently, she decided it was a good time for a break, because she sat her round bottom down in the middle of the white-gray dust and ignored the grit hanging in the air. Yanking her face mask off, Reenie tugged at the melted blue blob that must have been a wax seal at one point. The letters had clearly been in the wall for years upon years, and the hot summers had re-melted the wax any number of times, bleeding the color into the thick, porous paper that Reenie was working hard not to destroy in her haste to read yet another love story. Had Kayla cared, she would have recommended the woman read another poorly written romance novel over destroying something historical, but this was no ancient cotton gin like the ones she’d found lined up and rusted in the carriage house. Or the rods of squared iron that stood sentry in the corner of the blacksmith’s shop, still awaiting a smithy to transform them into hinge or latch. It wasn’t a gear wheel, a cog, an axle that must have been a part of something, half buried in the dirt floor of the carriage house. This was just paper, likely coated with the ramblings of a Scarlet O’Hara type with a penchant for whining.
Kayla felt her face form into the familiar scrunch of brow that Evan still used frequently and her father had once shared with both his kids. It was the family “thinking face” and she could feel that she was making it. Attempting to find some zen, she tried to smooth her expression, thus missing that Reenie had opened the top letter and was already reading.
“E.” She paused. “That’s it—it’s just written to E. That sounds mysterious.” Reenie smiled and began again to read.
“I find it best that I be blunt in this missive. Normally, I would wish you well and remind you of my ever-present fondness. I would ask that you return posthaste to Hazelton House and to me. I have begged that you find more reasons to stay longer at Mulberry Grove, and to visit here more often. Previously, my besotted eyes believed that your unease was with my husband, with the man that I should revere above all others and mostly above you.”
Reenie paused and looked up, her eyes hopeful that the others would find this as intriguing as she clearly did. Kayla looked to Ivy, still covered in her goggles and facemask. Even the long, wavy black hair that Kayla knew was there was hidden under a yellow bandanna. There was nothing to work with, no cue from Ivy about what to express, what to “feel”. So Kayla stayed expressionless and confused by what made Reenie excited in a rambling letter that had started with being “blunt” then had been anything but.
The tone of her future-sister-in-law’s voice went up a bandwidth, but Kayla focused on the words.
“For long months I have seen your face when you are gone. But yesterday I saw your face in the newborn babe of the housemaid. Though I am great and increasing every day, I attended the birthbed of this servant who has been loyal to me for long months when it was just us two women in the house. Now I find fault in both her attentiveness and yours.
“I am unable to find regret in informing you of the passing of my servant and her child. The striking resemblance to your family nature has washed much emotion from my soul. I ordered them dug shallow in the far yard with the other slaves.”
The voice stopped and Kayla took a moment to absorb what she’d heard. Given what she knew about mid-nineteenth-century writings—which was admittedly little—maybe the woman was being blunt.
After a deep breath and some fumbling with a third page that was stuck with wax, Reenie started up again.
“I beg you not to journey again to Hazelton House. Find any excuses to give to M. for your perpetual absence. But do not come to see me or the babe I carry. It shall bear a resemblance to you moreso than to M. to whom I should have stayed a loyal wife. My great pain is no less than I deserve having been given by you exactly that which I have given my own true M.
“Find your reasons for not attending to M. and hold fast to them. He deserves nothing of that which we have sown. He will mourn the babe he believes is his and with the child I shall bury my own betrayal and we shall never speak of this again.”
Kayla blinked. That part she understood. “That’s a pisser.”
Her words were echoed nearly identically by Ivy, from whom she’d picked up the phrase. If Ivy was upset at Kayla’s blatant theft of personality, she didn’t show it. All eyes were on Reenie.
But, as usual, it was Kayla who voiced what everyone else thought better than to say. “Do you think she killed it?”
Hefting the sledgehammer, Kayla wandered to another room. The old sitting room was mostly free of the grit that hung in the air where they had been ‘restoring’ the house. Blessedly alone in the cleared and prepped cube, Kayla sucked in hard-won oxygen through the facemask and blinked at the tainted air even though the goggles allowed nothing in. The sun came in through the windows, causing the ever-present dust motes to glint in its path like fairies and for a moment Kayla stood there admiring the trapezoidal shape of light on the flat plastic sheeting.
Kayla had prepped the floor herself, anchoring corners with round river rocks and carefully unrolling the sheeting, folding and tucking away the spare edges. She would have cut it with a box cutter but dared not harm the floors. She was no Reenie with her love of woodwork and dentil moldings, but she appreciated the not-quite-square and -plumb rooms. She had done the wallpaper work in this room, pulling back the upper left corner from each wall to reveal the layers.
They had all agreed that the wall on her left had to go. It wasn’t original. Reenie, the architect, had argued that it wasn’t load bearing. Ivy, the art historian, had pointed out that the wallpaper was only two layers thick, not five, like on the window wall. Evan, the carpenter, had shown them how the floorboards continued from this room into the next, indicating they were laid at some time before the wall had been built over them. Kayla, the one with Aspergers, had pointed out that the offending piece was constructed of drywall—a product not invented until the turn of the twentieth century.
Never mind that she had one degree in mechanical engineering and another in electrical. Never mind that every job she’d held had paid her more than Reenie made, more than her brother or her father had ever earned. Never mind that she had no social life so—despite an expensive habit of collecting small machines—she had more money saved than any of them. Regardless of all this,
she was the one who needed watching like a small child. She was the one who had been fired seven times, three of those since earning her master’s. Two of those times had been after she and Evan had both read more than one manual on finding satisfying and sustainable work for a person with Aspergers. Satisfying, she’d found. Sustainable, no.
So she was out here on this country road, beyond the stone wall, up the long, rutted drive and behind the old, worn walls of Hazelton House . . . with a sledgehammer and the need to blow off some steam.
With a grunt, she pulled back on the handle and used brute strength and inertia to get the hammer up and over her head and into the wall. The resulting hole was small and did nothing to calm the irritation that bubbled up in her when she thought of her last dismissal.
With time and perspective, she’d come to understand the other times she’d been fired. Her focus often did not match that of the company—they wanted time-over-budget; Kayla focused on quality-over-service. She found it hard to cut corners and deliver a product that was less than her best, less than as good as it could be. But this last time was not yet far enough behind her for any real clarity.
She buried the hammer into the wall again, feeling the slight give that indicated she’d hit her mark. Drywall didn’t offer the substance that good old lathe and plaster did. She moved over eighteen inches and struck again. Hitting a stud could change the way the wall came down. Well, if she were Evan, it might. But for her, hitting a stud would likely just send a wicked reverb down her arms.