Shadow Image

“Smell the rot?” She sat up suddenly, caught him staring. “God knows how long the seal's been bad. I just can't figure why it didn't come through to the dining-room ceiling.”

“Nice plumber's butt.”

A playful smile. “Hand me the work light.”

She took the light, tested it, waved it into the damp and mysterious place. “The water's going somewhere, that's the problem. Follow it and we'll find the next big nightmare.”

The house was a money pit; the inspector told them so even before they closed. “It's a hundred and twenty years old and been vacant all winter,” he'd said. “You're a long way from wallpapering.” But they both loved Shadyside, not for its too-chic Walnut Street trendoids or lively club scene or white-wine liberals, but because its public schools were among Pittsburgh's best. When after five years they'd decided to merge their households and families, they agreed without a second thought on where to do it, though Brenna discouraged his impulse to sanction the union with a marriage certificate. And, with some work, the house at 732 Howe could be a stunner—three stories of whitewashed clapboard, hardwood floors, and leaded-glass windows. They were fully aware of the rotted subfloors, clanging radiators, and Rube Goldberg–style basement furnace that frightened him beyond words.

“Did we buy too fast?” He nudged a piece of peeled linoleum with a toe of his Nikes. “There was that other place in Squirrel Hill.”

“Wrong ward. I'll need a Shadyside pedigree to get serious about city politics.” She grabbed a hammer and brought it down on one of the floor's crossbeams, crushing it like brittle cardboard. “Relax.”

He spied himself in the bathroom mirror. Behind the rimless eyeglasses, close-cropped gray beard, and smug detachment of a tenured 45-year-old academician, he saw the reflection of a classic beta male emasculated by an alpha mate. Brenna handled home repairs and power tools with aplomb. Relaxed? Definitely not.

“Where'd you learn how to do this stuff?” he said.

“I'm going to have to carve all this out and reinforce the floor before we can even think about replacing the toilet seal,” she said. “The kids'll just have to use our bathroom for a while. That's the least of it, though. That water's going somewhere.”

“What you can't see won't hurt you. I truly believe that.”

She sat back on her heels. “Odd opinion for a psychologist, Jim. Malpractice insurance paid up?” She plugged her saber saw into an extension cord, tested it, then offered a sly smile. “Maybe you can expand that little home-repair theory into a self-help book:
Embracing Denial
or
Chickenshit for the Soul.
Something
like that. You're on sabbatical. You've got time.”

The saw's blade chewed through the crossbeam with a chattering howl. A plume of sawdust rose from the gap in the floor. “That other one has to come out, too,” Brenna said, pausing just long enough to extract the rotted two-by-four. The saw howled again. “Oh baby,” she shouted, “we've got big problems.”

A matter of perspective, he thought. If they had survived the last five years together, they could survive a rotted subfloor and a renegade water leak. He wasn't naïve enough to think all their problems were behind them—he didn't consider himself capable of naïveté after watching his late wife, Molly, wither—but he was buoyed these days by a genuine sense of renewal, a well-placed hope for their reconstituted family. His older daughter, Melissa, was finally okay, lonely during her second month in France as an American Field Service scholar, but past the corrosive anger that had followed Molly's death. At eighteen, Melissa was calling him Daddy again, which could be jarring. With her soft, round face, almond eyes, and loose curtain of black hair, she was a photocopy of Molly at the age he first met her. His younger daughter, Annie, on the other hand, had inherited his face, a face that even at eight was all angles and boyish vitality. Put the beard and glasses on her and she could probably counsel his clients without them noticing his absence. Much to his relief, Annie still tolerated Brenna's seven-year-old son, Taylor, who remained appropriately worshipful and did everything she said.

Brenna stood up and brushed off the front of her shirt.

She caught him staring again, but this time he didn't retreat. He gathered her into his arms and kissed her damp forehead. She smelled of sweat and sawdust and Eternity, and the combination was irresistible. She pushed him away, gently.

“We need to properly christen the new house,” he said. “It's in the mortgage agreement. It's the law.”

She smiled. “That afternoon before the final walkthrough doesn't count?”

They'd hung their clothes on a back bedroom doorknob and sent their real-estate agent out for coffee. He smiled, too. “We hadn't officially closed.”

Christensen knew a hair-trigger place on her neck just below her left ear where her pulse was warm and every nerve in her flawless body seemed to converge, so he kissed her there. She started to push him away, then melted against him, saying, “Mmmm.” It sounded like victory.

“Your whiskers scratch,” she said. “I'm a mess.”

“Absolutely.” He ran a finger down her spine to her tailbone, traced a circle around each dimple there.

“We have too much to do.”

“What time do the kids get back from Simone's birthday party?”

She said, “Two-thirty,” but her eyes were closed, offering no resistance as he untied the knotted front of her shirt. He worked the buttons from the bottom up. “The bed's not set up yet,” she said, even as she maneuvered him through the bathroom door, down the hall and toward the mattress on the hardwood floor of their new bedroom. “It's not proper.”

“We'll just keep trying until we get it right, then.”

She pulled him down into a long, slow kiss. Her hips started to move with his, a gentle exchange of pressure at first but about as erotic as he could stand. She worked a hand down his back, leading him in their dance. She usually did, and it didn't intimidate him like it used to. He laid open her shirt and fumbled with the front clasp of her cream-colored bra until she intervened. She shrugged out of the clothes and he lost himself in her scent and softness until they could no longer ignore the ringing telephone on the floor.

“The machine'll pick up,” she whispered, her lips against his ear.

His electronic greeting began after the third ring. At the tinny beep, Terry Flaherty's rich baritone filled the room. “Brenna? I know you're there.”

Christensen kissed her eyelids, but he could tell that her attention had shifted to her law partner's voice.

“Call me as soon as you get this,” Flaherty said, his voice without any trace of his puckish Irish humor. “I'm at the office.”

Christensen tried the spot on her neck again, but Brenna was rigid. “Sorry,” she said, looking him in the eye, briefly, before rolling away and reaching for the phone.

“Wait, Terry,” she said, over the answering-machine feedback. “I'm here.”

Brenna's devotion to work no longer surprised him. She was talented, obsessive, and ambitious, perfect for Pittsburgh politics, and her reputation these days as Pittsburgh's best criminal-defense attorney went unchallenged by even the most predatory of the Grant Street crowd. Building that reputation had cost her a marriage, and she struggled with that. But not often, and never for very long. She slid her bra back on as she listened and buttoned her shirt all the way up, probably not even aware she was doing so.

“He asked specifically for me?” She listened a while longer, shaking her head from time to time, once raising an eyebrow at him. “When did it happen?”

He'd heard variations of her end of the conversation a dozen times, whenever she took on a new case. She reached for her purse on the floor near the bedroom window and rummaged until she found her trusty Mont Blanc. With nothing to write on, she grabbed one of the kids' abandoned coloring books and tore out a page.

“How badly injured?” Scribbling now. “Has anyone talked to the investigators?” She listened for a full minute, motionless. “Well, what kind of evidence are we talking about? Who's the witness?”

Brenna looked at her watch. “Fox Chapel's not far, but it'll take me an hour by the time I get cleaned up.” She scratched an address beside Cinderella's pumpkin coach and folded the coloring book page in half. “Good thing you were in the office, Terry. Thanks.”

Brenna was out of her shirt again in seconds, tossing it onto the mattress with a gesture as sharp as it was preoccupied. Then she was headed into the functional bathroom, her only comment a muttered “Unbelievable.” Christensen heard the pipes groan as she turned on the water in the shower. He followed, less disappointed now than amused by her intensity.

“So I should make other plans for the next hour, then?” he said over the shower's unsteady roar. He traced the lines of her body on the plastic shower curtain. Brenna suddenly peeled it back, catching him with his finger on the shadow of her breast. Her hair was already soaked.

“Oh baby, I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm going to need a rain check.”

“Hey, no problem,” he said. “Maybe we can use these testicles for bookends.”

Brenna laughed, but then closed the curtain and lathered her head.

“What's so unbelievable?”

“Three guesses who called the office looking for me this morning,” she said.

“Harrison Ford?”

“Nope.”

“The Nobel committee?”

“One more.”

“Bill Gates?”

She laughed again. “Close.”

He waited while she rinsed her hair. “Bill Clinton?”

“Closer.” She peeked out. “Ford Underhill.”

His jaw actually dropped.

Brenna nodded. “He told Terry I came highly recommended.”

“The state's next governor needs a criminal-defense attorney?”

“I doubt it. It's complicated. Just between us, all right?”

“Of course.” Christensen adjusted the bottom of the curtain to redirect a stream of water back into the tub as Brenna soaped her shoulders and arms.

“His mother tried to commit suicide yesterday.”

“Floss? You're kidding.”

Brenna stopped her furious lathering and peeked around the curtain again. “You sound like you know her.”

“I do, sort of. From Harmony. She's been a day patient there off and on since she was diagnosed.”

“Alzheimer's?”

“About six years ago. The Underhills are the center's biggest benefactor, and she's the signature patient. They named the new auditorium after her.”

“Don't tell me she's one of the people in your memory study.”

“I've been following an art class. She's one of about fourteen people in it.” He shook his head. “Suicide? Really?”

“Why do you say it like that?”

Floss Underhill was seventy, maybe more, the wife of former two-term Pennsylvania governor Vincent Underhill II. Vincent was the third-generation heir to Andrew Underhill's vast industrial fortune, as well as to the family reputation as great liberal champions. Christensen knew her as the feisty and unpretentious scourge of the Harmony art room, but he also knew she was, before Alzheimer's, the grande dame of Pittsburgh's charity fundraising scene.

“At her age, suicide tends to be a pretty rational decision,” he said. “She's demented, unpredictable. Demented people aren't usually able to think through a choice like that.”

Brenna turned off the shower. He passed a towel into the cloud. She wrapped it around herself and stepped out, heading for a cardboard carton of clothes in a corner of the bedroom. She pulled out a pair of lacy white panties and stepped into them. They disappeared beneath the towel hiding hips that, at forty-six, gave only the slightest hint that she'd borne a child. He stepped in front of the window and closed the miniblind.

“You still didn't answer,” he said. “Why does Ford Underhill want to talk to a criminal-defense attorney?”

He knew from The Look that some things stay between an attorney and her client. All she said was, “It's complicated.”