Shadow Image (11 page)

“Everybody at Harmony missed you this week, I hear. Maura Pearson says art class has been pretty dull without you.”

Floss looked down at her sketch pad, then around the dining deck, saying nothing. He began to talk, referring first to Maura, Emma, Arthur, and some of her former art classmates at Harmony. He told her about the new carpet in the activity room. He asked her if she'd worked at the potting benches in the outdoor rehab garden, whether she'd tried the wheelchair-accessible swimming pool. From there, he moved on to a litany of current events in sports, weather, national politics, sounding at times like an overeager cocktail-party host anxious to stimulate conversation. He mentioned Ford's run for governor twice, her husband's name three times, told her what he knew about where and how she lived. She listened patiently, with an intensity that told Christensen his efforts were having the desired effect. “And I understand you have quite a rose garden,” he said.

She nodded, smiling. “Out back. Blooming now, too. So sweet-smelling it'll knock you back.”

“So you've seen the gardens since you got back from Mount Mercy?”

Floss closed her eyes. “Vincent took me out there yesterday. Rolled me right along the path.” She kept them shut tight, as if the memory might somehow leak out and be gone forever.

“He's glad to have you home, I bet. So you just walked around, or were you going somewhere?”

She didn't answer, her eyes still closed, motionless except for the strand of hair that worked its way from behind her ear again and danced across her face in the light breeze.

“There's a big gazebo or something out back, isn't there?” he pressed. “Were you going there?”

Nothing.

“Do you go there a lot?”

Silence.

“When was the last time you were there?”

Her eyes sprang opened like window shades. She looked at him a few long moments, then down at her sketch pad, then squinted out into the rolling green hills. She picked up the pencil she'd been using to sketch and resumed work on the horse. Only now her lines were bold and thick, the knuckles on her hand white as she pressed graphite to paper, her hand moving like an excited seismograph in what seemed like a classic anxiety reaction. Which meant nothing. Something difficult and painful had happened to her there. That much he knew. She did, too. The question remained: What? But she obviously wasn't ready to go there again.

“Who takes care of all those roses?” he asked, backtracking to safer ground. But he had an idea, a little experiment: If she reacted so strongly to the place where she was hurt, how might she react to the names of the people he knew were on the Fox Chapel property the day she fell? “You don't do it all, do you?”

Floss shook her head, lips tight against her teeth, eyes focused on the pad.

“You have a gardener, don't you? Selena's husband. Enrique's very good, I hear.”

She nodded. “He's gone now.”

“With Selena?”

“Gone somewhere.” Her answers were clipped and stiff, her pencil strokes leaving angry black scars on the faint outline of the horse. “I want to smoke.”

Christensen tried to relax her with an easy smile. “Vincent doesn't like your cigars, does he?” he said, trying another name.

“Didn't used to mind. Now he does.”

“Your son, Ford. Does he mind?”

She shrugged.

“How about Leigh, his wife?”

Floss's pencil point disintegrated with a splintering snap. Her right hand slowed and finally stopped moving, as if coasting to a stop. When it did stop, she held the pencil up in front of her face and tried to blow the dangling wood shards from the tip. “I need a new one,” she said.

“I can get you one, Mrs. Underhill. There's plenty in the art room.”

She handed him the shattered pencil. “Go now.”

“You don't want to talk anymore?”

“No.”

Christensen looked around. Paige was deep into her paperback, apparently content and unconcerned in the morning sun. The closest occupied table was even farther away from them than Paige. He sipped from his lukewarm coffee, then reached into his briefcase.

“I'll get you a new pencil, Mrs. Underhill.” He handed her a Once-Lost Images calendar, open to April, knowing there was a good chance Floss wouldn't recognize
Some Crazy Story about Gray
as her own work. “Maura wanted to make sure you got one of these. You're famous.”

The old woman studied the image. As she did, her shoulders seemed to relax. Her face, if not serene, lost its tightness. She wasn't smiling, but at least she wasn't grimacing anymore. “I had a gelding like this once, a three-year-old, just like this one,” she said, tapping the horse's image. “A jumper like you never saw.” She stared some more. “Broke my heart when Warren took him off, I'll tell you. The good ones are funny that way. Haunt your life like shadows, then they're gone.”

Christensen waited, resisting the urge to prompt, wondering where the memory might lead her. Mentioning the horse's age—the same age as her grandchild who died after being thrown and kicked by a gray horse—struck Christensen as significant. Maybe she'd never worked her way through the grief surrounding that death. Maybe it was easier for her to grieve the loss of the horse than the death of the child.

“He was three years old?” he asked.

She nodded.

“And he's gone now?”

Floss shut her eyes again, tight this time. A tear squeezed onto her cheek.

“I can tell you miss him a lot,” he said.

She nodded, brushing the tear away with her good hand. She sighed deeply, her eyes still shut in the bright morning sun. “Miss 'em all.”

Not that Christensen and Pearson were in any hurry. With no real plans until the afternoon class at two, they'd decided on a lark to play hooky. Pearson wanted to know more about his research. The Special's gas tank was full. They'd looked at one another over bran muffins and cups of Harmony's cafeteria coffee and mouthed the words at the same instant: “Road trip.”

Christensen was curious about Muddyross Ranch, of course, but his curiosity now was as personal as it was academic. He had a perspective from outside the Underhills' inner circle that Brenna couldn't, and what he'd seen in recent days—felt, actually—was tinged with paranoia. It wasn't just the weirdness—the dark phone call from Myron Levin, the unexplained absence of the gardener and his wife, the late-night footprints on the front porch—but the nagging sense that Floss Underhill was trying her best to communicate. Exactly what, he couldn't say. But the same scrambled thoughts were surfacing again and again. The Underhills' attitude toward Brenna, the calculation of her hiring, bothered him as well. Brenna's pitbull reputation notwithstanding, the Underhills had unlimited resources. Why would they recruit a defense attorney they'd never met? The Underhills were savvy people, and savvy people have a reason for everything they do. Plus, in Brenna's business, information is power. The Underhills were withholding information. Why?

The sun already was heating up the immense car's interior. Christensen reached for the knobby art deco handle of the window crank. “Mind?”

From deep in her vinyl-covered driver's seat, Pearson reached forward and patted the pristine metal dashboard. “Before A/C,” she said, somehow reading his mind.

He flexed, ready for a struggle, but turning the crank was like cutting warm butter. Forty years old, and the car made his five-year-old Explorer seem leprous by comparison. “So how long did you spend restoring this beast?” he asked over the dull roar of rushing air.

“What do you mean, restoring?” Pearson said. “You take care of your car, it'll take care of you.”

Christensen scanned the interior. “Wait. You're the original owner?”

Pearson shook her head. “Mom was. We shared it for years until she passed.”

What little he knew of Pearson's life outside Harmony he'd gathered on the day he gave her a lift to work while the Special was in the shop. Everything fit perfectly with her nutty great-aunt image. She'd lived alone since her mother died two years ago, assuming you didn't count the menagerie with which she now shared their house—a burgeoning population of gerbils, a three-legged cat, an ancient Rhodesian Ridgeback with some sort of gland problem, and a grounded crow whose broken wing she'd splinted to no avail. It lived in her fireplace but had free run of the house. On Pearson's extensive menu of eccentricities, her weak spot for irredeemable creatures, including the Special, was by far her most charming.

Christensen rolled the window halfway up to cut down on the wind, then pulled a folded piece of poster paper from the briefcase at his feet. Laid open on his lap, it looked like one of Annie's preschool drawings—a pink bull's-eye at the center surrounded by a manic, scratchy swirl of Magic Marker colors. “What did you call this again?”

“Mandala.”

“Like Nelson?”

Pearson nodded. “Different spelling. Means ‘magic circle' or ‘center' in Sanskrit.” Pearson adjusted the car's massive rearview mirror. “You know all about that Jungian crap, right? This is part of that. From time to time we give each artist a piece of paper that's blank except for a circle in the middle. Then we give them paints and markers and watch to see what they do with the circle.”

Christensen pointed to the paper in his lap. “And the ‘Jungian crap' says this would be a snapshot of Floss Underhill's subconscious, right?”

“As of two weeks ago. I had her do one down in the dayroom. It's just a way to see where their head's at. Don't try to make too much of it. I don't. Just thought you'd like to see.”

Christensen looked again at the circle. “Help me here, Maura. Where was her head on this one?”

Pearson leaned over and poked a finger at the pink bull's-eye. “Dead center,” she said. “Strong sense of self. That's been consistent in every mandala she's done going back two years. The essential Floss is still in there somewhere, still knows who she is. But you don't need a mandala to figure that out.”

“And the squiggles?”

Pearson shrugged. “Something's got her upset. Same with the colors. Bright ones like that usually suggest agitation of some kind, but it could be anything.”

Muddyross Ranch promised nothing more concrete, he knew, but it seemed too important to overlook as he inventoried Floss's mind and memories. He and Pearson had gone through all of Floss's available artwork at the center and found variations of the riding club's logo etched somewhere in at least half of them. The place obviously meant something to her, but what? Maybe it was something simple, like her involvement with the Oaks Classic, or maybe it was just her favorite place to ride. But he had a lot of questions, and the family wasn't exactly approachable. Maybe someone at Muddyross could shed some light on Floss's fascination with the place.

“Has Floss ever talked about men when you were around?” Christensen said.

“To me?” Pearson shook her head. “What men?”

“In general. Not her husband or her son or anything, just, you know, men. Or bring up names you didn't recognize?”

Pearson shook her head again. After a half minute of silence, she said, “Well?”

“Just the way she talked when I visited her at Mount Mercy. Just kind of, I don't know, free-spirited maybe?”

Pearson turned toward him, eyeing the road only as needed. “Spill it. This sounds good.”

“It's not. I just mean, in general, Alzheimer's patients aren't usually aware if they're saying things that might embarrass their family or friends. We all have warning systems that tell us, you know, not to talk to strangers about our sex lives, that kind of thing. Late second-stagers like Floss have usually lost those warning systems.”

“This is sounding better and better.”

Christensen refolded the poster paper and put it back in his briefcase. “Clinically speaking, of course. Maura, help me out here. You've been around a lot more of them, and a lot longer, than I have.”

Pearson sighed. “Depends on the person. It's the ones who never talked before Alzheimer's who seem to talk the most toward the later stages. It's like their minds open up and the secrets just spill out. But I don't get the impression Floss Underhill was ever one to hold back.”

“Does it ever cause problems, with hurt feelings, that sort of thing?”

“When it does, it's the spouses, usually. Sometimes it's real personal stuff.”

“Ever with the Underhills?”

Pearson shook her head. “They're a pretty unflappable bunch.” She sighed again, deeply and with great purpose. “You're really not gonna tell me what she said, are you?”

He wouldn't, couldn't. What had she said, anyway, during that brief hospital conversation? She'd told one raw joke about men with beards. She'd used a couple of unfamiliar names. “She didn't say anything, Maura, really. It was just
how
she said a couple of things that got me thinking about the whole issue of privacy. I just never thought about how much we all rely on judgment with stuff like that. What happens in a family when you can't trust the people who know your secrets, or when the patient starts sharing his or her own secrets with anybody and everybody? It's just something I'd never thought about before.”

A sign flashed past on the right. Pearson steered on, aiming the Special's bulk into the harsh morning sun. “That might have been our turnoff,” he said. “Ridge Road goes right to Muddyross Ranch, doesn't it?”

“Oh, hell,” Pearson said. She lifted her foot off the accelerator and the Special slowed, as if she'd cut the engines of an ocean liner.

For someplace so exclusive, the riding club seemed not much different from the public stables at North Park. The parking lot was just as rutted and dusty, filled with big Chevy Suburbans and Dodge Rams and trailers of every conceivable design. Bales of hay were stacked ten feet high at the lot's southern edge, protected only by a flimsy sheet of blue plastic draped over the top and staked into the hard dirt. Pearson bounced the Special into an open space between a trailer and an overgrown thicket of weeds and trees, then stomped the brake. Plumes of dust poured into the open windows.

Christensen looked out across the rolling hills beyond the stables. He consulted his mental catalog of Floss Underhill's paintings for any landscape that might have been drawn from this view, but nothing seemed familiar. The stables themselves, directly in front of them, were sturdy and substantial, more stone than wood but modern in all the right places—built to honor tradition, but with the top-end market in mind in matters of convenience, cleanliness, and civility. The one thing he did recognize was painted on every stall door—the Muddyross Ranch logo. It was unavoidable, like a pox, on trailers, storage sheds, even depicted in the well-tended garden of marigolds and trimmed shrubbery in front of what surely was the ranch's administrative offices.

“Must be the place,” Pearson said.

He laughed. “Good guess.”

“Think it's okay to just wander around?”

“You're asking me, Maura? These aren't
my
people.”

They both watched for a few minutes through the Special's elegantly molded windshield. The ranch population seemed to be a society of women—thin, reedy blondes, mostly, with tight jodhpurs and scuffed black riding boots. As they moved about the grounds, each was trailed by an obedient, muscular mount that moved with the grace of a dancer. The few men on the premises seemed to have been bred for work. One, his black, bald head gleaming in the morning sun, lathered and rinsed a skittish white stallion along one side of the stables. Another moved from stall to stall bent beneath an enormous burlap sack labeled “Sweet Feed.” They seemed to speak politely to the riders as they passed, but they never looked up.

“What's our story?” Pearson asked. “We don't look like we belong, and someone's bound to ask.”

“If someone asks, we tell them the truth,” he said. “We're Jehovah's Witnesses.”

“Nice try.”

“Maura, relax. We're researchers, doing research. People usually bend over backward to help once you tell them what you're doing.”

“Truthseekers.”

“Exactly.”

The stable area covered maybe two acres, smaller than Christensen had imagined. The only riding facilities he'd ever seen were the sprawling public stables in the county's two regional parks. Muddyross Ranch smelled the same, and the dust clung to your clothes and hair the same way, but that's about all it had in common with the North and South Park stables. Muddyross had the unmistakable feel of a private club.

Stablehands seemed to outnumber the horses on the grounds. A few eyed Christensen and Pearson as they strolled from building to building, but no one seemed too concerned that they were there. In five minutes, they had walked through and around every building on Muddyross Ranch except the administration building. Nothing except the ranch logo seemed remotely like the images in Floss Underhill's paintings.

Christensen propped one of his feet on the low rail outside a stall, stroking the nose of a magnificent chestnut mare. “I don't know what I expected.”

“By coming here?” Pearson said.

“Other than the horse and the logo, her paintings are pretty abstract, surreal almost. I just thought maybe there'd be something that connected.” He shrugged.

“You said she competed here, or ran some horse show, or something? Why don't you ask around. If she's that big a player there's bound to be people who'll talk to you about her. Maybe you can pick up some background. Did you bring any of the paintings?”

Christensen shook his head. Floss's winged-horse image popped into his head, then disappeared. “Don't you have a copy of the calendar with the Gray painting in it?”

She patted her shoulder bag. “Let's show it around like the cops always do.”

“Maura, this isn't
America's Most Wanted.”

Christensen took a last look around, then looked at Pearson. In his jeans, Nikes and light silk sports coat, he wasn't exactly dressed to blend in with the town-and-country set. But the longer they hung around, the more likely someone would wonder about Pearson's odd getup. In her voluminous khaki slacks, Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt, and huge, unlaced Air Jordans, she looked like the grandmother superior of some preppy-tropical ghetto gang.

“Let's head on back,” he said.

Pearson was squinting into the dim light of a nearby stable. “Did you see that?” she asked, her eyes fixed on some distant point.

Christensen swiveled his head and squinted, too. The wide stable doors were about twenty feet away, but inside all he could see were empty stalls and an occasional knot of tack dangling outside the stall doors. “See what?”

“Second stall on the left side.”

She walked toward the stall door without another word. He followed, glancing once over his shoulder to see who might be watching them. A young stablehand was rounding the corner of another building, headed in their direction. “Maura?” he called to Pearson's back. But she walked on.

He caught up to her at the door, where she stood with both arms dangling into a stall the size of a decent living room. Sunlight streamed through a row of clerestory windows about twenty feet off the floor, and his eyes followed the dusty shafts of light from the windows down, down, resting finally on a horse's large gray rump. What looked like a length of fire hose dangled between its legs.