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“Where's my mom?” Startled, he turned and found Taylor standing unsteadily in the kitchen doorway. The pants and shirt of his soccer pajamas were on backward. Annie pushed past him in her oversized Penguins T-shirt and took her place at the table.

“Morning, Mr. T! Your mom had to go to work a little early today.” He knelt down and gathered the boy into his arms, but not before dealing four Eggos into the four-slice toaster and pushing the handle down. “And she told me to give you that.”

Taylor seemed to enjoy his affection. Any affection. Christensen tried to hug Annie, too, but she pushed him away and complained about his morning breath.

“Who was on the phone?” Taylor asked.

What was the name? Rankin? Raskin? “Somebody for your mom,” he said, thinking,
Some arrogant prick who felt perfectly free to call without apology at six-thirty on a Monday morning: somebody who dismissed me like I was the directory-assistance operator.
The Underhills' anxious political strategist, Brenna had explained after she hung up. The sheriff's investigators were asking neighbors about the relationships between Underhill family members. They'd also heard from a contact Downtown that other deputies were pursuing trust documents that might show who, if anyone, might benefit from Floss Underhill's death.

Brenna was already dressed and heading out the door to her office when she got the call. “Mercer's people aren't letting up,” she said. “They just want me to stay on top of it. I may be late.” She blew him a kiss as he sipped French roast from the first mug he'd found in the first kitchen box he opened. It read “World's Greatest Mom.”

He flipped on the countertop television and made school lunches as the kids ate, swabbing peanut butter onto whole-grain bread, studding it with banana wheels, and drizzling honey over the top. When he looked up, Annie and Taylor were licking the syrup from their paper plates. Tomorrow, he'd start watching their sugar intake more closely.

The jolly banter of
G' Morning Pittsburgh!
filled the cluttered kitchen. “Coming up, news headlines at seven!” said the impossibly dimpled co-host. “We've got the morning traffic hot spots, and our own Tim Mausteller will be along with his umbrella index.” She wrinkled her nose at the camera. “So don't go away!”

Christensen muted the commercials with a confident wave of the remote. No one was predicting rain today. “If you're done, guys, I want you both upstairs to get dressed and do your teeth. It's supposed to be warm today, so you can wear shorts if you want to. Annie, bring me the hairbrush when you come down, okay?”

“More syrup,” she said, pointing to a place on her spotless plate. “Just a little pile right there.”

“You've had plenty,” he said. “Upstairs. Don't forget the hairbrush.”

His eight-year-old stared coolly over the edge of her plate. “The magic word?”

“Sorry.
Please
bring me the hairbrush.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let's watch that.”

She would rule the world someday, he knew, possibly with an iron fist. Annie was a formidable intellect even now, with the unshakable confidence of a Zen master and the mood stability of a Texas thunderstorm. Her logic was always flawless, her arguments airtight. He suspected that even her most vulnerable moments were simply ways to manipulate him to mysterious ends that he could never fully appreciate. She allowed him a role in her life, but it wasn't a lead, and she never let him forget
she
was directing. For now, Annie regarded the occupants of 732 Howe Street, as well as her entire third-grade classroom, more like subjects than peers. She considered herself supremely benevolent in dealing with their shortcomings.

“My momph!”

Taylor sprayed waffle mulch as he pointed at the TV, trying to swallow an Eggo wad and talk. “Lowda! Lowda!” He reached across the kitchen table for the remote and got the mute button after changing channels twice. When he found the right station again, Brenna's face filled the screen. For a moment, Christensen had the unsettling feeling that she'd simply come back after forgetting her car keys or her Starbucks travel cup.

“—on the injuries to Mr. Underhill's mother?” someone asked from off-camera. A microphone topped by a stylized 2 hovered near Brenna's face.

“Turn it up, Taylor,” he said.

Taylor changed channels again, then in a panic began pushing buttons randomly. The set blinked off. Christensen snatched the remote from the boy's hands too quickly. “You're doing a good job, T, but maybe it's not working. Mind if I check it?” He found the right channel on the second try.

“—sustained some injuries during the fall, none permanent or in any way life-threatening.” Brenna was wearing her Professional Face. “The Underhills look forward to having her home in a few days.”

The camera panned back. Christensen recognized the ground-level view of Grant Street, the metal-and-glass entrance of One Oxford Centre. The reporter and camera crew must have caught her on the way up to the sixteenth-floor offices of Kennedy & Flaherty. He recognized the reporter, too, but he couldn't remember his name. The word “Live” flashed over and over at the bottom of the screen.

“We understand the Allegheny County sheriff is investigating the possibility that Mrs. Underhill's fall was suspicious in nature. Any comment on that?”

Professional Face. “I'm not aware of details of any investigation, if there is one, into this difficult situation,” Brenna said. “The family is just relieved that she's going to be okay.”

The reporter waited. Brenna waited. She knew how to play the game.

“Is she in trouble?” Annie asked. Christensen shook his head, held an index finger to his lips.

“They're telling us, quote, the investigation is continuing, unquote,” the reporter persisted, “which obviously suggests that there is some concern on their part about how Mrs. Underhill was injured.”

Brenna smiled. “Obviously, Mr. Underhill is concerned about how his mother fell, too, as we all are. We'd certainly hope the sheriff shares that concern as well.”

“Any evidence this was anything other than a suicide attempt?” the reporter asked. Christensen could tell he was getting frustrated.

“Not that we're aware of,” she said.

“But you're a criminal-defense attorney. You've also been involved in several high-profile cases that bear striking similarities to this one, all of which involved disabled elderly people. Why did Ford Underhill's campaign office refer us to you?”

“I can't speak to that. I'm not involved in Mr. Underhill's campaign.”

“That's our point—”

“The family's main focus right now is getting Mrs. Underhill back home, and we're cooperating fully with the sheriff's office to clear up questions about the fall. Any speculation beyond that right now would be inappropriate. Thank you for your concern, though.”

She smiled when she said it. The reporter surrendered as Brenna turned and walked into the office tower. The camera shifted from Brenna's back to the bulldog face of Channel 2's Myron Levin, whose name appeared suddenly at the bottom of the screen. “Again, Kelly, that's Underhill family spokesperson Brenna Kennedy with the latest on the—” Levin cocked an eyebrow—“
perplexing
fall on Saturday that injured the mother of Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Ford Underhill. Back to you.”

Kelly looked worried. “We'll certainly keep Mrs. Underhill in our thoughts.”

“We certainly will,” offered co-anchor Rob. He looked worried, too. “Thanks, Myron.”

Taylor's fork hung halfway between his plate and his mouth, as it had since his mother's face first appeared on the screen. He'd seen his mom interviewed on television before, each time with the same dumbfounded amazement. “Awesome,” he said.

Christensen patted him on the back. “You know that lady?”

“Brenna looks fat on TV,” Annie said.

Christensen noticed the stove clock and checked it against his watch. “Whoa guys, it's ten to eight. Finish up, get your clothes, brush your teeth, and let's get out the door. Hate to rush you, but the bell rings in ten minutes.”

“She should tell them just to show her face,” Annie said. “She has a pretty nice face.”

“Upstairs,” he said.

New living arrangement aside, the morning was building to a familiar crescendo. Christensen collected the paper plates and put away the syrup and margarine. He turned off the coffeemaker, rinsed the silverware, and dropped it into the kitchen's ancient dishwasher, which was half full of plates and bowls unpacked at random in moments of need. He poured Cascade into the soap holder, shut the door, and clicked the dial to normal cycle. The machine groaned once and stopped with an unhealthy noise. He spun the dial again.
Kachunk,
it said. He tried again but it made no noise at all.

Even if he had time to tinker with it, he didn't have the slightest idea what might be wrong. He scribbled a Post-it note for Brenna—“Bren: It went kachunk and stopped. Help!”—and stuck it on the dishwasher door. “Everybody ready?” he shouted.

The kids rumbled down the stairs looking like a Disney mule train, Taylor beneath an overstuffed and weighty
Hercules
backpack, one of Annie's discards, and carrying a lunchbox that looked like the disembodied head of Mickey Mouse. He'd insisted on it over Christensen's objections. Annie was strapped into her silver
Action Rangers
backpack with matching lunchbox.

Christensen tested the weight of Taylor's pack. “What's
in
there, buddy?”

“Rocks.”

The phone rang. “Let the machine pick up,” Christensen said, but too late.

“This is Annie speaking,” she said. His daughter nodded, shrugged, and handed him the phone with a scowl. “It's not for me.”

Christensen jammed the phone between his shoulder and his ear. “Hello?”

“Yes, uh, I—geez, I was expecting just to leave a message on Brenna's home answering machine.”

Christensen paused, struck by the odd sensation of
déjà vu.
He recognized the man's voice, so familiar, so recent, but couldn't match it to a face. “She's not in right now,” he said, “but you can probably reach her at her office.”

“No, I know that. I just—” The caller hesitated.

“Or I can take a message,” Christensen said. He grabbed the Post-its from the table.

“This is, uh, a reporter friend of hers.” Bingo. Myron Levin. “I need to talk to her as soon as possible.”

Nothing made sense. This was the same toad who'd just ambushed Brenna outside her office five minutes earlier, no question. Why was he calling here? “Like I said,” Christensen said, “if you call her office—”

“I left a message there, too, but, uh, just tell her I really need to talk to her.”

Christensen could see the kids through the open front door, waiting for him by the Explorer. “May I say who's calling?” he baited.

“Myron. She'll know. Tell her it's about an interview with Enrique Chembergo.”

Christensen scribbled quickly, but stalled at the name. “You're going to have to spell that one for me.”

Levin spelled the name, then said, “Just say the gardener. She'll know.”

“And you want to line up an interview with this person?”

“No, no,” Levin said. “I already talked to him. So just tell her that. Tell her he knows what happened, but not why. Actually, since I've got you on the line, any chance you could get that message to her, like, now? Her secretary just took my name and number, but I've got some information I really think she might need.”

“I'll do my best,” Christensen said. “Where can she reach you?” He wrote down Levin's cell phone and pager numbers, then read them back to make sure he had them right. Through the front door, he could see the kids drawing faces in the accumulated dirt on his car.

“Appreciate the help,” Levin said.

“Listen, is there a problem—” The line clicked and went silent, leaving Christensen with his mouth open and, for some reason, the hair on his arms standing on end. “Hello?”

Despite the rush, he listened until the dial tone returned. He wasn't sure why.

“Rocks,” Christensen said.

The teacher nodded sagely. “I see.”

He expected tears, or at least trembling hesitation. Taylor could be fragile. When they told him they intended to become a family, Brenna said the prospect brought on three days of relentless anxiety and nausea. He was doing well in his school in Mount Lebanon, even had a few friends, and the idea of changing homes and schools at the same time really threw him. But now, as Taylor walked down the aisle of his classroom, he seemed almost calm. He rearranged the clump of red hair on top of his head and took an empty seat at a cluster of four small desks. He folded his hands on the desktop and seemed to wait patiently for class to begin. Christensen didn't fully appreciate the depth of his anxiety until, trying to get a good-bye hug, he had to pry the boy's locked fingers apart.

“I'll be okay,” Taylor said. His lower lip trembled. “I've got rocks.”

“Of course you will. What's with that, anyway?”

Taylor's eyes shifted nervously to the classroom's cupboard. “You think I could bring my pack up here? What if it happens and my rocks are all back there?”

Christensen tried to read the boy's eyes. They registered real fear. “What if
what
happens?”

Taylor leaned close and whispered. “Third-graders. What if they attack?”

Annie.

Christensen bit his lip as soon as he realized, imagining his daughter's lurid description of the violence new students must face from the entrenched Westminster-Stanton elementary-school marauders. “Do you really think that will happen, Mr. T? Or do you think Annie might have been trying to scare you?”

The boy shrugged.

“Do you think any of the teachers or grown-ups here would let you get hurt?”

Taylor shook his head.

“You'll be fine, I promise.”

Outside, Christensen spotted a break in the parking-lot snarl and made his move. The Explorer squeaked between a Volvo wagon and a Dodge Caravan into daylight, its dashboard clock reading 8:04. He'd have a session with Annie when they got home, but he already had other things on his mind. He snatched the car phone from its holder and poked the programmed number for Brenna's office.

“Kennedy & Flaherty. How may I direct your call?” The receptionist, Liisa, spoke with a dignified air that betrayed nothing about her multiple tattoos or her years as a Liberty Avenue hooker. When Brenna was a public defender, she represented the then-teenager a half-dozen times, and knew she wanted a fresh start. All Liisa needed was a job, and she was the first one Brenna called when she and Flaherty opened their practice.

“It's Jim, Liis. Brenna around?”

“Hey,” she said, dropping her professional voice. “How'd day one go for the little skipper?”

“I think he's okay. Little rough and I just wanted to fill Brenna in. Is she swamped?”

“Who knows?” she said. “I just screen her calls, remember? Haven't seen her since she came in.”

“Are
you
busy?”

“Like a one-armed paperhanger.”

He steered onto Fifth Avenue, headed toward the Allegheny River and the Harmony Brain Research Center. “Tell her it's important, okay?”

The morning's odd phone call replayed in his head as he waited at the Negley light. In Levin's voice he'd heard a troubling mix of anxiety and concern, in addition to the smarmy I-know-something-you-don't tone that had come across on TV. Christensen paid close attention to people like that. He remembered, too, the newspaper and magazine clippings and printouts that Brenna and Flaherty had found while doing background research on the Underhills. She'd picked up the fat Nexis printout at her office after meeting the Underhills in Fox Chapel, and he'd scanned it while she worked on the bathroom.

Flaherty had searched only by the family name, not by Allecorp, the name of the family's main development company, so the computer had ignored much of the Underhill-related Renaissance development during the 1970s and 1980s. Still, the printout was as thick as a phone book. Practically everything the family did made news. He'd found references to a nasty probate dispute among grandfather Andrew Underhill's siblings in the mid-1950s, to the family's embarrassed attempt to explain a drunken indiscretion by young Ford as a Princeton senior, to a single, brief account of the accidental horseback-riding death three years earlier of Ford's only child—an unblinking chronicle of life in the fishbowl of wealth and celebrity. Only a few of the stories were negative. He could have gorged himself on tales of philanthropy. The last quarter-inch of the chronological printout was nothing but stories about the Underhills' heroic role at Harmony.

Brenna picked up suddenly. “So how'd he do?”

The driver behind him leaned on the horn. The Explorer lurched as he stomped the gas. “Stiff upper lip. I think Annie told him some horror story about what happens to new kids, so he started in a hole. I'll talk to her.”

“But he was okay when you left?”

“Fine. He was pretty excited, actually, after seeing you on TV.”

“You saw that?” she said. “Myron's such a jerk. He knows I'll talk to him if I can, but the visuals aren't as good unless it looks like he stalked me.”

Christensen shifted the phone to his other ear and moved with the morning traffic. “So the sheriff's people are still nosing around?”

“It's weird. Nobody Downtown's talking.”

Christensen pulled a folded Post-it from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “Somebody is. Levin called you at home right after the live report.”

“He called the house, too? It's a brand-new number. Myron's such a pain in the ass.” Brenna waited.

“Said he'd interviewed—” Reading from the Post-it now. “Enrique Chembergo.”

The line was silent, but only for a moment. “The gardener,” Brenna said.
“Shit.
He talked to Myron?”

“That's the guy who heard something or saw something when Floss fell, right?”

“Hell.
He and his wife both work for the Underhills. She does home-care stuff with Floss, actually. Both from Central America somewhere. I read his statement to the cops. Seems pretty sure what he saw. I'm sure Myron'll make the most of that. He say anything else?”

“He wants to talk to you ASAP. Said this guy knows what happened, but not why, and that he had information you might need.”

No response.

“Bren? He's just blowing smoke, right?”

“Maybe. Hard to say. I've known Myron a long time.”

“Then call him, okay?” he said. “I'd feel better.”

“How's your schedule today?”

“Open,” he said. “Just doing some screening out at Harmony, still trying to find case-study candidates. I want to be back by three to get the kids.”

“You can let them go to Kids' Korner after school, you know. No need to pick them up until six.”

“Just for today. I'll feel better.”

“Where are you now?” Brenna said. Her voice had changed.

He looked around. A state police headquarters flashed past on his left. “Washington Boulevard. Almost to Allegheny River Boulevard.”

“Still on this side of the river?”

He slowed as he approached the intersection. Directly in front of him, across the busy boulevard, the Allegheny River ran high and muddy. He watched a battered tug churn its way east.

“What?” he said.

“You're not
that
far from Mount Mercy, that's all. It'd sure be nice to know if Floss remembers anything about what happened. You could be there in ten minutes.”

“Bren—”

“She has some megasuite on the fourteenth floor, which is no big surprise. You knew the family built the new wing, right?”

He knew, just as he knew every corridor of Mount Mercy Hospital, every ICU nurse on every shift, every sad-eyed priest who roamed its halls dispensing platitudes like aspirin. Today was Monday. If nothing had changed during the past five years, the Mount Mercy cafeteria dinner special would be a gelatinous Swiss steak. Tomorrow: Overcooked lemon chicken. He'd tried them all during the tortured months that he and the girls waited through Molly's coma, never wanted to walk back into the place again, wasn't even sure they'd let him in again after he'd barred the ICU door, disconnected Molly's respirator, and let his wife die with the dignity her doctors seemed so intent on denying her. The last time he'd left there, he was in handcuffs.

“Right?” Brenna said.

“Huh?”

“The Underhills helped build the new wing.”

“Two wings, actually. Look, Bren, it's not like I know the woman well enough to just drop by. Other people at Harmony are much more involved with her.” He waited. “I mean, don't you think that would look odd?”

“You know you want to talk to her, Jim. You have as much right as anybody else out there. You're a researcher, for God's sake. You have every reason to ask questions. And I need your help.”

He
was
curious, and not just in an academic sense. Levin's cryptic message was troubling enough, but it was the reporter's tone, that unexpected undercurrent of sincerity and concern, that stuck with him. Still, the idea of returning to Mount Mercy…

“Floss'll probably be back at Harmony in a few days,” he said. “I can wait.”

“I'm not sure
I
can, Jim. There's so many people I need to talk to today just to get a handle on this thing. And from what it sounds like, with the Alzheimer's and everything, I'd need you along to help me interpret what she says anyway. Come on, baby, do it for science.”

“Bren?”

“Yes.”

“It'd be my first time back there.”

“I know. You'll be fine.”

“Bren—” he protested again, but she was right. It was as good a time as any to face it down. He eased the Explorer to the inside lane and slowed down, looking around for cops. This was going to be a risky U-turn.